Affection’s a funny thing. She got the news yesterday and I was already planning to be home late. A quick phonecall and I was marvelling how close people are with handphones. I sound like a caveman, sure, but you learn to appreciate the really important things when the need and anxiety’s great. So she’ll go under the “ray gun” device thing for five weeks, then spend another five years popping an inexpensive pill to prevent mutations. Mutations. Isn’t that what happens? I wouldn’t know.

For a moment there I felt the urge to expound on enviromental problems and such, but realized I didn’t have the stomach to do it: you get enough of a dose watching crazy anime like Gilgamesh and Akira and such. I’ve never really understood this Japanese obsession with broadcasting these public service messages.


Take Metal Gear Solid 2 (or 3?). The ending lasts a whole of ten minutes more than it should because the game designer thought it educational to insert ten minutes’ worth of melodramatic, wistful, infantile dross about the environment lah, genetic mutations lah, killing other people lah… all in a game where the object is to do something to prevent someone from taking over the world, killing included. I throw my hands up in disgust.

Or try the morbidly crappy ending for Gilgamesh. If you haven’t watched the series, you’re missing alot (ok, the “cinematography”, the “direction” is all very cool; I could go on) but not much in terms of plot. Everyone dies in the end: there, I’ve told you how it ends, and you get hints of this throughout the series (so, like, duh..). Yah, but see, the message of the whole damn thing is: human nature is evil, we’re bad, bad people, we’ve destroyed the world and we take revenge on ourselves blah, blah. It’s really that depressing.

When I was a secondary school student, my teacher, this big strapping Englishman from where-else used to give us all hard stares and extol on the virtues of writing stories with logical plots. Logical as in: if you’re writing in first person, you shouldn’t actually kill yourself off in a story. (So, yes, we should all burn The Trial) I’m sure his point is consistency; for me it’s a matter of good taste, that’s all.

Anyway, mutations. A freak of nature, an imbalance of probabilities giving birth to strangeness. How frequent is this? From the number of cancer patients the world over each year, you’d think it happens often. An urban disease? It’s pretty true to life, isn’t it? Our bodies reflect the strangeness of our own urban lives. Ok, I’m veering into anime-ending territory, but it’s just funny, that’s all. And we’re caught in that strangeness, aren’t we?

She got us gathered around the altar for the past few nights offering prayers. I stopped going to church not because I didn’t believe in a divine being; I stopped going because prayers and worship were, to me, appeasement. Appeasement: you pray because you fear for your life, you fear for the end of your life, you fear the big waves because “Oh God, your sea is so big, and my boat is so small”. Yeah, but fear, fear motivates you to do things you wouldn’t normally do.

So at the advent of a possible death sentence from doctors, surgeons, practioners - our high priests these days - you might consider taking up praying vigorously to a mostly-silent God. All the declarations of gratitude sounded hollow, and made me slightly embarassed: I’m brutish, so open displays of affection are a no-no, of course.

I mouthed the words, of course. It was haphazard, which just highlighted the desperation. But I mouthed those words not because I gave a damn what our mostly-humourous deity thought. It was because, as I stood behind her, I realized how things never change, and how I didn’t want to lose another one.

Such human frailty, this affection.