cookie-cutter comments

PM Abdullah has called on Malaysians to learn from Dr Azahari’s example and eschew violence, over here. He says, among other things:

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, in urging Malaysians to refrain from resorting to violence, said Azahari was a good lecturer who had chosen the path of self-destruction.

The path of self-destruction. Isn’t that tautological? Because if you’re a suicide bomber you will, by definition, blow yourself up. What self-destruction is he talking about? And these suicide bombers desire their own self-destruction, they want to go up in flames and little pieces for the greater glory of whatever brand of pot they’re on at the given time. It isn’t going to help us very much if we’re told not to be suicide bombers, is it?

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I’ve often wondered if getting cancer is like getting news that you’ll die in a few days. I’ve never had the misfortune of facing that problem, since my youth makes me care less about mortality than grubbing after every last dollar to feed myself. But soon, I may be in the position to know. Unfortunately, I’m not the one currently afflicted with cancer, but if I had the opportunity to spare her the pain and confusion, I’d gladly carry her onerous burden now.
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I’m at a loss for words.

I’ve spent a whole 15 minutes thinking of what I should write, and what I shouldn’t. That bothered me the most: thinking about what I shouldn’t write. The past 4 months have been crazy for many reasons: controversy, breaching the barrier between RL and life online, mob rule, and petty crusades.

Now add the spectre of pretension to that list.

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I hate Wednesdays.

It sits smack in the middle of the week like a smirking excuse of a mental marker; not quite the end of the week, and not quite the begining of the week. It mocks you by sitting on the fence, being in the middle, taking no sides - among other creative cliches. It stands like a big, fat Juno with arms on her hips sneering, “You’re not there, yet” in the most grandmotherly-naggy tone (substitute “wife” if married, I’m sure). And this has everything to do with tonight’s programme: it’s drink till you not-quite drop, listen to loud music and make an ass of yourself night.

I’m sitting in the office now with the miasma of my own bodily odours assailing my mostly-blocked nose, contemplating between slitting my wrists or engaging in a more socially-acceptable form of suicide. Liver failure, crossed-eyes syndrome, smelly puke and disgraced name. Oh, the humanity.
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I got this article from Salon.com off Mrs. Bakar’s post here. It really is a picture of misery being shovelled promise after promise only to be disappointed. I’ve always wondered what getting a rejection slip felt like, but never had the requisite wherewithal (some say “courage”) to actually get down to arranging stuff so I can then send messy jumbles of words off to publishers.

I had a group of friends, myself included, who wanted to get something ‘out there’ and published because we all had aspirations. One wanted to make lots of money (”I will be the next Tom fucking Clancy lah! I’ll dream up missiles that fly like seagulls!”). Another was more immersed in genre fiction, coming up with short stories of that ‘romantic fantasy’ strain. What to do, she was one girl, we were three guys, so we were always putting off reading her stuff.

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Xiaxue’s not apologetic, and not going down without a fight. But that’s not what caught me off guard. What caught me off guard was learning that Peter Tan has written to Xiaxue’s endorsers complaining about, among other things I gather, her insensitivity to disabled people, giving wrong impressions, influencing impressionable kids, etc. Her most recent blog entry can be found here. Shoalin Tiger’s also got a post up about the whole thing. An excerpt:-

It should be silenced, she shouldn’t be moulding the minds of the next generation, she’s turning them to pulp.

She should not be endorsed, nor respected, go ahead and read her blog if you enjoy it, that’s your prerogative, just don’t try and tell other people what she says is right, because it’s clearly not. I’m not telling you not to read her blog, I’m not saying her blog is bad, I’m just saying she’s a stupid ignorant, bimbotic, stumpy limbed naive bucket of shit. That’s all.

Yeah she annoys me, I might write to her other sponsors and voice my opinion, according to the oh great Xia Xue, that’s what life is all about right? Voicing your opinion, because it’s ALWAYS right, and not giving a shit about the repercussion or anyone elses rights/feelings.

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Tired but happy today.

On a whim, I invited my father along for a trip up to Mersing on-the-job. Not very professional, yes, but he wasn’t around for the meetings and such. It was a strange feeling, since this was the first time he decided to follow, and I had a few moments of doubt as I was reversing out of the house.

My father’s one of the old-timers we talk about, either in derision or awe. A repository of historical events having witnessed history in the making in the heart of our country. Over beers and cigarettes, we would sit ourselves down and talk about the ‘State of the Union’, discuss politics and how things have changed. Today was no different, and it was speckled with anecdotes about the past, as seen through his eyes.

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I’m thinking it’ll be more responsible to take a short break and focus on what I’m doing before I have to face the firing squad.

The thought scares me. Yikes.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll even be surfing much for the whole of this week. But that’s another story.

Update 18/10/05:
LOL.. luthien you farney

• thoughts on the caprice of some bosses
• thoughts on the usefulness of an education
• thoughts on security guards who don’t bathe, don’t wash their clothes, and who need women to look after them.
• thoughts on the virtues of procrastination. (am I spelling this right?)

Update 19/10/05:

• Saddam refuses to give up his name. Defiance? Identity? Names, naming and control.
• Control and games. Mind games. Games in departments. Work games. Games in the family. Projection.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 will be out soon enough… can’t wait…!
• Backtracking: Xiaxue? hoo-haa?

Update 20/10/05:

• Condolences to PM Abdullah Badawi
• I can’t even get fuckin’ ‘reversing’ and ‘overruling’ right, now can I?
• My boss recommends that I go pay for wild, unbridled sex and then sit for my papers since that would, in his words, “release tension”. Ha. Ha. Ha.
• Kassim Ahmad’s posted the rest of his thesis online, here! go read!!

When you get past the cliches of expression, I suppose you begin walking abandoned roads in a nowhere land. I wonder how novelists do it; finding in language an expression that is fresh, new and yet striking at the heart of its own truth. I’m not equiped with examples this early in the morning, and I don’t think I’ll be pottering around my books to look for good ones; it’s just an idle thought.

Rock music. 90’s grunge, STP and glorious clamour of guitars accompanying Scott Weiland’s voice. Back when I was holed up in my hostel studying for exams, Core would be on constant repeat, load and drowning out everything else on my first RM 75.00 radio-cassette player. It was my first radio, this rectangular, boxy thing. My father bought it for us when I was about 12 years old. It’s still around, these days droning out the monotony of news from the BBC. It had black dials and contraptions modulating output.
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I am stressed, therefore I blog. Now, how would that translate into Latin, I wonder? Any help, here?

Do you know how strange it is? When you get stressed out you take out your fried braincells on bits and bytes hoping to god what bleeds from your keyboard aspires to something cathartic. I probably wonder if the ‘masterpiece’ I end up writing deserves its 2-minute spot on my own blog.
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What I said to him must have been like an incurable itch.

He frowned at me, his face creasing up like his skin was paper-thin and ready to tear. I remember his shock of white hair above a commanding brow. At the time, he was still leading the Malacca-Johor diocese.

Anyway, this was years and years ago. When I was barely a teenager, barely a boy, barely the pubescent pervert I was to become. I had, at the instigation of my Sunday school teacher, taken goodly advice to heart, and went ahead and read the Bible like it was some old, gaffy storybook. You’ve got to understand: I was goofy in that way.

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And should we thank him? I don’t know. On the one hand there’s the fact that Rafidah Aziz hasn’t answered all the outstanding questions with respect to the AP issue. On the other hand, I’m mildy bemused by Tun M’s stamina: he just keeps going on and on and on, doesn’t he? If only ministers had the same stamina and persistence in fighting corruption at all levels, instead of restricting it to flogging the AP horse.

But’s that’s either too much to wish for, or too soon yet. It’s never too late, ya? Mahathir fires off a classic foot-in-mouth comment here :

“The Government must not cover up and lie to the public, it’s wrong. The Government knows that it was Miti that approved it, not me,” he said, adding that “any attempt to cover-up is very bad.”

“This is especially (important) as we now believe in transparency,” he told reporters.

Again, I’m sure the ensuing hypocrisy is unintended, but the implicit admission is just so telling; is the old man facing up to the truth in his twilight years? There’s a lot to be said about the idea that “I can be absolved of wrong-doing if you were benefiting under the auspices of my rule”.

I can almost see it now: you call me out, I’ll tar your name.

You start to get wary of people in the throes of arty-farty bullshit in my line of work; when they start waxing lyrical about, say, the “eternity between the falling dewdrop and the earth” you should squint, twiddle your eyebrows if you’re capable, brandish your cruxifix or perform any other outrageous, melodramatized gesture of abhorrence.

I recently met up with a friend from Singapore — ye gods, sometimes I miss that place so much it’s a palpable pain in my chest — and we talked and talked and talked for two straight hours. I wish I had more time, and I wish he did, but he wasn’t there for just idle chit-chat. We exchanged goings-on in our lives with each other, but in a very butch and touching way, if you know what I mean.

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Surviving funks is like surviving a long, heady night out with the boys: isolate yourself, innudate yourself with water/piss/panadol and then brood as the headaches take over. It’s such a human endeavour, getting stuck with ruts and such; it’s almost as if we are pre-programmed to stumble through life with one eye blind and the other shuttered. I suppose stumbling has its very own, particular comic value to watching deities. (anyone remember Gabriel’s opinion of angels on the expression of faces during coitus? ha!)

And sometimes you see it coming, the train-wreck to end all train-wrecks, and most times you don’t. I didn’t and my own particularly cheerful train-wreck has been creeping up on me without my knowledge. How has this come to pass, one might ask? It’s pretty simple: backroom deals, conversations whispered between conspirators in private and other cloak-and-dagger stuff resulting, with reference to the latter, with daggers in the back.

“Et tu, Brute?”

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The gods have deigned to remind me of their ubiquitous presence today. I mind my own business doing work the way it’s supposed to be done, and voila! car accident! Argh!

I tell you, it’s a cosmic plot to turn me loony. For no particular reason I decided to do my part and offer my car for our lunch trip, and within minutes of bowing to the fairer side of my conscience, I get banged from the front: a nasty bulk of a bulk-mover reverses right smack into the front facing plate, bonnet and grille and all.
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