Fly Away
Saturday, May 27, 2006
I have been pondering over a series of possible travel destinations. The idea of travelling, of course, is not so much as to get out of this miserable island, but to find peace and a whole new refreshing experience somewhere else.
Problem is, the northern hemisphere is having summer, so its god damn hot up there. The south leaves us with Australia (I've been there in summer and its cool, so now, winter? I'll die there...) It also seems that my pathetic social circle yields no one as a travel buddy (possible candidates are ALL not in Singapore now) - what remains are either people who cannot fathom the idea of taking leave to travel, or those who simply can't cough out the cash.
No offense peeps, I had my fair share of experience in not being able to cough out ANY cash at all.
I think I should pay Jiu Zhai Gou a visit, but forecast says the weather is AS HOT AS HERE!!!
Korea? Nah, I'm sick of that place.
Japan? I have to brush up on that language first.
Russia? (is there a flight there? i could make do with a dose of pretty chicks)
***
What we truly want
We always fail to find what we truly want, simply because it doesn't exist. And because it doesn't exist, it spurs us on to continue to want it so badly... a viscious cycle implanted by our creators to drive us on.
It is not so much that we have unlimited wants, but rather, that we have always, and will always seek that something we may never have...
***
Fearless
Some people are just fearless, immune to that particular emotional alarm which alerts us of bad things to come. They eventually become heroes for standing up against the "dark side", but of course, they always die in the end (not that it's a bad thing).
I pretty much fit that category, as long as you don't bring cockroaches into the picture, haha :)
***
Requiem - Inori
Sunday, May 14, 2006
There is no end to be found in this world.
Sleep, My Beloved. Your life goes on.
You were born, and you lived.
You will sing the song of hope,
For Eternity...
Offer up these tears;
The words of a new love.
Thank You, days of bliss within my dreams.
I think of the fact that we met here,
For Eternity...
***
Grey
Friday, May 12, 2006
It's bad... cos nothing seems to matter anymore. Is this state of mind merely transient, or have I really ventured beyond the realm's of mortal understanding and acceptance? Having perhaps seen this world through and through, everything just seems to excite me less and less.
Just a week ago I could still find the emotional / spiritual solace in music / composing / just simply playing a random tune. I could still take interest in wine and women. I could still tell the difference between japanese and italian cuisine.
Now they all sound, feel and taste the same...
I try to, but always end up failing miserably, to summon the energy to do something, something materially constructive, something that creates value, as mundane as it may be... damn, even the word value seems to sound mundane.
Is this the end? Is there nothing more left to conquer that would give me any gratification at all?
Is all that is left a boring streak of grey?
***
The Answer to The Lost
Saturday, May 06, 2006
BALANCE
It seems, rather unexpectedly, but not totally incomprehensible a circumstance, that the book (the one mentioned in the earlier post where ‘404’ was derived), have ended with an abrupt full stop, rudely (or perhaps there was truly no other way to end it), and there is nothing we can really do about the universal pattern of loss.
Loss and Gain; they form / complete the loop of the one universal rule – Change. When we seek to gain something, we stand to lose something, to replace that which comes in to take its newfound place in our lives.
We lose our childhood innocence to grasp the concept of reality, which mentally equips us for the challenges of the harsh society.
We lose our time and energy, possibly or almost always, our health as well, to earn the income, which feeds us.
We lose our fanciful, unbridled lifestyle for the predictable comforts and homely warmth derived from the establishment of a family nucleus.
All these are part of the exchange process. Nothing comes without a price; nothing at all. (Not that we should so ignorantly hope for that something). The question should therefore be, “What do I desire next? And what will I give to have that?” (Here, multi-taskers and multi-talents should note that we really have only 24 hours a day so do not think of overloading yourself. There really is a point where you cannot handle so many things. Trust me, I have encountered first hand, many a times).
THE GRATIFICATION PACKAGE
The following paragraphs should have been obvious to most people, most except me. I think I have failed to realise in the past, but thankfully have finally realised why the hell I find no gratification in anything I do, and every single achievement just serving the purpose of further widening the gaping spiritual gap of my soul.
As a friend of mine once said, “If you want to improve your pull-ups, don’t keep doing squats!”
Consciously or not, that was exactly what I have been doing; when I seek spiritual gratification, I bury myself in business. When I seek emotional gratification, I ten-fold my physical indulgences. When I want material gratification, I walk aimlessly in town but do not make a single purchase to quench the superficial desires (I probably end up buying a book instead).
Horrible, devastating mismatch…
‘I’ VERSUS ‘We’
I have come to the realisation, when I placed myself before the mirror of absolute honesty, that I have NO sympathy for the weak.
I shall not judge the great men (I used to think they were all nothing more than great liars with a slick tongue making empty promises and, well people forget the promises these great men make after they become great because people are forgetful by nature).
Anyways, this revelation, this truth about my ugly (well that should be the term of normality for people with ‘no heart’) soul, was uncovered today, when I was listening to a friend complain about some low wage, and a family to feed and all that really normal lamenting. Well, I should be able to comprehend complains of low wages, since I personally believe mine is no better off.
I thought I would think like that:
- Yes, we all have low wages. It’s a national problem of imbalance between income and purchasing power.
- We all deserve higher wages, and it is vital for all of us to earn at least 5k a month to simply survive.
BUT, I was truly thinking:
- What??? I have never heard of your pay scale!!! You mean it is THAT low???
- But come to think of it, you don’t deserve anything more. I probably wouldn’t even employ you.
- How will you EVER survive???
I have always tried to tag my personal cause to a greater one, trying to embrace the conventional teachings of goodness. I stupidly run my dealings trying to benefit everybody; trying to give customers more value for money, trying to give subordinates more welfare (mostly more than they deserve), trying not to mind taking personal credit (even though I truly deserve it).
Of course, in the end, it doesn’t work. It never will. Humans are ungrateful (and forgetful, as mentioned earlier), by nature. This ‘nature’ however, is directed only at the reception of good things (hatred always stays longer). Nobody will remember you and any single / multiple good deed/s you have lavishly spent on them, and it cannot be helped. IT CANNOT BE HELPED!!!
If one still thinks, in the face of such treatment, that it is worth the pain, go forth and be the great man. The world of sympathetic greatness and big hearts holds no place for me. I am but human, and if all that goes forth cannot produce results to change anything at all, I will not bother myself.
Henceforth, I discard the great word ‘WE’. I think I can sufficiently be contented with ‘I’.
THE ROTTEN BASKET
The world is rotten. It will always be, because that which we long for is always not there. That’s also precisely why we long for it. We constantly live in and out of the self-created ironies of our conscious and sub-conscious minds. We always contradict ourselves. That’s the way it is, so accept it or go jump off the Westin (If you can afford to pay to get in to the elevator first, and remember to wear covered shoes, slippers are not allowed).
In this rotten world, there are a couple of things we cannot change – The Rules:
1) What can be taken has already been taken.
Yes, every piece of land, property, idea, paper, trinket, gadget, every damn thing has been taken, somebody owns it. There is no such thing as - No Man’s Item, and even if there is, it not belongs to the “loss and found” department, which belongs to the government.
2) Everybody eventually, most innately, care only for themselves.
Whatever you have, whatever you want, no one gives a shit. No one will, just like we do not give a shit when a stranger comes up to you and claims to have just undergone a harrowing divorce (of course, unless his / her wife / husband is a hottie you would like to shag).
Therefore, to even get into their heads, you’ve got to talk to them, about them, for the benefit of them.
3) Face Value actually sells, and sells very well (since the majority buys it).
Thanks to industrialisation, globalisation, commercialisation, liberalisation, and many other ‘lisations’, we now have a breed of unprecedented-ly shallow population. This population, being to busy, with the too many things they are tasked with (by their bosses, spouses, parents, kids, friends, subscribed companies, the government, the government, the government…), no longer have time nor energy to look beneath the surface.
This actually makes selling anything a lot simpler. Physical appeal is about all they need.
4) There is really no right or wrong.
Morals, culture, religion, right, wrong, wrong, right…
Ever asked yourself where the hell these things came from. Now be enlightened – They came from – The Ancient Wisdom.
We are aware, or would like to believe that we are aware, that the ancients, those who discovered the art of astrology, numerology, mystic readings, religion and kung-fu, are wiser than us.
We are also aware, but perhaps have forgotten in our unjustified awe, that these ancient people also thought; dragons, minotaurs (makes me wonder if they actually tried cross breeding with cows) and orcs existed. They also believed that the moon was a goddess, the sun was a god, and that earth was flat.
Well if the theory of Ancient Wisdom actually stood to be true, we should be very sad indeed, because it means we, after so many years of evolution, now have even less wisdom than a Neanderthal!
WHAT NEXT
Since there is really no point trying to change the world (If we aren’t that great anyways), and the world is also rotten beyond redemption, and that mankind will one day drive its own extinction, and that everyone out there have chosen to base their thoughts on Neanderthal philosophy…
We can try to do the following:
- Take whatever you want, from no matter who. There’s no need to be sorry.
- Don’t bother making too much justification; you’re not selling the damn thing to yourself.
- Make sure you take care of your own interest, no one else will.
- Remove any obstacle in your way. You can’t progress otherwise, and will always be wrong until you have destroyed them.
- Enjoy yourself, in every way possible. If something makes you miserable, stop doing it.
- Make sure you trade in what you do not want, for what you want. Don’t worry, there are always the weaklings who would scramble to swallow the shit you have passed out. Its part of the human ladder of progression. (of course, it truly means that we are also eating shit, except that we, at whichever current stage we are in, actually enjoy the taste of it).
***
Reminiscing upon the Lost
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Life is a process of loss, which is part of gain, which is part of change, which is part of life.
If there should be a number for life, just as we so predictably award numbers and codes to everything we come across in our inept attempt at organisation (which truly only makes things so hard to locate we eventually hire ‘managers’ of all sorts, to find them for us; we suffer at the hands of our own imagined genius), the number, in my humble (who cares anyways) opinion, shall be 87485… don’t ask why, I don’t know, I have forgotten, or maybe I never remembered. Does it matter?
Speaking of numbers, I have recently subscribed to the theory of a book, a book which has successfully located that which all of us have lost in our lives – A conqueror’s resolve, a musician’s whim, a lover’s touch, a racer’s strength, a gymnast’s agility, a coded manuscript, a secret recipe, a courtly dress, a royal brew, a burnt out star, a golden era… We may all find at Station ‘404’.
404 – Not Found
Key some random, imaginary, irrationalised line into your url search bar on the nearest internet browser, and lo and behold, “404 – Not Found”. It is in that which we cannot find, there we bury, or rather buried by time and consequence (more often than not that of our unparallel foolishness; I have, or rather I will, henceforth cease from labelling my own species as ‘stupid’, they are now a foolish lot).
404 – Not Found – where we will never again find, and one day totally lose, as we lose control over our physical vessel, the memory of those which we have once held and carelessly let slip.
If one were to make a list of that which we have lost, forget it, the list can’t possibly be made (It will probably take as long as it would take a toy car to run into a dead end on a mobius strip). It can’t be made (physically, or in our world today, in softcopy neither), simply because it will, like the spawn of our universe, start at a point and stretch uncontrollably towards the finites of infinites.
Nevertheless, much due to insomnia (I am insistent on not taking those pills again, less I start astral-walking, [have I misspelled?] again; the last time I ‘walked’ into my boss’s office!), I shall try to name a few:
1) Good Music
What is music? Music, personally, is the one universal language we all understand but fail to articulate. It is the emotional expression that will never go wrong; the emotional expression that adequately defines our innermost, wherever we are, in which ever era we exist.
Good Music, however, only exists in wherever we are not and in whichever era earlier. And to our fathers, an era earlier, and so on… It is always cast behind us… in a time and place beyond the feeble reaches of our pathetic lifespan. The Pop and Rock eras will look back at the Renaissance, where there were no lyrics, only the altruist expression of sound; while the present era will look back at the time when every culture had a music to call its own, before the wave of ‘fusion’ (and mergers and commonality and democracy and the-one-ring-to-rule-them-all) hit us all so fast everything we hear starts to sound the same.
We will never hear good music in our realities (though one might try to invite imagination in dreams to connect to the lost frequencies). So face it, that’s reality, that’s who or what we’ve become; soulless engines toiling away to live, living with reasons we do not know, and in so doing wearing ourselves out to welcome our deathbed. Music, which evolves with its composers, shall see the same fate.
2) Progress
If Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are really correct in sequence, they are wrong in progression, and it is not in arrogance, but in the light of simple observation, that I call the bluff; his bluff (maybe it was a genuine mistake, but in this age, in this present, no mistake is genuine, or rather, whether or not is it does not matter, and we get punished for it all the same).
The HON (Hierarchy of Needs, I choose to simplify it for easy typing, though in explaining this act I have wasted an additional 224 characters – just goes to show how we end up complicating things as we try to simplify them, which I will illustrate further when I talk of SIMPLICITY), if I remember correctly, says that we build our needs based on the following:
- Survival
- Stability
- Social
- Self Esteem
- Self Actualisation
It seems, however, that we have been progressing in the absolute 180 degree opposite of the intended / correct / theoretical sequence! I shall explain why:
{Break}
I ventured downstairs to grab a drink from the vending machine, and guess what? I dropped a dollar coin into the slot, pressed for my drink (which is supposed to cost 90 cents), and started staring at the change-dispensing slot.
WHY AM I MORE BOTHERED WITH THE 10 CENTS CHANGE AS OPPOSED TO THE DRINK THAT COST 90 CENTS???
Just goes to show, as with all others things, there goes my sense and sanity…
{Continue}
Self Actualisation: We discard the need for that, or rather, we believe we have surpassed that stage as soon as we surpass our childhood. We drop our innocent dreams, and take the advice of wisdom from those with exceeding age and receding hairlines, to come down, DOWN, from our dreamlands into reality.
Self Esteem: We lose that too, as we enter the world of employment (a better word for slavery, all nothing more than a make-belief better world, in the name of the almighty democracy). We start bowing to people we cannot stand for scraps of paper we call money – our insolent customers, our unsympathetic bosses, our cocky colleagues who bow lower than us…
Social: We form the social nucleus we call ‘family’ as that is what the norm states. We indirectly also form around us a brood of bloodsuckers who constantly feed and live off the already meagre rewards of your massive energy output. We forego the need for social interaction to feed these bloodsuckers, in the name of morality.
Stability: We take loans, credit advances, hire purchases to ‘better’ our lives, directly adding to the piling financial deficit, and lull ourselves into believing that we have risen to a more affluent state of life. We place the only thing remaining of our livelihood, at the hands and mercy of our employers / business partners / clientele. In this ever changing economy, do you still honestly think there is anything called collaborative loyalty? And when the loyalty goes, stability goes with it.
Survival: And so we end up, merely surviving… breathing harder each day, just to keep the vessels going. We forego sleep, our mealtimes, our health, so that we can survive? How ironical.
So, can we truthfully ay we have progressed?
3) Freedom
We all believe, we all preach and sing praises to democracy, a system founded to give the people more freedom. It seems, however, we are merely enjoying under the deluded demise of whatever is left of our freedom.
We despise the old governing structures of monarchy, or mass repression at the hands of one man. To counter that, we create a system, a political revolution of the past era, to take the power of one man and divide it equally amongst the hands of all men! Do we not realise that now instead of one fool to rule over us, we have (let’s just take a small country like ours) 4 million fools to decide our future, judge our actions, and penalise our fancies?
The free-person, who has to consider in every single breath he or she takes; political correctness, mass appeal, social and moral good, a library of legal statutes (which most of us do not know shit about), the possibility of criminal or civil offence, is not so much a free person.
The free-country, in which the ruling party is elected based in the number of material concessions it places as open bribery to the people, where rich men can buy their way into politics and where every civil serving component in the country’s infrastructure inevitably falls under the reigns of the ruling parties, is not so much a free country either.
We really have the knack to destroy that which we desire! So much for freedom; swallowed, digested and passed out as dung in the pursuit for democracy.
And so it seems, that we lose and lose and lose, and the harder we try, the more we try to gain, the more we lose. Demoralising? Suffocating? Feel like slitting your throat this very moment? I’d like to do the same, but only if I cannot find the answer in my next post.
Till then, we can all brood in the miserable reminiscence of those which we have lost.
***
The Curse of Fatherly Hate
Monday, May 01, 2006
In this post, I speak of an emotional connection I have never been able to enjoy, for some reason I can never quite articulate. Sentiments described in this post are primarily derived from the movie – ROBOTS, in which I have come to realise the importance of fatherly love in the upbringing of a child, especially a boy, and the role it plays in bringing out either the angel or devil in the child.
Like most kids, I spent my premature years clinging on to the comparatively less temperamental mother, but as sense kicked its way through innocence, turned to my dad for direction and inspiration. Till date, as much as I hate to admit it, I have yet to find a way to diminish the respect I have for my old man, and this is probably the main trigger for my pursuits and my falls, as much as I would like to personally take responsibility for them.
As a role model, my dad could only be clocking way above the regular folk. He excels in languages, culinary skills for various ethnicities, DIY fixtures, computers, music, travelling and foreign knowledge, commercial management skills, and is always well informed of happenings around the entire world. Even with my current self I trail miserably in his shadows, clumsily trying to mimic his multi-talenting feats.
As a dad, however, he is probably the worst, or if he has yet to earn himself that label, he is at least an enigma, as my friends would describe. I might not have lead an overtly glorious life, neither had I the privilege of a smooth sailing financial accumulation. Nevertheless, my humble achievements should be at least a nanometre above the normal 22 year olds.
As a kid, I was probably a lot easier to raise than the rest. School fees were never a major problem, even though I may not be the cream of the crop, since half the time I was on scholarships, and the other half bursaries or similar. My parents never had to pay for a single luxury item I own, since I had to work part-time since 14 to accumulate my own savings. I may not be the moonlighting student-celebrity who takes home a million per annum, but at least I made my first 5-figure at 14. I may not have enrolled in multiple CCAs, but at least I find passable mastery in commercial designing, arts, literature, draftsmanship, music writing and adventure sports.
So… Why does my dad curse me to failure in every pursuit? Nothing I do ever seem to satisfy him. Sometimes I think to myself, that perhaps what my dad truly wants to see is my downfall. Maybe he can’t bear the sight of me soaring to greater heights. Oh my, this sounds so ridiculous!
I have endeavoured, and perhaps even internalised the desire to pursue knowledge in every single possible aspect of life, not just to be a jack of all traits, but a master of all. Consciously or sub-consciously, I am chasing the shadow of the man who explicitly despises my very existence.
Maybe, just maybe, I should, if I shall ever one day achieve enough, dedicate whatever that remains of me to the execution of this single, personal vendetta. O how I long to surpass this man and turn back to crush him!
But then again, if he were to be my role model, and also the one who fervently desires my failure… maybe I have to disregard his existence first, before even moving on.
***
Kitchen Cabinets
