The Deluge of the Ineligible Aliens

I’m excusing myself from posting for the next few weeks or so. Mostly because I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do for my modules, and I’ve got much to think about for my thesis (like: ‘the symbiotic dialectics between symbolic spatialities and societies’, ‘nasi lemak sambal tastes exceptionally good with fried calamari’, ‘it didn’t seem like a great idea but hey look how that turned out’, and ‘apparently, sir, you’ve lost your train of thought for the past eight or so stations’. (Yikes)

Anyhow. Life’s short, go do things! Eat more cake! Throw stones at monks! Be a bourgeoisie samurai! Now!

Love,
Carrick

p.s. No matter how many times you hear it, “Under the Bridge” by RHCP has still one of the most uplifting choruses ever. Complete awesome-ness really, and a very tattoo-able phase indeedy. No. I don’t ever want to feel, like I did that day. Really. You know. That day when everything was tainted with a sheet of infinite blackness and life was just a pit stop to complete meaninglessness. Yup, that one.

The Annoying Martian Goats are Delicious in Damascus (and then B minor, and then pianissimo G)

Marcus Aureoles was born by the sea, and like the sea, he was mostly made up of fluids, sand, and fishes. Today, Marcus showed up for the opera in a surgical outfit and a transparent fishbowl over his head. Meticulously, he wrote an equation concerning the functional derivatives of the whaling industry and salmon farming practices of several multinationals with a kerosene blowtorch on the already insured Roman column replica onstage.

Once done, he turned back to the audience, and wincing in emotional distress, he cried out:
“How would you expect to solve f(x) and g(x) by aggregated numbers alone? Will not the expiry dates of our refrigerators collapse under the common weight of the petit bourgeoisie? Shall not the whirlwinds of excitement dance in sync with our recycled antidotes of Technicolor histories and ceaseless realities? Rejoice! Regret not! Move forward! Now is the time to return home! Come together! To sew all the confettied parts as one realized glorious parfait festival! (Let us pray the necessary surgeries will lead the way across the shrine gates of economic dependency)”

With that, Marcus promptly set himself alight, and marched forth into cheerful oblivion. Many remarked later that the performance was “An Amazing Cumulative Spectacle for the Civil Rights Movement for Fishes”, “A Callous Self-Indulging Firework Display of an Overgrown Ocean Hippy”, as well as “Annoyingly Fantastic”. Marcus later admitted, in his prearranged death-autobiography, that the whole act was a tricky publicity stunt, and all things considered, would’ve been executed with much more pomp and pageantry were it not for the resolute convictions of the fish-king Umayyad the Third, who thought the idea of a flaming human popsicle was rather dickbrained.

Ode to Cors (not really)

I’ve got my modules~laa

I’ve got my modules~aaa

I’ve got my modules~yaa

and you have your cat.

The Adhesive Tape is Wearing Off Our Subtitled Summer Pastures

I’ve been pretending not to realize the inevitability of human life recently, more so than usual. Thankfully, Discovery Channel came along and cheered my sorrowful electric heart with this little ditty:

In the next coupla of months, we’ll be saying goodbye to some of the closest friends we have. They’ll be sailing for distant shores and greener pastures, and chances are, we probably won’t see them for awhile. Awhile, being of indefinite value, and stretched to the very limits along the Mysterious Time Trousers of non-committal Laundromat Statements. (For instance: “I’ll see you when I see you”. “Tare care. Stay in touch”. and. “I hope you die soon you selfish NoGoodBitchAssBastardIHateYouIHateYou”.

Till then, we have to make do with the faux figments of online representations of people. Ah the internet~ Distance is meaningless without you (I think).

And now, the Firm Believers of Sandwiches Sing

And now, the firm believers of sandwiches sing revolutionary songs for the cucumber soldiers and lettuce drummers.

After several days of nonstop html source coding, whilst listening to Led Zep and Blur and Busta and Chopin, I’ve grown several stubbles of beard and a fondness for the horizontal position. I’ve also realized the pinnacle of geek coolness, namely: the feverish nonstop working of html coding, whilst listening to Led Zep and Blur and Busta and Chopin. I’ve more or less resolved my perilous parsing problems, and it’s simply a matter of cleaning up the nonsensical bits and uploading the final templates before hurrah hurrah! Viva la libertad!

In other freedom bearing news, it’s an anticipated wait for the graduation ceremonies of close company come tomorrow. It seemed just like yesterday that we were bumbling freshies wandering our own individual ways to this great institution of questionable learning and terrible cafeterias, mixing and matching ourselves like tiny pieces of crushed sourdough in hot soupy soup of the day; mind you, we all taste the same once we’re soaked through and through – all yummy and lovely~ Here’s to the bunch of people who’ll be dressing down as marching penguins and square table-top hats good enough to balance a bowl of water on: Well done mateys!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some shaving to do.

I dreamt I kissed the Sun

I dreamt I kissed the sun the other day.

We were sitting at the corner of the universe with our legs hanging off the ledge of nothingness and beyond, and I was thinking aloud about how life was perpetuated for the rather rudimentary needlessness of transience in general. And she was telling me about how amazingly well I articulated the bygone native language of the cosmos – bullshitology.

She was impressed, I could tell.

Celestial winds billowed across our laps as we sat and watched the darkening multiverse as it spiraled its way into everythingness, and the candles that lit our view flickered for a moment and suddenly we were kissing.

Her blazing heat engulfing my lips, her golden spires of hair entangling my arms, her sunset lips perusing my soul and being. A part of me thought, “Shouldn’t I be lit a burning man?” And another part thought, “This is a dream, which clearly illustrates my own Freudian perceptions of exhibitionism as a lifestyle choice.” The last part of me (which was a significantly large part) thought, “This is fucking awesome.”

And then she took my breath away, burning away the last throes of my oxygen supply and letting my heart sing out its final moments of the dreaming and the real, its corpulent voice filled with clarity and emotion, and of the deepening consequences of being disastrously merely, mortal.

And I sit back from her and she smiles gently, with dream and reality secretly fading as the sunrise begun beneath our feet.

“It’s time,” she said softly, as she gazed towards the simmering glow from below.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the needlessness of transience, I suppose.”

And then, I woke up to the gushing traffic and the tidal wave of lurid morning voices and shouts and trundling feet of people going places.

“Ah,” I say to no one in particular. “Good morning.”

Ow

So I’m jogging along the nearby canal when my footing gives way during a turn and I stumble for a second and I hear the dismal scrunching of my left ankle joint.

“Why, hello Mr. Pain, it’s been such a long time since we shared a moment. Will you stay for a cup of tea and some biscuits? The kettle’s already on the stove.”

“Why yes, I think I will.”

“Waaaaaaaauuuuauuauauuauagh~”

Thank goodness for pain-relieving muscle rubs. The only thing now is that I smell like a wrinkly old Chinatown ah pei. Whinewhinewhine.

The Verbatim of the Masses is Stashed Under the Bed

What is it about collective denial that turns me off? Perhaps it’s the consistent head-shaking and impassive skepticism to everything-else-ness that makes me all silent and quiet on the facial front (whilst contemplating imaginary scenarios involving mass nuclear destruction and the collective end of humanity in my head).

When I was young, in primary school, I remember remarking about the veritable sizes of Procompsognathus, the little chicken-sized Triassic dinosaur that I had a personal affection for. Not that it mattered to my friends. Remember that this was a few years before Jurassic Park came along, “properly” educating the lot of us about the genealogies of dinosaurs in typified Hollywood form.

No.

The responses I got from saying “Actually ah, there’s a particularly small dinosaur that’s as small as a chicken” ranged from “Talk cock lah” to “Who you trying to bluff”, from some of my closest peers. The remarks were so harsh in nature that even I had begun to doubt my own facts on the matter (despite multiple recheckings of Mr. Encyclopedia himself).

More recently, the same scenario played out over a minuscule set of desserts at a local al fresco joint.

“Some species of house lizards are known to grow to the size of my palm”.

The subsequent wheezing and water-choking from (once more) some of my closest peers brought to mind rather gaudy flashbacks of my lizard-affirmation days from an earlier time. This time, I gave up on arguing. I guess I’ve learned that sometimes, reality isn’t meant to be bent for some people. That anything that upsets the natural order of things has a tendency for collective backlash – and I’m too old to be involved in that kinda shit.

Besides. We’ve got google.

On my part, I suppose my own “vow of silence” response was a positive confirmation of the Asch experiments. I think that when you first hear about them, the first thing you say to yourself is “I’m not going to fall for that”. Which was aptly, my initial reaction. No one wants to be part of the herd. But in truth, what Solomon Asch presented wasn’t a simple hypothesis on human conformity, but a suggestion for human indifference.

That’s one plausible reason why atrocities like the Holocaust, Dafur, and Iraq will always be with us. On one hand, you’ve got a bunch of enlightened individuals who feel that some of these things aren’t tangibly linked to us enough. On the other, you’ve got people going “Talk cock lah” and “Who you trying to bluff” (with the first group of people throwing their arms up in the air and going “What the Shit?”). Collectively, these elements, once shaken and stirred properly, result in the rather pulverizing cocktail mix of BTW, We R All Fuck-ed.

Not that it matters.

Really.

We’re all walking fossils anyway.

P.S: With reference to lizards: I know that dinosaurs aren’t exactly lizards. But for the sake of one man’s ongoing narrative rant > quit nitpicking will you?

On the Mechanics of Being a Man of Labor

So hor.

Apparently.

I’ve been experiencing my first instances of alienation and exploitation recently.

Working life iz the shiztyz.

Arghz.

I’ve been interning at a startup film production company for the past three weeks or so. The keywords are intern and startup. Both of which, when properly mixed, meshed, and blended together, result in the diminutive excuse for a certain Carrick to be immensely overworked, and horrendously underpaid.

Suffice to say, I’ve been feeling the torrid anguish of the oppressed and downtrodden to its fullest degree of late.

.

On the other hand. (which is a hand that is really, really, awfully, faraway from this hand).

I’ve been enjoying my work.

I’ve been enjoying designing and rendering the company’s website. (coming the soonz~)

I’ve been enjoying researching and sourcing the whereabouts of unknown productions companies and such.

I’ve been enjoying the civilities of free-flowing alcoholic parties and other riotous razzmatazz events. (and even getting to rub shoulders with the likes of Jack Neo, Robin Leong and Tan Pin Pin~)

I’ve even enjoyed being charged with script-writing a feature documentary series.

Which all in all, I figure: I’ve got it good.

Not that there isn’t room for improvement. (especially in terms of the financial side of things)

But.

In the general, are you happy with your life/job/position in the macrocosm of space and time and the universe? I think, for now? The answer’s a rather meek “yup”.

Observational Notes of the Office (by the Quiet Guy in the Next Cubicle)

I guess:

Sometimes, some people are like sponges. They absorb everything around them, and you hardly hear a squeak from them, unless you squeeze them till it hurts.

(but this seldom happens)

Sometimes, some people are like photocopy machines. They take whatever you give to them, and they print it all out again (with some ink smudges here and there), and they claim it for their own.

(people like that aren’t generally well-liked in social settings)

Sometimes, some people are like little staplers. They hold all the things together, and you never really can do much without them around.

(otherwise, it’ll all be a great bloody mess)

Sometimes, some people are like watches or clocks. They keep on going, with no aims or goals or destinations, and no directions, just wandering and meandering on and on until the batteries die out – which is a sad sight to see.

(and requires some Kleenex if its readily available)

I reckon:

I’m like a chair. One of those sturdy old ones with fixed legs and a general wobble when you tilt too far to the sides. Old. And sturdy. Patient, and always waiting. Occasionally, I do the traditional ass kissing. Sometimes I enjoy my job, just wallowing away as an accessory to the bigger office furniture pieces.

Sometimes I turn out to be the centre piece of attraction (whenever the Company decides to play a round musical chairs, for instance).

But generally. I just sit around and wait for things to happen. Sometimes they’re bad. Often, I reckon they’re for the better. Sometimes, things fall on me. Sometimes, they fall off. I’m good at being a chair I guess. I guess that’s why they call me…

…

(which is violently predictable, to a certain extent)