Attractive Decisions for Sad People

I imagine a group of ST newsroom people gathering over a collage of photos, scattered randomly over a table. Meticulously, they study each portrait, and one after the other, the rejected photos fall off the sides. Finally, after several hours, two pictures remain, of which a vote is called (as the rules of general democracy rightly dictate):

“All those in favour of Ms Lee by herself, in a prayer-like remorseful pose and a face which may be mildly construed as ‘constipated’?”
Around the room, a few hands come up, with silent echoes of “Aye”. A single thump of foot against ground.

“And. All those in favour of Ms Lee in the aforementioned position, this time with an added emphasis of melancholic sorrowfulness, together with Vivian in a forlorn expression of It-Wasn’t-Me, and some chubby fella who looks like he’s thinking ‘Mmm. Is that chee cheong fan I smell?’ – what say you?”
It is a tidal wave of hands that arises from the far corners of the newsroom, and accumulates to the thumpings of feet against ground. And so, a decision is made, and a voice booms from across the room: “TO THE PRESSES! TO THE PRESSES!”

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Hey. The only reason why some people still get to keep their job is that the ruling party is worried about setting precedences and exemplars of people-doing-the-right-thing. We donce want Opposition people going: “Well, she was fired for screwing up her job, shouldn’t we be firing You as well?”

Here and There Excerpts from “A Repression of Chemicals Delivers the Sombre Heart” and “Yay Zombies!: Bad Melancholic Songs from a Derelict Stranger on a Good Day”

Working on two stories concurrently. Here they are! (in bite-sized chunks of satisfactory goodness~)

[A Repression of Chemicals Delivers the Sombre Heart]
They say: Tough girls are made. Not born. Tough girls go through the grime and grit of the old city, get chewed up and spat out abandoned from the grousing streets and godless sewers, from the gambit of sidewalks lined by heroin conifers and crack alleyways and rustling foliage of useless fire-escapes and bestial condom-ridden rubbish chutes – from the yellow-red incongruous sins and hubris and detritus of the fathers and sons and the bastards. The bastards. They get hammered and stoned and butchered into gunny sacks of meat and skin, their bones hinging on rotten knuckles and unbroken ankle-shackles. An education to die for. Their clothes, food, shelter – garnered and farmed from the nearest available store of recycling collection bins, first floor laundry lines, and Salvation Army masquerades, (all at your most exquisite service). They are forged, and tenderized, skinned, and pulped, and squeezed to the very inch of their volatile existence, and they are made naked to the bare scarcities of violence, blood, and rage – the basic essentials of being human. And so, thus, they are deemed: the tough ones.

To this end, there are exceptions:

Tamasa Hertogh was born a tough girl.

(Indian mother, Eurasian-Dutch father. The former; a street prostitute, a vagabond, a stolen child. The latter; her pimp, a hard man, a bastard. Tamasa was born along one of Sungei Road’s many tributaries, in the second storey bedroom of an old warehouse that reeked of nostalgia, abandonment, and stale vomit. It was the start of the monsoon season. And so, as the first rains arrived, the rushing waters from the adjacent Rochor Canal and the pitter-pattering of the tinfoil rooftops eroded away any evidence of the infant’s first mimicries of arrival into a world where powerlessness was a manifested property of everyday life, and hopelessness was a concept to be lived and died for (and conveniently narrated to the passing clipboard carrier). Tamasa arrived to this world with all the attributes of physical toughness, kicking and screaming, crying and swearing, bearing all signs of the historical antecedent and allegorical allusion of her given namesake.)

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[Yay Zombies!: Bad Melancholic Songs from a Derelict Stranger on a Good Day]
At the horizon,
the boy from the sea met the girl from the sky,
in sweet caress and confession they embraced in purpose
in song they sang their lovers’ chorus;

“Kiss me dear for it won’t be too long”
Remember our tears and sing our heart songs
For so much can go wrong
at the horizon.

Damasked sea and midnight sky
the lovers hath danced by quickening twilight
In defiance of nature’s treading course despite
the lovers kissed in grace and sight.

The grains of tormented sand – fall stream
when winds of despair faintly begun
Like the last calls of the nightingale’s dream
the first dew drops grow’st from silent sun.

So this be their rare song
The lingering buds of newly met lovers un-abridged
between Earth and Heaven, across the flood
The boy from the sea, the girl from the sky
“Forget me dear, so long”
They parted ways, and said goodbye.

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.