ARE YOU AN ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON?

I’ve had lots of people simpering at me recently, “O Great Huanderer do regale us with your wisdom; you are a prince amongst men and a lion amongst sheep how did you acquire your exalted status.”

Most great people do not share their secrets with the world; however, I also understand that it is important to reward my ardent fans. It is thus with great munificence of spirit that I reveal how you may be an Asian Social Dragon (ASD) just like me.

Here are some Frequently Questioned Answers for you.

And for the wise, herein lies a hint pointing towards one of my many positive attributes: My Wit. To be witty, it is not enough to merely be profane, flippant and very abrasive. You must also master the art of turning common acronyms and sayings on their head!!!! Would you like to find out more?

My book,  “How to be a Witty Asian Social Dragon (WASD)” (which is only $24.95 if you BUY NOW) will tell you everything you need to know about this topic. With this in hand, you will be well on your way to enjoying your chianti with a side of fava beans.

Frequently Questioned Answers

a. What is an ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON? 
The Mushu of Mingling, the Smaug of Socialisation and the Drogon of Dialogue. All will be gobsmacked by your mad scales the moment you lay your webbed feet in the room.

b. Where do ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGONS ORIGINATE? 
Asian Social Dragons are found in…you guessed it, Asia! They subsist primarily on a liquid diet of bad wine. Their special abilities include exchanging very good money for rectangular pieces of hard card that have their name and title on them. They reproduce viviparously, but mostly by accident because drunken one night stands do not always promote careful contraceptive use. They can sometimes be found overseas in little draconic diasporas but is an Asian Social Dragon still truly Asian if it no longer resides in its place of birth? This is a question which intersects rather thornily with questions of identity and birth and it is not the place of this FQA to go into such issues. This author has no truck with social constructs. 

c. What is the way of the ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON?
The way of the ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON is primarily one of SELF-HELP. For it is important to OVERCOME SHYNESS in order to become good at NETWORKING. Sometimes people ask HOW TO GET GOOD AT NETWORKING, SINGAPORE and it is important to master this skill in order to HAVE A GOOD CAREER that earns MORE THAN $10,000 MONTHLY, when you WORK FROM HOME. And what do you mean that’s not how you do an SEO shush SEO is my bitch i paid good SkillsFuture credits to learn this. People will always be jealous of ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGONS.

d. How do I become an ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON? 
Buy my book. It’s only $15. I’ll even throw in the companion “How to be a Witty Asian Social Dragon” paperback ($24.95 if you back me on Patreon!!!) even though it’s only in Beta*
*by that I mean i’ve thought very hard about writing it, at least 3 times a day. I’ve also told all my friends about it on social media. This means it is as good as written.

So congratulations! You’re well on your way to becoming an ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON! But I know I’ve got to keep going at you before I completely wear down your barriers to purchase. Well – part of the ASD’s kit is being completely comfortable in fancy-dos. I mean clearly, there’s a whole universe of things to master before you become a fully-fledged ASD which I obviously can’t cover in a single blogpost? (Trust me you really have to buy the book it’s got a 90 day money back guarantee and everything ASIAN SOCIAL DRAGON, NETWORKING, SINGAPORE, MAKE MONEY FROM HOME)

So without further ado, presenting…

NETWORKING: 4 TO 7 SECRETS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!!

Protip: Always be unpredictable. Keep your audience on their toes. How long is this listicle going to be? 4? 6? 7? Dare I say 5? Whet their appetite for your unique brand of chaos and you’ll have them eating out of your hand before long. This does not indicate sloppiness or a lack of precision. 

1. Case the joint:
   Everything you’ve ever known about interacting with your fellow man – throw it out of your mind. You’re in a state of nature now and it’s hunt or be hunted. If you came to this networking event with an entourage (as befits an ASD-in-waiting of your soon-to-be stature), ditch them. True dragons work alone.Mark the buffet tables, the bad wine, the toilets – these are keys to your success. Look for the most important person. They will be the loudest and largest and be a little thin on the top. You will also observe that their movements will be accompanied by the sound of rustling banknotes. It is rude to stare at the paper money which falls off their person from time to time. They may be moulting – after all, they are probably reptiles of some sort too (Like lesser versions of who you will come to be, basically). Now, walk over to them purposefully.
2. Refuel: 
   I hope you’ve marked well the buffet tables because you’re not doing this on an empty stomach. Grab a plate and shovel as much food on it as you can. Bonus points if you elbow a person or two out of the way. Asserting dominance at the buffet line is optional but encouraged. Stuff your face and flick crumbs at anyone who tries to come close. Remember, you network on your terms, not anyone else’s.  Slurp noodles with heavy sauce in your nice white suit and try very hard to avoid food stains. An ASD ALWAYS LIVES ON THE EDGE.

3. Say Hello: 
   You are now ready to approach your mark. It makes no difference if they are involved in conversation. Remember, a true ASD does not balk at making their presence felt. Etiquette is the province of lesser beings. Insinuate yourself between the mark and their conversation partner. Remember to do so with style.
   
   Protip: Squat down where you are and duckwalk between your mark and their partner. Leap up and surprise them both. Here is one possible approach:
   

4. A Firm Grip: 
Now that the moulting man has been made aware of your presence, you must introduce yourself. Nothing impresses the rich and famous like a firm handshake. And you are a trash compactor made human. Grab his hand with confidence and strength. Remember the hallmarks of a good handshake –  look him dead in the eye and bring the web of his hand to yours.
Protip: If you are unable to find the fleshy part between his thumb and pointer it is permitted to lightly walk the fingers on your free hand across the inside of his wrist and onto his thumb while making cooing noises under your breath – BUT DO NOT BREAK EYE CONTACT! You have to assert dominance.

Bring all your strength to bear on their hand. Remember, the handshake is incomplete until you can feel the bones in their fourth finger and pinky shift under the weight of your confidence. Do not allow them to extricate their hand from your grasp. This is a test which you must not fail.

5. Talk. And talk and talk and talk and talk: 
Now that you’ve crushed the opening gambit, both literally and figuratively, you must proceed to tell your mark about your company. “Less is more”? No. More is More.  Ignore all of that crap about appearing genuinely interested and not pushing your own agenda too hard. Smoke and mirrors are for lesser beings. Incidentally, I hope you haven’t released their hand. No? Good. They may be screaming in pain at this point because they’ve lost feeling in their digits. It’s all a test. Do not lose heart. Ram your information down their throat. Have you ever seen a mother bird feed its young? Well, that’s your baby bird that don’t want to eat no more. And Mother knows best.

I have prepared a visual representation of how things should unfold. 

They may struggle but you must never lost sight of the fact that that a) You had them on the ropes and dead to rights from the moment their knees touched the ground and b) All this information about your company will allow them to find ways to help you. Remember, they can’t help you if they don’t know what you are about.

Protip: Some schools of thought say that the best networkers are those who seek first to serve the needs of the other party – and if opportunities to collaborate arise from there – then that’s something done right. Heed them not. Do you want to remain middle class forever??? 

Dominate the conversation. Every verbal jab, thrust and riposte is a path that leads back to you. Keep the 3 H’s at the front of your mind: Hijack, Hijack, Hijack. Here’s a possible way to take charge of the conversation: “Oh you’re a *insert boring occupation”? Well funny, I used to be a software engineer too…BEFORE I DECIDED  TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR LET ME TELL YOU MORE ABOUT HOW YOU CAN THROW YOU MONEY AT ME”

Protip: Don’t give them a chance to introduce themselves. They may starting thinking that you value them as individuals. No can do, buster. Think of them in terms of what they can do for you. “Listening” and “Loser” both begin with an “L”. Coincidence? I think not.

Asian Social Dragons Do Not Lose.

Some of the greatest Asian Social Dragons who have lived were able to sweep through an entire room without remembering a single name despite depleting an entire backpack of namecards.

Even in networking, remember the law of averages – Quantity over Quality Always. 

6. Be Gracious in Victory:
Help your mark back to their feet. They may appear shell-shocked – but that tends to happen to people when they first realise they are in the presence of a Venture Capital Virtuoso. Dry your precious spittle off their face with a well-placed serviette or two (this is why you must always remember where the buffet tables are!) Don’t forget to place your name cards in all their orifices. This way, they will remember you for life.

7. Refuel:
You’re not here to stuff your face, you’re here to P O W E R   N E T W O R K. And generating power requires fuel so you need to descend on that food line like a biblical plague. But don’t take too long, the rich and famous will always be moving. And so should you. 

8. Bonus – Inner Game:
Protip: I’m willing to bet that no one expected an 8th point when I had only initially promised 7 haha. Do you feel that undeniable undertow in your belly, pulling you in my general direction? Who is this person, so full of surprises? Well, friends, I won’t belabour the point but as you can see, Attraction is not a choice. This is the way of the Asian Social Dragon. As an added sweetener, I’m really going to give you a bonus point below. Now stop staring at me with the eyes of a supplicant – Asian Social Dragons do not wish to be placed on a pedestal. 

Everyone has an internal voice, and an internal mirror. When you retreat inside yourself, what do you see and hear?

Meditate. Always meditate to get in touch with your inner ASD.

Everyone has a different inner ASD and diversity should be celebrated. This is what I see when I look into myself and I hope yours eventually comes to look the same too:

And this brings me to the end of my post for the week. I certainly hope I’ve piqued your interest! It is my sincerest wish that you achieve your fullest potential with the Asian Social Dragon Way – so don’t ever sell yourself short.

If you’ve liked this article, remember to share it with all your friends – also, don’t forget to leave your credit card number and the CVV in the comments!

THE WORLD IS YOUR FLESHY WATER-DWELLING MOLLUSC OF CHOICE

 

 

I am a Starving Artist

I am a 25 year old man. I am also a copywriter in a small firm, but i often introduce myself as a starving artist. 

Writing is a lie. Bold claim – but I, of all people, should know. Marketing guff. Exciting copy. Statistics in journalism. Professions of undying love and affection. All sterling examples, these.

But even if you take away the intent to deceive – with language as a willing and able instrument; how can you purport to speak the truth when the very foundation of writing is one which is profoundly unstable?

I am of course, referring to the present tense. We are often told to write in the present, to bring the reader into the thick of the action.

Lies.

There is no devised narrative or first-person account which does not take place after the fact. “I strike him in the face, hard, and I run”. Why, are you throwing a punch with your left hand while simultaneously recording the events as they unfold with your right?

Laughable. 

So let’s not belabour the point -most, if not all writing, is a lie. 

As you might have gathered, my relationship with my craft is a complex one. On one hand, it keeps my belly fed –  but barely. On the other hand – well. 

And so my days pass in a mixture of self-loathing and fleeting smugness at one cleverly devised turn of phrase or another.

I clock in at 9am everyday and leave by 7pm, if I’m lucky. Most times I am not and find myself on a bus home close to midnight. No, I do not get paid for overtime, but thank you for asking. 

I am often asleep when my head hits the pillow. I am up by 7am again the following morning. Rinse and repeat. Weekends are not sacred. Is it therefore any surprise that I find it difficult to care about a lot of things? 

I’m not oblivious to my surroundings, i merely find it hard to be curious about the world around me when I’m tired all the time. 

I clocked in at 9.15 today and felt the minutes pass with agonizing slowness . I was busy, but not so busy as to be wholly unable to steal time away from the organisation in 10 minute blocks. 

7pm came and left. Procrastination will be the number one chronic disease in our generation. 

The rest of my colleagues took their leave in stages – at first an exodus and then in dribs and drabs.

I left at 1 in the morning. Do not think that I had any sort of meaningful activity going on inside my head at this point. 

It was then that I saw her. I mean, I assumed it was a her. Long hair and none of the thickness through the shoulders that men tend to have. She had her head pressed up in a corner; a corner where two walls met at a 90 degree angle. 

Now, it takes a lot to shake me out of a work-induced coma and I suppose a woman kneeling in the carpark wouldn’t normally rank very high on that list. 

If there had been cars parked in the lots behind her, she would have been completely obscured.

My hair did not stand on end. There was no indescribable feeling of wrongness. I approached her slowly from behind. 

Definitely a her. 

She was completely still. Close enough to tap her on the shoulder, my proximity failed to alarm her. I regarded her silently for a few seconds while debating what to do. I thought of clearing my throat to attract my attention but I decided against it. 

“Screw it, I’m going to assume she’s got her own very good reasons for doing this.” were the thoughts that ran through my head. 

I turned and left. 

When I clocked in the following morning, I made a detour to the lot where I had seen the lady the night before. I squeezed between the wall and the car there and squatted down where she had been. Nothing. I ran my fingers over the asphalt in search of any markings or clues which might hint at the reason behind her presence the night before. Nothing. 

I shrugged and headed back to the office. 

Lunch was spent gathering information from my colleagues, many of whom had been working in the office for longer than I. 

“I’m surprised you even approached her in the first place,” said one of them. “No, i’ve never seen anyone kneeling in the corner – but then again, I’ve never stayed as late as you have, ” said another. “Well if it helps, there’s a place of worship just behind our building and some of their number have been known to conduct mass prayer sessions; they sometimes spill into the lots when they’ve got too many people,” said another, shrugging. 

And so I had gotten to the bottom of my mystery. I was indeed aware that there was a church in our building but it didn’t seem like I was bearing witness to an oversubscribed worship session. Besides, why would you want to kneel on bitumen when you’ve got an air-conditioned compound to pray in?

But i suppose some affairs transcend the logical. As someone who had never once stepped foot into any sort of religious establishment, the ways of the faithful were as unfathomable to me as my distance from messianic figures probably was to them. I pushed the issue out of my mind. 

I saw her again later that night. Shaking my head slightly, I spared a moment to reflect on her avowal of creature comforts before returning to my contemplation of supper. 

I didn’t keep a record in my head – some days I saw her, and some days I didn’t. Either way, it mattered little to me. 

Today began just like any other. I had been going home at close to 8pm for the past week or so and I was eager to maintain my streak. All the offices were closing for a month-long break and I wanted to end my year on a high note. 

Alas, this was not to be, for my client had very bad reasons for rejecting good copy. Come 5 o’clock , I was getting desperate. 

Ever heard the phrase, “write drunk, edit sober”? I swore by it in my university days. Unfortunately, much had changed since I was 23. 

It turns out that alcohol had never made me more creative. It just lowered my standards and messed with my perception of time. It was a jolly and rather inebriated copywriter who left his office just past 11. 

As I swayed my way across the carpark, I saw the lady kneeling in the corner again. A regular fixture, she was becoming. Emboldened by liquor, I stumbled my way over to her in the dark. 

“Hey uh, you alright?” 

No response. 

“Hello?” 

Nothing either. 

“Sorry m’am, are you okay?” This time, I punctuated my question with a hand on her shoulder. 

That got a response, alright. 

Problem is, I can’t remember what she said. 
Nor do I remember what she looked like when she turned to face me. 
Did she even turn around? 

But surely, something must have happened. Something must have happened to leave me kneeling in the corner like this, with my head pressed into the junction where two white walls meet. 

Surely, something must have happened to leave me here, reliving my story over and over again inside my head. I cannot move, but that’s okay. 

Like I said, the present tense is a lie.

I’m not worried, really. 

It’s only been a couple of weeks – at most. Someone will come over soon enough. 

I can feel them getting curious already. 

I am a starving artist. 

 

 

 

Eggnog and I

So according to WordPress, a new editor is coming to level up my layout. 

Screw my layout – if you can make me a slightly better person – i’ll even consider not deleting your cookie-cutter emails – yes, the ones that automatically get chucked into my junk folder (thank you, filters). 

Generous, I know. But as the nefarious but weirdly insightful Pol Pot once said, “ask not what your open source website creation tool can do for you, but instead ask what you can do for your open source website creation tool.” 

So I’ve decided to help increase WordPress’ traffic by at least one or two clicks this happy month with a spanking new post. And on top of that, well – why wait for external forces to make you a better person when you can take the first step yourself? 

(Slight misrepresentation here, I’ve actually been engaged in a longstanding struggle to better myself – see also: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. The use of the word “struggle” is deliberate; for as you can see, I am clearly making slow but consistent headway. Yes.)

So, as we were. In my bid to become a better person, I’ve decided to embark on a personal campaign to pick up some new…abilities. Unfortunately for me, I do not think that these will all be economically viable skills. Or as some might say, mad skills to … discharge the debts (someday I will get the lingo down pat, but not today). 

If it helps, think of this as a protracted game of Skyrim where, instead of spending time on useful things like “One-handed” and “Sneak” or even “Archery”, you choose instead to invest your precious and valuable time in things like “Putting On Your Trousers Without Hands” and “Yawning With Your Mouth Closed”. Yep. 

And since it’s Christmas, I’m learning to nog. Eggnog, to be precise. 

Impressive, I know.

Do not for a moment be fooled into thinking that this was a spontaneous decision. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve actually been flirting with the idea of brewing up a batch of eggnog for the past 4 years. Unfortunately, I fell victim to the usual forces that conspire to murder such fledgling ideas in the cradle (I’m looking at you, Voldemort): 

2015: Ah shit I’ve got no brandy. oh well next year it is
2016: Ok i’m ready how much does brandy cost YEEZUS CHIRST MARTELL IS BRANDY??? Let’s rethink our fiscal approach, hun. 
2017: Ok, so my friend’s offering to get me this 30 dollar brandy from DFS do I really need some eggnog in my life what if i mess up the recipe let’s think this through again
2018: Fuck it. Let’s do this.

This sudden wellspring of confidence, coming from someone who, when he was 14, boiled himself 2 full bricks of claypot noodles in plain water and proceeded to very indignantly complain about how it was completely flavourless, might appear unfounded to some. And for the most part, it was. 

(I ate it all. It was incredibly unsatisfying. Never let is be said that I don’t clean up my messes. I generally do. Generally.)

This same person would then proceed to pan-fry frozen nuggets without thawing them out, laud himself on his …ah… resourcefulness before realising that his golden-brown delicacies were in fact frozen solid on the inside. He would then proceed to cook them another way. 

Fun Fact: Did you know that when you boil nuggets, the outer layer tends to flake off completely? This leaves you with an unappetizing clump of greyish-white meat in a very clouded sort of broth (and here I am using the word “broth” in the loosest possible sense)

Substance-abusers say that hitting rock bottom, while terrifying, tends to provide them with the necessary motivation to pull themselves out of a rut. The only substances I abused were butter, salt and pepper – but when you end up accidentally burning porridge while trying to re-heat it…I think it’s time to take a very close look at your methods. This stuff I was wasting by the crock-full could very easily have been turned into delicious sustenance in the right hands. 

Mine were very unfortunately the left hands. 

And so I erred on the side of caution thereafter. Noodles. Eggs. Fishballs. Broccoli. All boiled with delicious hair-thickening MSG. Look out, Gordon Ramsay, I’m coming for you!

This happy state of affairs would have continued, and the eggnog would have remained an unfulfilled wish had I not eventually gotten tired of my same old boring pot luck contributions my recurring excuses.

After all, when you break enough promises to yourself, you either give up on this accountability thing or you figure that the last time pays for all and go for broke. 

So after a little googling, I settled on a recipe which was chosen as much because of the website’s great SEO ranking (scrolling can be really exhausting sometimes) as it was for its simplicity. 

I have reproduced the recipe in all of its full glory here (Along with a couple of annotations, by yours truly. Am I doing this value-adding thing right yet?): 

A) “Prep Time and Cook Time: 25 minutes”  I am not sure if the original author was some God-Tier kitchen prep type or if she had made a career out of general optimism and over-estimation, because I took an hour and then some.

But you know what else could explain this? I really, really suck at kitchen prep. 

B) “Granulated Sugar” What the hell is granulated sugar, even? Doesn’t regular sugar come in grains? Is that right? Is regular sugar granulated sugar or am I overthinking things don’t they just come in white brown and maybe orange if you are a huge fan of Putu Mayam?  This one threw me for a loop – as it happens, I was not wrong – but it is conceivable that I could have really mucked this one up.

Damn you, insecurity-engendering-terminology-requiring-additional-googling-to-decipher. 

C) “BEST EGGNOG RECIPE” – ok i’m not so sure about this. Did my eggnog taste good because of my tender loving care or because I followed the recipe to the letter? In fact, I didn’t actually follow the recipe to the letter, for reasons that will soon become clear.

Am I just a gifted eggnogger? I am sure I don’t know. 

On the bright side, the ingredients weren’t too hard to procure. The instructions, on the other hand…remember when I said I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter? It wasn’t a matter of will – there was just way too much ambiguity for me to go down that path.

i) “Light and Creamy”

My thought-process throughout this entire ordeal is as follows:

“Is this light and creamy?”
“What about this?”
“What is light and creamy even?”
Does this mean stiff peaks or not stiff peaks?”
“haha, peaks. haha, stiff”
“oh look at you, adorably using baking terminology! you’ve never even seen peaks on a whisk in real life before jeez”
“fuck i’m getting distracted”
“is this supposed to take this long???”
Nothing’s sticking to my whisk. Is this normal?”
“ok clearly it’s light because it’s not sticking to my whisk but is it creamy enou— you know what, never mind, my arm’s tired, I’m done. ” 

ii) “Bare Simmer” 

So apparently a bare simmer is when you only see a couple of bubbles breaking through to the surface. A simmer is when you see fine but constant bubbles. A vigorous simmer happens just before a boil before the massive bubbles start appearing. Google, thou art a genius.

But mostly, I conclude that googling, whisking and keeping an eye on the milk is really, really, really hard.

iii) “Temper” 

Thanks to the time I spent browsing numerous fantasy novels involving blacksmiths and sword-making in my youth, I know that tempering a piece of metal means that you plunge it, while really hot, into cold water. This apparently improves its tensile strength. I tried the same thing with a glass test tube when I was 13 but all that happened was that I had to pay for it and clean up the shards.

Should I plunge my egg mixture into cold water too?

Short answer, no.

Perhaps my most reasonable gripe in this entire list – so it turns out tempering requires that you slowly increase the temperature of the eggs without cooking them.

This also reminded me of an episode some years ago when I turned Hollandaise sauce into scrambled eggs. Suffice to say that I undertook this step with extreme caution. 

iv) “Most of the Hot Milk”

I was flying by the seat of my pants at this point. Well look, in some circles, 51% is considered a majority and it would therefore not be semantically inaccurate to use the term “most”. At the same time, 99% can also be considered “most”.

Quite a margin, I’d say.

I ultimately settled for “when the milk became too shallow for me to maximise my soup spoon’s potential”. 

Hot milk? This was fasting shaping up into a hot mess. 

v) “About 160 degrees farenheit” 

Damn you, imperial system!!! And I don’t actually have a dedicated thermometer for food so is it really a good idea for me to stick a rectal thermometer into my delicious almost-eggnog. Hmm. 

vi) Do you have any idea how much trouble I had locating a bottle of cheap brandy? You’re not even going to tell me how much to add here? 

I eventually compromised by adding liquor to taste. Which is really fancy-speak for “also make this up as you go along, like you are naturally inclined to“. 

The end result? It was actually surprisingly palatable.

So here you go. My Eggnoggy Adventure in about a thousand words. And there I go, learning new skills and making up words again.

In sum – if you want some delicious eggnog you can either a) make it yourself too or b) ask me nicely, wait for me to finish hemming and hawing, and then make it yourself anyway.

Either way, I’ve placed the original link to the recipe here – if I can do it, so can you – and Merry, Merry Christmas! 

 

 

Yohoho And A Bottle of Rum

Hello, s’been a while, as per.

So a couple of months ago, I thought the time was ripe to give sailing another shot.

“Another shot”, you say – “That presupposes that there was a shot that came before…But soft! What backstory through yonder window breaks?” 

So – when I was a wee lad of about 17, I signed up with the school sailing club. I was under the impression that I was going to be surfing, but with a sail. 

Imagine my surprise when I was told to sit down in the boat on my very first lesson.

I learnt two things that day. 1) Sailing and windsurfing are two entirely different pursuits. 2) Don’t love the sea too much, it’s not going to love you back. 

Of course, far be it for me to quit from the outset. I did what I could to pick up the sport – my learning journey began with a friendly enough boat – it was yellow and had lots of friendly, rounded corners. It was called a Pico. Sailing the Pico was lot like getting herpes – troubling, but not fatal (not that I would know firsthand, of course)

This happy state of affairs would not last. I eventually graduated to a deathtrap faster boat known as the Laser. This boat did not have nice, rounded corners. Oh, no. It was all angles and sharp pointy bits and LOTS OF ACCELERATION and a fuckton of things that could draw blood and/or maim. Probably both at the same time. 

So no, me and the Laser did not get along. At all. 

Don’t be such a baby, you say? 

Right, so straight off the bat, you need to understand that the Laser (I’m going to be using this interchangeably with “Sailboat” to sound a little more credible)  is a slave to the wind. You’ve got a little rudder thing at the end but that rudder’s really there for general directional control – to help you spin your boat around in such a way as to fill your sails with delicious moving air. If you’re going to try to move from place to place by abusing the rudder – you’re in for a rough time.

Have I done this before? Yes. Do desperate times also sometimes call for desperate measures? Of course. Incidentally, is this also much safer than involuntarily catching a stray draft and capsizing violently on a pointy rock lying sneakily in ambush???  Yes, yes yes a thousand times yes!!!! Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of the time, I was going out of my way to hide from the wind. 

That is quite far from the textbook definition of what sailing is about. 

 

Without boring everyone to death about the technicalities of the SS Fuked (Spoiler Alert: He says this but he’ll go on for about 3000 words or so), suffice to say that the thing in my right hand is the rudder and the thing in my left hand is a rope called the mainsheet. And what this mainsheet does is that it allows the sailor (or in this case, the hapless fool who knows not what he has signed up for) to control the sail by pulling on it or by giving it a little more slack. Elementary?

Nope. 

This was a source of no small confusion for me. Whenever someone shouted for me to “sheet in”, I would instinctively let go of the damned rope and try to grab the sail – seeing as it was the only thing on the boat which vaguely resembled a sheet. 

I eventually managed to overcome this. An involuntary twitch and about half a second’s worth of processing were about the only things that betrayed me whenever Jane rained holy hell on me from her motorboat.

To make reference to someone in a story before introducing them is a sure sign of a highly dis-organised mind. Incidentally, my coach’s name is Jane. Or at least, it should be Jane. (I would say trust me on this but, y’know, disorganised mind)

One memory sticks out. 

There was this one day – it was not so much a tempestuous day as it was an incredibly valuable learning opportunity. We learnt firsthand how the wind came to be figuratively associated with terms like “fickle”, “capricious”, “Hurricane Katrina” and “Stormy Daniels”. I do believe all 8 members of our team had gotten got separated at sea. It was almost as if we would not have been allowed to reunite had we not successfully survived the trials and tribulations set before us.  It was all very Herculean.

I cannot be too specific here because I was too busy capsizing, righting my boat, and capsizing again down the other side. I’m going to call this chain-capsizing (yes there’s a probably a proper term for it, but, no i do not know what it is) It was tiring, unrewarding and repetitive. It was then that I realised that I probably wasn’t going to enjoy the life of an academic. Quick illustration for everybody regarding chain-capsizing.  

 

So this happened to us. Over and over and over again. Clearly, someone had not done a lot of good in their past life. It must have been a colossal amount of bad to outweigh the good I had done, of course.

About half of us made it back to shore under our own power – I may or may not have wept tears of pure joy when my boat ground its way onto the shore about 30 metres away from the landing zone.

Incidentally, Jane did not appreciate this. According to her, i had grounded the boat many, many times over the past few weeks and clearly had not been listening to her. 

Or at least, that was the upshot of her lecture. I wasn’t listening this time, either. She later made me do push-ups for flagrant insubordination.

I would have thought that she would have let things slide this time – seeing as about half my team had to be collected and towed back one at a time by a solitary powerboat but i guess that’s what happens when your coach is born cruel. 

We were rather humiliated, Jane was practically dripping with anxiety and the boatman was tired and annoyed. No one was happy and I was reminded, in many ways, of a properly working democracy. 

Good times. 

Some of you might still feel that there is no cause for concern. “Surely, chain-capsizing is merely nastily exhausting and no cause for concern? I do not understand how this could lead to any form of injury or maiming.”

To which I would like to say eat a dick, but thank you for using that term I invented kindly suspend your judgement; I’d like to bring to your attention the final piece in what some have called (me, mostly) the Holy Trinity of moving pieces in a sailboat – The Boom.

 Satan’s SlamStick is all the more deadly for its uncanny resemblance to a run-of-the-mill low-res brushstroke in MS Paint. 

Right, so one thing you might notice about the boom is that it’s attached to the sail. Which is controlled by the mainsheet. (Kind of controlled. This really depends on your level of skill. In my case I should have just flipped a coin and/or prayed. Probably both)

This means that whatever affects the sail tends to affect the boom as well. The sail is about 7 square metres of strong canvas. What all this means is that there tends to be a helluva lot of force behind that horizontal metal rod coming towards your face.

If you’re lucky. Sometimes it ambushes you from behind too. But of course, getting hit in the head with a piece of metal is what I would consider a mere introduction to the wonderful and wacky world of sailing.

So let’s talk Handling.

 

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”  ~ Sang Nila Utama

The diagram should make it pretty obvious that your boat reacts a certain way based on its position relative to the wind. This may or may not be a gross oversimplification but broadly speaking, I am not completely wrong.

Please allow me to explain these zones.

1. The Green Zone:
   You’ve done everything you can, but your boat isn’t moving. That’s because you’re trying to sail upwind, doofus. That’s like putting a boulder at the bottom of a mountain and expecting it to roll upwards. On the bright side, you are completely safe and you are definitely not going to get hit in the face by anything bar poop from a passing bird. On the flip side, you’re probably not going anywhere. In some ways, it’s a bit like being stuck in a dead-end job. 
2. The Purple Zone:
   By some miracle, you’ve managed to leave the green zone and your boat is sort of cruising along comfortably. Good job, you! Is that pride you feel? If I were you I’d rein it in; we all know what happened to Icarus that one time his dad gave him a pair of wings.
3. The Orange Zone:
   Remember when you were safely in the Purple Zone and I was subtly telling you to quit while you were ahead? It’s still not too late.
4. The Black Zone:
   Those things you see in the diagram? They’re flames. Designed to indicate how unconscionably fast you’re moving. You are moving downwind. You done goofed. Ever tried changing direction at speed? Say hello to a face full of water. 

And therein lies the rub. As with most things in life, going really fast is a lot easier than stopping. Going downwind really fast is not intrinsically terrifying. It’s the implication of turning at this velocity that causes your sphincter to go on strike.

And how did we end up in this sad state?

The first thing to note about being in a Laser is that there’s no Left or Right. You either go towards or away from the wind.

Coincidentally enough, you can do also do two things with your rudder. Well, three, if you include what I said earlier about whipping your rudder really fast like a sad kind of paddle. It’s about as efficient as doing the breaststroke with only your nipples. 

I digress.

One, you can point your tiller towards your sail – this is called Pointing (surprise!). This causes your boat to slowly move closer and closer to the wind until a) you come to a complete stop in the green zone because you didn’t trim your sails properly and your boat slowed down too much or b) you manage to whip your sail around enough such that your boat passes the first 30 degree mark, moves through about 60 degrees and hits the next 30 degree mark and continues to move. This is the first of two fancy moves. Some call it tacking. I will henceforth refer to this as tempting fate. 

As humans, we ought to know our limits. I know i have no chance of verbally explaining what the hell I’m going on about – so this diagram is as much an attempt to illuminate as it is an acknowledgement of my shortcomings as a writer. Alas.

 

So that’s a bird’s eye view of me in a boat, the black circle represents my head, the black lines are my arms, the solid green line is my tiller (which is attached to my rudder). The dotted green line is my mainsheet and the red is my sail.

I think boxes 1 and 2 are easy enough to understand – 3 is where is starts getting tricky. As you can see, once my boat passes a certain angle, my sail begins to flap (look carefully at the two ghostly boat-echoes in the centre).

If I didn’t turn with sufficient momentum, there’s a very good chance I’m going to get stuck between the 30 degree lines. Observe how the sail seems to pass through my head. No, I’m not Madonna’s Immaterial Boy. My head is in fact underneath the sail/boom and my body is poised very uncomfortably under the sail as I figure out how best to shift my weight to keep things balanced.

As I uncomfortably shuffle my body from side to side, the wind continues to change and the boom delivers love taps to the front and back of my skull. These are reminders that I am an idiot. At some point I just give up and sort of curl up in the bottom of the boat with my knees to my chest.

This is not pictured.

Now, if I’ve got sufficient momentum going into the tack, the sail straight-up shoots beyond the imaginary mid-line of the boat and I am forced to shift my body to the other side of the boat to avoid capsizing. I have successfully tempted fate and gotten away with it.

I direct my tiller away from my sail and pick up speed.

This brings me to the second thing you can do with your tiller – Bearing Away. This brings your boat further and further away from the wind (i.e moving you closer and closer towards the black zone) until a) you pass a certain angle, causing your sail to spontaneously change direction. The change catches you off-guard and severely destabilizes your boat. You are also moving really fast (black zone things). This combination of factors leads to your capsize or b) you react appropriately, throw your body to the opposite side to counter the sudden change in your sail’s position and perform, almost entirely by accident, the second fancy move.

This is Gybing. I will henceforth refer to this as Certain Trouble:

 

Again with the bird’s eye view – 1 and 2 are easy enough to understand. I bear away and this brings my boat closer and closer into the black zone.

In frame three your boat should ideally move from right to left. Now, if you’ve done things right, you’ve pulled your mainsheet in (remember the dotted green line?) and you have successfully trimmed your sail. But this is not an ideal world. Enter Frame 4. 

And how did we get into this sorry, sorry state of affairs? 

TANGENT TIME!!! 

When you trim your sail, you’re sort of channeling the same amount of wind down a narrower funnel by pulling your sail closer to you. And boy, is this wind pissed at the new development. Your boat is literally slicing through the water at a 45 degree angle because you are this close to a capsize – but on the bright side, you are tearing through the waves at lightspeed, much like a man running away from his psychotic ex. You are also leaning your body out over the edge of the boat to keep it as flat as possible. This is called hiking out. 

If the wind picks up further and you’re already hiking out as much as you can/you’re not as heavy as you should be, the wind is going to have its way with you and you’ll just get picked up and slammed into the water. If the wind suddenly drops you’re going to topple into the water backwards because physics is an unforgiving dom who doesn’t care about the safe word.  

–TANGENT END- 

Right, another quick look at the picture:

Now that you’ve trimmed your sail, you’re going to want to continue bearing away. Once your boat turns pass the imaginary purple line biscecting frame 3, your sail’s going to whip in an incredibly violent way from one corner of the boat to another and if you can’t do some contortionist shit to bring your body back in, whip your head under the boat, and slink over to the opposite side of the boat to balance things off…you will find yourself in for a world of pain.

The boom either smashes you in the face or you capsize pathetically because your sail is now on the same side of your body and you are about as balanced as the diet of a fat man who has been steadily eating himself into obesity because his parents loved him too much to correct his dietary habits when he was a kid. Over-specific, I know. 

(If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about at this point just click on this link here. It’s 3 minutes long and if you want to get the good part just skip to 2.28 it explains the problem with gybing really well)

Frankly, I find that there are just too many variables in this sport for it to be good fun.

So – after about 3000 words, it’s onward to the main story! 

My friend and I, let’s call him Duvalier, had decided to go out sailing. The catch was, the two of us hadn’t touched a damned sailboat in a while. And we were a real ambitious pair – see, the intention was to set off from Pasir Ris, sail 5km down to Changi, have a sumptuous repast, and head back to Pasir Ris.

Small Catch: we would be sailing against the wind the whole time – which meant that instead of moving in a straight line, we were going to have to zigzag upwind the whole way. 

 

The dotted lines represent our intended course. But how hard could it be to tack upwind over and over again? After all, it’s wayyyyyyy better than gybing. 

Well, plenty bad, apparently. Allow me to list the ways we might possibly have fucked up.

1. Rigging a boat takes a bit of practice. All kinds of moving parts and shit. 10 years spent away from a sailboat does your memory no favours. I had a bit of trouble getting everything together – thankfully, Duvalier had my back. In spite of that, I strongly suspect there were some things i hadn’t tied down well enough. This eventually returned to haunt me.
2. I decided not to wear my glasses. On the bright side, i stashed it away in my life jacket. This was a Very Very Very Good Idea.
3. Didn’t bring meself water. Or communications. Because really, we expected to be done and back in about 2 hours. A bit like that time 3 years ago when I decided to go for a little paddle around Ubin.
4. The winds were insane.  It is a terrible thing, to be surrounded by people with negative karmic balances. 

One Silver Lining: I brought a paddle. A dragon boat paddle, to be precise. (Spoiler alert: This was ultimately scant help but I do think it is testament to the fact that I am getting better at this “not killing myself at sea” thing)

We launched off uneventfully but i found myself in a bit of a pickle fairly swiftly. I was blown off course in about 10 minutes and I promptly capsized. When I righted the boat, I was in for a slight surprise – the sail had come loose and was flapping quite merrily in the wind. 

As you can see, I had zero control over the sail at this point and tying it back on would have required that I wriggle my way to the bow of the boat and wrangle it back onto my boom against horrific winds – all while remaining afloat. This was a highly unlikely series of events. 

And so i decided to slowly make my way back to shore to assess the situation. Remember the paddle i brought? It came through.

Needless to say,  I was staging myself a medal ceremony for the Unparalleled Foresight Award on the inside of my head at this point. Good work should not go unrewarded,

I think you’ll consider what happens next quite fitting.

I saw a man waving at me from the shore. I chalked it down to neighbourliness – for I am essentially a sightless man without my glasses. Too late, I found out: he was warning me off my present course.

He was a fisherman and I had blundered straight into his line. Understandably enough, he was pissed. I was less than pleased too, but for a slightly different reason. My craft was stuck fast. I laid my hands on his damned line – it wasn’t completely taut – and I tried to disentangle it.

Alas, for he chose that moment to yank the line towards him with an almighty tug. My hand slipped, the hook bit, and pain exploded in my thumb. Not for the first time do I find myself with a complex mix of respect and loathing for the clever fellow who invented the barbed hook. 

The fisherman caught on (haha) pretty fast from my frantic waving.. After a few seconds of sound and fury that did neither of us any good, Duvalier sailed into earshot and shouted the both of us into a state approximating composure – I tore myself free and made my way to shore the best i could with 9 functional fingers. 

All things considered, it could have been much worse. No complications developed from getting stabbed with a rusty hook (i say this with the benefit of hindsight) and my thumb was otherwise functional shortly after. Duvalier and I had a quick discussion and we concluded that i should probably should stop sailing blind. This is not entirely a euphemism. 

And so I tied my glasses to my face with a bit of string that came from some other part of Cavalier’s boat (because clearly, we hadn’t yet learnt our lesson about tampering with boats) and we proceeded to re-tie my sail to the boom. And here came, perhaps, my second biggest mistake of the day. 

We bold sojourners decided it was to be Business As Usual.

We intended to be at Changi at 1pm and we had set off at about 11am. I had wasted about 35 minutes with my antics. No big deal, we thought. As long as we were back at Pasir Ris by 5pm we were golden. 

There is something to be said about stubbornness. It can be a Very Bad Thing sometimes. 

And so we pushed on. I’ll spare you the specifics but we were separated about half a kilometer in (I cannot estimate in knots so you’ll just have to deal with the incongruity).

He was far, far ahead of me – you might have inferred that I’m quite wary about going too fast; well, Cavalier had none of my mature and grown-up wariness – he actively enjoyed being a waterborne insurance liability. 

When he was finally no more than a speck on the horizon, the wind, which had been picking up for the past X minutes, finally stopped picking up and started laying down.

My last thought before re-discovering my nostrils’ capacity for seawater was, “well, at least Cavalier’s fine”. 

How wrong I was. When I resurfaced, i realised that he had capsized at about the same time as me. Quoting the immortal Zac Efron, truly, we were all in this together. 

I proceeded to clamber my way onto my daggerboard and attempted to right my boat. 

Remember the chain-capsize? It’s not normally that easy to set off a chain of capsizes. 

I hit pay dirt that day. After the third consecutive capsize, I was about ready to start slamming my skull into the hull (if you’ll say that aloud you’ll realise it’s got a great ring to it)

My mood only improved marginally when Cavalier zoomed past me on his boat while I was mid-flounder. He was putting a stop to things- we were not going to make it to Changi given the wind. I was glad things turned out that way. The smell of fear-pee was starting to become really discernible. 

The time was approximately 12.30pm. We were less than a quarter of the way through our journey. 

 

I returned my tender ministrations to my boat. On my 4th or 5th attempt to right the craft, inspiration struck. I intuited that something might have gone wrong with my boat. I was right. There had been great violence done to my laser – by the wind and the waves, but mostly my shoddy knotsmanship. The boom had fallen out. And this 2-metre piece of metal was happily suspended from the sail, dancing in the wind with wild abandon whenever I flipped the boat up – only to pull the entire craft down again with its momentum. 

Some experiences should never be had more than once. This was one of them. 

I was not having a good day. That strange object above my head? The paddle. I now had to manage quite a number of moving objects

On the bright side, I wasn’t the one who had gotten himself into a… situation. Misery loves company – it was with mild horror (and relief. Predominantly relief) that I realised that Cavalier had gotten blown completely off-course towards – irony of ironies – a sailing club. 

I was getting desperate – but Providence provided (to be fair, it’s in the name) in the form of a Novel Idea (Remember also that I was a little dehydrated at this point so my decision-making skills might have been compromised). 

 “Since i’m not making any progress – how about we flip the upside down completely – so the sail won’t catch any more wind – and paddle our way back to shore?” And so I did. And so this was how the coast guard found me about 15 minutes later, situated about a kilometer or more offshore, having moved nary an inch since I had had my Bright Idea. 

Coast Guard: Hello sir are you alright? 

Me: (Panting like a bitch): ohoho yes yes everything’s under control don’t worry don’t worry

Coast Guard: (looks meaningfully at the set-up, is not sure where to start) Are you sure? 

Me: Yep yep it’s all (pants) fine (slams paddle really hard into the water in an attempt to move it, but of course I’m not angry I’m the most good-natured person this side of the Island) 

Coast Guard: Well…if you’re sure…you don’t need to be towed back to shore…

Me: No, no, it’s all good don’t worry (Also Me Inside: ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU ARE GOING TO REJECT THEIR OFFER OF ASSISTANCE) 

I strongly suspect they could see me struggling inside. 

Coast Guard: Uhm Are You Sure? 

I cracked. 

Me: “I AM SO SORRY ACTUALLY I DO NEED HELP”

Ain’t nothing like the taste of humble pie on a bright summer day.

Coast Guard: (dry chuckle) I thought everything was okay? 

Motherf**ker had a sense of humour.

Me: (swallows) oh I changed my mind, good sense prevailed uhm I would be most indebted if you could tow me back to shore 

It was about 1.30pm at this point, I was hungry and thirsty and was making absolutely no progress. Salvation was at hand, for the attractive price of One Manly Man’s Pride. 

Coast Guard: Well okay then you’re going to have to hang on for a bit – we need to head back to the station to *mumble mumble (I zoned out here for a while)* We’ll be back in 10 minutes or so! 

So much for salvation. So I sat on my sorry boat and waited. And waited. 10 minutes passed and I could see neither hide nor hair of my benefactors. 

I am not known for my patience. 

When the coast guard next saw me a good 20 minutes later (Do you want to know something funny? I didn’t bring water, I didn’t bring communications, but I cared enough to bring my watch), I had swam underwater to untie my boom completely from my sail and my boat was seaworthy once more, relatively, speaking. I basically had no way to control the sail – and you know what? It was the safest I felt all journey. 

This time, I could reject their offer of help with aplomb. On the flipside, though, they also took my name and my number just in case. They did not elaborate and I did not ask. 

I was headed straight home, an unstoppable force.

About an hour later (2.40pm) I encountered an immovable object.

Mud. I was stuck fast in the mud. The tide had fallen and my boat had gone to ground (again). Not quite the triumphant return. 

Mercifully, the story just about ends here. It turned out that a powerboat had been sent out to locate us at about 2pm thanks to a) Cavalier, who had radio’ed in from the sailing school and b) possibly the coast guard. 

By 3pm, I was all cleaned up and my boat, while a striking shade of brown, was no worse for the wear. 

But what of Cavalier, you ask? It turned out he had capsized offshore while en route back and his Laser had turtled too. Slight difference though. He had foundered in the shallows and his mast had planted itself very deeply in the mud. From what I understand it was Camelot all over again, sans one Arthur Pendragon.

Salvation was at hand. The coast guard, I believe, was actively patrolling the area for other poor fools (there was a precedent, see) and happened upon him. 

From what he told me, they lashed their boat to his and dragged it upright with lots of horsepower. What could go wrong?

Do not underestimate mud. His mast was bent into half. When he eventually made it back to our place of origin there was quite a lot of explaining to be done. I am only glad that Jane had not been there to witness it – she did not deal well with the hull of a boat scraping against the seabed and I highly doubt she would have dealt any better with our substitution of “hull” for “mast” 

So there you have it. If you ever see me in a sailboat again please find your nearest police coast guard patrol vessel and inform them that you have evidence that a terrible kidnapping has taken place (you won’t even have to give them my number – they probably still have it) because i sure as shit didn’t get on that boat of my own free will. 

A landlubber’s life awaits. 

Motorcycle: An Honest User-Review

Do understand that this review will not be representative of the vast majority of user-experiences.

But if you are known among your friends as “Questionable life choices. Also, rides a motorcycle.” then I do not doubt that you will have much to gain from what follows.

I am writing this to commit to posterity a series of impressions which I fear will fade as time passes – for memory is a fickle friend and the vividness of an emotion has an altogether too troubling tendency to dull as the years settle.

So please, do enjoy the story of my very first adventure on a motorcycle. It might be a bit underwhelming, but never for a second doubt that I am ever always ready to abase myself for your entertainment and dramatise otherwise bland occurrences at the drop of a hat. I speak the truth and nothing but.

Let us begin.

Most of the time my brain exists as a messy wasteland (but only in April!) of random thoughts including but not limited to:

• what’s for breakfast
• what’s for lunch
• what’s for dinner
• ugh is that a pigeon i hate pigeons
• flying diseased rats
• that contribute nothing to society
• disgusting
• would slap them out of the air if i could
• alas but germs
• do you think if i pushed the door labelled “pull” it would open?
• i really dont think think they should be poking the fruits so hard
• yep they just went and bruised it
• jeez it’s really not that hard to not bruise fruits
• is it?
• ok actually these apples bruise pretty easily
• shit he’s looking at me
• gonna walk away
• should i ask the nice aunty to not turn my tea into liquid diabetes
• oh look a message on my phone let’s ignore it
• reallyyy should have told her to go easy on the sugar
• etc

Feast your eyes upon the single-mindedness of my focus. The sum total of the activity in my brain is also ceaseless and infinite. At least, till the first time i got on a bike in some random training school.

All that hitherto meaningful movement happening on the inside of my head vanished.  It was almost instantly replaced by an unbelievably sonorous voice that pronounced, with palpable gravity:
FUCK ME THIS IS GREAT 

Profound, I know. I was Mr. 100% attention for the next couple of hours.

When I finally purchased my personal set of wheels and took my virgin trip down the highway, I heard something a bit different, in a higher-pitched voice:

TELL MY PARENTS I LOVE THEM. 

I did not expect this.

Of course, my trip didn’t begin thusly. Things began easily enough. Start up the bike, get onto a minor lane, find my way onto a highway, and blunder to my destination. Alas, my comportment before I hit the highway was very different from my comportment after.

I have represented the difference pictorially:

 

You must understand that this was my first time unsupervised on the roads. It is no joke to be going down the highway at a speed fast enough to turn you inside out against any number of stationary objects along the side of the road.

I can remember with some clarity many things i have done without supervision, a few of which my parents might even have been okay with. Parental approval or not, many of these times i remember with mild fondness.

This was not one of them. It takes a special kind of person to consider the first time they peed themselves one of Life’s Great Firsts.

There was no time for the usual clutter in my head. I had time only to hope that I had fully paid up my insurance for the year and then proceed to utter a silent prayer to the God of Pre-Roadkill.

My distinct lack of composure was compounded by the fact that my cruising speed was not, shall we say, something I was particularly comfortable with. I had hitherto been of the impression that a speed limit of 90km/hr suggested I was free to go as slow as I wanted – within reasonable bounds. (For reference, the Dadmobile used to be a van that never went beyond 60km/hr on the highway. Up until about a year ago, I was under the impression that this was a reasonable. Spoiler alert: the vast majority of motorists feel otherwise)

After becoming the subject of incessant honking and numerous aggressive and testicle-shrinking invasions of my personal space by unbelievably hostile motorists, I realised that what I had initially thought was a limit, was in truth, merely a minimum point. Well, more fool me.

It was peer pressure bordering on coercion, with potentially unpleasant results, exerted by strangers significantly heavier than you.

In other words, it was a bit like being back in the army

This should come as no particular surprise to you, but I was also lost. Pictorial representation below.

Of course, there are some who have said “dude, couldn’t you just have checked the damned map?” This is an entirely logical path of inquiry. I do not fault you for thinking this way.

Regrettably, the motorcycle did not come with a nice little piece of hardware to which i could affix my phone. I also thought that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to have an additional distraction while surrounded by lots of heavy metal boxes moving more rapidly than i was comfortable with.

On a completely irrelevant note, we all have two sets of reasons. The first set of reasons you use to fob off uncomfortable questions. These are reasons that could stand up in court. They sound plausible, logical, and if you’re lucky, even intuitive. The second set of reasons – we call the truth.

There are some who have accused me of being too lazy to buy a handphone mount.

I would like to deny these allegations with great vehemence. Please refer to my first and only set of reasons.

Right, so back to the story. You might be a little concerned for my safety at this point. But pray allow me to allay your fears. I had in fact, prior to my undertaking, developed a system to help me get from Point A to Point B, and here it is, in its full glory:

Right, so in the name of public education, a mnemonic is one of those memory techniques you use to remember particularly fiddly things e.g. the order in which the planets orbit the sun, “Mindy’s Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas”. I normally denounce these techniques as gimmicky and pointless.

(Considering, of course, that it takes additional energy to remember a very convoluted sentence. But also because i was really young and had absolute faith in my then-capacious mind and therefore pooh-poohed these…aids for being uncool in much the same vein that kneepads and training wheels were uncool to a very young boy at that juncture of his existence)

But as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures and this was the solution I had come up with after staring at Google Maps for about 10 minutes with no luck.

I decided not to apply the mnemonic to the highway part of the journey because I thought that bit was straightforward enough. Interestingly enough, this would not return to haunt me.

Anyhow, I wound up with this:

Fendemeer, Bendemeer Link, Jalan Johndemeer towards X-something Road and X-Something Avenue.

I.e. FBJXRXA or, Fender bender joseph X-ray X-arroyo (Shut up no one said it had to make sense)

After repeating this to myself multiple times, i decided to set off on my merry way. As you can see, my mnemonic does not include helpful bits of information like “turn left here” or “turn right there”.

Now assuming i had bothered remembering where I was supposed to turn I could possibly have moved into the correct lane well in advance but look at all that milk all over the table i suppose there’s really no point crying over it anymore.

Of course, I was still a little concerned about turning onto Jalan Johndemeer towards X-something Road, but let’s face it, what are the chances that i could mess up a turn onto a road with a name that distinctive?

As it turns out, pretty damned high. After a series of missteps, I had been reduced to a fairly abject state.

On the bright side, I am no stranger to changing plans on the fly (preemptive chuckle). The slightly bad news is, wriggling your phone out of your pants (this is why i chuckled), unlocking it with a complicated squiggle and increasing the brightness to a level sufficient for you to decipher the damned map – oh wait guess who forgot to turn on his location feature because he wanted to conserve his battery – guess we’ll just have to wait another 10 seconds for the signal to get through OH LOOK THE LIGHTS ARE GREEN AGAIN. SEEMS LIKE I’LL JUST HAVE TO CLIP MY PHONE BETWEEN MY LEGS AND HOPE FOR THE BEST WHERE MY REPRODUCTIVE GLANDS (OR SHOULD I SAY GLANS HEEHEE) ARE CONCERNED RE: RADIATION

Of course, the fact that i had goofed in a spectacularly big way really only dawned on me when I realised the road i was on was essentially surrounded by a huge water body. This might not seem significant, but there are no reservoirs in the heart of town. And I was headed for the (almost) heart of town.

I will spare you the details of how I navigated my way back to my destination. But if it helps with your visualization, what was supposed to take half an hour, tops, ended up taking three times that.

It was with great relief that i arrived at my destination, none the worse for wear. The fact that i was in a state of shock and was slightly bow-legged (See: Phone between legs) from the journey does not, of course, suggest that I am anything less than a manly man.

Toxic Masculinity? Is that you? 

In summary, it has been almost a year since my Odyssey. I do feel like I have grown a lot in the intervening months.

No, I still don’t have a handphone mount.

Shush.

Till next time.

It’s been many years since you left but my life just hasn’t been the same without you oh woe

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ve lost quite a bit of time.

I suppose it would not be amiss if I were to commemorate this loss with a post entirely about things that go missing in the night. (Or the morning, as it were. The Patron God of Lost Things cares little about the time of day)

As one depressed fellow once said, “You don’t know what you’ve lost until it’s gone.” A similarly depressed fellow subsequently followed up with the very original, “You have to lose something to know how much it’s worth.”

Loathe as I am to identify myself with any of these fellows – for I am a decidedly effervescent and optimistic sort – I must admit that even the best fall down sometimes (he said, unashamedly plagiarizing from Howie Day with great aplomb)

Like most stories of loss, this one begins with the usual familiarity-induced indifference. But unlike most stories of loss, I didn’t lose her piece by piece. I lost her all at once.

Some have argued that watching someone slip like sand through your fingers despite your best efforts to keep her/him is the most painful feeling in the world. Perhaps, perhaps.

But I make special allowance for another sort of loss: Losing something close to you that you were never particularly fond of nor had much of a use for – but never for a moment thought you would lose.

(A bit like when a guy shears one of his own nipples off in an accident involving a pair of scissors, alcohol, and bad drinking buddies. This is of course idle speculation)

And this, ladies and gents, is the story of how I lost my helmet in service of my country.

Unfortunately, no story by yours truly would be complete without a long and convoluted introduction so please, allow me to cleave to tradition – for a man is worth little without the weight of tradition on his shoulders.

For the uninitiated, I have included a quick word-picture of a helmet which should hopefully give you a better idea of how the lovely thing works:

Helmet: Piece of shit equipment made of heavy heavy kevlar that belongs on your head like a 5 year old belongs on the internet.
Helmet: Important part of your personal equipment that stops you from transitioning into a state of existential ambiguity should a bullet happen to fly towards your head from the front, miraculously missing the 90% that is your face. Said percentage varies depending on how high your forehead goes

If your not-friends made fun of you in primary school for having a forehead so high it was almost a five-head you might as well proceed to swap your helmet for a top hat because I understand it is all the rage to “look good on your deathbed”. Also because you should probably cover that forehead of yours, friend.

 

For those of you who might not have gone through National Service, I have tried to demonstrate that the helmet is a rather heavy piece of equipment that, while necessary, can incidentally be a pain in the neck (heehee).

But people better than I have griped since time immemorial about things good for them and I see no reason to buck the trend.

Anyhow, back to the story.

Now, most army personnel evolve unique ways to cope with the helmet and to utilize it to its fullest. As per my usual operating procedure, I have included a diagram to facilitate reader-comprehension.

As you should be able to see, there are 3 soldiers inside this picture. One soldier is significantly happier than the other two. Is it because he has magically grown a pair of green pigtails? Is it because soldiers are greedy capitalists and the currency in this pictorial world is boxes and the happy soldier is therefore twice as rich as the two sad soldiers?

The answer to both questions is no.

Obviously, Paint is not equipped to render the precise movements of my mouse into vivid detail so you’ll just have to rely on my description. The strange green things you see in the diagram are in fact meant to denote the chin straps of the helmet. Many scientific studies have shown that a man with an unbuckled chin strap enjoys a quality of life above and beyond that of the life of a man with a fastened chin strap.

Unfortunately, leaving your chin strap unfastened is frowned upon in most situations. Especially if you are part of the lower echelons of the army – ie a trainee type.

(Hair exhibits a curious correlation to status and/or rank in the army. The longer your hair, the higher your status. Which is why returning servicemen have the most luxurious locks. This may also explain why guys tend to let their hair grow to strange lengths after they finish doing their time)

Recruits have no hair. Cadets have a bit more hair but are nonetheless still maggots. This means that an individual who wishes to unbuckle his chin strap needs to be a sneaky little man – to be caught is to risk the wrath of those who are not-maggots – and dare I say – their wrath is the stuff which legends are made of.

But I think this is quite enough redundant information for now – let us sink our teeth into the meat of the story.

This story goes back almost a decade ago, back to when I was still in the thick of National Service. My narration begins on a day which, owing to the unreliability of human memory, must necessarily remain unknown.

On that fateful day, we were expected to do a nice little route march somewhere, followed by a river crossing thing and more marching before wrapping things up with a leisurely shoot. A shiny new badge would be conferred upon the completion of these tasks.

Henceforth this shall be know as the Middling Trek for, it was neither a long march nor a walk in the park and therefore an oblique golden mean.

The various hoops that we were expected to jump through are represented below:

I have omitted the shooting bit because it is not relevant to the story. I claim authorial liberty etc.

Something you should know – reckless man that I am, my game plan for the final few months of my time in military school involved keeping my head down and attracting as little attention as possible.

This meant that my tendency to shoot my mouth off was more or less completely suppressed in the presence of authority. I was, in short, your classic rule-abiding, risk-averse sort who believed strongly in plodding along with his head down.

I would glance askance at the individuals who took little shortcuts and ran around less than appropriately attired. In other words, I would have performed splendidly in the public service.

My helmet was always fastened properly and my water bottle was always filled to the brim. Boring as hell, I know, but i thought it was wise to accumulate goodwill for a rainy day – why tax the patience of your superiors prematurely when you know that you’re going to fuck up spectacularly enough someday?

That day had come.

The advent of the Middling Trek meant that the end of our training was nigh. As I packed my shit the night before, it occurred to me that I had yet to do a single route march with my chin strap unbuckled (Hard as this might be to believe, I shit you not) – and with the clock running down, my inner rebel was howling for blood.

Dare I do so tomorrow? Dare I? Seconds elapsed before a resounding “fuck yes let’s do it” echoed in the recesses of my cavernous head. And echo well it did, for my time in the military had hollowed out much of the inside of my cranium. One believes that it has since been restored to its former glory but frankly, I’m willing to be corrected on this.

The start of the middling trek begins innocuously enough. 10 steps into the march, I surreptitiously look left, right and left again before I casually let my fingers drift up to my chin. My nerve fails me and I improvise. A few dramatic scratches later, I drop my hand back to my rifle.

Commit to it, you fool! Stop touching your rifle compulsively just because there’s no eye contact to avoid!!!

(All i can say is that anxiety expresses itself in different ways and some ways are slightly more inappropriate than others)

There is a click and my helmet comes untethered.

There was neither theatrical flash of lightning nor throaty roar of thunder. Much less a chorus of angels descending from on high to damn me for my audacity.

All in all, it felt like the first time I stepped into an arcade at the ripe old age of 16 after years of conditioning by my folks to believe that it was populated by members of the Yakuza, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Russian Mafia and all the Chinese Triads combined.

More descriptively, it felt a little bit like Fido the “Good Boy! Now roll over! Play Dead! Who’s a good boy? YOU ARE. YOUUU ARE!!!”  discovering the pleasures of consuming his own ordure and being relegated to the ranks of “Bad Boy! BAD BOY FIDO!!! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. GO SIT IN THE CORNER!!!”.

I was a newly-minted rebel. I was a big man. In my head I had grown a couple inches taller and packed on 5 kilograms of pure muscle. I could now afford to swagger boldly where no one had ever swaggered before.

(To a layperson it might have seemed as if I had developed a severe abrasion in my nether regions and was trying to avoid further aggravation of the area but to a Trained Eye this was clearly not the case. More fool the hoi polloi.)

Tragedy struck seconds after I finished wrestling a couple of black bears, a crocodile and a manticore to the ground (yes I thought manticores were mythical creatures too but I guess this is why keeping an open mind is so important)

Twas time to cross the bloody river.

At this point in time, I had completely internalised the fact of my ballingness. (for my more impressionable readers this isn’t a word yet but if the millennials have their way we’re going to have a problem on our hands) 

And much like that dude with the wings made of wax, I had completely disregarded the fact that my powers were not in fact intrinsic and stemmed from an external source.

Had I remembered this, I might have recalled that my bloody helmet was unbuckled. Alas, for hindsight is 20/20. (But come to think about it being able to see out of the back of your head would be a gift no matter your visual acuity)

As the canny reader will have realised, my unbuckled helmet was going to be a problem. SPOILER ALERT: Shit that isn’t tied down to your body has a disturbing tendency to drift away when said body is submerged in water. 

Luckily for me, there was a series of incredibly alert officer-types on duty standing by to make sure every cadet was shipshape and ready to take to the high seas (and when I say “high seas” I really mean “filthy brown pool”)

Unfortunately for me, this otherwise admirable safety net was hampered by the fact that

1. It was 3 bloody am and the visibility was not what one would consider “excellent” or even “existent”, for that matter.
2. There were flashlights involved but they were not what one would consider “bright”.
3. There were officers involved but they were also not what one would consider “bright”.
4. I’m sorry, the word I was looking for was “observant” but I couldn’t resist taking a shot anyway.
5. Actually, I’m not really that sorry. You’ll understand why as the story unfolds.
6. Everyone was ridiculously tired and as the old adage goes, “you see exactly what you want to see” and what my officers wanted to see was an enthusiastic young officer with his chin strap buckled, his lifejacket fully inflated and the fires of youthful zest burning in his eyes. And so that was what they saw.

In their defence though:

1. It was completely bloody likely that the lifejacket was obscuring my chinstraps from view.
2. Tis my bloody responsibility to take care of my own shit. I make no excuses for this.
3. I suppose looking at about 180 cadets over the period an hour or so couldn’t have been very fun.
4. It was 3am and my officers are human too.
5. Shit happens.

Again, allow me to pictorially represent the rigour of the final checks:

You can’t tell but the fellow doing the check was in truth, extremely focused. 

And so, I hook myself onto the line that had been set up earlier between two trees and proceeded to plunge into the water with a hop, skip and a jump.

This wasn’t the first time we were doing a river crossing. I was therefore justifiably blase. This approach towards life was quickly complicated by what felt like a tourniquet around my neck.

As the canny reader will have noticed, having a tourniquet around your neck interferes with your airways. And my airways were indeed being interfered with in a very big way.

I figure it is nary but a stray weed and proceed to vigorously dip my head into the water in the hopes that it might go away. When I finally re-emerge, I am akin to the Genie when Aladdin decides to release it from its servitude.

(To be precise, it is all I can do to stop myself from flying into midair and doing a pirouette, all the while advertising the fact of my freedom in a very loud voice, reality be damned)

I shake my head experimentally to verify that I have shed my restraints. All is good.

It was then that I realised that my head was suspiciously light and the back of my hair was suspiciously damp. What began as an inkling condensed into a too, too solid certainty.

I pat my head to confirm my suspicions (but alas, for i did not rub my belly at the same time) and to my shame and horror – I touch hair.

My helmet is no longer on my head.

Naturally, my first instinct was to locate the damned thing. I stopped looking towards the sky and directed my gaze forward. Happily, my helmet was before me, bobbing along merrily on the surface of the water.

Cruelly enough, this part of the story is not going to end well – I can’t bring myself to type it out so please enjoy the following visuals:

He says it like he didn’t have to type out the words in paint anyway

To cut a very long story short, it turns out that kevlar is not known for its buoyancy – and to return to an earlier point – you see exactly that which you expect to see – which may or may not explain my previous optimism.

Now, I hadn’t said this before, but two instructors were in fact floating in the vicinity on a boat of sorts to make sure no troublesome reports had to be written we were in no danger of drowning.

This is in fact a good time for me to remind you about the point I had earlier made about instructors and luminosity – or lack thereof.

What ensued was one of the most ridiculous conversations I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

The ranking officer on that boat – well – let’s just call him nob.

nob: *realises I am conspicuously sans a helmet* OI cadet! Where’s your helmet??

Me: Sir, I think it’s missing.

nob: Yes I know it’s missing but what do you mean it’s missing?

Me: *begins to understand that I might have to talk slowly with this one* Sir, missing as in it’s not here.

(As we all know, there is an art to answering questions without actually being helpful and I believe my apprenticeship in this specific field started at a very young age)

-At this point in time the other fellow on the boat realises poor nob is in need of a helping hand-  

Other Fellow (To nob): Yah he lost his helmet.

nob: Huh? Like that how??? Where’s the helmet?

Whips around jerkily like he expects the helmet to come floating down on a beam of moonlight – in his defense, I did much the same thing in the immediate aftermath of my loss. 

Other fellow (Visibly annoyed): Helmets dont float

(alas if only someone had made an announcement to this effect at the start of the exercise)

nob: WAH! Then can we get him to find the helmet?

Other fellow (Grits teeth): It’s 3am. He’s wearing a lifejacket. How is he supposed to find it?

nob: Oh like that ah? *frowns in thought. Crickets make sweet music in the night and somewhere in the world a child is born, and someone discovers the philosopher’s stone* eh I’ve got it how about we make him take off his lifejacket and dive into the water to find his –

(Please understand that at this point in time I am carrying a fair quantity of gear- the most significant of which is a backpack of sorts which weighs anywhere between 10 to 20kg and a rifle thingum.)

…

(On a completely unrelated note it can be a little ironic when safety officers recommend the violation of safety procedures. A bit like when nurses run around murdering people)

Other fellow (lets out a soft sigh born of profound exasperation and prolonged exposure to our good man nob): Ah cadet you just carry on with the crossing.

me: Thank you sir.

-Conversation Ends-

For the rest of the middling trek I am visited by multiple instructors who wish to impress upon me the fact that I am possibly the only individual in the history of the institution to lose my helmet in a river crossing.

But then again – the institution has had a long history indeed – and human memory is fallible. Was I to have this dubious distinction taken away from me too? (much like my helmet, but the deprivation is figurative this time) 

On the bright side, though, everyone was a bit too flabbergasted to punish me – so I suppose I had that going for me.

I vaguely remember the poor fellow in charge of my platoon going: “How? How did you lose your helmet? yes yes I know you lost it but…How??? How???” His confusion was palpable. I cannot deny that my heart went out to him at that moment.

I did not, of course, provide much of a cogent explanation beyond a half-hearted “I suppose I hit the buckle by accident and the whole thing came out”.

Or something. Who would have had time for the whole story? Between the interruptions from other instructors and the crap good-natured ribbing from my friends, how would I have been able to put together a coherent narrative? Perfectionist that I am, I chose not to go down that path.

No, I wasn’t trying to avoid getting punished. I have no idea why you would think that.

And thus ends my tale of bereavement. Sometimes you do a small stupid without expecting it to become a big stupid but to your horror – and everyone’s delight – you end up with a massive stupid on your hands.

There’s a silver lining to this story, of course. One of my instructors eventually snuck me a spare helmet. There’s a lot to be said for pure dumb luck but I suppose there’s an equal amount that could be said for unsolicited acts of kindness.

Especially when you’re a maggot on the receiving end. Hoho.
Toddles, y’all.

(Coincidence of coincidences, it’s 3am again)

 

 

He was a fun guy

“The writer who thinks his work is marvellous is heading for trouble”.

I watched you walk away from me. You weren’t the first. Like so many others before you, you were not missed. 

Eventually. 

That line really, really stuck with me.

The nice thing about being a kid is that everything you read is new and exciting. After a while you start to expect every writer to be just as exciting as the previous one. The deeply tragic thing about all this is that it took you quite some time to learn how to believe in this.

Some beliefs are easy. “My pillow will not disappear in the night.” That’s an easy one.

Some beliefs are a little harder. “My public transport isn’t going to run into unforeseen delays tomorrow”. Now, that’s a little more difficult.

But few are as hard to commit to as a belief that behind another mountain lies a newer and more exciting one.

I suppose what I’m saying is, that specific belief took some balls.

“Will the next book be as exciting as this book? Surely not”.

“Ah, but it is!” 

“Must have been a coincidence” 

“How about this one?”

“Clearly, another coincidence! Or is this a sign of more to come-” 

And so forth, until the day you decide to end your silly free trial with optimism and commit to a 2-year subscription to “Idealism Unchained“. The deeply ironic thing about all this is that the very evidence you’ve put so much effort into collecting is now the reason you’re so hard to impress.

The sad truth of the matter is that if you keep picking at a scab it’s never going to heal – this applies to both wounds of the physical and the emotional variety. So cut out that “let’s revisit this trauma over tea and cupcakes” bullshit because i have a sneaking feeling that it’s not going to make you better.

This revelation occurred to me when i was hopped out of my skull. It is quite unfortunate that it no longer feels quite as mind-blowing as when I first had my little epiphany. 

I feel a bit like a character in a Murakami novel sometimes – I don’t do things – I just am. It’s a bit like swimming in a pool of amber. You’re not moving much and you know it’s going to be the death of you but as far as final places of repose go – you could do a lot worse.

Murakami is a bit like eating sambal – you know the general taste of the thing but you’re just not entirely sure of the specifics until you get right down to it. You sometimes get a bit more than you bargained for – sometimes a little less – but it all tends to even out.

Eventually.

I’m never really sure what sort of world I’m operating in – is it scientific? Is it supernatural? The odd thing is that I suspect I could put my finger on it – given sufficient attention – but i’m strangely reluctant to – am I trying to be true to the spirit of the work (or am I just intellectually lazy and content to drift along in a literary haze)? I am sure I don’t know.

This is an odd sort of mood to be in – but then again, I’m never productive when monochromatic.

It’s like getting medicated for a series of health complaints – it isn’t enough that you’ve got to take the pill for keeping your temperature down; you also need to take the one for getting rid of your phelgm. Don’t forget the cold compress for your head because you walked into a tree while you were in a fever-induced fug. But I think at the root of it we’re all rather complex and any element missing from that cocktail of emotions is one condiment short of Man’s Lot. Jealousy, pain, love, anger, rage, dissatisfaction, malcontent, anger (am I repeating this?), acceptance, disaffection, nostalgia, melancholy.

But mostly just a lot of detached head-scratching as I try to think of another emotion starting with “A”.

I remember flossing my teeth at 2am in the morning and staring at the bristles of my toothbrush.

Before staring at the bristles on my chin.

It felt a little like I was watching a tennis match between two physically-unimposing 5-year-olds trapped in an eternal rally. The net result (ha) is that the balls tend to go back and forth rather predictably and somewhat languidly. 

As did my eyes. 

I also remember taking my toothbrush out of my shoe bag and transferring it into my backpack at least 5 times. This begs the question of why my toothbrush was in my shoe bag in the first place. 

I’m actually slightly apologetic that this post doesn’t have the same number of sketches it normally does. I greatly enjoy doing my crappy ms paint drawings but lately it seems like I’ve been forced into a choice between “WRITE” and “MS-PAINT” and I can’t seem to do both at the same time without feeling like I’m sacrificing one or the other.

Actually, this is a complete lie – I always end up sacrificing the writing bit because coming up with stupid ass captions and silly stick figures is cathartic – but really, cathartic is one thing but giving my readers a cohesive story line is yet another.

And so I have compromised in a way that makes no one happy at all – if you were to take a look at the draft section of this blog you would completely understand.

I remember the sky was absolutely stunning that night. Incandescent midnight-blue, haphazardly scattered rust-coloured clouds. Was there a moon? I think the moon shone strangely that night. The sort of brilliance that screams for your attention from the corner of your eye but becomes a soft glow when you look at it directly.

More than that I cannot say.

And there was a quiet explosion in my head and the shrapnel was a net of gold shot through with jade flecks. 

A susurrus of reassurance: “it’s all connected. Everything’s bloody connected.” 

Today was an abnormally exhausting day. Far be it for me to dangle these tantalizing nuggets of information before you without revealing the devil in the details but I’ve got plans for this story – someday. Suffice to say that inasmuch as well-meaning folks rattle off stuff like “it’s dangerous” and “Don’t do it”, some people are experiential types and will not believe that the expression “He shat his pants in fear” is literal until they shit their own pants in fear and then it’s regrets all around.

I very frankly didn’t expect this post to turn out like this but who can say what your child will look like 25 years down the road?

A friend of mine told me to put my thoughts down on paper because it might prove useful someday – unfortunately, I was a little too distracted by the texture of the blanket on my temples.

For the most part, though, I have been true to the spirit of the experience. 

I don’t think my work is marvellous. (Not all the time, at least, and not in the recent past)

Trouble dogged his heels like a clumsy stranger with oversized shoes. 

Until next time, friends.

Are Lost

Right, it’s been a while. Let us begin in the thick of things, for I am the very soul of brevity. (For those of you who have no idea what i’m going on about, the first part of my story is here)

Now, I had been given a set of very specific instructions (by none other than the Host) on the day we were due to head out to the hot springs:

1. Bring a small towel.
2. Bring a big towel for the purposes of drying yourself off post-shower.
3. In the event of a possible failure to comply with 1 & 2, make a small monetary contribution to the proprietors of the spring. Expect them to reward your contribution with a small towel.

I dutifully packed the big towel in my bag. Damned if I was going to pay wildly inflated prices for convenience. I wasn’t so sure about the small towel, though. I already had a big towel. Why the hell would I need a small towel? Does a man with a bazooka bother scrambling for a miserable Glock? I think not.

Stop staring at my androgynous crotch, oversexed reader (But to have a “Bazooka” AND a “Pistol” though. Possibilities…) 

As I grabbed my pack and prepared to haul ass, a number of thoughts occurred to me. My misadventures over the past couple of days had taught me that the Host, while meticulous to a fault and a bit of a cautious type, wasn’t the sort of person to give unreasonable instructions like “go count the number of grains of sand on the beach” or “go fill out this sieve with water” and even “don’t sleep during lectures”.

“Please Sir, we’ll do it for all the underprivileged kids!”

I therefore knew for a fact that the Host did not give instructions lightly.

Nonetheless, I figured that there was no shame in asking a few questions.  After all, I could just as easily choose to ignore the Host if I felt he was exhibiting the risk tolerance of an 80-year old man in the aftermath of hip replacement surgery.

Me: “heya why the hell do i need to bring a small towel?”

The Host: “Oh it’s for your face/head.”

Me: “is that it? Well. Fuggit”

The Host: “It’s also for you to cover your…y’know…up when you’re moving from place to place” *makes a vague gesture*

Me: “ha. ha. What the hell are you talking about mate?” *A too, too solid certainty descends upon me* “You’re effing kidding me we’re going to be effing naked, are we?”

The Host: *peers at me as a white man might have peered at a tribal sort centuries ago when white “explorers” were spreading over the surface of the globe raping and pillaging  delivering sliced bread and clean, running water to all and sundry (in a word, Civilisation)* “Yes, of course we are! You have to be naked in a hot spring!”

Me: “Wait, you’re going to see my dick? And i’m going to see yours? This is fucking amazing, mate!”

The Host: *Stares at me fixedly* “…yes.”

Me: “Cool beans. Hey if we’re going to be seeing each other naked anyway why the hell do i still need to cover my ass up? I mean you’re going to be checking me out anyway, aren’t you, you horn-dog?” *cackles* (I’m expecting the three witches from Macbeth to give me an honorary membership any day now)

At this point in the conversation, I realise my friend is inches (heh. heh. inches. heh. heh) away from launching into an exasperated but possibly amusing (more so to me, less so to him) tirade about his bemusement at the manner in which I have survived a fair number of years without suffering blunt trauma-induced impairment (To which I would respond that somewhere out there, someone’s looking out for me. I prefer to think that the force in question has a terribly crude sense of humour, is female, possibly hot, and wants nothing but the best for me. One can dream, can one not?) Kind-hearted chap that I am, I beg off.

Me: “right right. I don’t have the towel though. D’you happen to have a spare I could borrow?”

The Host: “Unfortunately for you, I have a spare towel for drying off but I don’t actually have a spare face towel.”

I was in fact fairly tempted to ask if he would be willing to take a pair of scissors to his towel but I understand that having a manslaughter charge on one’s records can be a obstacle to gainful employment. I did not wish to hamper his future in any way (I also understand that bleeding to death from a stomach wound can be an incredibly painful way to go and I’m not a real big fan of pain. But obviously, concern for his future was by and large the more relevant factor in my decision-making process).

Me: “Aite. So I’ll just go without one. No biggie.”

The Host: “It’s compulsory.”

The stare has become, if anything, a little more fixed. The temperature in the room was rising. (And not in a homoerotic way. His loss, clearly)

Me: “mmm…kay. Guess I’ll buy it at the counter then.”

The shadows surrounding The Host retreat a little and his eyes stop glowing red. I heave a tolerably subtle sigh of relief and shoulder my bag.

Host: “I need to use the toilet. I’ll rendezvous with you at the convenience store”.

But of course, we both knew that he had to spend the next five minutes un-summoning Cthulu.

He locked himself in the toilet and commenced the horribly complicated ritual. Or maybe he simply had had a particularly stubborn gob of phlegm stuck in the back of his throat.

Either way, I hope we never find out.

As I traipsed out of his apartment, my attention was drawn to a piece of checkered fabric sticking out from a compartment near the bottom of his door. I pulled it out and gave it a cursory inspection. It looked clean enough. I held it a distance from my nose and sniffed it carefully. It smelled of nothing organic. It did smell sort of…familiar, though. After a quick cost-benefit calculation where I weighed the pain of getting fleeced against the discomfort that a reasonably clean but dubiously-scented cloth might possibly create, the choice was clear.

Never let it be said that I am an irrational being.

I shrugged and stuck it (the cloth, not the shrug. Ambiguity can be such a bitch) in my pocket. I figured that he had probably forgotten about that specific piece of fabric and had clearly underestimated the depths to which I would sink to avoid unnecessary expenditure.

We were due to hit the springs after traversing a relief feature as part of the itinerary. Which we did. Once again, the exigencies of story-telling demand that I fast-forward over the dreary bits. What I will narrate, though, is this amusing conversation that transpired some time between lunch and 4pm. Please forgive the egregious lack of precision.

Me: (Very sheepishly) Mate, you know when you said you had no spare face towel?

The Host: yeah?

Me: So i found this cloth thing. And I brought it along. *undulates uncomfortably* Like if you want it back* I’ll just go buy myself a face towel or some shit.

*Basically when you’re offering food to your friends but you actually really like the stuff you’re passing around so you sort of hope that no one’s going to take too much of it. Unfortunately, you have great taste in things so prepare to be frustrated on this count. Very frustrated indeed. 

The Host: …I’m not going to begrudge you that little piece of cloth but….where exactly did you find it?

Me: It was on your door. Somewhere. Near the bottom of it.

The Host stares at me quizzically as he attempts to recall what I might have scavenged from his abode. The click of the Eureka Moment was audible.

The Host: (Barely suppressed laughter) Do you know what that cloth’s for?

Me: Sniffed it. Couldn’t tell.

The Host: (Bursts into unrestrained laughter) I POLISH MY SHOES WITH THAT.

Me: RIGHT. IT’S KIWI. NO WONDER IT SMELT FAMILIAR…I’m missing the point, aren’t I?

The Host: (He does not reply. It can be hard to talk when you are laughing)

Me:…so…you want it back?

The Host: ARE YOU HONESTLY STILL GOING TO USE IT?

Me: Iuno. You mind?

The Host: You should reallyyy have asked me about this.

Me: That’s not a No. Thanks, friend.

I won’t tell you whether I used the cloth in the end; not because I’m trying to hide details from you, but really because I genuinely have forgotten. To my eternal chagrin, my memories of those days are patchy at best.

And so it came to pass that after a longish trek which will remain mercifully un-narrated, my party and I made our happy way into the springs. After purchasing our entrance tickets, we were directed to a changing room. And when I say “directed” I mean we followed The Host because I am unable to understand instructions written in Japanese.

Alas Poor Wednesday

We arrived at the changing room in short order. Now, despite the fact that my unflappability is rivalled only by that of an ironically-named fictional avian entity from a mobile game that went viral in 2013 (Hint: If a pornographic variant of this game were to appear in the near future, I am of the opinion that it would go by the name of ‘Fappy Bird’), I was taken by surprise. I had never in my life seen such a large concentration of naked males in a single place.

Like any facility that allows for a multitude of semi-naked and/or naked bodies to frolic in a body of water, patrons were expected to shower before engaging in the festivities of the day for the purposes of hygiene. This was where mistakes were made.

1. I desperately had to answer the call of nature. Could I have held it in? Possibly. Would the people around me have appreciated it if my bladder had decided to spontaneously give up the good fight in a hot spring half an hour later? Not bloody likely.
2. Who the hell wears glasses in a hot spring? Not me. Can I see without my glasses? Let me put it this way: If you’re five centimetres away I can sort of make out a fuzzy-edged, strangely-shaped protuberance above your mouth.
3. Does it make sense for an independent, healthy and visually-impaired young man to split up from his friends in a foreign compound filled with naked men? Of course. Also, I do not see how this story could go wrong in any way at all.
4. Did my friends say they were going to wait for me in the hot spring or back in the changing room? Could I have clarified? Yes. Did I clarify? Does a Manly Man Show Signs of Weakness and/or Uncertainty? Get out.
5. Did I know there was going to be more than one spring in this place? Nope. Did I bother to find out? See: Manly Man.
6. I vaguely remember my friends saying they were going to meet up with me in fifteen minutes’ time. Did I want to be the strange bloke who was completely naked barring a watch around my wrist? There’s kinky, and then there’s asking for trouble when surrounded by naked men. Did I see any clocks nearby? See: No glasses. 

Upon my egress from the toilet, my friends were nowhere to be seen. I greatly resented the architect responsible for the compound. He obviously had not had the presence of mind to place the bloody showers in the same location as the pee-receptacles.

[But as the bloke who, at some point in his life, thought it was a perfectly good idea to swing a machete at a mosquito on my arm, (Spoiler alert: I missed. On the bright side, the machete was fairly blunt) I did not think that I had a right to comment on lapses in judgment]

On the other hand, I had more pressing problems to deal with. Namely, where the hell were the showers?

My search for the shower area took me to a strangely-lit area that resembled an open-concept dressing room. ‘Twas split up into many cubicles with mirrors and seats in each compartment. I saw some men sitting around in this area staring into their mirrors but the partition walls prevented me from ascertaining the true purpose of this odd space.

Remember also that when you are confronted with the certainty that behind a wall exists a naked man, you do not try to discern the activity that said man is engaged in. You merely offer up a heartfelt prayer of gratitude for the existence of the wall and move on as quickly as you can.

I left the dressing room behind swiftly enough and found myself in what could best be described as a pseudo swimming complex. Allow me to represent this pictorially.

The dimensions were based on the number of steps it took me to walk around the entire compound.

And why exactly did I have to walk around the entire compound? Simply put, my friends were nowhere in sight and it was becoming increasingly important that I locate them. My… instincts were starting to become a little…problematic.

Me: Right. Gotta shower. Where the hell’s the shower?

Me Prime: Hey hey there’s a shower there in the open. Go for it

Me: What, you mean like i’m at a swimming complex? Are you sure about this?

Me Prime: Do you see any other showers in this place? Make do

Me: That guy’s looking at me funny.

Me Prime: He is admiring the way the droplets of water adhere to your naked, princely form 

Me: Right. Really appreciate this positive self-talk but maybe tone it down a notch? I feel like an exhibitionist where the hell are my friends good lord.

Me Prime: Walk around the place I’m sure they’re around here somewhere

Me: I am so glad my eyesight is shit.

Me Prime: This way you can’t enjoy the fear in their eyes. Which is good. That would distract you from creating more fear

Me: Are you freakin’ nuts? Is this the time to be putting on a display of dominance? All I’m saying is that I’m happy I don’t have to see their…bits.

Me Prime: Shhhh. You’re in the prime of your life. Law of the jungle. Slow down. Walk Slowly. SLOWLLLLYYYY. Confident people stalk. You are confident and therefore, you Stalk. You own this place. Look into their eyes. Gaze into their souls

Me: Have you completely lost it?

Me Prime: Trust me. We are very good at this posturing thing

Sometimes I ask myself why reptilian hindbrains haven’t been phased out of mammals. 

Me Prime: SCRUTINIZE THEM CAREFULLY

Me: Have you even been paying attention when we watch Animal Planet? MAKING EYE CONTACT IS THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING “FIGHT ME YOU FOOL” TO A PRIMATE.

Me Prime: What you perceive as a problem I perceive as us struggling our way to the top of the natural order

Me: I am not bloody listening to you.

Me Prime: YES. WALK AROUND THE SPRINGS ANOTHER TIME. THEY SHOULD BE USED TO THE NEW HIERARCHY BY NOW. YOU BELONG AT THE PEAK OF THE FIGURATIVE TOTEM POLE IN THIS EDEN OF NAKED MEN 

Me: Mate, I have no idea where the hell they are. This is my third time walking clockwise around the hot springs.

Me Prime: Mix it up. Walk anticlockwise. Remember, if they can’t read you, you have the upper-hand. Eyes on the prize. eyes on the prize

Me: You are certifiably insane.

Me Prime: Hey. HEY.  That dude just made eye contact with you. I THINK YOU CAN TAKE HIM

Me: That’s an old man.

Me Prime: AND NOW HE WILL LEARN THAT ONE IS NEVER TOO OLD TO KNOW THEIR PLACE.  IF YOU GO FOR HIS JAW YOU CAN DEFINITELY AT LEAST DISORIENTATE HIM BEFORE YOU GO FOR THE TAKE-DOWN. HOW FAST DO YOU THINK YOU ARE

I was beginning to attract a fair amount of attention for…any number of reasons. It seemed the better part of valour to lower myself into a random body of water and pretend that I was merely a very discerning foreigner.

Unfortunately, I was also fairly sure that I was fooling no one. I made what I hoped was a gesture of languid ease in the direction of a bunch of middle-aged men. I have no doubt that they thought my abortive semi-wave a sign of an impending epileptic fit. After pretending to be in my element for what felt like an eternity, salvation came in the form of a naked friend.

I have never in my life been so happy to see a naked man.

The following conversation subsequently unfolded when I was back, safely ensconced in the figurative* arms of my friends.

*Remember that we were naked and that as a heterosexual male, it is deemed inappropriate to be flouncing around naked with your male friends.

Host: Where were you?

Me: uhm. i got lost.

Host: Did you shower?

Me: *shifts uncomfortably* Yes of course.

Host: *narrowed eyes* Where?

Me: The open-concept showers.

Host: What are you talking about?

Me: Like in a swimming pool where you rinse off before you enter?

Host: You fool. That’s merely for you to rinse off. You are expected to take a proper bath.

Me: What, in full view of everyone? WELL….

Host: No! There’s an actual place where you can sit down and there are mirrors and stuff.

It then struck me that he was talking about the strangely-lit area with the partition walls. I wish there was a moral to this entire fiasco but the only thing I will say is that a bare bum on a cheap plastic stool is no more pleasant when you’re in your twenties than it is when you’re a wee laddie and your parents are trying to convince you to not move around so much when they’re trying to rinse you out. 

End.

Not All Who Huander

Hello, friends. Sorry about the hiatus; I’m not dead and all is good. I hope you’re ready, ladies and gentlemen, for a tale of excitement, intrigue, adrenaline, and above all, pig-headedness shading into stupidity…but this time, overseas.

Quick Disclaimer: It has become increasingly difficult to turn up material for this blog. Much of my inspiration comes from my daily life; hilarity ensues when you are faced with a choice between a Path A that, like an insurance agent with your best interests at heart, promises to get you to your destination uneventfully and a Path B which, like a certain world power which “intervenes” in the domestic affairs of other nations out of the goodness of its heart and not because of certain hidden considerations, continually suggests that a pot of foreign policy gold is just over the rainbow without telling you how exactly across the chasm that lies beneath it. (I’m not naming any names, but it starts with an “A” and rhymes with Bamerica) As is customary, I have included an illustration to facilitate ease of understanding.

Because Eat a Dick, Robert Frost

This is all fine and dandy when you’re playing for low-stakes. Or when you’re too foolish to realise the stakes have crept up on you while your back was turned (Much like that one time your friends snuck up on you to strip you naked on your birthday while you were busy tap-tap-tapping away on your laptop)

*SEGUE*

Half a year ago, I asked a friend of mine if he wanted to head out overseas to do whitewater things with me. He had in fact been on the scene way before I had. I assumed his answer was going to be a straight-up yes. It was not. He thought about it long and hard before smiling sadly at me, “Can’t do it, bro. I have too much to lose now”. I didn’t feel it then, but the full weight of his words struck me in the face a couple of days ago.

You’re not just living for yourself. You’re living for lots of people. You can’t say shit like “Why don’t you let me do what I want to, I’m not hurting anyone anyway!!!” because one way or another you’re nicely ensconced in a web that joins you up with lots of people that give a damn about you. (Whether they are right about your life decisions is an entirely different story, but still, sometimes it really is the thought that counts) Simply put, you literally only live once so please use your brain the way it was meant to be used.

‘I am so deep it scares me sometimes’, he said, completely spoiling the moment.

*SEGUE OVER*

So anyway, my point is that choosing to be a stubborn and/or lazy little shit the path less travelled sometimes pays rich dividends but it gets increasingly difficult to tell if things are going to blow up in a very big way as you get older. Basically, I can’t take the same risks I used to and expect to get away with them (even though I’m fairly certain that I still can, which is actually the scary bit, if you think about it. Confidence is the headiest intoxicant)

So y’know, expect more observational humour and less Huanderer-As-Protagonist things in time to come because I am scared shitless and weary at heart using my brain in the way it was meant to be used (but not always).

We cool? Great. Now on to the Story proper!

A Backstory:
A bunch of friends and I decided to fly off to Japan because it seemed like the right decision at that point in time. I then proceeded to make three decisions that would dictate the shape of my adventure over the next 7 days:

1. I first decided to crash with a friend who was living in Japan because I did not have, as the charming expression goes, “money burning a hole in my pocket”. Henceforth, this friend shall be known as The Host simply because the best way to repay generosity is obviously with a shitty code-name. Sorry mate. (This was also to partially ensure that my continued presence would not drive my travelling buddies crazy. I cannot for the life of me imagine why that might be the case. After all, I am kind, sensitive, do not have a reputation for offensiveness and am renowned for my restraint and social grace. Yeah Fuckin’ Right. In retrospect, this was in fact a very wise move indeed)
   
   
2. If you were to put a gun to my head and force me to choose the least sensible decision I had made prior to the trip I think this would be it. I decided it was a great idea to not get a sim-card for wifi-thingum. Do bear in mind that I wasn’t going to be staying with my friends, which meant that linking up with them would be mildly problematic in a foreign land (incredible punctuality and foresight notwithstanding) Do, also, bear in mind that no wifi meant no google maps (But with that being said it turns out that not updating your google maps for a year suggests that it’s not exactly going to be the most responsive and/or accurate sort of navigational system in the world so I would like to think that wifi would not have helped much anyhow. Again, another picture for cognitive convenience.
   
   As you can see, I was so pissed off that I wanted Google Maps to be a standalone company with a stock that I could curse.
3. The attitude I decided to adopt towards sensible, well-meaning advice such as “Dude do you want to get free wifi because if you do you need to sign up for this thing at this station next to the airport” and “Remember to get off at the Station X and not Station Y, mate because Station X takes you on an entirely different line” was remarkably reminiscent of the attitude I tend to adopt towards things like “Wet Paint, Do Not Touch” and “One Way Only”. This was again, not a good idea. Please refer to the picture below for increased clarity.

This is what happens when you secretly translate all the full-stops into question marks

I hope you all have a better idea of the conditions which set the stage for my shenanigans in a strange land. Let us now plunge into the next part of the story.

Into the Belly of the Beast 

My first encounter with the madness that was Japan in fact occurred just before I was due to depart. 3 hours before my flight I was frantically hammering away at my laptop trying to figure out how to get myself to The Host’s abode without violating a thousand and one subtle norms demarcating acceptable behavior in Japanese society. [While I do not think it pure coincidence that my various acquaintances have, over the years, told me repeatedly on multiple occasions that they were ashamed to be seen with me in public, I had always assumed that this was a result of their myriad insecurities and infuriatingly low levels of self-esteem. I do my best to reassure them but there is only so much you can do for your friends if they absolutely refuse to love themselves (Heaven knows I tried)]

All in all, I was fairly optimistic about my prospects of success with regard to blending in

I also refused to accept directions from The Host because I wanted this to be an adventure. (The fact that I was a stubborn little shit that couldn’t be bothered to read through lengthy, detailed directions obviously had nothing to do with my resolve to be independent)

After a good half hour wrestling with the Google Maps interface, I understood that I was to alight at “Kita-Ayase” along the Chiyoda line after making a certain number of transfers across the rail system and walk approximately 500 metres or so to his crib. This would have been wonderful news if not for the fact that i had absolutely no idea what the railway map looked like. On the bright side, Google was but a few keystrokes away. On the decidedly darker side, however…well:

It was when I lay my eyes upon this map that I realised that I was well and truly f***ed  

It was apparent that the effort required to parse the map was not going to be worth the reward. I slowly closed my laptop and decided to just ask the nice people at the train station how the hell I was supposed to get from point A to point B. I was of course, assuming that my incredible savoir faire would once again come to the fore when the occasion arose.

As you can see from my very rational cost-benefit analysis, I am a humble being that does not balk at asking seeking guidance from complete strangers. While I was slightly concerned that the Yakuza was going to strong-arm me into getting a dragon tattoo on my back and thereby propel me to fictional fame as the new star of a Stieg Larsson novel for asking them how to get to a garden or a shrine I was sure that the pros of this outcome (Fictional Fame!!! Dragon Tattoo!!!) would outweigh the cons (None whatsoever) and proceeded to preemptively make my peace with the world. Again, my unparalleled ability to engage in lightning quick cost-benefit analyses had come in handy. Having a suite of incredible skills obviously guarantees great success in life.

Apart from the conventional hazards posed by a delusional mind, my plane ride was otherwise uneventful.

I touched down with a completely inexplicable desire to douse my head in a basin of cold water. Apropos of nothing, it dawned upon me that:

1. It is not considered impolite in Japanese society to say “Good Lord No I’ve had enough” when the nice air stewardess asks you if you’d some alcohol to help you unwind on a seven-hour flight.
2. Even were it to be considered the height of discourtesy to refuse libations, it is ok to be impolite once in a while.
3. It may be slightly painful to travel in a foreign land while toting a number of bags while one is in a state of hypersensitivity to light and sound at 8am in the morning. Who knew that birds could be such shrill motherfuckers?

But as they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice. After consulting the nice lady at the station, I was told that I should drop at “Nishi-Nippori” along the Kita-Senju line and find my way to the Chiyoda line. Even in my debilitated state, I realised that a certain “Nippori” station lay beside the “Nishi-Nippori” station on the map and that pictorially speaking, it was “Nippori” that functioned as the conduit of sorts between the Chiyoda line and the Joban line. Inquisitive young man that I was, I asked innocently if she had perhaps been mistaken.

“Fuck No”, she said (I may possibly be making shit up at this point in time but I believe I have captured the general essence of her reply). I thought I had bid a fairly convincing goodbye to your ugly-ass face post-secondary school but I guess we meet again, Mr. Parallax Error. Either way, I deferred to her expertise, accepted the map she offered and then proceeded to board the train with my bunch of merry friends. Tragedy struck approximately forty minutes later.

(It is important to note at this point in time that i had already unfolded, perused and refolded the map multiple times. My attempts to decipher and commit the results of my cognition to my short-term memory were perhaps partially hindered both by the fact that my compulsive manipulation of the map had created a grid of ridge-like creases obscuring certain words and the fact that I had myself a pneumatic drill going away merrily behind my eyes)

“Nippori”. The driver demonstrated his staggering ability to multi-task as he made an announcement over the system and pulled into a bone-juddering halt which did my migraine no favours. (Actually, he was positively nurturing where the growth of my migraine was concerned. It was my general welfare towards which he demonstrated a staggering disregard) As we all know, the human mind can be staggeringly irrational. It was at this point that I gave in to the siren call of irrationality:

Me Prime: “Suppose she was wrong then?” 
Me: “C’mon, you paranoid little shit, she works there for a living how the hell could she be wrong?”
Me Prime: “Dude the scientists at NASA were wrong about the O ring that one time and we all know how that turned out” 
Me: yes but we’re not at NASA now, are we?
Me Prime: “DOESNT THAT MAKE THE MARGIN FOR ERROR EVEN LARGER?”
Me: (cautiously) okayyy I take your point. What would you suggest?
Me Prime: Dude who do you trust the most in this entire universe?
Me: Us.
Me Prime: Exactly. So dyou think we should get off at Nippori or Nishi-Nippori? 
Me: What do you suggest?
Me Prime: Look mate, the two bloody stations practically sound alike don’t you think we’d technically be able to get to the same place if we to alight at Nippori OR Nishi-Nippori? In fact I’m pretty sure Nishi means something like “Near” or like “Alter” and they’re probably connected let’s just get off here (Writer’s Note: No it does not. I still don’t know what it means, but at least now I almost understand what they mean when they say you are your own worst enemy)
Me: It’s going to be cool. Let’s bounce.

***Without prolonging my embarrassment, suffice to say that I realised my mistake after alighting and failing to locate the Chiyoda line after a fairly thorough search on foot.

Without prolonging my embarrassment, suffice to say that if i had had a tail I would have clipped it tightly between my hindquarters while making my way back to the platform from which I had alighted in order to wait for the next train to Kita-Ayase.

Without prolonging my embarrassment, suffice to say that I now understand that approximate semantic similarity is not proof of any underlying order or interconnectedness.

I have acknowledged my idiocy. Let us move on from here and speak no more of this***

After what seemed like five minutes but was in fact more than half an hour, I found myself at Kita-Ayase. Have studies not shown that time flies when you’re having fun? Based on my fairly sketchy memory, I knew that i had only to walk parallel to the tracks for a few hundred metres or so to get to my destination.

Thankfully, I was well-prepared and had made a rough drawing of the map of the location/Thankfully I was well-prepared and had bought myself some internet connectivity at the airport/Thankfully I was well-prepared and had accepted The Host’s offer to fetch me from the station. 

As much as I would have enjoyed demonstrating my great foresight, this was not how things turned out. What I had figured leading up to my decision to not make the required arrangements above was that I was either going to get to my destination in 15 minutes or I was going to have to walk 15 minutes in the wrong direction and double back for another 15 minutes. I was completely willing to pursue either course of action because what’s half an hour in the larger scheme of things? Apathy is a terrible, terrible force.

I chose the friendlier-looking path. The gods had decided to be kind and I was completely right. I got to my destination within fifteen minutes and proceed to collapse in unadulterated pleasure at the feet of my host, who responded the best he could upon the appearance of an extremely twitchy human being with bloodshot eyes who positively reeked of acetone. To his credit, he accepted my handshake with equanimity and waited for me to turn away before passing his hand through a naked flame for the purposes of disinfection. He is a good man.

After a day spent recuperating from the trauma of my journey, meditating under a waterfall, The Host very kindly thought it would be a great idea to take me for a run. And to his credit though, it was an incredibly refreshing experience. On the flip side, and this is of course no fault of his, but The Host has, over the years, acquired a reputation for being incredibly circumspect. As we suited up for the run, I noticed that he had thrown on a windbreaker and was changing into a pair of running pants. I looked at him in slight bemusement. He felt my eyes on him after a while* and went, “Dude do you want to borrow a jacket and pants? It’s going to be cold”

*I mean, all i’m saying is that in an alternate universe this could have happened 

As I said earlier in my preamble to this post, I had resolved to ignore sensible bits of advice prior to the commencement of the trip and I had no intention of breaking a promise to myself. I naturally scoffed at his offer and brushed him off because real men clearly do not fear the elements. I figured that after taking his cautious nature into account, I was not in fact taking a risk. I threw on a singlet and a pair of shorts and I was good to go. Half an hour later, I had learnt a few things from this experience:

a) Adjusting for caution is a lot of trial and error.

b) 12 degrees is in fact a lot more impressive in reality than on paper.

c) Wind chill factor is a lot more impressive in reality than on paper.

d) It is fairly easy to bite your tongue when your jaws are knocking together at an incredible rate.

e) Mother Nature doesn’t fuck around.

As the learning points scattered throughout this post should suggest, this was clearly an incredibly fruitful journey. The rest of the days passed with relatively little incident. Interestingly enough, my luck held when it came to linking up with my fellow travellers. Despite the fact that I had no way to contact them in a foreign land from the moment I stepped out of my Host’s apartment, things worked out in a happy way and I did not have to do that thing in certain pieces of fiction, particularly of the romantic variety, where you stand in the same spot for an extended period of time and waste away while legions of passers-by walk past you.

(Their faces blur but is that a function of the cinematography, your lack of attention to detail, the tears that have coalesced in your eyes or simply the torrential downpour that has taken you by surprise? Some questions are not meant to be answered)

It is with no small amount of shock that I realise that I have hit the 3000 word mark. I’m absolutely sorry about this but I’m going to have to leave the final bits of my post till next time.

But nonetheless, thank you for getting this far. If you’ll come back again soon I’ll tell you a little bit more about how to avoid making eye contact while naked in a sea of other naked men and how i completely dropped the ball on the railway system on the last day yet again (and suffered a slight heart attack at the very real possibility that I might have missed my flight; a heart attack which eventually turned out to be unfounded but was perhaps partially motivated by my regard for my bank statement. Fun fact: If you’ve got enough cash, most problems can be overcome. Problem is, money doesn’t grow on trees. Paper is made from trees though, but I suppose the two are slightly different)

So, I loathe a cliffhanger as much as the next man, but this will have to be…continued.

 

The Root of the Problem

I’m all out of witticisms so let’s cut to the heart of the matter. I decided it was a great idea to get my wisdom teeth extracted halfway through the semester because I am not very intelligent sometimes I am deeply concerned about making sure the rest of my teeth have sufficient space to thrive and grow like the good food-destroying pieces of bone that they are.

When my acquaintances found out about my impending operation they began laughing at me for not getting my shit done when I was in the army because back then this shit would have been
1) Free of Charge
2) You get a great number of days off just so you can relax at home while pretending to be in great pain.

(The word “pretending” suggests great manliness on my part where the tolerance of pain is concerned. Please remember this. It will return to haunt me later in this harrowing tale of bravery and stupidity)

Simply put, I didn’t have time to get my tumor-teeth extracted back then because I was busy protecting my nation from evil, conceited, young men without hair. And by “protecting” i mean I was delivering them from ignorance. Which is to say, I was an educator of sorts. And by “educator” I mean i was making them do lots of push-ups (but not more than 20 at a time!) for stuff like untied shoelaces and looking sad while doing push-ups. You know. Completely justified. It’s a circle of life thing.

So anyway, my friend told me she had a way to estrange me from my unwanted teeth in a relatively fuss-free manner.

As I backed away slowly from her, she explained that she did not actually have a car and would very much prefer it if I were to stand still as it was very hard for a girl of her size to inflict massive trauma to the head with a brick.

I’m kidding, actually. It turned out that her faculty was doing this thing where people could get their teeth plucked and shit (really working that whole paraphrasing thing right now) at a reduced price. There was a trade-off, of course. I was going to be a teaching aid. Of course I agreed. She said “reduced price”. What could go wrong?

(For the millions of you out there who are worrying about my general health and welfare at this point in time because of that very ominous turn of phrase, please allow me to allay your fears.Things eventually turned out fine. Your concern is, of course, appreciated. Much like all your fan mail. Yep. Even the ones you didn’t write. Especially those.)

For the uninitiated, going for a wisdom tooth extraction is a lot like taking a shit. There are three phases to any world class excretion experience. The Before Phase, the During Phase and the After Phase (Which is nothing like aftershave, if you’re wondering.Even though it’s technically part of the After Phase of shaving, as the name would suggest. So I guess there’s a slight similarity thing going on. I digress)

Before you take a shit you need to place the toilet seat down, and gently wipe it with a few sheets of whatever absorbent material you have on hand. (Protip: Please do not use your shirt. Or your pants. Underwear’s fine. No one gives a damn about underwear) And then you remove your required articles of clothing and sit or squat, depending on your preference. I would illustrate this but I really can’t be arsed (teehee)

During the actual shit, think happy thoughts and wait for your rectal walls to do their thing. Try not to suffer a hernia. I understand they can be quite painful.

After the shit, cleanse your nether regions in your preferred manner and go about the rest of your day with your head held high. Do not forget to re-clothe yourself. Always remember, kids; there are no flashers, only hasty people!

I hope that clarifies things.

So, Before you extract your wisdom teeth, you need to go for an X-Ray so the dentist knows how much of an uncooperative piece of shit your jaw is. 

Anyhow, I had been told that my wisdom tooth was impacted in my last dental check-up. (Note the use of the singular”tooth”. Like the “pretending” that I was talking about earlier in this text, this word will also return to haunt me). I was quite happy about that, really. I was given to understand that most people tend to have a total of four wisdom teeth, two in the upper jaw and two in the lower so I thought that I was already getting off pretty lightly.

(I also now understand that wisdom teeth may grow back post-extraction because we all have a bit of shark DNA and this is in no way scaring me shitless. This is a tangent that I thought was worth pursuing. Please enjoy my tangent)

For the lucky people out there who have had no problems with recalcitrant teeth thus far, understand that an impacted wisdom tooth is a tooth that can’t grow out properly because some other teeth are in the way (Jeez, can’t you guys just get along? And I guess you just “happened to be there” when he was trying to get out. You little shit) I had initially thought that this meant that my wisdom tooth was perhaps a little slanted to the side. Not displaced by more than a few degrees, was what I thought. Unfortunately for me, I was in for a number of surprises. I have helpfully illustrated this for you, dear reader.

Suffice to say that I was not a very happy man at day’s end. On the bright side, I imagine that women feel very much like how I had been feeling when told that they are pregnant by a gleeful doctor despite having had their tubes tied. So I’ve got the whole empathy thing going for me, at least. This concluded the pre-operation rituals.

During: A week later, I returned to Dr Pain (I’m going to call the dentist that because a) i can’t remember his name and b) spoiler alert! He is in many ways the epitome of pain!) to get the stuffing figuratively kicked out of me.

Having picked up a bouquet of roses from the florist and a nice bottle of champagne from my wine rack, I was pretty sure I was going to get lucky. Imagine my horror when it turned out there was not one, not two, but three dental students ambling around Dr Pain in their adorable green scrubs. Between the sterile white walls, the smell of burnt enamel in the air and a bunch of children, whatever ambience there might have been had resolutely evaporated.

“Damnit!!!” I thought. “Foiled again!” Smooth operator that I was, I did not choose to articulate those thoughts. I was pretty sure that I could still turn things around. All I had to do was to convince the students to have a five-way. Everyone knows that medical types are repressed as hell. Or at least, you would, if you’ve ever watched Gray’s Anatomy.

If all of you are waiting on me with bated breath to see how things turned out, I’m going to have to disappoint you. Dr Pain resolutely ignored all of my advances. Clearly, I failed because of the damned students. The fact that the specialist was almost three times my age, married, male and heterosexual obviously had nothing to do with that fact that I significantly less than successful. Nothing at all. But on the bright side, he did slam four cartridges of anesthesia into my mouth, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.

“You are going to lose all feeling in your mouth and you won’t be able to control your tongue in the next few minutes, this is completely normal. Don’t worry”.

“But I barely even know you! Don’t you think we’re moving a bit too fast?” was what I had intended to say in a decidedly frosty but somewhat coquettish manner to pay him back for spurning me a couple minutes earlier.

Unfortunately, what came out was “Gweh rugh bleh luhk?” It turns out that anesthesia takes a while to kick in but when it does start to take effect it really doesn’t fuck around. I amused myself for the next five minutes by slapping myself. It was amazing. I felt absolutely nothing. I imagine this is what it feels like to lose your sense of touch so again, empathy. (Two empathetic incidents in one day…is this a coincidence I think not! I am becoming a better person!)

When the students finally managed to force me into a straitjacket, Dr. Pain was ready to operate. This was when shit really hit the fan. All thoughts of romance flew out the window. It turns out that severe discomfort has an almost magical way of capturing your attention. If you don’t believe me, get someone to punch you in the face when you’re feeling down. It’s not going to make you feel better, but it’s going to divert your attention to more…ah…pressing matters, so to speak.

It was then that I realised that Dr. Pain was pure evil.

D. Pain: “Ok does this hurt?”

*me, trying very, very hard to reply* “ooga”

D. Pain: “Ok good (He does not seem much like he cares about me at this point in time. I could have given birth to puppies and he would probably have nodded at me solemnly and continued to operate)…NOW AS THE REST OF YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE I HAVE MADE A TRAPEZOIDAL INCISION IN HIS GUM TO OPEN THE FLAP AND WHY DID I DO THAT? SO I CAN GET A BETTER ANGLE FROM WHICH TO COMPLETELY BRUTALISE HIS MOUTH AND NOW WHAT I AM GOING TO DO IS TO APPLY THE BUR TO THE CROWN AND LOOK HOW NICELY THE WISDOM TOOTH HAS FRACTURED INTO FIVE PARTS AND YOU USE THE FORCEPS AND YOU GIVE IT A CRACK AND YOU SLOWLY REMOVE THE PIECES FROM THE SOCKET OK THIS IS A BIT STUBBORN YEAH PASS ME THE DRILL AGAIN. Are you ok?”

At this point in time I am no longer the smooth operator that everyone has come to know and love. Listening to someone explain to you in vivid detail what they are doing to you is at once disorienting and unpleasant. I suppose this is why not everyone likes it when their partner talks dirty. Again, allow me to illustrate the degree to which I have been shaken (but not stirred)

If you observe the curvature of my spine you will realise that I am about to start re-enacting that scene from The Exorcist where the poor possessed girl inverts herself and starts doing aerobic things on the stairs. My glass lies forgotten on the floor in a puddle of martini (which looks suspiciously like pee but is, in actual fact, not pee for my bladder control is par excellence *at this point in time, anyway. I do not rule out the fact that incontinence might strike in my twilight years because getting old is bullshit*)In summary,  I am most resolutely no longer mellow. In fact, I suspect that if I had NOT taken four shots of the numbing agent to my mouth I would have punched everyone in the face and ran out of the room with blood streaming down my shirt (which, incidentally was black, because I had had a vision that morning that bad things were going to go down later in the day)

The extraction of the tooth in my left side of my mouth took a little over half an hour. Which was perfectly fine. At one point in time Dr Pain muttered that he was “running out of time”. To which I desperately wanted to respond “No bro you’re not, you need to chill the hell out, time is a social construct, go ahead and take your time, mate.” But alas, my tongue was not as functional as it should have been and he smiled at me because for one glorious shining moment, I must have reminded him of his children back before they had learnt how to talk.

“I’m going to move on to the one on your right now are you alright with continuing?”

At this stage I am powerless to resist. I make a sort of non-committal grunt in the back of my throat and resign myself to another half-hour of boundless joy.

Which is promptly delivered. Isn’t writing magical? You get to skip all the shitty parts and get straight to the funny. Anyway, I am released after an hour and am given some pieces of gauze to bite on. I am told to apply great pressure until the bleeding stops. I will tell you that I bit onto that stupid piece of cloth like I was hanging off a cliff by my mouth.

Dr Pain: “Ok bite on this until the bleeding stops, don’t rinse your mouth, don’t gargle, don’t use a straw, no solid food, don’t brush your teeth, try not to probe the extraction site with your tongue.”

“Anything else I shouldn’t do? Perhaps not breathe while hopping backwards on my hands?”

Is what I should have said.

But remember, kiddies! It’s hard to talk when your tongue is passed out on the floor of your mouth covered in strange fluids like your grand-aunt at your cousin’s wedding in Boracay!

I do not speak but nod in such a way as to give Dr. Pain no clue as the mutinous thoughts that are flowing through my mind. (In all fairness to Dr Pain, he was a wonderful dentist. I could not have asked for a more professional caregiver. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you know how it is with pain-induced rage. Do you think the Hulk gives a damn if you’re on the way to the market to get a couple of carrots for your vegetable soup? No, he does not. Hulk smashes.)

“Oh and one more thing. Come back next week for your dental review”.

Oh fuck.

I felt pretty good about myself when I finally dragged my sorry ass back into my room. I had been issued painkillers but I wasn’t taking them and I was feeling pretty much like my old self again (Which just goes to show the sheer amount of pride which comeths before a fall) It had been exactly 3 hours since my surgery.

It was at this point that I concluded my machismo was second to none and that I could totally do this post-op shit without painkillers. I proceeded to throw my painkillers away.

Nah just kidding. Didn’t throw the damned things away. Not a single day goes by that I don’t thank Huanderer-past for his very, very, very, very wise decision. I don’t often make good decisions, but when I do, they’re bloody good indeed. 

The numbing agent was slated to wear off 5 hours after the surgery. Still feeling pretty good about myself at the fifth-hour mark, I decided to take a nap because obviously, humans are incapable of feeling pain when they’re asleep (Sometimes I think a university education is completely wasted on me)

As I slowly drift off to sleep, I become aware of a gentle throbbing in the sides of my lower jaw. I am wrenched back to consciousness in a somewhat unpleasant way. I check the time. 3.45. Shit’s supposed to wear off at 3.30. I figure i’m good and I lie back on the bed again. The throbbing becomes more insistent as the seconds elapse. If this was secondary school, it’d be like your teacher asking you to “please could you keep quiet and listen” the second time you disrupt your class. Insistent, but not quite pissed yet. It begins to dawn on me that when Novocaine wears off it doesn’t do so all at once but in stages! 

3.47.

3.48.

3.49.

At 3.50, it feels a lot like an orchestra of construction workers armed with pneumatic drills has found its way into my mouth and is happily carrying out an excavation. Needless to say, I am sorely tempted to start yelling in pain and irritation but my mouth sits uselessly on my face, much like a portrait of a mouth as opposed to an actual, functional mouth. (My friends later informed me that I was a much more agreeable fellow when I was silent. I was not amused)

At 4pm I give up and pop a couple of painkillers. The next fifteen minutes that pass are fifteen of the longest minutes of my life. I start by regretting every single uncharitable thought that has ever crossed my mind about post-extraction patients feigning pain and i finish by promising to sacrifice at least 7 cows to the powers that be when the painkillers begin to take effect (Spoiler: I never do sacrifice the cows. Alas, for I am an oath-breaker) I close my eyes.

And when I next open my eyes, it is 6pm and the worst of my ordeal has passed.

After: When I finally headed back to the dentist the following week, it was with much apprehension that I laid my sorry carcass back into his chair. Needless to say, the students were there to continue bearing mute witness to my humiliation. Thankfully, nothing particularly interesting happened this time round. Dr. Pain gave me a syringe with which to irrigate the gaping holes in my sanity mouth and told me to “avoid getting shit stuck in it”. I am paraphrasing rather liberally at this point.

But there was one silver lining in all this, though. I hope you’ll all find this as amusing as I did.

When Dr Pain was messing around in my mouth with his mysterious dental tools, he pointed to what I assumed was the gaping wound in the back of my mouth and proceeded to ask the students who were crowded around me like moderately-reluctant mourners who only turned up at the funeral of a somewhat distant relative because their parents were being absolutely unfair what the unsightly gash on the inside of my face was.

He was greeted with absolute silence for a good 10 seconds.

Dr. Pain:”Anyone? Anyone?”

*mimblewimble*

you could have heard an incredibly light and small pin drop in zero-gravity in the silence that ensued. It’s amazing how quickly people stop talking when they should and start talking when they shouldn’t.

Dr. Pain: “It’s a healthy wound”

Students: ORHHHH Healthyyy wound…

I will not take this chance to ride roughshod over the students because for the slack-jawed astonishment they exhibited. They were no doubt expecting some morbid but rare disease portentous of impending death. Sorry to disappoint, Negative-Nellies, but not today.

I do not exaggerate when I say that the students sounded more relieved than I felt upon the revelation of the answer, though. It turns out that students everywhere sound exactly the same when faced with a question from their professor. Who’d have known?

And this concludes my amazing adventure to the dentist. Till Next Time.