Siamese fighting fish… such strange animals. They're known for being territorial and aggressive and that's where the title of the book “Rumble Fish” comes from. People stuck in an aggression loop, you beat me, I beat you, then something comes up and we are uneven again, so we start stomping each other. The only time we think we are settled is when we’ve made our “bubble nests”, fragile, temporary things… such lonely lives we lead. I just finished reading the book. It was a random decision, just for once thinking about what I'd like to read rather than what I have to read. I’m honestly finding it hard to keep up with uni at this stage. I’m normally good at it but I’m screwing it up this time, for family commitments, work and all that. That’s probably why I got home today with nothing written for my thesis, went to our bedroom, sat on the bed in front of the weird blue light that comes from the filmy window and started reading. It was out of a feeling of sheer disappointment, like I felt “there’s nothing else I can do, so I’ll just read”. “Rumble Fish” was quick and deep, like a sucker punch that takes away your breath and leaves your lungs aching until long after. My only regret is that I didn’t read this when I was 18. Those were my golden times. Just done school, with a head roiling with ideas and hopes. The way it looks, life won’t reach that standard of “meaningfulness” for a long time, maybe never. Funny thing is, I never thought my eighteenth would be the best year of my life back then. I actually thought that it was pretty commonplace when I was living it. I guess the best times in your life are when you have the loftiest aspirations, not when you're close to realizing your dreams. Just on Monday, a senior colleague told me he was retiring. He is a really funny middle-aged guy. He is big and broad-shouldered but he huddles his limbs in his suit to look smaller and whispers when he talks; the kind of man that would rather be liked than revered. He has a sense of humour that really resembles that of my late uncle, with whispery, delicate jokes that are carefully crafted not to offend anyone. On the last day before he would leave, he came up and said hello. I gave him a music CD and a copy of a comic I had drawn a while ago, cuz he said he liked comics. He said he was gonna leave for Italy, live there for as long as he liked cuz he had its citizenship. He hadn’t liked the imposed retirement plan, but he shrugged it off with a sad smile. I guess he just wanted to continue work. Being retired meant he was now alone, without a plan, and I doubt he had a well-established family. He never talked about that aspect of his life. I hate the System for that. It gives you this fake promise that if you work and earn money, it’ll be enough. It keeps you so busy that you don’t even get to question what you’re earning your money for. To eat, to fuck, and then what…? The objective is to mold you into a docile, productive citizen. Oh, of course the less time you spend on your existential questions, the better it would be for a system that needs your work. “Love” is supposed to be a collaboration with another docile citizen, that would make you more productive at work. As soon as it gets more serious than that, as soon as it gets out of control, complex, incomprehensible, even suicidal, you face the dreadful consequences of not following the rules. If you can’t bear the consequences, you get dissolved in the system in a way that you are neither its loyal soldier, nor a fierce rebel. I feel a lot like this right now, stuck in the space in-between. Can’t accept its values, can’t fight them either. I just wish I could forget about long term plans for a while and break out. Reminds me of the Motorcycle Boy and the rumble fish. He wondered if the rumble fish would live better if he would drop them in the river. Well, I wonder that too.
Why doesn't it feel good to write anymore? It's like I can't feel any interest towards characters or stories, not in reading nor in writing. Every story feels bland and insipid. I like to think that I'll write something substantial one day, but when it feels so meaningless, I don't really know if I can do it. I was thinking about the term "depression". I've never considered going to a counselor to just talk about the possibility of depression. What is she gonna tell me? That life is beautiful and blah blah. Or throw a few pills at me. I rarely have the energy to cook anything. Our place feels remote and dark, our relationship distant, brutal in forgetting its golden past. All the work that is dumped on me makes me nervous. I think I've made a few mistakes here and there in the paperwork we had for moving to the new place. Received the keys yesterday, but I don't feel happy or anything. My thesis's deadline is fast approaching but I haven't written anything in the last month. I guess we both are depressed, only there is no cure. What is lost is lost. "There was once a young boy. Innocent, naive and curious, he would look for any kind of adventure. He would run up the hills strewn with thin grass, bask in the smiling sunlight, listen to the rooster's crow at the break of dawn. He would climb down old wells, chase the rabbits on the plains, play hid and seek with spiders. There was once a boy, whose cackling laughter would echo in the foggy pathways of morning. There was once a boy who dreamed of going to the city and becoming a poet. But he never reached puberty. He died in an attack to his village, along with all those who would ever remember him. His face has now faded away in my memories and I wonder, was he ever real?"
I'm a bit restless. 1 am again. Hello midnight my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. I've recently come to love Russian songs. Compared to heaps of bad English hip hop music that is being produced these days, I think contemporary Russian and French pop music is much stronger, both in beats and depth. English pop music used to be great in the 80s, but most of today's big names aren't more than synthetic DAA DAA DAA DA DAAA DAA DAA. Instead I'll give my kudos to the contemporary English rock and metal music. Awesome stuff. Since we're moving to a new house soon, we've been busy doing the paperwork and it's not even close to finished. But I'm just listening to some music and pretending that I don't care... just for the time being though. Lots of stuff to do tomorrow. I don't even want to think about them. In the evening, after going to the bank for blah blah, we relaxed. We had some lode-gold wine with salted cashews and watched an old black and white movie from the 30s. It was one of those plot-based films, boy meets girl, and then they do everything to unite. But it was fine. I guess the fact that it was so old also helped we me watch a simple romance movie (I'm such a nostalgist). I've recently received a job offer from a corporation. I accepted it and forgot about my plans for getting a PhD for the time being. Yet I'm pretty daunted. I've never had a full-time job. And this one looks very demanding. Maybe they would sack me during the probation period?! Hah, that'd be unfortunate. I also recently watched Good Will Hunting, cuz I had seen it mentioned in another blog. It shook me and became a favorite. I sympathised so much with Will, even though I'm nothing like a genius and my mathematics among all things is a mess. Yet, it was more relatable than any other film I've watched this year. The reason? I don't have a clue. Some films hit me hard in the face. Some only tickle. Some don't even drag me to the end. I'd seen Whiplash before too;a great movie and had a similar theme; getting mentorship for developing your talents. But in Whiplash the mentor was an absolute jerk and the mentee was just an ambitious dude who'd do anything to immortalise his name. Here in Good Will Hunting though, Will was not looking for fame. He didn't want to go the ordinary way. He didn't even care for competitions cuz it was all too easy for him... that's such a cosmic feeling. To feel like you've got a shiny spark that no one else needs to understand. Well of course Will doesn't exactly stay this way throughout the film, but he still is needless of money and fame. Such a powerful thing to ignore them both and have confidence in yourself that you have great talent, and it is the manner of its growth and your passions and feelings towards it that will truly affect your life.
It's 2 AM. I'm sitting in front of my laptop, in my packed room where storage boxes are jammed on top of each other, cuz well this unit was too small for us from the beginning. We never unpacked these boxes. Boxes... just like the ginormous skyscrapers in the city. I see people in suits striding past the morning streets every day, their radiant cool eyes escaping contact, their smiles trivial and detached. I'm one of those people on certain days when I go to work. Shallow? Oh I'm slowly dissolving. My passion to writing is fading away, because I guess when you become disengaged from people's pains and hopes, your emotions get too scant to drive you to write (that is if you want to write about something you're passionate, not just to make money). That has nothing to do with work though. It's got something to do with this freaking society... or maybe me? I went to my classes at uni as usual. This is the final semester and guess I'd miss the library and the atmosphere. After the final class, we went out, not even saying a word. Everyone wanted to escape awkward conversations so they just fumbled with their mobile phones. I did the same, just pretending that there's some thing important on that small screen. Then, when everyone from my class had sufficiently dispersed around the campus, I went in the library, ate uni food sitting on a coach in the dining area. It felt lonely, not that I would like one of those senseless shallow conversations about the units I was doing and all that jazz, but it felt lonely because there was nothing more to uni. There was no one with whom I could share my feelings and feel like they might be interested. I had felt almost the same for the past four years at uni. Hadn't expected it all to be so cold and meaningless. I just spotted a girl from our creative writing club in the porch, talking to another guy also from our club. Well... of course, I didn't want to go talk to them (despite very much liking it if they would've come talk to me). I couldn't even have a simple friendship with these people. I sighed and looked at all those cheerful faces and little clusters of boys and girls cracking jokes, their headphones lolling from their necks, their youthful faces still glowing with lofty aspirations and vivacious relationships. I admit I sort of hated them for their general dumbness and having more energy for life. Now, I sound like a total snob. Their general dumbness? Really? You think you're better than them and curse them for not approaching you, but you don't even get out of your hiding place to talk to them. I'm simply not interested in having such friends. I need people who're more emotionally intelligent and mature than this. Haha, good luck finding them. Especially now that uni is coming to an end. You're gonna have a hard time finding friends among all those smug assholes in suits at your future jobs (if any). You got a big mouth, you know. And so the internal conversation goes. Guess the problem is me, not them. These poor kids are as lively and understanding as they could possibly be under their circumstances. Sitting on the big blue couch eating meatballs and hard rice, I was dazed, submerged in horizons of my loneliness for painful minutes, lonely in a room full of laughter and chatter. The only person I thought could possibly understand my thoughts (or rather, the only person I felt might be even slightly interested in hearing my POV on things) was this 40 year old guy in one of our classes with whom I chatted a couple of times, about the current media, favorite movies, the ethos of our age and all kinds of things. It all made a lot of sense, and I wish I could have understood him better, but guess it felt awkward to meet up regularly the two of us talking philosophic gibberish. Wanted to meet him and his wife at an academic conference but he never emailed me back and I didn't follow up any more either, feeling like I didn't want to be a nuisance despite my intense curiosity. It's hard to explain what I was trying to gain out of those conversations since it's purely "emotional information" and knowing about someone else's experiences, something that sounds so foreign and weird to people. But in any case I tried. Don't tell me I'm not trying to socialise. It's just that I rarely feel interest in talking to the common types of people, and the "uncommon" types are also often just as smug or shy as me. So my information about people is fragmented and scant. It's like four years of uni has taught me nothing about humans. Damn. Well, what? Did you expect me to socialise by going clubbing like most people at my age? I've got an established relationship with a lovely partner, so I get pretty bored by all that fad about going clubbing on the weekends just to find a temporary partner. People my age are just experimenting with their relationships, breaking up, getting heart broken and then forgetting their ex just like a piece of shit. Boring as hell. Oh yes, the creative writing club people are different. They know they should build relationships with people who share their interests. And believe it or not, they've got some elaborate relationships too. But again, they can't go beyond the limits of their self-centered needs. They never go try to explore the dimensions of people drastically different from themselves. Insular again. Impenetrable boxes. I've ranted enough. Life's better than the last few weeks, but that's why I gotta reflect back on it all. I've really lost a lot of my passion towards writing, and it wrenches my tears and breaks my heart and tortures my soul and breaks my very being, but it just is what it is. Gotta look it in the eye and see what I can do. After all, I've journeyed so far just to write. Can't abandon it so easily.
So I get on the bus, sit in my usual place and think about last night with a torturous pain behind my eyelids. I didn't get enough sleep. Living alone for the last few weeks hasn't helped. I feel isolated, more than I usually am. I lean my elbow on the back of the seat in front of me and take a deep breath, looking at people scurrying towards the bus. I think of how angry and drained I am in general. Do I have depression? No... I don't think so. Then I think I just want to fight someone. A man comes in, I don't wanna say of which race he was cuz I hate stereotyping, but in any case, the guy is fat and big and has two enormous bags with him. He strides to the priority seats, and tells another guy, a 40 year old guy with whitish blond hair and jolly black eyes, to "show some respect" and get out of his way. The fourty-year-old man gives a friendly "what do you mean, mate?" smile and says he's got bags too. But the fat guy insists and brings up the volume of his voice. He is taking control of the environment, I notice. He's trying to dominate by his booming voice. He says all sorts of racial things... If you live in Australia, you probably have heard all kinds of stories about the European settlement, but this guy just gives it a horrible twist and says he's entitled to be treating everyone as he wants, because he owns the land. People are quiet. No one so much as coughs. He starts telling hurtful stories, taking our interest in his gibberish for granted... I look him in the eye. I hate bullies, and I hate when someone claims authority and no one complains. I guess my gaze is too fixated, too sour, and too tired. He now is talking to me, picks up on my race and says I'm Anglo-Indian. Well, wrong. "Are you talking to me? I'm not Anglo-Indian" I say. At this moment, the school boy in front of me turns towards me, his eyes filled with horror and surprise, and a tad bit of curiosity cuz he wants to know whether I really look like Anglo-Indians. The fat guy starts talking again, now telling stories which are supposed to hurt my feelings. Well, wrong again. I'm not even listening, but I never look down. I frown, look at him, and then avert my eyes to the window. Using slangs doesn't really bother me, but I feel like this is not the appropriate place to just say to him "Go fuck youself, asshole. Get off the bus already!" No one else did this... so maybe it's not acceptable? He's swearing while telling his stories. A man sitting in front of me-- I can only see the back of his head and he seems to be around 45, wearing formal clothes-- says, "Watch your language when you're speaking to her". I think "hmmm", I don't care about my ego. But I do care about this brute feeling so entitled for no reason. The fat man has stood up tall in front of the middle-aged guy. He yells, "Shut up, cunt! Don't you dare tell me what to do... you c-c-cunt!" I try to break the gap, to lighten the heaviness of silence after his loud voice. "That's not very nice," I hiss. The fat guy starts swearing again. The middle-aged guy says, "Manners", I say in agreement, "Be polite". The fat guy is getting off but meanwhile he tries his best to swear at the guy who was supposedly defending me. When the bus moves on, the blond man at the front smirks and shrugs, "Agh. That was a bit of excitement early in the morning". A lady sitting in front of him looks perplexed by all this and says, "This is insane, I mean... we have kids here on the bus!" The atmosphere is getting lighter by a mixture of hysterical laughter and chattering. I get off the bus at my stop, thinking that I don't care... but then the thought of how I could have answered him back in a stronger and more aggressive way creeps in. I repeat the scenario at least 12 times in my mind while I'm at work. I tell three of my colleagues about the incidence; they laugh and shrug it off "Oh but you can never escape these people... Oh.. but what can you do". I try to focus on my work, I listen to Korn and just try to do the work, but when I look at the clock it's already been five hours. Five hours! I bite my lips with disbelief. Am I going insane? How did I not feel the time go by... Maybe I'm losing my mind. Fuck it. I'll just hand in the draft to my manager. I listen to Korn, there's a weird song now playing, called Daddy. I hear the vocalist crying so naturally, squealing, blubbering, choking, weeping... I just read the comments under the Youtube video. Apparently the vocalist had been molested as a child. I play the song again. God this is so freaking psychotic... the cries...! I just play and play and play all of their songs. The day ends. I managed to end it without any trouble. I should stop trying to self-diagnose schizophrenia, depression and more. I really should. I say goodbye to everyone at work. They don't have a clue what's been going on in my mind and this makes me sad. Their smiling faces and their simplistic chit-chat make me feel out of place... I feel like I want to fight someone. I feel that itch again. I feel like I want to tear everything apart... it just feels appropriate. Not that I care about the little incident in the morning... I kind of feel happy that I got to see a bullying scene. That's what I was asking for, right? I wanted to argue with someone, get out the tension inside my head, but very little of my anger got expressed. So little that I'm starting to feel that I should have treated him like himself, rather than trying in vain to be polite and yet solid. Alas, the opportunity is gone. Fuck all this. I'm so drained... I hate humans once again. Wretched things. We should have been born mushrooms or cabbages instead.
I just woke up in the middle of the night, not panting, not being restless or angry, but as if I had been conscious all the while that I had been dreaming. I woke up at 3:43 AM after having a dream of my dear uncle who had been very close to me, almost like a father, even kinder. I dreamed of the time he was going to final decline. I was worried about what he had been through before he passed away... had he been suffering? Had a pain in his chest? But no... he had passed away in his sleep, so gently that even his wife had not noticed. The poem went like this, Do not go gentle into that good night... But that was a different story. It was about the struggle to live... what if you wanted life to finish gently, mercifully? That's what my uncle had wished for. He had wanted a swift flight and he had achieved it at the age of 75. Yet... this is not enough to console me. I would never want him to suffer, but I would always regret his death. He was one of the sweetest persons I've ever had in my life. I'm sorry for having been living away from you for so long... It hurts me to think of how good you were in all my childhood. We were living in the same complex as you... We would be going on trips together with family... I still have the family photos with you, me as a kid grinning from ear to ear for having you around. Because you were always cheerful, always made jokes even about death and disappointment. You had a spirit that I haven't seen in anyone. A spirit that would lighten the air, cheer up everyone in the room. It hurts me to think of all the times that we were gardening, watering the flowers and the vine, how good you were... I so miss that. I am so drained of life now. I hate humanity. I hate to be still be living in this senseless world. I hate it without you. You always made my world so meaningful, so glorious. You told me stories of your past, how you had fled home, how you had detested your father, how you had come back back for the first time after years and had seen your sister grown to the age of 6, not even recognizing you. Stories of the past, painful stories, and yet you were an awesome story teller. Oh I wish I had lived somewhere close to you so we could meet and talk... I was born a few decades too late, you would tell me. If I had been older, we could have been even closer than this. You said your old age was a barrier, and yet I've never seen a young person as sharp and infinitely understanding as you. We could have been talking about everything, politics, literature, arts, society...But... All of that is gone now. I have lost you. And until I die, I'm sure this world will be a pain to carry in my chest.
Warning: This is pretty much a rant. And yet another day that I can't force myself to sleep early. My mind is bursting at the seams. I so wish I could channel my thoughts and feelings to someone whom I had understood and built a connection with. It's been difficult to convince myself that the reason I'm away from my family for freaking 5 years (dammit!) is just writing. I have no writers group that would share my passions, aside from the university's club, who are... let's say different from me (still the best thing I could find). And next year, I won't even be able to see them since I'll be working full time. I'll grow even more isolated, even more alone, until the point of writing itself would be lost-- may as well the point of living be lost. These thoughts have been whirling around in my mind... I watched a rockumentary just recently. A great piece. Really reminded me of my teenage years. I was so fond of doom metal back then. For some fleeting mintues, I remembered how I had felt 9 years ago, what had concerned me, what had given me joy, what I had dreamt of. What was painful was not the realization that I hadn't reached what I had dreamt of, but that I no longer even dreamt of it as passionately as I used to. My emotions were now only little figments, lost in a sea of constant delegation. The leap was too much for me... 5 f*ing years... Can you believe this? It passed like a blink of an eye. I'm positive that the rest of my life will pass just the same way. What I had wanted to achieve feels so meaningless now at this point in time... unbelievable. The point is... "I was me but now he's gone" as Metallica once mused. I can't see myself reviving anything valuable where I am now... these people don't need me to write for them. People back home did, and yet they would bite my hands whenever I tried to help them. I am stuck in an endless loop that goes nowhere. It would feel so pointless if I ended up wasting my time away from my family not even being read. [Sighs and leaves the scene with no answer]
I chew my lips and touch the sleek keyboard, my fingers twitching in anticipation. The blue light of my laptop screen reflects on my typing fingers, turning them to moving serpentine skies. I am in a weird stage of my life. On the one hand, there's the internships, which don't pay me but take four days full time work, and on the other, my writing. I was feeling very down recently, and immersed myself in suicidal music, humorous mementos of the world of the dead, because I asked myself a thousand times, "Is that all there is?". I stared blankly at the unknown horizons of time. I think of my uncle who passed away recently, think of what kind of a person I'd be if I had grown old like him... I always praised him for who he was, but am I strong enough to stay in this wicked, unpredictable life until late, like he did? And if I do, what's the point? I can feel the time swallowing down my emotions and passions, taking my youth, taking my health. I am young but I know this won't last. What would I want to have done before my death? Write. There's a new short story award coming up in April, and I want to submit a piece. It's asking us to imagine the possible political/ social future of Australia, given its history... I will definitely submit something and I bet I'm one of very few people who even knows about this prize, so the chances aren't that low... yet I have no idea what to write. It's like I'm lost in this whirlwind of editors' expectations and I'm trying to levitate and drag myself out into what personally want to write. It's always good to have a think about what the assessor would like to read, but it's also important to write something you personally have some feelings for. And these days, I have feelings for almost nothing. The barbed wires of Anhedonia have separated me from the rest of the world.
Grab my ears and haul them, cut them away. Smother the burning liquid spirit of music, save me from the hypnotic suppression of livid vibrations, the delirious hallucinations of alien cosmic composers. Let them spew any wretched sound that they want, yet shield me in your void. The end is unwritten, the end is mine. I stand against the telekinesis of fate, as the echolocators skulk and scan the space. Inside the bunkers of the moon, where stardust wafts out around the shrapnel shells, let the war be mute.