(and waved like they just didn't care.)
To all those patient enough to weather through a much regretted lack of activity to still stagger onto my blog to read this,
Merry Christmas.
You rock for just being here.
Love,
Dani el Dee. C.K.X.
Time is not on my side and I'm still wading in the middle of the ocean, no compass in hand.
The finality of it.
Last night Jae and Feng came down to the hotel where I've been holding up in the past few nights. It was a night I would like to attach more meaning to than it really had.
We got a couple of bottles of wine, a few beers and we sat on the plush beds throwing our woes at each other and replaying lives lived a long time ago. Alcohol has a way of breaking away months of disassociation built up between people. We talked about things I wouldn't go back to. Things I love to regret. Stupid things I still love to miss.
We talked about ever-undulating friendships, never having enough money, and how guys are getting cornered into becoming the new girls in relationships.
Keith and his fleet had just ported and a handful of them were heading to Boat Quay for drinks. I knew it was an asinine call but I supported the motion for us three to join them. We met an old friend there by chance and the dead of night developed into a drunken blur filled with too many pints of lager and too many belted out choruses in Chinese. (I think beer improves my embarrassing Chinese literacy.)
The night ended in quite a comedy because in our stupor, the three of us sped off with somebody else's Martell bottle that was very much half-full, not half-empty. Keith called later when we were drenched and back at the hotel, telling me that the bunch of faux-gangsters saw 'the guy with the hat' running away with the bottle, and that I should lay low because they threatened to stab me if they saw me again.
The fucking hilarity of it all reminded me of someone I'd long forgotten. Because those were the absolute in-the-moment-ness he'd plunge into without thinking twice.
But when it was all over and I was face-to-face with a man with the sparkle of a boy's eyes, I felt a crushing surge as much as that seeming liberation. One of the differences between a 22 year old and an 17 year old is that nothing stays in-the-moment anymore. You do this whole after-activity evaluation process, kicking 'the moment' into perspective.
I felt like I wanted to be two different people. And I had assumed all along that I already had myself all figured out. Dani A is an unrestrained spontaneous fire with an invincible fervour for life and dreams, and he cannot stand Dani B's monotone boringness and nagging fear. Dani B is the sole force that is pushing this heap of bones to places, charting directions and setting in motion the things that matter, and he thinks Dani A's baseless dreams will never be nothing more than what they are.
These days I'm so ready to throw the Yin and Yang philosophy of balance out the window because it starting to not make sense to me. Sitting on the fence in the middle of everything splits your ass wide open.
I cannot say that I don't think of her. I do, a lot, but I'm too proud to admit it. In fact everything I do is still in reference to the both of us. She fell in love with A but she inspired B. A could charm Hitler into marrying a Jew. B's not cool, but he's definitely something to be proud of. Something a girl like her would be proud of. Something she can depend on. That's quite a something innit?
Sometimes, more than anything else, I enjoy walks alone after work to nowhere with my satchel in hand and The National in my ears. It's a simple solace I find.
It's ten and I'm the only one left in the office. I took a smoke in the backdoor lift lobby that comes complete with a view of the Singapore River, Chinatown and beyond. The city looks like an overturned sky of stars from way up here. But from this vantage point in pocketed silence, it makes you feel unnervingly alone.
In that moment, I kinda felt really alone.
Right now, the only thing I want in the whole world is a roadtrip.
For now, I'll just keep on walking.
Turn the light out say goodnight
No thinking for a little while
Let's not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
We’re half-awake in a fake empire
I was sick to my stomach. Completely sick.
When my eyes cursored over the words, I swear I felt the bile of disbelief rise to the top of my throat in a burn.
No, this isn't rage. Anger has its liberating effects. This is something else.
This is disgust.
Maybe she got one thing half right. I'm not going to do anything and just drift along if, for the rest of my life, I have to pretend to be happy shelving everything that ever was important to me.
Because the real Dani has other ambitions beyond dollardollarbillYall.
Because your remarks should stop where your business ends. And where this is concerned, it ends with who I am.
Because you don't know me.
I omitted this opening paragraph for an article I had to write on Mentorship. I obviously got carried away.
In it’s most vivid portrayal best accessible to the majority of us with a predictable ingestion of Hollywood fare, mentorship is a diminutive bearded Asian elderly (preferably Japanese or Chinese) who teaches lightning chops and kicks to an unassuming fourteen-year old, so that the latter may overcome (in style) the trials of growing up. Spoken often unintelligibly and with a suspect air of indifference, the mentor reveals his aged wisdom through adages that are seemingly simplistic, abstract and entirely irrelevant. But when scrutinised and embraced by the discerning, the lacking sophistication in phrases like, “Man who catch fly with chopstick can accomplish anything,” bears an engineered genius that makes it easily applicable to almost any circumstance.
A weekend in a rhyme /A year of sweet romance
A snapshot of a lifetime /A diamond in the hand
This Greek intoxication / Decreed by Fates it seems
A place in constellation / Our coupling of the seams
I came across an amusing quote.
"How? to make God laugh.
Tell Him your future plans."
[Permit me a minute of uncool.
Sims 2 on my mac is working brilliant! Can't wait for the add-ons to finish downloading, but they're taking longer than summer in Singapore. Goddamit!]
I'm flying home in a couple of hours. I'm leaving behind what seems to have impressed on me to be a sort of...parallel universe.
My presumptions didn't fall far from thinking I would look into this world from a glass door. It's not my embarrassingly rudimentary grappling of the spoken language. Or the fact that everybody seems to have the same fashion taste when it comes to outer wear to shield from the now fading cold. It's the way people live their lives. Their typical thoughts and emotions. That's something I don't think an alien could really learn or comprehend. It's like one of movie storylines where in somewhere someplace someuniverse outwardly different from your own, there is someone someother just like you, just living in a different context. I hope the local version of me has cool hair too and doesn't spit in people's way like people do here.
This place is rough and crude. The cutthroat circumstances that plague this place like they were once disease that has now laid to rest and become mainstay because it's just been too long, bears an ignorance amongst its people. A kind of ignorant and self-serving attitude that has hardened them into a certain kind of trivial mercenary. Yesterday, I boarded a bus and took seat in front of two visiting caucasians, one German, the other Brit, I think. About getting on the bus, the German commented that he was so relieved to see people finally so civilised. They usually don't queue and wait. They huddle and riot.
In all the crudeness, people are pussies here. The other day whilst in a two-and-a-half-hour-queue to scale the 3rd tallest mountain in the country, this bitchy looking woman started rambling off in this part of the world's trademark animated tone. She ranted in a fast-paced shriek that could have inspired the Banshee, towards my brother who must have inadvertently done something to offend her. I shouted at her and shot a hard stare. Then she avoided my gaze, eyes-front, feathers outstretched, in that signature I-live-for-myself-and-everyone-else-in-the-world-I-don't-care-about-should-die posture. People here know how to hold a quarrel. They'd beat down anyone I've ever known in Singapore with their verbal assaults. But they're pussies.
They had Lord of the Rings on TV...dubbed in the local language. And I would never have fathomed Elijah Wood's mastery of Chinese being better than mine.
I think about people. People in their own universes living out their own lives the way they understand life to be, the way they're used to. Then I think about her.
How has she been living her life the past ten days without me? How has she taken to the spaces that I'd left behind? Does she still think of me like an instinctual habit? I feel a soft-voiced nervous trepidation creeping over. The thought of going home to a girl whom I have to hug with a brick wall built in between. That kills.
I know her like I know where the moles on my body are. And I pray to God that tonight, I will still know her.
You'd say to me,
I want to repair your desire
And call it a gift
That I stole from just wanting to live
Now I see the vision through your eyes
Your innocence no longer fuels surprise
And I'd say to you,
Trying to outrun your fear
Running to lose
Heart on your sleeve and your soul in your shoes
Take a left,
A sharp left
And another left, meet me on the corner
And we'll start, again.
Help with the gift of music.
CALLING ALL GENEROUS SOULS!
You, yes, YOU could be the lucky one to help me shower the world with the most
mid(day)dream
In Big Sur we take some time to linger on
We three hunky dory's got our snakefinger on
Now let us drink the stars
It's time to steal away
Let's go get lost
Let's go get lost
Cigarettes and a super silent night. There is no summation or conclusion to this. Just a train of thought.
I told a friend I changed my blog because I got sick of the old one and my chamber of thoughts needed a revitalising migration. He retorted, saying, "What do you mean change your blog. You can't change a blog when you didn't have one to begin with." I looked back, an eyebrow raised. "You had a blog. Then you disappeared. Then you created The Quixotic," he said, referring to the seemingly indefinite hiatus I took without notification.
Our conversation developed into a realisation that many mutual friends we've become disconnected from for some reason (we keep a foothold on their lives by reading their blogs), have been writing rather depressive entries of late. Talk of dashed dreams, inspirational blackholes and glacial hearts from too many discarded run-ins with love, these very reminiscent of adolescent disconcertion.
I wrote like that in the army. Amongst the occasional proclamation of hope, I was bleary-eyed from forced and extended stagnancy. I guess that's why I stopped writing in the old place. When restlessness morphed into boredom.
It's a wonder when hindsight frames the last ten months. In perspective, that's two months short of a year since I hung my beret. That's eight months since I first kissed the Angel. That's five months since starting nine-to-fives.
That's half a year since I could walk into an R-rated movie beating my chest, head tipped upward, man(legal) enough. Damn, and I haven't.
Like I said. No conclusion. Just train of thought.
The pawn asks God,
What do I do?
God says,
DO WHAT PAWNS DO.
The pawn retorts,
Yeah but do I advance or do I hold. Do I marinate myself in terriyaki sauce and wait for the Queen to get to me or what? Coz pawns do that too, man.
God says,
THE ANSWER IS WITHIN YOURSELF. YOU KNOW WHAT MUST BE DONE.
The pawn dismisses all foreplay,
Come on Big Guy. I'm looking for divine inspiration here. I really hate this one way street. I need to get to the end of the line so I can fucking do something with my life instead of just making like some goddamn runway model but there's a whole bunch of them midnight blackness darkness dudes who could write a '365-Ways-to-Eat-a-Midget' book over there. (Sorry bout the using-your-name-in-vain-thing.) I'm just a pawn, man. I just need some direction.
God says,
THERE IS NO WORTH IN BEING SHOWN THE WAY, NO PRIDE IN KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT THOUGHT, NO REWARD IN BEING GIVEN THE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE.
The pawn slumps to the floor and lights a cigarette, in resignation to the confines of his black square tile.
He whispers under his breath,
Fuck. I hate motivational bullcrap. Thought I left it behind in the friggin' army.
Is it that hard to make sense of anything?
God says,
SUCH IS LIFE.
If I were to name my poison, I'd proclaim Escapism. Too much for my own good, I muse.
In my daydreams, I've dined with aristocrats and fair maidens, battled foes worthy of FBI Most Wanted, walked through lush forests with earth that doesn't stick to barenaked feet. I've starred in my own 007 plot, and led anthemic choruses to an ocean of zombiefied worshippers of me.
I'd only read my tales if the words were a little taller than what they really are.
Dear Reader, musicforthefloater is an outlet. An exaggeration of my life. My want for grandeur.
Whatever lives in the recesses of my head and makes it to these pages, is a film-worthy adaptation of my life...
..based, of course, on real-life events.
