BOOKED

the other day as i usually do, i picked up a book at random but this time not from those nicely lined in book racks of my three thousand or so books in my personal library (and still expanding) but from the stacks of books under my bed which are waiting to be put in their proper place on book racks which i couldn't because they are now full and turned out this book is other colours ,a collection of 'essays and a story' by orhan pamuk.

i came to orhan pamuk rather late and i must thank one 'pessoa' who first made me aware of this writer several years back. i very rarely care for book recommendations from anybody until i 'met' pessoa in one book forum. we had a fight over something and i challenged him to name some of his favorite books and much to my delight he came up with a list of about fifty or so books about 40% of which were completely unknown to me -at that time. the reason why i asked him to name his favorite books is simply because i will know immediately if he's a good reader or not by the list of books he considers his favorite.this is the easiest way to find out if someone is an idiot. the fact that he used pessoa as his 'avatar' after fernando pessoa which at that time was also unfimilar to me indicated that he is a very well read man and a book addict.

and you can't find a more book obsessed person than orhan pamuk. i once read somewhere that he would feel literally sick if he is kept away from his reading and writing. for those of us who are unfortunately inflicted with the curse of inordinate love for books and have become book addicts, one of the chief worries is what to do with all the books we keep on collecting although knowing full well that we'll never ever going to read most of them in this lifetime. and it was a pleasant surprise to find one of the essays in orhan pamuk's other colours is "How i got rid of some of my books" and unlike my usual approach to reading -for pleasure- i approached this article as some of us would read all those 'book for dummies', namely to find solutions to our particular problem.

but in the end i get nothing of the kind out of it. the essay is what one would expect from orhan pamuk. a very interesting and meandering thoughts about favorite writers and his love of books. he would never write anything remotely pedestrian like all those boring DIY articles in book for dummies but he did mention that he managed in the end to dispose a laughable 250 books (out of twelve thousands in his library!) . and i find it very funny that those he considered unfit for his library are those books as he put it in the last sentence of the essay

This is how my Turkish literature shelves are quickly losing works by half-witted, mediocre, moderately successful, bald, male degenerate writers between the ages of fifty and seventy.

what a strange dream! it's quite atypical of my normal dreams of girls -who are not my wife- having all sort of shenanigans with me and what is worse is the dream was in english... a sure sign that i'm turning into one of my most hated creatures...the wog! oh what a dream! and it was not 'i had a dream' kind of that most famous black man on earth (and who recently slipped down to the second- after barack obama) who was shot dead for his idealistic dream...no, mine is a whole lot down to earth, mundane but disturbing to me none the less.

they say your dreams reflect your collective inner subconscious concerns and desires. and some say it merely depends on what you ate the night before, or because you don't wash your feet before you go to bed or some religious nuts would say because satan piss in your ears...

but let's see. what was the last food i ate last night?. Pineapple. doesn't seem to explain the dream. did i wash my feet before i go to sleep? my feet are always clean. i wear flip flop slippers in the house and i don't go walking barefoot anywhere and sometimes wash them before coming out of the toilet...so i can consider that yes, effectively i washed my feet.

did satan piss in my ears? my wife always read passages of the Quran before she drops off beside me and although the Quran is not my bed time read i consider i was close enough to the holy book so i assume satan won't be hanging around near me. so, no satan urine in my ear.

and that remains the last thing. my subconscious desires and concerns. i'm a normal man. my normal aim in life is just like all of us... sex drug and rock and roll...or variations there of. the last thing i did before i went to sleep last night was to watch the late and great gore vidal on you tube . and read APOLLO magazine (Oct 2008) article on Prince Hans-Adams II of Liechstentein art collections which is considered to be one of the world's gtreatest private art collection. all these have absolutely nothing to do with the dream.

so there's one thing left that can explain it. it's the office work! like most of us poor salarymen, we bring our office worries to bed. but i always take a cavalier attitude towards office work. my motto is do your best but fuck them if they don't turn out the best. but the funny thing is i don't have any worry ith my office work. i could do them in my sleep!...hey that's proably the answer!

i dreamt of being tasked to chair a multi agency multinational meeting on a topic which i was absolutely unprepared for. we came to this office and led to a meeting room which had a BED in it. as some of the members arrived one or two tried the bed reclining or sitting on it. and all the participants in the meeting were WOMEN. some were quite beautiful and many were CHINESE. i was very flustered because i didn't know any of these women and i didn't know what the agenda was and no knowledge or experience on the topic at hand. and instead of documents and files i only brought a PILLOW to the meeting....

i drove to pd on saturday night , the last night of campaigning for the bagan pinang state by election . jalan pantai was chock full of people and there was a very carnival like atmosphere along the road especially near and around telok kemang area. you can't even enter telok kemang and the traffic was diverted away at the roudabout. not without unintended sense of humor - it was diverted out back to kl.... i stopped at one place which i mistook for a pasar malam but full of people selling PAS things ...t shirts, cds, dvds, even dikir barat cds...but with a difference... the songs were all PAS oriented campaign songs. very nice. i almost felt like i was in my home town kb. never thought to see this kind of thing in PD which on normal days is almost like some places in bali...almost...and i thought hey, the old bugger is gonna get a drubbing this time may be? ...but then i realized all this carnival was due to people from outside coming to campaign or give moral support to PAS . met many people from kelantan, trengganu etc. spoke to a few and even went to one of the PAS ceramahs nearby which was empty and i had a sinking feeling that all wasn't well...and the rest is history...the sly bastard won by a landslide.


so much for idealism. all the yellow black and brown voters went back to support the dimunitive bugger in droves. can't blame them. fuck idealism. you can't eat idealism. what have they got to lose? between a dour , inarticulate and almost retarded looking PAS candidate and a cheerful devillish bugger with bag loads of goodies...in hindsight it's obvious who the people in pd will choose. it's a no brainer.

i'm feeling sick of my fellow malaysians again... i'm losing hope. i don't think we'll ever be going to see umno and bn uprooted. may be we deserve having these crooks as our masters. we are all not so angelic ourselves. we're fucked and so we deserved to have fucked up masters.

the great wonder is we can stand being made fool of and being kicked around for more than 50 years by these assholes and yet we are super critical and can not stand five months of teething problems when it comes to the more idealistic PR people. talk about twisted logic.

but we have to look at the bright side of life - to quote life of brian - again. may be this bagan pinang fiasco is just a special situation. a localised and temporary insanity. we move on.
may be we all should be more positive . may be it's instructive and we to take heed from this little story...

A young man was extolling the virtues of his beautiful fiancee. One of his closest friends exclaimed, "you can't be serious about marrying Sarah Jane! Why, she's fucked every man in syracuse."

The bridegroom-to be thought awhile and then muttered pensively, "Syracuse isn't such a big town."

- Giant book of Dirty Jokes.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

- Umberto Eco

Hey i like that. i don't exactly know what it means but i like it. and perhaps that's the reason why i like books by people like kurt vonnegut and mark twain so much. hell i even like chris rock's stand up comedy. and all those fantastic coen brother' movies. they all have one thing in common. all these people make us laugh at the truth...whatever the hell truth means.

on the first day of hari raya about noon or a bit earlier -around elevenish (as some would say) we were enjoying our hari raya gathering eating all kinds of kelantan cookies and delicacies like tape beras and nasi dagang , and oh by the way nasi dagang belongs to kelate and so is nasi kerabu, or budu or akok and so don't terengganu dare to claim nasi dagang as theirs or petani malays of southern thailand claim the rest as theirs or else there would be serious 'repercussions' from us (just remember pendet issue hmmm?) - but as i was saying while we were gorging ourselves silly there was this assalamualaikum greeting from two indian looking white jubah clad long bearded guys at the door and today being an open door festive day we invited them in and as usual in our place, we always assumed that jubah clad foreigners can only speak arabic and so some of us hollered to bukhari, my youngest brother and a syariah mejistrate educated in jordan and the only person in our family who can speak impeccable arabic to come and talk to these guys. but turned out they could only speak a little arabic ...shuay, shuay...and i asked them if they speak english and one of them said yes....

and so i invited them in and invited them to eat our copyrighted food like tape beras and akok and nasi dagang...and while they ate i asked them who they were (turned out they were pakistanis from islamabad) why they came to kelantan and the english speaking guy said they came to seek donation to build a mosque in pakistan and people recommended them to come here because it is 'an islamic state' and i said yes , that's true. that's true...and i asked them what do they think of taliban? and their eyes opened wide and they exclaimed taliban no good, taliban terrorists! and i said no they are not, they are good people!

and they still persisted, no !taliban bombed mosques, killed people they are kaffir...they are kaffir from india coming to pakistan to become terrorists...and i said no taliban is good they fight the fucking americans, they do jihad...and sensing my 'angle' they softened and said yes real taliban is good but many called themselves taliban but they are really kaffir..they killed and bombed mosques... they are indians...and so i let it at that...and asked what do they think of osama ben laden...and to preempt whatever they wanted to say i said osama is good! osama fights for jihad...he fights the fucking americans... and so they nodded and looked anxious to go... and so i gave them ten ringgit....and off they went ...

not that i'm tight fisted or anything but i commented to my syariah court mejistrate, how do we know if these guys are genuine? there are so many fake donor seekers around...claiming to be jihadists from afghanistan, myanmar , palestine and the rest. they might simply collect the money changed the jubah to jeans and t-shirt and go and enjoy themselves at the thai cowboy town of sungai golok just 40 km away. but on the other hand who knows ? they might be genuine donation seekers. the mosque name is ali murtaza which is a very syiah name... which is another interesting point i would like to discuss with them but this is hari raya...we don't wan't to be too serious... most of us were only interested to just enjoy our copyrighted kelantan food after one long fasting month which wasn't really making us any lighter because we were pigging ourselves silly at night instead which defeat the whole purpose and spirit of ramadhan which is another story again.......

eid mubarak ...

friendship is a funny thing. the ones you made during your younger days usually last the longest. forget office collegues. they can be the best of buddies when you work togather. they may open their heart out to you, tell their darkest secrets and perversions but the moment they change jobs...woosh..gone. like rats out of an aqueduct, to quote life of brian . but those that you made during your school days are different. perhaps because we were more innocent then. we had higher tolerance for each others' stupidities and cruelties. we didn't understand what hurt means. we didn't take things to heart as much as we do with friends we make during our later years. and with the passing of time memories become all the sweeter as all the hurts we might have harboured would all be healed by father time.

and that's why i hate reunions. they kill old memories. and more likely than not instead of reinforcing friendship it can go wrong and we would be hurt by the slightest unintended slights. so i usually stay away from reunions. and looking at once sexy girl friends which you may or may not have fantasised and masturbated to and now looking like mishappen baloons don't help.

but here's another thing. with facebook , reconnecting with old friends that you have not met for donkey years suddenly become so easy. but this too, i tried to steer away from. occassionally i came across a few familiar names but i never invited any of them into my fb. almost all my facebook friends are virtual friends. it's interesting to to see some of these people making fool of themselves by spouting pseudo philosophies and making inane remarks . but this is no problem, because i have a very high tolenrance for stupidities. what i can't stand is fakery and wogism.

real friendship is almost impossible once you have reached a certain age. if you don't make good friends during you school days, well forget it...may be i'm wrong. i'm always wrong. i actually have some very interesting friends that i made post school days... but to say that they are friends that i'd die for, well, that's asking a bit too much. in fact i don't think i'd die for anything. i'm very selfish. just like all of us. we're all heartless....except those stupid ones who think they must save the world. why?

sometimes i wonder... why can't we be like the singaporeans or the chinese ( in china ) or the vietnamese. these people's philosophy is simple: why give a fuck about politics? whoever rule the country is no concern of mine. if we can live reasonably well and have enough 'space' and lee ways to do whatever we like, then why worry? we're fine!. who gives a fuck what those criminals do in their parliaments or whatever they call the monkey house where they preside.

but i think i know the answer why we care about politics so much and why those people don't. it's simply because malaysia is - to use a singapore expression- a kiasu country. we think we are the best and comparable to the best in the world in everything. when the US admitted that they are screwed because of the financial blow-out, we say we are ok because we can manage our economy well.when other countries are in turmoil and their people are at each other's throats we looked smugly and say, look at us. we're multiracial like no other country in the world but look how we live peacefully with each other (and forgetting places like switzerland etc). when our neighbours are demonstrating and rioting all over the place we shake our heads and say, what kind of democracy is that? we malaysians practise real democracy. and there actually lies the answer why we're obsessed with politics.

the real problem with malaysia is this. since we are kiasu and want to beat the shit out of everybody we try to ape everybody that we think are good. we think the brits and the americans are good. they practise democracy. so we must too. so we practise democracy. a better way than the brit and the american version. but this version is like opening a door a little and allowing us to glimpse what is inside. and so we peeked in and we glimpse what freedom of expression is like. and we know it's good and so we ask for the door to be wide open . and here lies the problem. the door remains open just a little and our political masters say that's it . no more! and so we holler and shout and become obsessed with politics. we see that our masters are bastards but because the door isn't wide open we are quite powerless apart from shouting and hollering and becoming obsessed with politics.

but china or vietnam are diferent. they don't give a fuck. politics isn't the common people's concern. just go forth, multiply, make money , have fun. leave the governing to us. that's not your affairs. do this long enough and if you govern well (like singapore) , people will soon forget about politics and they will sleep well without getting their blood boiling about the affairs of the state. but we malaysians are too far gone. too late to go back to china model. we've tasted the best thing in life. full democracy and freedom of expression. and we want the max. but we aren't getting this anytime soon. and so we shout and holler and become onbsessed with politics.