Category: Uncategorized

It always begins with a startle.

Then gradually she would come to grasp sight and sound, where bright fluorescent lights seem to blind her and the alarm deafen her that to resist any stimuli would be futile. There, there, where am I? What hour is this?

so each day is sliced into little chunks of hours that we must concede into and slave ourselves away to things uncertain. it is a work that never reveals itself until you choose to unearth it yourself, have you a will and a heart to venture and a mind that questions. mouthes that never stop speaking noses that never stop running heads that never stop buzzing these rubber feet and rubber hands that grope at pavements cements cables three striped rectangular buildings all heating up waiting to be discovered to spark to blow to die to flash and burn everything down to the ground. a spectacle to behold.

still, there must be some ground/room for optimism, no? it is either the lack of sleep or the lack of freedom or your overarching attachment towards persons and things and updates that really mean nothing in the long run. what will not go away will never go away, and you need to assure yourself of that. so in between listening to advice on how to behave in public human traffic or how not to spend money or how to stop having audible monologues or how to order coffee or how to dress, in short, how to present and maneuver your ill-equipped self to the world without being dependent on other people (there is still much to be learned), you must learn not to be held by the arm at every stop at every doubt but to step into the right direction and stick to it without wavering.

at this point all things seem to desist in meaning and new words crop up shrooming over your head out of sheer aching of not being used for a while. desist? i insist. and the lids are again heavy and the body weary and the heart empty. boohoo. every day new faces crop up too and there is never enough time to reconciliate with them so they fade into the background without ever being told or remembered by. just another day and another face that will soon efface and be replaced.

at this rate how shall anything have meaning?

this state of the bereavement of the soul is killing me.

rarely excited these days.
either i don’t care or i see nothing in everything.
maybe i need to weed out a few people and start redeeming myself.

“Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past”. -Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas Salome, Florence Diary. 

*

questions darted pertaining of life abroad, whether that privileges anything, one knows whether to answer, it’s okay, it’s good, it’s fun. because the possibilities of extending conversation exist. so you contemplate within two seconds whether to slip into the mundane details of living eating praying paying walking studying speaking, or to give them entirely new perspectives on things they never expect to be said. choices. to entice or to be concise.

sometimes it all depends oaaan the mood, like how much you have eaten through the day, or how bored you are at work (or the absence of it), or how intrigued you are by the person next to you. lately they all do.

*

so amidst the tar and nicotine now slowly depositing itself into your lungs, you listen to them getting all worked up over yesterday’s match, all gallant and brave at giving commentaries on the screen, but cower cover and annihilate their selves in the presence of authority, nobility, stature. so everything is superficial at best, and so you witness resentment beneath all those formalities, rules, and procedures. ah, bureaucracy.

*

what are rules created for, anyway? is it meant to contain or to liberate? question of the day.

*

i’m just being complimentary.
complimentary to whom?
complimentary to you.

doughnuts. i’ll say no more.

*

why not we write about real things with real permanence, time date, and everything? why put everything in a foggy haze, as if our purpose is to confound the reader, to drag him down to our own solitude, our sadness, our so called melancholic despair stemming out of purposelessness?

the breaking down of the spirit, the spirit continuously engaged in trivial matters of bargaining and consolidating and the loosening up of the jaw to smile smile smile and never even mean it. an exercise to make up for the lack of warmth, routine speeches and words and formalities all to shroud the heart and tongue that betrays once the person is out of sight. so we form inconsistencies, with every transaction conversation built upon pretense; one departs always with bitterness with doubt with hate with annoyance.

a system based on the lack of trust, breeds suspicions, lies, deceits.

to put trust into a person is to respect. and while respect (they say) must be earned, one should always be the first to offer it, for to start on a (negative) empty slate, to debase before one is uplifted, so one  assume a character (because it is expected of him) and thus nothing no one ever gets out of the rut (unless one really fights against it).

profitability vs. efficiency

should learn how to susun ayat better. this is only a place to throw clouded thoughts. disorderly at best.  therefore should start writing essays. meh.

getting used to not having to face the lifeless computer screen even though i have to do some research work on it. odd men talking valiantly about football but shrug at the site of the book. the kind that speaks of a person as if they know him and talk cock and bull and conjure things out of thin air.
a let down. weird advice passed down through generation that have no rational basis. the limits of how much to suspend your rationale and start believing shit. mungkin saya patut join unmsia lol. confusion between plain mysticism versus pure tahyul. sufi orders in malaysia. the politics of working. the amount of slacking in the office of melayu. corny speeches elongated laden with empty slogans and promises and harapans. more jokes than substance as if to be likable in the office is more important than getting your job done. old men who watch transporter movies, and freaking narnia. NARNIA. to recognize locality of people from studying their faces gait and voices.

i feel as if i am having a field day everyday sampling/observing/talking to all the different people at work, studying the lower rung of society in which i never really encountered at close hand. makes you wonder really, how things progress from one thing to another, or how developed this country is. the importance of mobility, nobility, jobs of fathers, the places you come from, yada yada. the priorities and ambitions of people in general. (Kata Qutb, cita cita lumpur). then again, small talks are superficial. (reminder to self : one cannot judge so harshly).

***

to be thrown from one environment to another.

***

morning talks to brother no 2. topics include cycling in malaysia, how does a country generate wealth, how does a city retain wealth, how wealth is distributed among people. economics. i should marry one ( ha ha ).

***

slowly reading Ahmad Wahib’s book, or catatan harian. need to re-learn all those wordy terms. for some reason his reasoning is that falsafah is opposed to agama. that is, if one tries to differ between  reason and belief. viewed from a western approach to philosophy, or their attitude towards christianity, which is actually contrary dengan how reasoning is done/interpreted in early islamic traditions. need to read and understand more, anyway.

ticking off books one by one.
Black Spring is amusing in all its runniness (?).
Kreutzer Sonata is a preach misogynistic book on the chastity of women, despite well written. smooth sailing. a few true points in which one can see why Hamza Yusuf often quotes from Tolstoy.
Girl Interrupted is downright disappointing in its attempt to justify mental disorders, and all its chemical imbalances, when all it is is about a whiny young girl incapable to grow up. lazy and crippled. or maybe i read it too late, or liked the movie better.

even if i keep on returning here to meet myself i think there is nothing more to be met, as if i had stopped trying to grasp anything higher than what i am capable of, this state of complacence (?) settling within. already i can see myself atrophied, my mind my soul suspended permanently unable to move to swim against my own attachments to persons, ideas, and ideals. all self inflicted.

tolstoy says (or was it rand? or some other…), that humans differ from animals in their inability to recognize their own limits. that the predator stops hunting when he catches a prey. the other prey(s?) shall stop running, knowing that the predator has reached its limit. there is no cause for fear. and so is everything else on this earth. everything acts within its proportion, in accordance to their natural laws. but man, given his so called akal (reasoning) sometimes reasons himself to be limitless and acts outside of his limits, and so he hoards out of greed, become miserly and continue to devour in order to be satiated, but find himself never satisfied, so he continues to expand more and more oppressing others and such. or such that he sets himself out so low, believing himself incapable of movement except to crawl over others creeping on the shadows of yesterday never actually attaining anything but the worsening, degradation of the self.

sah bukan rand ni.

going off into tangents already.

to be limitless, to feel limited, or to recognize and act within one’s own limit.

goodnight.

goal; one book every two/three days.
(is that within my limit?)

i wish there was an option for people to be removed from pictures.

sometimes i see no point in writing anymore. the fact that i have to start working tomorrow horrifies me. today i am here sitting eating yesterday’s bought banana where i think i bumped into one of those ahmad deedat’s disciples, having no thought of the present yet where my mind blank where the desire to sleep overrides the desire to sleep, like everyone else you meet, on airport floors, on chairs in sleeping bags waiting for the next morning flight while you hide yourself in some obscure corner and start congregating about ayats and the present, three in malaysia, one in new zealand, one australia another korea, all out of place and worn out for the week. a syllable isn’t heard, except from the loudest of them all, who speaks of integrity honesty and cars colliding and money burned and belts churning. so in the next five hours i have to board two flights back home. the bus first, where i have to haul the disconnected contents of my life and dump it into the comfort of my home, and finally return to the womb.

the mind is no longer in the state of aggravation. either dumbed down atrophied distracted sealed off, i grieve.