The Dark Before The Dawn

Around you people die. Around you people fall sick. People catch colds and get hit by trucks and fall off buildings. They leave behind them families, children, parents, friends. They leave behind them troubles and unfinished businesses. You stand still. You do what everyone does, and yet you feel that somehow you will not be harmed. You want to believe you're the chosen one, the Wolverine with incredible healing powers or the Batman who can never seem to die. But you're not. None of us are. 

One day you go to the hospital and the doctor says you might have caught a killer virus, a ferocious cancer growth, the damaged kidney. One day when you're driving happily you're hit by a truck and the next thing you know you've lost all your limbs. And you lie there in bed, in disbelieve. You don't know how to react. 

In the movies, people cry. In the movies, people lose their temper and start screaming out. In the movies families know exactly what to say and friends are always there to make you feel better. No. Not this time. This time you have no idea what to do. You can't cry, you can't scream. Your families are nowhere to be seen, and your friends keep saying the wrong things over and over again. 

The doctor lays out the possible treatments you can take. He looks at you and asks you how you feel. You say "I feel.... nothing". Numbness. Everything around you is a blur. Things happen and you can never catch up with it. You got nobody to talk to about this. You're lost. Blur. Too fast. Words don't register. You stare into blank space, and nothing happens in your head. Your hands. They tremble. Your breath. They tremble. You curl up into a fetal position, hoping to gain a little comfort. It doesn't come to you. You punch walls to remove the numbness. It doesn't go away. 

Then you look at people around you, living normal lives, and you want to get back to that life. You miss it. You can't believe that one small mistake can lead to such a catastrophic disaster. You refuse to accept what has happened to you. You'd sleep every night, dream of waking up all normal again, and then waking up to a damaged body. Denial. You'd always wake up to a crippled you, a wrecked you. They say crying helps, but no tears would come out. They say screaming out loud helps. You stuff a pillow onto your face and you scream into the pillow. It helps, but only very slightly. They say drinking drowns your sorrows, but it will always come back once you sober up again. No. NO. NO! This is NOT happening to me! NO FUCKING WAY!!! 

Rage takes over. You keep losing your temper, even at the smallest things. People around you will start keeping a distance because they don't understand you and they have no idea what is happening to you. You explode. You find it hard to keep a straight and objective thought. You can't control it. The fire inside. The need to deal damage. The need to scream and throw things around and see everything around you burn to the ground. Sanity hangs by a thin thread. One minute you know what you're doing, and the other you lose everything. Why? Why the fuck is this happening to ME?! WHY? It repeats in your head. It rewinds and it replays. The last moments replay and replay and replay. It haunts the fuck out of you. WHY not HIM?! Why NOT HER?!! WHY ME?! 

Sanity seeps back into your head. Slowly. Steadily. You finally regain a little bit of consciousness. You see again. You hear again. The true gravity of the situation finally weighs in on you. It's heavy. You can't breathe. Then you can breathe again. Then you can't again. You begin to think now. God may be able to help. You start striking deals with HIM. You ask for a short rewind, and in return you devote your life to helping His devotees. You promise to be vegan if. You promise to change if. Just one chance. ONE. Chance. 

Nothing works. You're still the same. Times are hard. You feel useless and you've lost all dignity. You'd rather die a hero than to live a helpless shit. Google SUICIDE. Google DROWNING. Google POISONING. Some may lead you to God's doors. Some may enlighten you on some really good ways to die. There's no point in living anymore. You distance yourself from family and friends. You make them hate you. It would be easier for them to let go of someone they hate. Sometimes you would sit in the car for hours long, engine running, thinking if you should stuff a pipe from the exhaust into your cabin. Eternal sleep. Every night, you would pray for God to let you sleep and never wake up. Eternal sleep. You stand by the railroad for a while. You think. You contemplate. You consider. You take one step. Suddenly voices echo in your head. It was your mom. She called you. We're here, son. Don't do it. You turn around and walk away. 

After a few attempts, a thought strikes. If you're gonna die anyway, why not make the best of what little life you have left before you go? Exit with a bang. Don't waste it by just leaving so soon. Since you're gonna die anyway. Better to enjoy until the time comes. Then you start to see. The sun. It peeks behind the most majestic mountain range in the world. It floods the ice caps gold. The sea. The waves crashing onto white sand stretching miles long. Pastel blue lakes. The jungles green from afar. The trees taller than any building known. Rich dark soil. Birds. Crickets. Monkeys. Lovers laughing, babies crying. The deafening cascade of the waterfall. The calm river afterwards. Rebirth. 

What Goes On In My Head

Sometimes I sit in a corner, quiet. People come up to me and ask 'Hey what you doing? Why so stoned? Why so anti-social?'

So I will tell you what I am, most of the time, thinking about. 

Sometimes I think about how I would turn out if I was in a war-torn country. Will I be as bitchy as I am now (as of recent days a few of us have come out with a term to label male bitches: Mitches)? Will I be such a drama king? Would I pick up a gun and kill someone? Will I kill my parents just so I get to live? Is life that important? Is human's survival instinct so strong that one will kill even the ones he/she loves in order to stay alive? 

I don't know. Because I'm not living in a war-torn country. I can't judge, I can't label, because I don't know the first thing about what these people have to go through. 

Sometimes I think about pain. I think about how much pain a person can bear before he/she passes out. How much pain a person can bear before he/she dies. Sometimes I think about drowning, about free falling. Sometimes I think about being beaten to death. The question I would always ask is 'at what point does one give up fighting?' 

I have been beaten before, but not to anywhere near death. And I've been bound and beaten before. The latter is more humbling. I drowned before, and in that instance there is absolutely nothing I could do but pray. Heck, I didn't even have the bloody mood to pray. But that was just me. I've fallen before. Falling is both the fastest and the slowest occurring moment in a person's lifetime. People who've fallen would know what I mean. 

Sometimes I would think about what I would say right before getting myself beaten up. Because sometimes, just sometimes, it's cooler to go down fighting than whimpering like a coward. This is what I would say:

If you're gonna beat me up, make sure you kill me. If you can't kill me, run. Run as fast as you can and as far away as you can. If I find you, prepare yourself a coffin cos I ain't gonna buy you one. 

I can always imagine myself saying these awesome words to my killer right before he pump my head full of lead. But I know reality won't be the same. I know I'd piss my pants and be crying for mercy like a fucking coward. But it doesn't hurt to imagine. 

Sometimes I'd think about confronting someone who owes me money. He would be an epic retard and try to twist the story around to make it sound as if I actually owe him more than he owes me. You know what I'd say? I'd say this:

Here's two sacks of sand. Take it, and run. Before I finish this cigarette, I want you to disappear from my sight. If I find you, you better have the two sacks of sand with you, because I'll need to cover you with them when I'm done with you. 

But I can't do one most important thing in that statement: finish the cigarette. Because I haven't been smoking for a little over a year now. And I don't think I'll ever get back to it. So this means 70% style point has already gone out the window even before I started the sentence. Okay I admit, part of this epic statement I stole from an old Bollywood movie. 

Sometimes I'd try to figure out why people would love to hate each other so much, and why would people need to place themselves in smaller groups of 'elites' so they can actually feel good about themselves. Then I realized that people need to hate. We need to take a side, in everything we do - In politics, in religion, even in existence. So I think the only way for us to be united is if we have a greater enemy. It could be an alien invasion or a killer virus or vampires and werewolves. 

Sometimes I would wonder why is it so hard for us to be ourselves and do what we really want to do because it would make us happy? Why is it that we need to live for other people, make other people happy, be accepted by other people? We don't live their lives. They don't live ours. It's because No Man Is an Island. And because of that every man/woman needs to be a part of society. This means we will all need to conform to certain rules of conduct, and this varies according to how high up to First World scale a society is in. Some find it sacrilegious to smoke cigarettes in front children, while some think peeing by the road side is normal. 

So these are some of the rubbish that go through my head when I'm sitting in a corner all by myself. I'm not an anti-social person, sometimes I am so sociable you'd wish me dead. I may be planning world domination or a drug that can create zombies or a way to kill all humanity. Or I could be planning my dinner, or what to wear for tomorrow's Ball, or what to say if I was his best man.    

Till Death Do You Part

I never understood what it all meant. Probably it's because I grew up not knowing the true meaning of it. To me marriage was always simply humanity's need to be normalized into society's behaviors. Procreation and the need to ensure survival of the species is just another word for the insatiable need to quench one's thirst for lust. If everyone is doing it, so should we. My parents want to have grand kids, so lets give them grand kids. So we've been going out for a million years now, getting married is the only logical course of action. I don't want to die alone or surrounded by cats who'd, out of hunger, eat me.

You see, my family never understood true unconditional love. I don't refer to my extended family, what they do is none of my concern. Mom and dad only ever know how to fight with each other, curse at each other, and throw chairs at each other. There was a lot of hate in the house where I grew up. Not that I cared, it gave me the perfect opportunity to start smoking and drinking and clubbing (called discos back then) and running around with parangs (not what you think, really). You get the picture. I never agreed to LOVE and MARRIAGE and FAMILY and bla bla bla. Well not until quite recently. 

Have you hung out with a couple who'd keep looking at each other and nodding at each other, not saying anything to each other, and knowing exactly what they were talking about? It's like they went to telepathy school. 

Do you have a friend so close to you, you'd psychoanalyze all the girls he went out with and keep telling everyone nobody is good enough for him? And then suddenly this one comes along and somehow all you could ever do is nod and nod and nod... and smile? 

Then there's this couple who'd spend an entire day in the cyber cafe, each doing their own stuff and playing their own games, not talking to each other, and call it a good date. 

And then this girl who'd always complain about her man, about how silly he is and how he can't do this or do that. And all the while she was complaining, she had this uncontrollable smile across her face - the smile that says 'I love him I love him I love him'. 

Then a very beautiful girl who met this boy when he was in deep shit with no money or anything to his name, stuck by him through thick and thin, even when business ventures turned bad. But every time I meet up with them, I know as long as they stick together they can weather any storm. The boy, by the say, can make his eyes disappear just by smiling. And he looks like a pear now. Yes, his mom agrees. 

There's this guy, who the girl chose over a rich boy (he now owns a Ferrari and all the lots). Even after 4 kids, they would steal each other out for dinner dates. They still look at each other with those eyes, those feelings, like they've just met and they were full of puppy love. They make mistakes together, accept them and move on. They don't own fancy cars or big houses or enterprises, but they have each other. And really that is all that matters.  

I know what it means now. Not that I am ready to embrace it, I still don't think it's my kind of thing. But I understand it. It was never about the diamonds or cars or shiny branded stuff or financial stability. It was never about making their parents happy or doing what everyone else is doing simply because. It's about being able to finish each other's sentences, about knowing exactly what the other wants just by looking at their faces, about feeling the warmth of each other even in the coldest end of the world. 

Fancy birthday and anniversary celebrations are for teenagers. After a while these things will mean nothing anymore, and what is left will be the unspoken affection they have for each other. When they can sit down for dinner, like every dinner before this, eating without saying a thing to each other, proceed to watch a movie, like every other day before this, and go home knowing they've spent another eventful day with the person they love the most. 

People And Paper: Promote or Pull Out

Companies are going paperless. It's a trend, and I was not saved from this when I was running my little business. Going paperless is efficient: filing is made easy and space saving. Emails, news and magazines reach recipients immediately and print cost reduced dramatically. 

But is paperless the answer for everything?  Is this crucial medium of humanity's very civilization facing extinction? Hit the link below and be enlightened on some critical myths of paper consumption and the degree of harm it does to the world, compared to techie substitutes. 

http://www.paperonline.org/myths-and-realities

Seem legit? I don't know how true it is, but I do know we are now a little more educated.