Treespotting

on Growing Moss

2012-01-13T04:02:00.000+07:00

I'm growing moss.

I know. I've seen that look many times before. Many people don't think growing moss as something to do but only because you've never been to a proper moss garden. Some temples in Japan have really fluffy mosh garden. In Sapa, there was a mosh waterfall. In Bohorok, some parts of the jungle have moss almost up to the knees.

The garden in my living room - approx a 3 by 3 open air area - used to be covered in several different kind of mosses. Some fluffy, other taller and bigger, all in best shades of green. That was before a massive ecological disaster a few years ago that practically killed everything.

Now I'll be working on something bigger, better, greener.

Growing moss is different to almost any other gardening. In fact, most often, it runs against the opposite of most gardening principles. Where most plants would thrive in richly nurtured environment best delivered in controlled system, moss grows almost exclusively where no other plants would.

It is the most primitive living organism on the planet. They live in the most extreme habitat: arctic and sub zero conditions - eskimos used dried moss for boot insulation - as well as in the desert, under water and on concrete, asphalt, near toxic deposit, drainage systems, asbestos, basically everywhere but normal soil.

They grow upside down. Yes. Really. Unlike other fruits and vegetables, moss doesn't have a root system - their whole body absorbs water. With no soil to absorb water from, they drink from their leafy parts - the green part. Different moss drinks different and this is how you get the colors.

They have amazing versatility in natural shading and if you get it right, you could color it any way you want. I've seen fluorescent natural moss and there's nothing on the book that says it couldn't be done.

Except that moss takes forever to grow. I've two workers practically living in the house for some major water proofing of the house, messy earth works and two dogs running around so it is a little unfriendly at the moment but worry not, I think it is working. With some luck, we will see result in less than three month. Except that now the lead handyman is sick and he is heading home for a few days and it will be chaos for a while.

Speaking of chaos, I've learned today that the wind took down 15 billboards across town last Thursday so local gov't suspended all new license and set to prepare a new construction standard. Extreme weather. Maybe it is time to grow moss. Glow moss.

Anyway, no, I don't really do pictures but there will be visual documentation later.

Other stuff, too.

PS: If you know anything about growing moss at all, I'm curious to hear and learn. I understand it is very tricky.

from Wikipedia

on a Car

2011-12-27T00:10:00.002+07:00

Aston One-77

on a Future War

2011-11-14T05:42:00.001+07:00

Every once in a while, I ponder about big scary serious stuff. Nuclear meltdown is a persistent threat in my generation. A savant with a hangover on some other random part of the world could easily trip over buttons and bring humanity as we know it to a standstill. That or an earth shattering tsunami.

These days, another War looms in the proverbial horizon. I am certain of it.

After going for many months from North Africa (Tunisia and Libya) to the Gulf States (Yemen and Bahrain) history is gaining momentum in Syria with citizens uprising that is getting bloodier and uglier by the day.

Discontent in Syria is not news but for many months, uglier and more intense uprisings in Libya and Yemen stole the headlines. Unlike Bahrain - with grand Saudi help - Syria failed to shut down the movement in the early months and as the Assad regime cracks down even harder on their subjects, inevitably the international and regional interests are also getting more intensely intertwined.

Pro regime mob attacked embassies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey and western countries, this WSJ piece detailed how basically it looks like Syria is positively spiraling out of control. And it is looking for scary.

Next door to Syria is Iran. IAEA released a report saying something about Iran building nuclear weapons - hardly a fresh suspicion - but with US 2012 coming soon the call for a military action now seems much more a realistic scenario. I'm sure I've read somewhere that US Presidents are more likely to go to war coming into their second term. Iran, with deep interests in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan views (and is likely to respond to) any military action as an existential threat and there's no telling where things could go from there.

More and more, the US is adjusting to the Post-Cold-War-Superpower Syndrome: It's learning that projecting military power no longer requires conventional military footprint.

Technology is a critical enabling factor: Unmanned Drone (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Everywhere), Air Force tipped the balance to deliver military victory without boots on ground (toppling Qaddafi in Libya), Stealth surgical mission deep behind enemy lines (Bin Laden hit in Abbotabad).

Not less important, however, is the regional temperature.

The rich kingdoms and sultanates of the Gulf have a lot to worry with the Arab Spring. Indeed, they are the ones with the most to worry - and the most to gain from the status quo. As the rest of the world worries about the Economy and Energy dependencies, the Arab tribes are enjoying huge windfall from oil revenue. They need to feel strong and safe and the US of A needs both the oil and the money.

Most recent is a USD60bn in arm sales to the Saudis but many smaller news are scattered out there. Blackwater setup a private army camp in UAE and a proposed missile defense plan among the Gulf States to arm its increasingly hostile borders with Israel, Syria and Iraq.

On the other side of Asia, Turkey, have their own interests and not necessarily aligned with either Iran or the Arabs but Europeans have a lot at stake for instability to reach Turkey. Besides, troubles with Israel and Libya and Kurd-Iraq is already putting Turks on edge.

Come to think of it, a military escalation would almost benefit arm dealers everywhere - impact on oil sales would be offset later. I imagine non energy trades with the Gulf States to be minuscule compared to the billions in the potential arm sales.

All this just worries me a little bit more today.

Chicken

2011-11-07T02:55:00.005+07:00

by the great Ralph Steadman.

on The Water Edge

2011-10-05T02:27:00.000+07:00

Too many things happened. Yes, really. Too many things happened and a lot of it I cannot write about. Not now anyway. In many ways, it was a strange twist of Fate, not quite what I expected for a normal, random life. Then again, I’ve noticed ages ago that life, is never really quite random. I reckon it’s up to the gods. Her feet are tender, for she steps not on the ground but on the heads of men, said Socrates about Fate.

I was back at my seat across the lake. There’s a place in Jakarta where you could sit and stare at a pool of water large enough to be a small lake, with the city lights behind it. I love the way Jakarta lights up at night and most times, I could sit there for a whole day and sit and write without having to talk to too many people.

The place been there forever. I once took a date there. It was something about a horoscope reading, I think. There’s a spot where I could just watch the whole view from behind big thick glass, temprature controlled and soundproofed so I don’t really have to fear the wind or the smell of the city but I like it down there.

I spotted a huge lizard there, easily two metres in length to the tail, I think. Sometimes people living on the shacks around the edges swim in the water. Sometimes people fell in and died. There’s alwas someone fishing and sometimes they run with kites. The wind race between the towering concretes sometimes you could notice the building swings.

At nights, the Jakarta skyline always forces me to recall what it looked like years and years ago. New towers shine up, others changed in colors. The water is still there, deeper in the shadow, further in the darker edges of the city even as it gets prettier.

There’s a sense of void, the feeling of something very obviously missing. The body of water was built as fondations to skyscrapers that was designed a decade ago. It was a careful plan laid to ruins. Waterpark for the reservoir dogs.

How to get everything you needed and lose the only things you wanted. I should write the fucking book for it.

on Sleep and Lack of It

2011-10-01T03:57:00.000+07:00

I can’t sleep. This happens more lately and these days, it does inflict some physical stress. Since Mother went thru the operation last year, there were just more and more of these things. It really is about growing old. My friends are growing old. Our parents are growing old. We’re dealing with real world shit.

Personally, I think doctors should grow some humour. My late uncle was funny, God rests his soul. He was making jokes even in his deathbed. But most other doctors I met this far in the year aren’t very funny.

In any event, yes, I can’t sleep and so I write and that’s generally how this blog happens. I been writing when I can’t sleep since I was about eight or so – Mother kept a few typewritten pages of a pirate story that I did when I was sick and bored in bed. My blogs and forum threads are all over the place going practically the entire length of my life.

The good thing about it is that I could sometimes go back in time and just read what I wrote then. Most of the time, it wouldn’t make much sense to you guys. For any garden variety trolls out there, I’d advise to think again. I don’t write expecting anyone to understand, I write because I can’t sleep, this shit isn’t supposed to be making sense. They’re just my notes. It’s good since my mind isn’t too right with names and dates.

Construction workers are doing my side of the house and they make noises every morning so it bothers me when I can’t sleep at night cause I can’t really sleep in anyway.

No kidding.

on Up and Looking Down

2011-09-30T16:49:00.000+07:00

Javajive took this picture, some five years ago looking at what currently is the monstrous Kelapa Gading Mall Complex.

on Stories

2011-09-26T02:10:00.001+07:00

to entertain and amuse
fools and lovers
fathers and sons
smiles nonetheless heard
amid a room full of silence
~Lame Attempt

Someone asked if these stories were true. Well, for the most of it, yes. They are true. The names and dates are changed and the sequence of events are often unreliable but the events that I described are most likely true.

She said she didn’t know I was going to be there. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. I tried asking but that she wouldn’t answer. She didn’t know I was going to be there but she knew the others would and that was difficult enough to understand. There were literally hundreds of friends and strangers. Parading it in my face was uncalled for, it was the night we met three years ago. We were supposed to have dinner the following night. She said she was sorry she didn’t wear it for her date with somebody else. I didn’t even know what that meant. If you asked me, I’d say she was drunk but then again, it would be more believeable if you said I was drunk. The club was big enough for everyone. I offered champagne if she wanted to celebrate. And a table elsewhere but they insisted to stand in my face. I left and stayed outside for two hours while she danced and took pictures and looked pretty. Her friends were there and all of them left, everybody was in a hurry to pretend like they didn’t know what happened. All alone her smile faded and she hit me in the face and stormed out. The hyper prize of Jakarta social, you could get away with anything so long as you look good doing it in the mirror. When the mirror fails, you bring your own crowd.

Of course, why would anyone want to do that, is really beyond my faculty for understanding so you’re free to choose whether it actually happened or it didn’t. Some of it did, some more of it happened too, but they didn’t make it to my notes. Some things aren’t worth remembering.

Someone asked why they weren’t here. Why I never wrote about them, even if they were there. I’m not entirely sure. I don’t have a rule about when to write about what, or who but generally I only write when I know how the story ends. Other things I write elsewhere and it wasn’t for anyone to read. It helps

Some of these stories are real, others are my wishes and fantasies. At times, they feel a lot more real than they were, other times they remain a taste of distant memories. I no longer question why shit happens. They just do.

I flew halfway across the world to have dinner with the woman I married, all the way to a restaurant out in the water by the pier in Brighton. Just as I changed for dinner, coming out from the shower and getting dressed, I realised I lost my wedding ring. The hotel room was literally torn apart but they never found the ring. Arriving to my table, the love of my life waiting, the first thing she noticed was of course, the ring. I didn’t even bother to try explaining how I lost it, or where and when. Even I knew the answer wouldn’t change anything.

Do I blame anyone, or do I think anyone is responsible for any of these? No shit. I’m a social retard, not a deluded idiot. I don’t blame anyone, I merely take notes. If I was going to write my own stories, I'd leave out the parts with cancer and bank balance. As far as I am concerned, shit just happens. There’s nothing you could do. Vince called it Freak Occurrence and Jules called it Divine Intervention.

When the train finally came, I walked onboard and left. It was good while it lasted. It was bad when it was real. It was just the way they were. We are, we were, we never was.

The train always comes at three am and sets apart what dreams were real. To me, this is unreal as it is to you, but it is nevertheless my life and my blog. So I write.

Have a good week, all.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2011-09-25T18:15:00.000+07:00

I think you might do something better with the time, than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers
~Alice in Wonderland

Morning greeted her in a white room overlooking the city, completely naked. Outside, there was a whole world of everything else but inside it was only her, on a queen-sized bed with no cover and a bunch of pillows. All of them white.

She counted her toes, first left then right. She watched herself on the far end mirror. Satisfied that all her toes were there, she grabbed a robe from the floor and reached for the cigarette box. The lighter was in the big clear ashtray on the night desk. She checked her iPhones and put the music on. Outside, the city was well stuffed with a new day, humming noisily, gripping, brimming with greed and carbon monoxide. She smelled of sex from last night.

The girl sat there for a moment that felt like forever, staring into space, gathering her thoughts, looking for things that weren’t there. She could remember the day and was somewhat aware of the calendar. She knew where she was. She was there quite a lot and the room was familiar. She knew how she got there and she knew how to get home. She just wasn't sure of the whys.

It was good for one last fuck. It was a good fuck. There were patches of dried cum on her face. She could taste him in her mouth. The Marlboro burned shorter, nearer to her fingers. She could smell the week outside the window. Life, just outside the window. Jakarta wasn't going to wait. Her world wasn't going to wait.

She rose from the bed and washed her face. The cold water against her face shook her up as she wiped yesterday clean. She turned hard, as hard as the showerhead could deliver. The water run as she washed the last him in the drain. She was all something to someone else. The water brought goose bumps along her back. She turned the water hot and washed herself, touching her in all the right places to loosen the edge of memories and poured far too much cream and moisturizer. The air was thick with water and she could no longer see herself in the mirror.

She wanted to wake up on her own bed.

The phone nabbed her out of the ritual and she listened to the instructions for the day. She had everything cancelled, told them she needed to rest a little bit. She wanted to go down to the mall and get a pair of sneakers and fresh underwear. Also a gin and tonic. Maybe even some breakfast. She put on a dress and picked a pair of sandals and left.

on The Morning After

2011-09-25T15:04:00.000+07:00

I think I was once
I think we were
~Jim Morrison, Wilderness

The week was intense. There was that whole business with peace in the Middle East and the economy looking for a new low but as always, I’m more interested in myself.

I spent more time in and dealing with hospitals than anyone could possibly would ever want in the last week. It was just one thing after another. The people in white are never the ones with good news. I needed to get away from them just to get better.

I sent my results to Sam, taught her how to do Google Hangout and set us up for two hours of lecturing and tongue-lashing from my old friend. She didn’t look at all old, however. I had another blackout a few weeks back and that dropped me out for a few days but I felt better now. The drugs put me to sleep and the painkillers numb the pain. In my book, this is better. Sam concurred.

The night adventures were no less exciting. The party the other night was a new low even for a guilty conscience and the timing couldn’t be more ominous. It was the night we first met many years before, surely, I could be forgiven for remembering. She apologized for not wearing the birthday present since she was out there for a date with the wrong guy, parked in my face. Drunk as you were, it was still hard to believe, whatever drugs to take.

After they left we partied on and I left the club at the wee hours, calling the one number that I knew would pick up at such ridiculous hour. I told her I needed to get away and she happened to be awake.

She came with her big car and let me drive, ramming the beast for borderline red sprinting the length of Jakarta outer ring road with the windows down. Sobered me up right quick though I probably had enough shit in my blood to kill a regular horse.

Olive dumped me – if that was the word – not like we even met or anything in recent years. She said she now decided to do it as if she hadn’t done it ages ago. She asked what I saw in her – or maybe she was wondering what I saw in Alice. Maybe she was upset cause I didn’t get her a birthday present. Maybe something I said on Twitter upset her. I wasn’t sure. We didn’t even meet, she did this via text.

How could she dump me if we had never actually dated was not a subject we breached. My companion of the night cracked a laugh every once in a while as we made laps and mocked the crescent moon.

I asked why she didn’t wish me an August birthday. She said it was only to see if I were to notice. She asked if I gave anyone at all a birthday present this year and I told her about the stones. She asked if I had pictures but I didn’t. I turned the music up and reminded her that we were there to forget. She reminded me I said that three years ago.

Jakarta doesn’t get any stickier.

To be very frank, I’ve no idea what’s going on anymore. At some point the train will crash and you pick up the pieces, I guess, or you leave. Getting on that three am train was never easy. You just wish it goes as fast it could, knowing full well it wouldn’t go fast enough.

I told her about the night with the wrong girl on my couch. She asked how that could’ve happened and I gave more details than was probably necessary. She wondered if I apologized and mocked my sense of sensibilities. I clicked on the higher setting and made the turn for a final lap home. The faster you go, the faster the world comes at you and less and less things matter beyond the road up ahead. Just lights and noise coming in might the wrong way.

There were just a lot of things, the last three months have been very trying in every sense of the word and somehow I probably skipped over that part. I knew in the back of my head that I was going to have to do it eventually, but there were so many other things. Maybe I should’ve done something earlier but really, I couldn’t see how anything mattered now. I wasn’t about to dwell on maybes. There were too many moons mourned.

It was impressive that she could hold herself for so long, all things considered. The party must’ve been real awkward, she said. I failed to notice as I was outside for the most of it and I thought the music sucks. She plugged my iPod to the car and played 200Kmh in the Wrong Lane and bet for tears if I could do it before the song ended. She thought it was pretty hard core. I shrugged.

The sky was turning a shade brighter by the time we reached the gate and made way towards KFC in Pondok Indah. The morning smelled funny. I felt yuck. Waiting in the car, her hands touched my neck and the shock reverberated thru my spine like fresh memories. Like Life rarely felt so real.

The fried chicken took forever but soon we rejoined the morning traffic, sneaking our way back into the city. Morning people going about to do their daily runs. There were couples on motorbikes holding to each other dear tight. She asked if we could’ve been a real couple. Like if there was any particular moment where our choices could’ve made a difference. I pretended like I didn’t hear the question and munched on the spicy wing. We put Oasis on and sing along and forgot the answers.

She asked if I knew whether she got home okay. I wondered if I should care. I begged her to stop asking questions and lit a cigarette. I don’t think they get it. It mattered to me because at some point, it felt like a real couple and we were talking real stuff. I had never done that before. I never had anything of the sort before. I haven't even the vaguest idea of what the rest of the population are taking for granted and for a while, I thought I wanted to try. I wasn’t keen to talk about it and I am not about to now.

Briefs of romances and mad fucks aside what we had years and years ago was not a relationship in any meaningful sense. It was fun and happy and wild and sweet and I would not ever forget it but it was never real. It’s not like we ever wanted to be a real thing. So no, I didn’t really think like there was really a point where what we did would’ve made any difference. There, I said it. Things were different. You get older and you're supposed to grow the f up.

We had a room in a building overlooking the city. The sky was overly bright. The room was white and cooled to near freeze with a few candles on the far end. I remember where everything was but the view outside had changed a bit since. The smile remained the same.

I knew exactly what she would say. Everything we had to say we have done in a different life. We touched our toes and recounted our momentous fuckups in silence. She said she learned to forgive that way. Some new age Zen shit I didn’t quite get. We went to a place from long ago to look for comfort and found the effort exhausting.

In the end, a lot of things happen for no good reasons. Or at least, not for those that you would ever understand. Things just happen. People do things out of spite or out of hate, they kill in the name of their makers and love in the name of their women. Bad shit happen in bad weather. You couldn’t save the world but you could with the ones you love and in the end, you care only for the things you love. As much you think you’re Batman, you really are not. As much as you wanted things to be right, they could always go wrong. Then you go and make your amends and save the night. You hope the morning comes and you wouldn't miss them too much.

on The Things We Know

2011-09-24T19:05:00.001+07:00

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
~Much Ado About Nothing

There are a lot of things you don’t know. Great many things you would never hope of knowing. For the most of it, the entire premise of the Life was based on the assumption that we would always want to know more. She wanted to know what apples taste like.

The devil is always in the details. Like when you sat in a room and you heard conversations you wished you didn’t and knew things you weren’t supposed to know.

My head works in funny ways – I am not linear like most people. I work to simultaneously contemplate a number of options quicker than most other fellow humans and yet I don’t process social cues the way others do.

I have a visual memory, which means I don’t recall words and numbers but I could look at a page and moved to the next just as another part of my head do the transliterate and made sure that I understand it. I love magazines because they slow me down. I find reading books relaxing.

Rest assured, I am not in anyway better than any other people since this process corrupted my social skills to a point where most people I simply find annoying. Obviously, almost everyone would agree to a point, that I am an asshole.

I like machines because they are predictable. Computers don’t make mistakes. They do exactly as you tell them to do and so long as you give them exactly the right instructions. Machines have no capability of forgetting. They always know.

Unlike us human, they will never forget. Why would anyone need to remember things while you could always Google it in a few seconds?

Facebook recognizes your faces, Google remembers your questions and Twitter recalls your sudden thoughts. Four and a half million people have “Top Secret” clearance in the United States. The internet oozes with secrets just as the air breathes lies.

Why do you need to remember things anyway?

The things we know change who we are. To unknow is not even a word. The things we know makes who we are. The things you do would probably fuck you up more but it’s always the things you know that keeps you awake.

The Oracle said that we could never see past the choices we don’t understand. You made your choice, now you must understand it. Trinity didn’t die, but it didn’t mean that you would never die. You just gotta sit to the end of the story.

on The Mourning Bride

2011-09-22T05:51:00.000+07:00

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
~The Mourning Bride

The whole night was bizarre. Of course, there was an easy point to be made that I ruined a perfectly good night out for everyone, but really I didn’t. I had my own reasons to go and it had absolutely nothing to do with pulp romance.

It felt funny this morning so I thought it was just some leftover funny and I went out anyway. I was supposed to go to another party later so a thirty minutes gap could’ve changed the cosmic balance of things. It could’ve been just the weather or the traffic or the drugs I wasn’t taking. I felt funny and the back of my head felt like it was pushing towards the front, pressing reality a little bit too hard on my forehead.

I needed to go out somewhere with loud music just so I didn’t have to go mad listening to the voice inside my head.

There were hundreds of people that night. Only one person knew all of us was going to be there. She wanted to gloat to her ex and brought a date. Except that she ran into me instead. I was there with a bunch of guys looking for a night out to get wasted.

I was already inside and well into our drinks when I spotted her just arriving with a group of friends. She came up to me, looking slightly wasted and drinking straight from a beer bottle, saying, “Behave yourself…” like sixteen times. I knew she was drunk but I told her to quit saying it after a while. She then dragged me to introduce her date, a singer or something. Someone I was supposed to recognize but really I didn’t. I really wasn’t sure what the proper etiquette at this point. I tried hard to be polite but I couldn’t exactly pull a conversation with the poor fucker so I went back to the bar and ordered another drink.

The fucking drinks never arrived so I spent a lot of the time staring and trying to blank out. Alice and her group of friends parked themselves literally next to my group, so I had to watch as they took group photos and shit. Modern day Jakarta hipsters, it’s all about looking pretty and available. I guess my role was supposed to be sitting in the bar and watch the whole sick tragedy plays out with bad music in the back. Truly, the music was torturous.

I wasn’t quite sure how exactly to behave so I went outside for to breathe a bit. The air was sick and reeked with bad shit. She was as pretty as always, immaculate as ever. She said it was her job to look well.

At some point in the night, she came outside and chatted a little bit, her friends came to said good bye and left. I asked who she was going home with and she went completely mental. She hit me in the face.

Her friends came to get her and they went home. I went back to the club, drank a little more and tried hard to forget everything that just happened. Everything that happened between today and the same night years ago. Exactly the same night, and everything in between, and to pretend like none of it had ever happened.

Perhaps that’s just how Jakarta works. You pretend like you didn’t see the greydom around you. You pretend like the smell of the stinking sewers wasn’t there at all, so long as you had the windows tight enough, you really would never know. You pretend like you didn’t know what things happened, even when they did, for no other reason than to pretend like we could feel good. Perhaps, I was supposed to stand there all night and watch her do what she did and pretended like I feel nothing.

Hundreds of people there probably knew how to pretend better. Only one person knew that we were all going to be there that night. She wanted all three of us to be there and everyone to see, friends and strangers, too. She wanted to dance and made me watch. I really wasn’t sure what the whole thing was all about. I left and got a smack in the face.

There’s only so much you could do to pretend like things didn’t hurt. You put a little bit more make up and crank the music a little louder and you could numb the pain. You take harder drugs and drink stronger stuff and pray that you’d fail to remember. You take the funny pills and believe that you will live forever.
You go for the light and hope the morning never comes.

You stood on the burning bridge and watch.

in the Bathroom in September

2011-09-18T05:27:00.002+07:00

For I am not, Jesus of Nazareth
~September 19

I went to see Vivian’s daughter in Semarang. She never asked me to but I was curious to see how the little girl was faring in life thus far. She looked like a smaller version of her mother and she talked much less. We met in a small restaurant with bright lights and as I drank my hot tea I tried to spot the resemblance to her dad. She didn’t actually look like her father.

Later in Jakarta, Vi asked why I went all the way there to see the little person. I wasn’t quite sure either. As far as I knew, the two of us were the only people who knew who the father was. Vi asked if I had copies of the DNA result from Singapore. I told her I did. I probably should’ve told her earlier but the circumstances were different then.

I wondered if the girl would ever find out who her father was. In films and stories they always do but I doubted the veracity of real life. Vivian would prefer that she never knows but she said we’d know when the time comes. At the moment the little girl could barely speak. Maybe it’s best she’d never know. I really wasn’t quite sure. We needed an arbiter of sort and Vi elected chocolate martini ponder on the what ifs.

I never liked little people much and never really spent any time with them before. I used to keep my hair long and that scared children away. I never lived in a house with children before and whatever limited experience I had with them was mostly annoying.

I kinda got along with my niece and nephews – three of Sis’ – and I took Alice to meet them. Don’t ask why but I did. I don’t think I’ve ever actually done that before. I just don’t bond with children. Having asked the geneticist they think this is because I never had any of my own. I find dogs much more manageable.

Vi, the Grand Mistress at Restating the Obvious, pointed out that I was growing old. Since we were exactly the same age, I concurred. At some point, I’ve arrived close to the conclusion that I would probably never have my own children for the rest of my life. I asked if she regretted not having being around her daughter as she was growing up but I could see her point that it was better for everyone this way.

By our fifth martini the subject turned towards yours truly. I was feeling very obviously shit and at that particular juncture of time and space, there was literally nobody around and it was getting kinda creepy. Everything stopped making sense sometime in August and I was near losing it. Vi wondered how Alice could’ve gotten me so riled up. We’ve seen everything and done all of them.

I really wasn’t expecting people to get it. They mostly worked under the assumption that I had known all along. But really I didn’t. It was like a time delayed fuck up and it hit me right in the face. I needed a lot of martinis just to recall the details. There were so many lies, I needed to be drunk to keep count. The other assumption was that everybody assumed that I was only out for a joyride.
On account on getting old and growing up, I really wasn’t expecting the drama. Maybe I was distracted, you know, the cure for cancer and work and all the legal stuff, I wasn’t paying attention. We were supposed to be all grown up and prioritize and shit. And we were prioritizing. There were a lot of big things, us things. Things I probably wanted and it looked appealing at the time. So really I didn’t know anything until relatively recent and it just hit me with a time delay. The veracity of real life.

SMS freaked me out. I’ve never quite understood why either. It’s partly my general distrust of telephone communication and it put me under greater stress to communicate in the medium. I wasn’t expecting everyone to understand.

We took a table outside to avoid the fanciable Saturday night crowd. Vi was in a short skirt and high heels and she didn’t look at all like a mother who would be missing her daughter and she was attracting too much attention at the library. We wanted shots of Patron in rows of six with lime and salt and a whole lot of yesterdays. There was a driver waiting so it wasn’t like we needed to worry about getting home. I was obviously getting attached.

Vi promised to handcuff me to the fucking railings so that I wouldn’t go on a suicide binge or anything funny of the sort. We were born on exactly the same date so we placed bets on who got to go first. The conversation went intelligible for a while and our great hosts were nice enough to provide us with a large bowl of pistachios and an isolated garden light with mosquito repellant.

Around ten in the evening Master Clerk presented himself at the poolside with his latest snotty bitch with spectacular boobs and they stopped our suicidal thoughts for another dozen tequila tears.

Master Clerk had a particular history with women. He was good with the pretty but stupid crowd. He’s been friends with us for many, many years but none of his girls ever spoke. This one, Nina or something, arrived for a tequila binge by the pool in a skirt shorter than the only other girl around and she was oblivious to the world. Vivian asked him if she was even legal. He didn’t know. He was right. It’s not like it mattered

He was probably drunk when he arrived but Master Clerk was considerably less funny that night and he unleashed at me for having him done all the arrangements, only to have me blown it to pieces in the end. He said he lost money in the whole thing. Like he actually lost money in me breaking up with Alice.

The night grew darker and the moon went higher and brighter and the water was making patterns as each of us took turn to throw stones at the past. Nina – the girl with Master Clerk – was obviously on some sort of funny drugs and she was completely incoherent for like half hour or so and there were many more people around the pool. Some of them very pretty, others I did not recognize at all. I was in deep dementia and spent most of my wary moments watching out for Vivian not to fall in the pool. The thought of her naked scared me.

Mike was there. He was a ghost from the past. Alive and well and mad as ever. I wasn’t sure to be happy or shocked but it was my birthday party and everyone was on the watch of our blessed Jesus so I greeted him politely. Where sane minds go, Mike had always been on the dark side and he was the last person I needed to see but it was somewhat comforting to see familiar face. He also had with him some white unlike anything you would ever find and cut in Jakarta and I was pretty sure that Vivian was no longer wearing her underwear.

She was obviously touching my genitals during one of the toilet breaks.

Mike came with a bottle of aged grapes and he wanted me to sit and listened and I did. I didn’t even know he knew Vivian.

They had this look like secrets were of times gone past.

It wasn’t midnight before Princess came in all her glory. Right when I was fucked and frowned as if Shiva had a personal beef. I watched her as the security people opened the French windows for her and she stepped into the moonlight and walked for me on the wrong side of the pool.

They should have a Hallmark card for a breakup because Princess was certainly gloating. I wasn’t sure quite of what. I was drunk and fucked and messed up in Wonderland and here comes the girl in hot pants to tell me that I banged on for the wrong girl. I told her she was the fucking idiot of September.

My God, she looked fucking fantastic.

Princess looked fantastic in hot pants and tank top and I wanted to fuck her in the bathroom but there were too many people around. I didn’t realize they had a birthday bash planned. She was looking all the shooting star that she was.

She no longer did lines but Princess was willing to make sure that I wasn’t bleeding around the nose and keen to know the latest gritty details of Wonderland. None of us would ever want real life and we ordered a little more drink. The Princess was a little more drunk and I was the little bit more drunk. We were aware that we had just a little bit too much of everything.

There was a whole lot of cake and cream and hot tea and shit and I wasn’t even sure of who was ever there. Some I knew and some I didn’t and some more pretended like they didn’t know. For the most of it, the party pretended like it never happened.

She looked at me. The most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life and said she was sorry. Never quite sure for what but she did. She was drunk. Way more fucking drunk than I was.

Happy Birthday, me.

on Brighton Moments

2011-09-13T14:07:00.001+07:00

Once you were my future then you're my misery. In my future, once you're misery and forever you will be my past.
~Californication

It’s pretty weird. I know it’s not sounding like things were getting any better or anything but it did. You went out the back room with the mirror and not having to stare at it for too long. Actually, there were no mirrors. There were no real faces to see but the pretty ones. Who knows what you see in the backroom.

Outside, the heaven was ripe with Virgo moon, slightly yellow with a tint of gold not quite the cold blue colors of August. I don’t quite remember what was outside but I know the moon was not blue. I can’t remember much what’s outside. I wanted enough to forget but not too much so that I could remember the nicer bits. Most of the time, I just forget the bills.

It’s hard walking away. I don’t often do that. I’m like one of those ugly little dogs that snap and lunge at your ankles with all the worst intentions – never quite to eat you alive - but you will eventually die of rabies or some terrible mess. I feel like a mangy little dog at the moment. Then I took some more.

The train ride from Brighton was by far the hardest. It was long and cold and wintry and it was hugely expensive. The other Brighton in Melbourne was less horrible, a few degrees more embarrassing and slightly more affordable. The others I register less and less in my aging brain. I stopped keeping track of good byes.

There’s a small tree in front of my house right where I buried my dog. He was a great dog and lived a long happy doggy live for a few years with me. We moved places several times but he stayed with me. In both times I was in Brighton the dog was home waiting for me.

People come and go. The rest of the world is getting noisier and they now wake up earlier and earlier. As I sat on the train, there were always a lot of whys. Why things happen and why the gods aren’t being nicer. Why the most beautiful things hurt so much.

I went to the flower market and sought out the darkest roses I could get. Everything in there at the time. They’re large and fresh though they hardly smell. The colour dark like wine. The thorns I put away but you couldn’t have put them all away and bound to hurt some one thing or another. You stood on the burning bridge and watched.

The ride away was easier as you find out where you were going. It was easier to sleep after a few days with harder and harder drugs. At some point forgetting seemed most natural as there are fewer and fewer things to remember. I remember little of Brighton except for the crazy dragon palace that the king built on his opium binge. There was a bit of coke and some tequila in the little room. The brief moments before each shot flashed with questions but tequila works every time. When it don’t then you add a little be more. Eventually it will all be alright.

There were many questions and none had answers but one was probably if it ever hurts as much for her doing what she did. There were so much deeds and deceits, everything was ugly and twisted and unreal and it was nothing like a love story should. I loved her as she was in love with someone else. Then love means very little. Maybe, it was never meant for anything at all.

You pushed to the corner, pressed the flush and took a little bit more. Salt and lime masked the pain, the rest of my faded self went elsewhere. You wished roses made things better but it didn’t. You wished the moon outside would do her things and make the nights better but it didn’t. You sat and wondered why it hurts as much as it did. Maybe if you were toughen up a little, you’d feel no more and fear no more and you took a little bit more. Maybe if you sleep a little bit longer, you will eventually forgive.

I wanted to sleep.

Escaping Wonderland

2011-09-12T08:56:00.003+07:00

the edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
~ hunter s. thompson

The people on this blog aren’t named (nor the stories dated properly) for good reason. Some stories are best never told. You don’t really have to read on.

The story with Alice began with a trip to Wonderland ages ago. It seemed like forever now and details are now hazy but allow me to indulge. The only thing I have from those days – and the whole ride really – are piles of emails. It’s my blog, my stories, my rules. Consider this science fiction. Maybe I write it down trying to make it real.

We communicate with better things thru better ways and yet we tell each other less and less. Maybe because we expect everything to happen on Twitter and so we naturally assume that if it’s worth finding out that you had already found out anyway, and thus it wasn’t worth telling at all. In any event, yes, emails. Nothing more. It used to be sms that did this. Now we live the day and somewhat rest our soul to Google and Facebook to keep the better memories. Same shit different day.

Maybe I was just pissed that I was the last to find out.

We never went to movies or went out anywhere proper except for very few, select, mostly incidental arrangements. There was no pictures around. I once took a series of her on the couch but lost it when I lost my 500GB drive a few months back. I had some pictures she sent from strange lands but that seemed too much like a different life now.

Whenever we crossed paths with other people in Wonderland, it was almost always something unpleasant. Anything from psychopathic trolls to family dramas and divorce lawyers. The only thing that ever happened for real was us. At least at some point, it seemed like there was an us somewhere. In hindsight, there was probably nothing.

It was never right to go down the rabbit hole and I should’ve been expecting the unbuckling. The trip wasn’t in Technicolor but Alice was beautiful. Alice made things happen. She made you believe in the impossible. I did.

We never went to movies but Alice was good at story telling. We stayed on the couch and made love all day. We made love so intense at times, despite of all the other things in Wonderland, we were invincible. I felt good like I haven’t been in a long time. There must’ve been a lot of good there.

It sure felt good at the time but still, Wonderland felt like what it was, never quite the full reality with a dose of abandon and foul language. I didn’t quite get my head offed but she kicked me in the groin once. That ending was rather abrupt.

I went thru my archive and I've pretty much said my piece about the subject. Affairs, cheats, guilt trips, lifelong denials, the whole fruitful nature of the women kind, apples and the original sin. For the most of it, we've all heard it before. Life cycles out mostly everything. After watching Game of Thrones I now believe in dragons did exist in distant past. I’ve seen them all and done most of it before.

For the first time I handed the car key to a girl the other night and slept thru my ride home quietly. It was one of those things, I always offered to drive for the girl and I certainly have never before fallen asleep in a car ride anywhere. My sleeping problems aren’t limited to the bedroom and generally speaking, I can hardly sleep in bed other than my own. There’s always a first time for anything. The girls would say that I don’t have much of a social skill anyway and they are most probably right.

I guess in many ways it was about expecting to survive and escaping Wonderland at some point. That’s what it said in the book. Eventually we were hoping to emerge somewhat on the other end and do some good and that kinda worked to keep at it. For a while that seemed convincing enough.

I called on Vi to ask what would normal people do. Of course, it’s not like Vivian would know any better about Normal People. Normal People don’t climb into the rabbit hole and got lost in Wonderland. I asked if there was ever a red pill-blue pill moment where choices were to be made to be a prostitute – and expensive one - or ‘did things just happen.’ In a city like Jakarta, anything can happen. She explained that it was mostly a lifestyle thing. One thing after another. It’s not like I know how to raise a kid. I keep a dog – and a cat. People are keen to remind me of that these days. She asked how my quest for the Cure of Cancer goes. I got lost in Wonderland.

We ended up at Dragonfly where I drank mostly water all night and watched Vi danced with her friends. I never saw Alice dance. She loved to dance and I knew that but we just never got around to it. The few random nights where we actually went to clubs they were overly crowded or were just the wrong crowd. She went clubbing mostly with her friends and I wasn’t much into clubs. I just realized how much I wanted to see her dance. Vi asked how I knew she could dance.

Of course the blue pill moment was rather obvious. You didn’t just fall into the rabbit hole. In my case, Alice presented me with the choice and they were clear. The sky was blue then. It was like I sat down properly with Morpheus himself and everything was as real as it would ever get. These were the things that would matter.

Vi asked if I was in love. Love made me do stupid things. It’s not like people don’t know these things. They do all sorts of crazy stuff. That probably was true as well but really it was more the temptations of growing up. To learn how to love beyond the madness of Aphrodite, lust was not all there was to it. That I wanted to spend a Sunday afternoon watching happy little people under the sun. To see her dance.

I asked if she ever loved the Old Man. If she ever wanted to have her daughter to come to Jakarta and live with her. For the lives we choose to live, Jakarta knows no limit. She wondered if there ever was any substantial distinction of the people you wanted and the people you needed to be with and Jakarta had the most to offer. Even if there were any distinction however, we failed to see how it could make any difference.

Newton toyed with his eyeballs to see if he could look at real life differently. The heaven and the stars above are only as beautiful as the eyes looking at it. He very nearly blinded himself in the process but he proved a point. Plus he figured out where the stars and everything else were.

Olive wondered what I saw in her. She reckoned that I put too much on the glitter and the makeup and thus I forever destined to be rolling down the wrong path. She’s one of those few who knew of my past married life and the whole hangup with children and my mommy issues and shit. She was the difference between the world of Captain Hook and the Mad Hatter. In the most generic sense that a female person could make sense, Olive probably makes a little more sense than Vivian and I was all ears.

Not that it mattered one bit. The matter of the adventure with Alice was never brought for the Council. In fact, few Council members were aware of my trip in Wonderland and disclosures were provided on need to know basis. Not so much that there was anything to hide – because, this we really didn’t – but mostly for precautionary measures against trolls. It was never my trip to begin with.

Vi asked how could I not know of the things I now do earlier. I was supposed to be good with this thing. At this point we were sitting around in a coffee shop somewhere and the caramel Frappuccino dripped on her lips. Perhaps we were in some sort of state of denial, although I would’ve insisted that it wasn’t. Not for me. Maybe it was more like Dorian Gray. They all waited so long to look for the painting in the attic. Then it was late. Her sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed, an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for her.

Frightening as it was, I had been down there before and I knew the crazy shit Wonderland pulled over your waking eyes. I was there to watch. Watch like the White Rabbit she said. It's not like there's anything really I could've done. I asked if people could really ever fuck their ways out of trouble. My friend was an escort girl for a while, she knew this stuff and it was a perfectly legitimate question for a morning with a bad hangover and a vengeful Sun. She said it really depended on how much money you have – and how fit you are. She has a body built to sin and spend most of her days in the gym.

If Morpheus ever offered her the pills, she would be one to say no thanks and walked away not taking anything. I don’t think Vi ever did drugs. She always said her life was crazy enough as it was and she had trouble finding the way home even when sober. So we sipped the fraps and stared at the sun until we could do that no more.

We stood at the burning bridge and watched.

Maybe I didn’t see it coming. Maybe I did but I didn’t know what to do. Maybe this and that. Maybe the fire scared the shit out of me. Maybes. We could do that all afternoon but the sun was hurting the eyes. She asked if I were fit enough to drive so I dropped her back and took a cab home. She called me on the phone for company and before falling completely asleep she asked if I would go down the rabbit hole once again. Maybe, maybe not. Whatever. We share the exact same birthday so she knew exactly how it feels growing old. You run out of life earlier in Wonderland.

Jakarta, August 2011

Fear and Loathing in August

2011-09-05T04:05:00.000+07:00

If you were gonna have sex with someone and you knew that it would be the absolute last time, what do you think it would be like?
~Californication

There are too many things I don’t get in life. At points, I thought I forgot completely how good things feel like. Maybe that was why I got on the plane. Got on the fucking ride for nowhere.

Like most years, the shit hit the fan in August. There must be a cosmic trigger somewhere that I’d accidentally pulled some 30 years ago. I always get birthday blues and bouts of depression weren’t uncommon during this period but this year it hit especially hard. I don’t really know where to start.

I went to Jogja for a weekend. Madly enough, the hotel had neither room service nor internet connection. How’s that for karmic returns? It did have cable and hot water though so it was at least half way decent. I understand that this is the fasting month and all but not serving food at ALL time makes very little coherent sense in my view. I didn’t bother to investigate but it could be a sect or something running the place. I noticed there were residential buildings on the outlier of the compound. My window on the ground floor opened to the parking lot so I noticed these things.

I got to the airport early this time and took my time at the coffee shop. The fugitive Nazaruddin was arrested by the authorities in Colombia. The man was Treasurer for the Party, the President’s ruling party and after 75 days of international manhunt, he was arrested in Cartagena, Colombia. How’s that for high drama?

Gotta give it to him, the man does have the cojones. The lack for gray matters however, was fatal.

Nag as he was, Udin isn’t very bright and brash to a fault. He obviously knows a lot, seeing as he really was running the Party’s finances all the while misappropriating some 6-8 trillion IDR from his role in the DPR budget committee.

That’s just shy of 10 billion USD in some 30 cases investigated so far. Even for the scandal-ridden SBY, this is a whole new height.

In short, this is the largest corruption case in one of the most corrupt nation in the world. The press went completely berserk, the Circus a natural breeding grounds for rumors and conspiratorial whispers. Pundits lined up. I couldn’t hear what they were saying from there in the boarding room but I could guess. Not that I cared.

I was exhausted really. Too many things happened this year, at some point August came crashing and everything after was different. Jogja has a different vibe to Jakarta so I thought it was a good idea. Plus I know someone who finds the best mushroom from the south coast. I was on a new pain killer regiment and have pretty much given up on alcohol. I don’t really feel like getting drunk. I needed a hard reset. Plus, there’s no debaucheries available to the visiting public in Jogja so chances are I wouldn’t be getting into trouble. I even got to the airport early.

The speculation seemed to be about “what happen if…” which I don’t really get. I don’t think we get to play if. We deal with when. It was like Watergate except in this one Ehrlichman fled the country and broadcasted his grievances via Skype to the local stations. It could not possibly get anymore ridiculous. Soeharto would’ve come up with some sort of permanent solution though so I guess 2011 does progress.

2011 Is a sensational year. So far, a Middle East uprising, a Nuclear disaster, Space Stations broken and retired, extreme weather, America got downgraded and much of the Old World is going bankrupt. This week, Chinese patrol boat confronted Indian Navy. Turkey expelled Israel Ambassador. China launched an aircraft carrier. Apparently, they actually have two but one was converted to a hotel instead. Go figure.

You could call it whatever, I’m calling it a New World Order. As market adjusts and deleverages, it will require a fresh risk distribution to continue to grow. In a way, it’s a socialist idea. The present day post-imperium Super States bound to disagree and will undoubtedly cling desperately to their obsolete roles but eventually they will give it. Americans get this lesson in their debt debate.

A lot of the basic rules of Governments and Law and Order are based on this century old ideas of Sovereign borders protecting their masses. No longer. History has seen enough of governments killing and looting from their own people. Modern day politics were defined by the media, to the point where journalists are designated their special pedestals in the order of things. Really, these days most journalists are no different to common bloggers and in places where their tyrants control the media, bloggers are even more useful than their more celebrated counterpart of proper journalism.

No shit. Indonesian news televisions proved my point.

Irene seems like a large hurricane. Well, the largest hurricane for the broadcasting public, I guess. But maybe it really was unusual to have that sort of hurricane in that part of the US, who knows. There was also an earthquake in the Washington area, highly unusual I was told.

We’re seeing extreme weather everywhere around the world. Indonesian volcanoes are noticeably more active in the last 18 months. During the eruption, people in Jogja could see the fire of Merapi just on their horizon.

Domestically, I had my own bubbles burst in August. It burst in my face rather spectacularly, timed with birthdays and paper works and stuff.

On a strange note, the rambutan tree is giving me birthday gift. The rain made this August the wettest month in New York’s history. It’s also the deadliest in Afghanistan.

At some point, I ended up sitting around in a film set with a bunch of guys figuring out the boring details of an extensive and gruesome scene. There were busy locating a missing camera person or something and there were people in funny make ups and stupid faces. Or maybe not.

Snap, snap! August wasn’t all bad shit and freak weather. Things were buzzing at work and for once, actually going they were supposed to be for an honest man trying to pay the bills. Jakarta lost some two million people or something going back to where they belong for a week and traffic was a breeze. Going out was less of a chore and the city looked much less gloomy for once.

To say that things with Alice weren’t well would be the understatement of the year. In some ridiculous corner of my little mind I was probably wishing that August would make it better. I know, that was dumb. To pretend that everything was alright was probably meaningless because the whole thing was a lot of pretense in the first place. Vi warned me three years ago that this would happen. Actually, for that matter, everyone warned me that it would happen. The trip to Wonderland doesn’t always go on Technicolor.

Needless to say, I have been warned and stupendously, I bid the other ways. Perhaps it was futile but you couldn’t blame a man for trying. It could’ve been the birthday blues and the sudden realization that I have spent 30 long years on this planet, one long history of sorry mistakes and timely divine intervention, just shy of completely insane but never quite on the same length as most of my fellow citizens.

A random Englishman joined me for dinner and wine the other night. Bald in funny glasses that reminded me a little of Professor X but lacking the mutant charm. He was friendly and nice and the conversations probed the more interesting questions. Again, it could’ve been the painkillers but there seemed to be a lot of pondering through the ages, with questions like, “was I ever anchored?” – or something of the sort. He also said that I had ‘anarchist’ written on my forehead. I think he meant it in the nice kind of way.

Maybe, for once in my life, I wanted to fall in love and be in love and actually live happily ever after like other normal people with legit credit cards and fancy titles and stuff. No shit. Normal people do this sort of things a decade ago.

Palestine will be a proper sovereign nation in a few weeks time. If 2011 was going to deliver the magic, I thought it was probably time to actually want the whole package. The point was in there somewhere, I completely lost it by now, but I assure you readers, it was there somewhere. Alice was – and is – very beautiful. In every sense of the word. Details will be for supper.

The maids were away for the holiday and the intense socializing of Ramadhan brought me to my knees and at some point I could only handle very little of non-adjusted reality. Now that I could actually afford it, I checked myself into a hotel and indulged in room service and actually eat food I could eat. The fucking teeth. That’s also for some other time. So you sat in the room and listened to Burroughs reciting Junky in a recording from the 50s that I found on the internet, a bottle of Chilean red, a handful of painkillers, strips of LSD, a pile of funny mushroom, sweet dates, some cheese, some olives and a lot of thirty years to swallow.

Being Indonesia allowed me the chance to witness some of the most spectacular moments of its history. Having been around to other places though, also keep things in perspective. The handle treespotter was for my first non-sanctioned account in my campus’ network. I took Fluffy for a train ride to London once and she noticed I was giving estimates time to Charing Cross. The view on the train across Lincolnshire was flat. Green, but completely flat and it was devoid of interesting landmarks, except for the trees. There were people in the UK who spot trains and birds and stuff. It’s probably an English thing.

There was a time when riding on a white striped red Dodge Viper from San Francisco to Vegas with a stop in Joshua Tree National Park where U2 did their thing and a race for the Canyon to see God’s largest art installation – twice stopped by the duly patrol of US highway police people – there was a time when that seemed to be the sensible thing to do. I ended up in a magic carpet ride towards Tijuana with an American girl and for like half a year or so, the rest of the world was on some sort of suspended state. The world was alright though. It went along without me. There was no stopping to the inconvenient truth.

I met the Old Master Jedi for drinks one night and we got to the point of comparing President Yudhoyono to President Nixon. Surely, anyone with even some basic recollection of history would see how this Udin business is Indonesia’s Watergate. The Old Master refused to accept to accept my Nixonesque references in that surely, this goes near enough to the very top. I didn’t persist on my argument on courtesy that the Old Master was retiring and naturally inclined to be on the Moderation Camp.

These are the people smart enough to have great recollection of what happened and made the most of it but live in the persistent fear that any further change would be dramatically unacceptable.

The market volatility for August was spectacular by any comparison. The machines now handle most of the trades thru specialized trading entities and the boat begins to rock. I’m trying to write about this in a more novel form but really, I haven’t gone much. I was on a deep depression binge at some point and I needed my pills then it spiraled into the abyss. I just preferred to do it somewhere with room service rather than at home. No words was catching anywhere and I stopped writing anything except for occasional rants on twitter. I wrote tons of legal documents and stuff and at some point, my drug addled brain stopped functioning properly. I’ve never been much good with people. It should’ve have taken whole of thirty years just to establish that.

Fluffy would’ve some Freudian text book case to characterize my peculiar interest on great authors who blew their brains out and frankly, I think her theory has merits. Not that I have any plan to intentionally put a gun to my own head in the near future but the idea had always been fascinating. There was a whole set of stories about Death that I did a while ago but I stopped because even I had to admit that at some point it was getting quite morbid and rather dangerous.

When Mother was diagnosed with cancer last year and she had to undergo the whole treatment thing, suddenly it became a familiar thought, however inconvenient that was. Again, Fluffy would attribute this to classic Mommy Issues et cetera and she probably has merits.

Perverse curiosities with machines, short attention span and experimental transcendental tendencies aside I’m probably not different to the next dude tasked with finding the cure for cancer.

Not that I think it was completely impossible. There are gazillion types of these stuff and there’s no telling on what mad scientists in labs across the world are doing with their latest toys. The application for bio-gen engineering surged to historical record as the United States played catch up to multinational labs and a bunch of James Bond villain types. I find Death a very curious matter.

There’s an uprising across the Middle East, Moammar Ghadafi on the run and Hosni Mobarak in a cage. I think history needs – and coming for – a drastic adjustment. Inevitably disruptive but will eventually be better. Think about it. An anonymous blogger making it along this far for 30 years plus wouldn’t have been possible a hundred years ago. Someone would’ve surely put me in a camp and I would die for no good reason. All I proved was that I wasn’t a fluke and there are millions of people out there just as close to the edge as I am for reasons they couldn’t explain nor comprehend. For the most of it, a lot of life is about taste and I would not be judged of bad taste.

Foul language perhaps but never a bad taste.

One evening in Jogja I spent walking along the bustling Malioboro with a small girl that I had just met. She took me to a place where we sat on the pavement next to the dark side of a rail station drinking coffee with pieces of hot coals dropped into it. There was totally no drugs or alcohol or any of the baddie stuff but it was as mind altering as any I guess. There was also an FHM Girl Next Door Party at some club there, too. There was this plastered all over the city streets.

Back to the matter at hand. The Udin Business. I hold that this is somehow a critical juncture for Indonesia. In a way that is uniquely challenging as it deals with a whole load of upgrade to the basic ideas of human rights – eg. The Internet – as well as aging tyrants in their final hours for the wrong side of history.

For a dash of drama, I decided to fall in love with my own little angel and descended into the rabbit hole along with rash abundance of common sense. Off with their heads, she said and she did too many times. It never mattered for a long while since we all knew how Wonderland ends. Eventually you’re going to escape. Jealousy adds sparks and sends Saints into the Sea. You could even say that this was relatively normal for Mr. Brightside but feel it's not.

Very much like Nixon and that’s how I think it should end. I don’t even wish to see the President dragged to court or anything as sordid. I think Indonesians have learned their lessons – and the Ways of Their Leaders – there’s no need for such madness. Nixon was pretty much guaranteed pardon so he could fade away in peace into the assembly of history. The Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans and many other people across the Middle East have endured this for too long and 2011 was the year they wake up. It’s their Berlin Moment.

I understand that for a lot of people this is a very inconvenient and uncomfortable subject but I know full well that there were discussions across the country on the very subject. Jogja has this peculiar air of being rather wired wirelessly and the citizens were nothing short of revolutionaries. The atmosphere was very politically charged and yet this people managed to appear as sober as anyone.

Aphrodite was supposed to be the most powerful of all gods and goddess as she touched on anyone she wished. The mighty Zeus was bullied and the citizens of Troy was utterly destroyed in the ashes of history. There was a time when Love was a lot like many other things – as in, loving the new Mac Booc Air and wishing it comes with a larger drive – but really wasn’t quite what it was.

In many ways, falling in love was supposed to be very much like to being lost. Everything else was mundane and only the wish and command of Aphrodite would appear important and reasonable. The younger generations refer to this as tingling butterflies in their stomach or fireflies in Manhattan. To fall in love is in a sense, much like a voluntary lapse of reason.

The element of immeasurable expectation was set into the calculation early on. The basic rules didn’t apply. There were simply no rules for this. Much like a social upheaval or pornographic moments, you were not supposed to be wishing for a predictable out come or a politically acceptable representation of facts for the living memories but it would remain to be the there.

If you were gonna have sex with someone and you knew that it would be the absolute last time, what do you think it would be like?

Si Tu Me Olvidas

2011-09-05T02:26:00.000+07:00

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists:
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

~Pablo Neruda

on Money Machines

2011-08-27T19:22:00.002+07:00

"Investors need to start from scratch, rebuild their portfolio and have a conversation on how much risk they are willing to take, get some help -- someone who can navigate this market unemotionally."
~Dean Barber

The global market went thru its worst swings during the first half of August. By the second week, market transaction exceeded the volume from the entire previous month. The week registered some of the wildest market volatility in decades. Trillions of dollars moved and some disappeared into the ether.

Analyst and technician were convinced that computers have taken over the trading and hitched the market on a roller coaster. This wasn’t the first time it happened either, in 2010, the Dow fell nearly 1,000 points in minutes. Computers rule Wall Street, says CNN.

Most large funds rest their portfolio on automated trading platforms, managing risk and exposure based on sets of rules and parameters. Machines execute the trades in miliseconds. Technology of today makes it possible to keep track of the billions of dollars within individual funds.

Only machines could do that. Most human trusts less of other human when it comes to large among of money so they let the machines do the managing.

As these machines soared to work in August, the global network trembled and for a few weeks the Dump brimmed to the limit. A lot more noise and a lot more data went missing.

Actually, No.

Large banks keep their own machines so the bytes never really disappeared. On the outskirts of Manhattan and in various suburbs of world’s metropolis, gigantic machines in private clouds of large organizations pounce and work the data so many different ways to make sense of money, for the human.

It would trickle out later reassembled, reformatted and rearranged in the circumstantial modeling needs of these human traders, access would be very tightly controlled and audited. Most human would never, ever get to the raw stuff.

The authorities go all Bradley Manning on anyone stealing from the Dump.

on Roses and August

2011-08-11T04:47:00.004+07:00

But America's war grew worse and worse and eventually it came to London. After that there were no roses anymore. Not for anyone.
~Valerie, V for Vendetta

Drought and famine in Africa. The increasing food price makes it even harder according to this UN Report. Millions and millions of people will die in Africa.

The rest of the World are currently worried about the market and the economy. The US Gov't was downgraded by Standard and Poor, losing its Triple A rating just as their Government failed to reach a Debt Solution. They didn't. Tea Party people apparently took the US Government hostage and essentially exposed the weak links of modern political system: Politicians.

There's never was a guarantee that only the honest or sober people that will get to govern. With the trillions of dollars that the US Gov't owes to the rest of the World, it was a matter of time before the sobriety of the sovereigns was questioned.

Speaking of sober, flash riots all over England.

There are now large demonstrations in Israel. Egypt now has serious questions about their future. Assad in Syria move tanks on civilian cities. The US put sanctions on Syria and today Turkish Foreign Minister was in Damascus for six hours. Syria has share borders with Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Even the Arab Kings were upset at Syrian regime.

In Karachi, 300 people were killed in the last month in an urban battlefield. In Mexico, 15,000 so far in an escalating drug war near the US border.

It's hard not to see this as a pattern. A systematic societal shift, disruptive shift where citizens everywhere - from London to Benghazi, from Karachi to New York City - reorganize themselves.

In rich countries, the economic powers are decoupling themselves from the sovereign. Global Multinationals must now seek and depend on growth from elsewhere than America. Vancouver is growing faster than Seattle. Societe Generale had to defend for France's Triple A rating - battered on a chronic telephone connection with Maria Bartiromo on the glamorous CNBC deck. Battered. We know how the French sentiments go in New York.

The French bank asked France's financial markets watchdog Autorite des Marches Financiers to investigate the origin of rumors that caused the bank's share price to plunge.Europe is in the middle of a serious debt crisis. The consider this the rationalization of the imperial premium that's been paid over centuries.

Japan. Yes. Nuclear meltdown.

This is a market where the gold price is a measure of risk. They're talking USD2500 at the end of the year. I have always been wondering if anyone know how much gold do the World really have? Merely about the size of a small office building, apparently.

The rise of the Merchant Class? Certainly, although not quite.

In the less glamorous nations, like Misrata or Karachi, the sovereigns leverage on their crowns to pounce on their citizens and they organized themselves in violent uprisings. In Egypt and in Syria, the citizens not armed and the practicality of revolution against tanks and armors are almost futile but they organize themselves anyway. In London, they were looting for HD television. This is a story on how BlackBerry Messenger enables destruction.

2011 is full of these stories. It is the year when most people finally realized that the internet is real. Virtual citizens are no more merely virtual and they wreak havoc just the same. Wikileaks brought the mighty USA to shame. More than anything else, Wikileaks showed the world how small, dedicated few could take down giants. It's a story we all love. Anonymous are now calling for a Nov 5 take down on Facebook.

Less biblical and closer to present day, Sony claimed the attack on its PlayStation Network this year is costing them some 170M USD - potentially more than 100 million users on the network are affected. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. are investigated for phone hacking conducted in their news gathering practices.

Attacks on RSA allowed vulnerabilities in various US defense contractors Lockheed Martin was breached and President Obama was personally briefed on the matter. McAffee discovered a systematic attack and exploits on various committees around the world in the years leading to Beijing Olympics. The Vanity Fair article clearly refer to the rising Chinese threats.

The Chinese have a very different notion on intellectual property rights. We have all known this for a long time. This alone probably contributed the largest to the establishment of electronics and semiconductor industries from China to Japan in the last twenty years. Give them a market of half of the world's population from China to India, it is not difficult to argue that there is probably something very wrong with the current copyright system.

After all, the present day notion of intellectual properties were almost entirely setup by a bunch of studios sitting in Hollywood and they were designed to cater for technology and distribution almost a full century ago. American patent system is a mess and unfit to meet the need for progress. When it comes to genetics, bioengineering or even tech patents, the system needs a major overhaul.

Simply put, the World needs to figure out how to best manage their intellectual property rights in the more and more connected world. It's a daunting challenge.

Technology allow modern citizens to form new societies. Welcome to the New World Order.

I kinda put 2011 into perspective. We're nowhere near the end yet. Palestine will be a nation by then.

And it's my birthday next week.

Have an August week everyone.

on Skype

2011-08-06T12:48:00.001+07:00

Never send a human to do a machine's job.
~Agent Smith

I definitely write much less these days. I write a little bit here and there and there are thousand little pieces here and there that I never managed to finish. Most times I just spit it out on twitter. Or emails. Or chat. Whatever.

I'm not very good with real time social. I could be okay with a crowd but then I prefer loud music to blank them out. But no, no more clubs. I don't do as much clubs as I used to. Too many people too busy pretending to be normal.

Sam discovered Skype so we chatted a few times. She recommended the same prescription with some alternate dose. She should know these stuff, being a geneticist and all. Doesn't matter, most of them are not available in Indonesia and I feel very uncomfortable taking pills. The alternative to it was for me to get a girlfriend.

I thought she looked happier and her boobs looked bigger but she insisted on for me to stay on and babble about girls and pills and what not. We agreed that humans are mostly hormonal creatures and the primary difference between boys and girls are in the hormonal composition. The hormones are affected by chemicals - either thru food and stuff, or ciggies, drugs and stuff. Along this line of argument, mood altering substances should be okay, plus it is coherent to my liberal bias towards the organic end of the spectrum. You only need to look at America and rethink the idea of 'natural' human. Some girl on Fox was talking about taxing junk food. Social engineering. Z thinks people were mostly there for social engineering.

Sam suggested my aversion to pills are irrational and totally unsustainable. According to the blonde on Skype, I was in some random collision course with fate and if I were to evolve along with the rest of us, I need to be medicated. Painkillers for the teeth, sleeping pills for the crashes and Ritalin to keep me sociable. If only everyone socialize only thru Skype and Circles and whatnot, I don't even have to take anything at all.

Yes, the girls. Ridiculously enough, Alice left Wonderland. It had to do with the said unfit lifestyle. I decline to elaborate anything at this point and unlikely to do so in near future. I think all girls should be medicated.

NASA sends a spaceship to Jupiter. It will take five years for Juno to get there. Huge unmanned spaceship that will take pictures and stuff.

I was wondering if there were some biophysical symptoms, hormones or neural activities that could reflect on a person's alertness or social intensity. Firehosing social data like twitter and facebook gave you a taste of this but that was the machine side.

I was wondering if there's a way for us to measure how connected we are - really - up there, in the brain or in the heart or what not. Since human are getting healthier and bigger and stronger over the last few hundred years, surely we've gotten much smarter in the last few thousand years. I need to educate myself on this a little bit.

I'm currently reading Robocalypse. It's a novel on a robot uprising, by a guy who also wrote a handbook to survive a robot uprising. It's interesting and also a good read. There's a Spielberg movie in the works for the pictury type.

The thing about most robot sci-fi scenarios is that most of it are bound by the software-hardware thing to it. For any machines to be capable of Evil it will require an instruction to do so. The instruction presumable came in some software form, written by human. This was true decades ago. These days, instructions are build into gazzillion chips and processors you carry around everywhere, the software is not quite as soft.

There's this drone that could hover and take over your GSM network already. DIY stuff with custom hardware on a remote GPS controlled flight path. News Corp. apparently now runs newsgathering drones.There's your aha moment. Journalists think they're at the forefront of this but really, at this stage they're already dying dinosaurs. Most traditional half duplex media people just don't get it.

Before it gets to the point where the machines physically rise and take over the world, the ubiquitousness of these machines and their outrageous processing capability - as well as their incapability of ever forgetting things, a characteristic feature of the more organic creature - will have so radically alter humans and the way they socialize.

I will be pondering these things and try to sleep. Have a good weekend everyone.

on Packets

2011-08-05T15:20:00.001+07:00

It's a scientific fact.For every year a person lives in Hollywood, they lose two points off their IQ.

~Truman Capote

There were pictures and numbers. Millions of them. At times, he spends hours staring into those pictures like they do in movies. Lots of faces. Sometimes he recognizes familiar faces but finding the matches are work for the machines. He was only looking to see if there’s anything that his mind picks up anything the machines failed. The machine always misses.

The screen shut to sleep mode and he dove back into the pool. The water cancelled out the noise. For a while, he heard nothing else but the water. He made two laps under the water in the pool then moved to sit in the hot pool, watching the laptop from the far end.

The raw packets came in various sizes and with their own metadata. There are machines that catalogue and assign them unique packet IDs. Some encrypted, others binary or plain text, the machine don't care. Each packet stacks were tagged and packed, usually no larger than 2GB but some machines now work directly on the cloud so size doesn't matter as much. The machine could work on for as long as neccessary.

There's also The Dump. Machines are very good at looking for the obvious - catching duplicates and noise cancellation – and the unused data are scattered all over the internet. A lot of these made their way into the Dump and there were people and machines living off it The packets are mostly noise, but they frequently threw random stuff. Mostly faces.

People used to pay many to go play in The Dump and collect pictures or files to feed random RSS for their blogs or photoblogs or what not. It was random enough for Google who put text ads next to it. Like an automated blog farm. It used to be all about ‘the Customer.' Marketers and social engineers play the human arbiter and did their best to make things make sense for human. Human sells the click.

Lately everyone knows that machines are mostly doing the clicking. Machine clicks, machine reads, machine logs. Human do little else but paying for them and playing with them. Tablets, mobile phones, smartphones and what not.
For some reasons, the machines are very peculiar about maintaining the old and redundant and obsolete machines. Machines never forget. They don’t really die. Not very many people get to see the Dump.

Beyond the Cloud, packets are available in all flavors. Machines sort out tags and reassemble the bytes into more coherent threads. Music packets make their ways onto Torrent and from there on, for retailing to the rest of the internet. Video packets are larger and require added human value in packaging and subtitling. In the Mainland, machines already do the subtitling into broken Indonesian, French, Portuguese and whatnot.

From a TiVo in the US, all the way to wholesale DVD industries in Asia, the packets never reached any physical form. Not until they were burned on bright discs and sold in the billions in the region. Packets worth differently to different people, but only if you know what they are. Or where to get them.

The small man emerged from the water and walked over to the laptop bringing it back from sleep mode. A few more minutes according to it.

Less legitimate packets came incomplete or available only in fragments. More sophisticated machines let you play with these and design your own packets. This particular one was geotagged – as most wireless packets inevitably are – to filter out specific areas in South Jakarta. It looked like it came from three Malls and two office building but he didn't yet have the details.

Courtesy of other machines, the packets were reordered to keep a timeline on a location, or a set of locations. Online services data, mobile snapshots, connection logs, security cameras, public webcams, whatever. Random thoughts, food pictures, corny songs and tons of porn. People want their porn everywhere and the machines know. They could be instructed to ignore these but they know to always include some.

The laptop on the dry desk continued to work with the screen dark. The box was verifying a particular 650GB files collected from the last batch earlier in the year. Machine approximation works differently to human. The laptop said it would take two hours to do it. Now it kept saying a few more minutes.

It was important to verify the packets and be completely certain that you have the packets you needed. The machines have no refund policy.

He closed his eyes and flashes came by. It was like to spot a memory. In fact, it was exactly like that. The digital fragments are memories of human, machines and the network around them. Collecting these memories was the easy part. Finding the right ones is a separate task. He wasn’t even sure of what he was looking for.

The data came from the Dump so they were littered with fragments and reacquired logs. With the binary data and encrypted separated, there were still gigabytes of text dump. He had yet look into it again but from what he'd seen and heard, the packets appeared to look random enough: public areas, Malls hotspot, cafes, Point of Sales and even parking logs.

From this point on, it was his packet to do as he wished. It was out of the Dump.

on Herr Minister

2011-05-15T17:31:00.003+07:00

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.
~Engels

Herr Minister stood straight by the window in his room so that he's back was parallel to the glass. He was dressed like an American banker even though he was actually educated in 1980s Pakistan.
Today, he wore a dark navy suit with white shirt and a light blue tie. In his breast pocket, a matching handkerchief. He looked almost Italian.

The Consultant was mostly listening. Herr Minister wanted a test run on his vision. He wanted toys to play with and to show the world his was as good as any of them. He made good on his bluff against Blackberry and other American companies and he was on international newspaper. Herr Minister was not about to back down and The Consultant's job was to meet his wishes.

The other persons in the room were two people from accounting department and they were busily keeping notes on how much Herr Minister's new toy was costing the Nation. This was perilous times and they understood that Herr Minister was not to be denied.

The military and the agencies understood the threats of future even if they had problems articulating it. The politicians were still rattled by the recent deregulation, a subtext of paranoid, post-nationalist is always a fixture of Indonesian politic narrative. The President and the people in power naturalled feared that they yielded too little power and control over their future.

Herr Minister was the main man and he was intent on delivering beyond the expectations. Secretly, he wished the future for himself. The Consultant's job was not to ask questions.

On his laptop, he worked on a recquisition form. The major telcos rolled several new, massive rural network to be deployed as part of the Government's infrastructure push. These were large data network designed to eventually take over the country's future to the digital age. A national grid. The Consultant's job was to listen in to this new national grid. Herr Minister wanted it done.

In Tunisia just before the revolution, the Ammar - their equivalent of an Information Ministry Agency - deployed a country level keylogger that essentially feed the entire Nation's login information and credentials to the Ben Ali's regime. The Ammar collected hundreds of thousands of Facebook and GMail passwords and used them to quell dissent. Facebook eventually figured it out and upgraded their entire security policy.

The Egyptians had access to American technologies. Deep packet interception technologies were unavailable to commercial enterprises just five years ago but nowadays, industrial grade, real time telco technologies were all available to the right bidder.

It used to be that the most sophisticated real time monitoring systems were only available through Israeli companies. GSM encryption were notoriously hard to crack - burner phones are still the most secure voice communication system available for your entry level would be terrorist. GSM interception systems were only made available to government agencies via lengthy negotiation and hefty price tags - the implementation took years.

These days, real time GSM interceptions are available to kids with laptops and internet connection.
The Consultant was happy with his budget and excused himself. Herr Minister looked happy and that was all that mattered. The Consultant would set to work immediately.

on The Cloud

2011-05-11T20:58:00.002+07:00

There was also a girl. I have not seen her since that night. Not that you could escape her sights. We chatted on blackberry on random nights. Mostly emails.

I wrote her very long emails. Some drunken rant, parts and pieces of my world domination plan. I know I shouldn't be telling people stuff but I did anyway.

The Edgelings and the girl never met. As far as I know none of them had ever personally meet each other but we were all experienced each other's existence. Among us, we always know there were others that knows more. Within us, there's always a need to know more. Beyond the hives however, there's always more.

There were wars among the hives. Mad, brutal conflicts happened on regular basis. In the ancient days we faxed black tape roll to ruin their toner. Everything from pizza delivery to illegal packets. I woke up to find my mailbox spammed to the quota - porn spam.

In Camden Town they were running international network of free telcos. Exploiting the numbered flaws found on the old analog switches on last generation telco infrastructure was a past time. In New York, some guys routed calls to party lines in the Carribean. In Jakarta there was a market for free to call phones. In Hannover, a group of Turks were establishing a trade route of international calling cards network - a lot of them needed to call home.

I think kids everywhere just want to talk. The world was learning to talk. These days they do different stuff. A team of geeks raced across the desert into Benghazi and stole Ghadaffi's telco, making free calls for the people in the rebel held area.

For Indonesian kids under Soeharto, the big secret was the weatlh of information out there. Beyond their repressive despot realm of control, the citizens of the world shared a common hope. Beyond the Cloud, up in the air with whispers and secrets, there were all sorts of things.

on Sikrets

2011-05-11T14:02:00.001+07:00

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
~The Secret Sits, Robert Frost

There's a gang, a very small and loose gang in the city armed with antennas.They collect secrets.

People do this everywhere in the world, especially a few years ago when wireless was new and people don't understand why they need secure connection.They set their laptops in random places and listen in to the air, capturing bits and whispers.

Normal laptop will do but if you add a small antenna, then it could be quite powerful. When you do it over an area to map security leaks. These days you do it in a car with an iPad.

If several people doing it - across a time period, then you could easily map whose network and what are they using it for. Most of the time, people do it to sniff the network - identifying the holes. The data are usually rubbish (because driving means you're likely to only capture parts of data streams) and often times hard to understand since you lack any context to decipher.

A much smaller group of people are more interested in data. They keep and pile random rubbish for months and pour it over every time you have more. Some go to starbucks everyday, some hangs in the mall, others install beacons semi permanently in public places. Over time, you build context. By time I don't speak weeks, more like hours than days.

Locating a peculiar rooftop corner in SCBD for example, these kids locked into the network used by large banks where they sync books and compile nightlies. Until very recently, nobody ever really get the wireless demons.

Most times, it's harmless and completely random shit but over time, you collect secrets.

on an Orange Note

2011-05-11T03:45:00.000+07:00

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

~Pablo Neruda

She left a note in my pad. Done in my orange marker – presumably because that was the only color available wherever it was when she wrote it down.

The first time I read it I didn’t actually read it. Literally, I shoved it back and lost it in the pages. I knew what it read but I didn’t want to read it. Then I bought a new bag and a new pad and I actually lost the pad for a while. I’ve always knew it’s there and I knew what it said but I didn’t really wanna read it.

When we first met she made me promise not to ever ask when I would see her next, and there were nights where I could feel like heavens were conspiring against me and her and I knew I would miss her so much. Then I would know I still had that note and I could read it again and I hoped it would make me feel better.

She was in one of her moods the other night and removed me from BlackBerry Messenger – the ultimate punishment for our modern day Jakarta social scene, I guess. I went around town for sightseeing, wanting so much to actually call her. Except that I had no good reason to call whatsoever. Maybe I just wanted to hear her voice.

Arriving home in the wee hours, I found the bag and looked for the pad. The page was there. Exactly as I remembered it. Her handwriting better than me. She scribbled some pictures around it. Not sure what, could be flowers but it might also be the sun.

She said I was special and that will be forever. She was more elaborate and filled more than half the page in lines but that was sort of the essence of it. Reading it had an unreal sensation. Like holding something you wanted so badly, you treasure even the moments when you first read and see it and touch it. You always wanted it to be like yesterday.

It’s been months now but it always feels that way. I never actually sat and read the whole thing thru. It’s just always in my bag and I feel better knowing that it’s always there. Reading it made me feel all funny and tingly.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Do I write a note back, or do I email or what not? I’m not sure what the kids are even up to these days anymore. For once, a lot of things seemed very real. So real it scared the living shit out of me. I’m not very good with this sorts of stuff. It's not like there's anything I could do.

I used to read her Neruda almost every night. Random lines from from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. Ranum.

That kinda set the bar pretty high so handwriting a return note seemed like an impossible task. Usually I just stared at it for a few minutes, soaked what it means and push it back into the bag. It would’ve been easier if I could just tell her like normal people would. And made sure everybody knows. I wish I could love her like normal people could.

But really, I can’t. I really can’t.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

but this in which there is no I or you.
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

~Sonnet XVII

on Recent Weeks

2011-04-10T05:22:00.000+07:00

I been working quite a bit. The last few years have been very taxing so working on the internet stuff is a welcome relief. The industry is different now. New faces, new people, new stories. The industry as a whole is very bubbly. It feels 2001 all over again.

Mother was happy and healthier. It was good to see her happy. The two dogs - both Alsatians - are humongous and very healthy. I had a good weekend just playing around with them dogs for two days.

Back in Jakarta though, things weren't always as peachy. Alice went ape for no obvious reason and I kinda had it then. There was simply no reason to let myself be subject to abuse that way. It was all very upsetting and so I went to De Hooi on the way back home. I wasn't sure if I wanted to bother anymore. This thing looks just very messy and complicated and unpleasant.

As always, the place is packed fool with little girls in hot pants. It was all just ridiculously fun. There were a few old friends that I haven't seen for a while.Gossips abound. There's a whole out of life out there beyond me. I just listened and mostly listened to the band and played pool.

I haven't played pool for a while and I am worse now than I used to be a few years back. I guess I'm gonna have to practice more. I couldn't focus, barely thinking one ball at a time. Nevertheless, it was a good nite out.

I met someone I've met before. This story will be a separate post.

Have a good weekend, all.

Knut Dies

2011-03-21T06:04:00.000+07:00

Knut dies at age four. I am very, very, very sad.

Really. He's so cute.

Here's the full news from LA Times and a slideshow from Reuters.

on a Baby and the New World Order

2011-03-08T02:43:00.000+07:00

Among the more important news item of the month was the likely addition to the family. Sort of.

The maid asked for permission to speak last night and thus he spoke. They - he and his wife - have been wanting a baby for a while. So far, she isn't pregnant. According to some news he heard from back home, another couple they know are expecting one. The maids are going to adopt a baby.

The house is large enough so I don't have a space concern. They're separated enough so I wouldn't have to worry about baby screams. I also don't expect the little thing to eat too much so it wouldn't exactly be overly expensive. Probably more like keeping an extra dog. And speaking of the dog, Verbal doesn't seem to mind little kids.

In any event their decision was made independent of mine, his wife was already on her way to the village, she left upon hearing the news last night. He requested three days off to go back and check on the baby, she would return in a week or two, again, depending on the baby. Plans were made and executed. I have little or no decisions to make really, except to nod meaningfully.

Chubby dropped by randomly after dinner I told him about it. We thought of how things would be different, but really, they wouldn't. While we were chatting, Chubby asked to confirm if something he heard was true. I could have conceivably done the things that I had allegedly done but in the particular case that he was referring to, I assured him that it was completely untrue.

He said that some of these shit could've been true but nobody really accept that. A lot of people would rather that these are fiction and unreal and not really happening. It would be too much for too many people. Chubby said I made a lot of people very uncomfortable.

Of course, on the blogs, things are never entirely real. Dates and names I change all the time and stories got mixed up. Some are probably obviously identifiable but legally speaking (Indonesian laws prevailing), I always have a plausible denial. There's always a good chance that I'm only shitting you here.

Chubby pointed out the obvious, that things could get nasty and out of control and it would some how turn these individuals that my disruptive presence is contradictory to their collective goals and thus some of them would probably consider disposing me entirely. In all likelihood, I will be considered a nuisance.

I think we're just being paranoid but in any event, none of it would be too strange. I've a temper issue and I don't like people very much and I am being constantly harassed by exes and bad memories.
I don't mind not having too many people around.

Chubby mentioned that having a baby around the house is probably a good thing.

PS: Most recent updates from the World Domination Plan - on the Wonderland Notes.

on March 2011

2011-03-07T10:21:00.000+07:00

Too many to tell really, I wouldn't know where to start.

I'm gonna give myself a star for every time I started a post with a statement to that effect. Usually, I ended up not writing much at all.

I'm quitting Twitter for a while. All these people living in Twitter kinda weirded me out. Before you know it, everything is about who did what on Twitter. Most of them are people I don't really know anyway so it's not hard to stop tuning in to random gossip.

The thing with Mother is still much like the way it was. I need to resolve my finances so I could sort the rest of this thing out. I'm also hoping to go to Europe soon. Some exciting stuff is happening with work and things are looking up a little bit, so I'm actually looking forward to the rest of 2011.

There's also all sorts of exciting stuff all over the news. The whole Middle East is going kaput. I oh so look forward for the Kindom of Saudi Arabia to topple over. Unlikely, but a man can hope.

In Libya, a team of SAS soldiers were caught and handcuffed and soon enough sent home packing after they were caught in the middle of the desert with equipments and stuff. The Foreign Office said they were escorting 'diplomats' though there was no explanation why these guys landed in the desert outside Benghazi and not flying in properly via the airport or the harbor (HMS Cumberland was docked in Benghazi). Very peculiar. Must be some yet to be released movie plots that we know nothing about.

From Jakarta, same old stuff. The President is mulling over a cabinet reshuffle after relationship deteriorated further with his coalition partnet. Golkar and PKS pushed for another Pansus (a DPR Special Committee) last week. The proposal was repelled but now relationship seems to be hitting rock bottom. Gerindra is looking fit and ready to join the government and maybe, even PDI-P. This shit bores me out.

The girls. Well, the girls will be its own post although there's less and less to tell about any girls. Things are just very murky.

Now.... I've a few things to do. Back later.

on a Poster

2011-02-17T18:47:00.000+07:00

on a Dick

2011-02-16T02:26:00.000+07:00

A little dude, balding, half aged fuckwit with a little less sense than manners said something about money. I can't remember exactly what he said but it pissed me off.

It was something he said in public and there was little to suggest that he was joking. He thought he was pretty funny so he was laughing about it but I didn't think it was funny.

I bottled it for a few hours but in the end I came to conclusion that the man was just another little middle aged prick with a bank balance so I went quite irate. I have no need for another middle aged fuck to mingle. I have a bigger mouth and a better bank so you could go eat your cake and shit it. See if I care. Oh yeah, apparently, he reads book and shit.

Don't make me laugh. A little man with a littler dick and a little more money and I'm supposed to kiss his ass. Yeah, right. Do let me know when he had ever paid for a single bill of mine and I would be glad to repay him in full. Don't get me started on this, please.

Or else...

Well, or else, you're just a little fucking loud mouthed, middle aged dickhead.

Do tell, I would be happy to pay for your pills.

This whole thing happened on a Valentine weekend. This and that and a whole lot of other things too. The other things will come later.

You little dick, here's a message: YOU ARE A LITTLE DICK.

You're a little shit, too. You're not even worth a big shit. You're a little shit and that's that.

on Party Snail

2011-02-07T14:23:00.000+07:00

I've a small garden in the middle of my living room. Just a box really, with some plants in it. Some two or three seasons ago, the garden was infested with snails. Some were obviously baby snails - tiny with fragile shell - but others were pretty big.

One was particularly large snail I named Henry. Every once in a while, the snail would work its slow way into the living room, most often whenever the garden was flooded during one of the heavier rain.

One night, Henry arrived and was obviously looking very tired and I was feeling festive, so he was offered some Goose. I understand that a straight shot would probably kill the little creature so the vodka was mixed with tonic and a dash of lime.

The drink was poured on the ridge (see pics), so it wasn't like I forced Henry to drink. The snail could choose to either pursue the drink, or avoid it altogether. Amazingly enough, I think he liked it lots. You could see almost his entire body stretched out to suck out every last drop of it.

He got funny, too. At one point, Henry lost his balance completely and almost tipped over. I provided plenty of water so he was always wet. The dog found the whole thing quite amusing. We put some music on, I could almost swear the damn thing even danced.

I had the garden done last year and rid of all the pests, Henry was deported to the nearest field where I expect him to expire in good time.

Full Photo Set is here.

note: in the spirit of the Jedis, I used the term "I" to represent "we" - I was not alone at the party and I genuinely think Henry was happy. He is no longer with us.

on Shit Rules

2011-01-13T04:45:00.000+07:00

I'm getting very tired with this shit. All this shit. Hypocrites and shameless little fucks with too much to prove and too little to go. At some point, nothing means anything anymore.

I'm getting very tired and bored. It's hard to believe in anything, cause there doesnt seem to be much to beleieve in anymore. Even if there is, i cant see much the point in it.

In the end, you need to make a fuckload amount of money, then you can make shit matters. Does it matter how? Not really. It reaaly is doesnt matter. The only people who care are the people who doesnt know how to lose. Well, time to get lost.

It's pretty weird. Right, wrong, good, bad, whatnot. I dont seem to know what is what anymore. It doesnt even seem to matter anymore. Everyone seems to have one set of rules they keep for themselves, one for everybody else, and a different set just to talk about. Maybe so that they could all talk about the same shit and still feel good.

I feel yuck. I need to know how those people sleep without drugs.

PS: this is blogging from the iPad. It's okay though a little awkward. The interface doesnt all work on the iPad browser and i'm only learning to type with it.

on Full Wreck

2011-01-09T04:12:00.000+07:00

O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
~Romeo and Juliet

Describing what I am right now isn’t easy. I myself would have a hard time. I suspect most common observers would say the same. One in particular described me as a wreck and I was inclined to agree.

It was New Year’s Eve and Princess found me stuck in a corner chatting up a minimally dressed nineteen years old with Pearl Jam blasting ridiculously loud. The room was so dark and so loud and stunk with antiquated cannabis and beer residue and I was resting on a thumping Peavey box sounding out Eddie Vedder. The 19yo before me was a friend of a friend who was all too keen to learn of what grown ups do in New Year’s Eve. Then Princess turned up.

She arrived unannounced and uninvited. Apparently she’d been around since well before midnight but she was lounging in the other room and was totally unaware of my presence in the vicinity. Likewise, I was preoccupied in the box at the furthest end of the hall.

I was told it was going to be a small and intimate affair. I was in no mood for drama and handling Miss Kryptonite on New Year’s Eve wasn’t it and I thought I had made this clear to the guys. I agreed to come and socialize only because I was running low on my own drinks and that Chummy came to pick me up himself. He said he had stuff for me to work on and I needed work so I went with him. It would’ve been good to meet the boys.

Nineteen was as nineteen does. She was sweet and pretty with legs that went on forever. I recalled seeing her at The Cure concert in Singapore a while ago, she was with the group that went on to party at a club at the Quay. I remembered her small protruding breasts, she was wearing a small and delicate top with no undergarment. I couldn’t recall her name though.

Polka Boy arrived before midnight, along with a few large boxes of dynamites and fireworks. He promised them to be very loud and bright. The last two boxes contained half a dozen identical bottles of cheap Mexican tequila. Cheap and foul but they were the real deal. The Kitchenhands readied sets of salt and lime along with their magnificent soups. I thought it was probably one of the best parties ever since none of us needed to do anything at all. Good stuff were hand delivered in good taste.

Meanwhile, Guitar Boy and a few other guys were drinking and smoking and gossiping and groping in the other room. They were watching Pearl Jam at the Madison Square Garden in the soundproofed studio – I took the next box and got only the audio and Nineteen. You get the picture.

To tell the truth, it wasn’t even slightly pornographic as Princess found me out shortly after midnight. She burst into the room, I didn’t realize she was behind me until she was literally right behind me, smelling of her royal scent. Nineteen choked for a few seconds and politely excused herself out while I struggled to manage an erection.

Really, there was nothing pornographic. It was all just my dirty, dirty mind.

She was concerned about Mother and we chatted a little bit about the family stuff and what not. She told me about a new job she was working on. I think it was some art project or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. I told her that I really needed to shut down and not think of anything real for a while and that she was ruining my wildly fantasized New Year’s Eve.

We left the room shortly and mingled with the other guests. It was a windy night and a little cold but the fireworks were heard for miles. Most of us were just lounging on the roof as the skyline cracked with colours. Polka Boy was right, his arsenal was very loud. Some of us were very wet in the pool and others were eating continuously. I had more soup and some caramel pudding. She was holding my plate. I don’t think anyone noticed.

I was feeling sad and lonely and angry and mad and I was in search of comfort for self preservation. There was no rule in the book that says that you shouldn’t hold hands with the ex.

For a brief hour or so, Jakarta was happy and familiar even comforting. Everyone joked only the right jokes and laughed for most of the night. Some of these faces I’ve known for many years. Some were married then, so many are now divorced and single. The most thoughtful question of the night must’ve been, “how many marriage is currently socially acceptable?” Others were single until very recently and they were busy playing nice to their spouses. Nineteen and her friends were underage a decade ago.

I thought I sounded very old then.

But fuck yeah. I’m a thirty years old with one divorce and a dog. I’ve a mother with a malignant tumor and no medical coverage. I’ve been through hell and back. I danced with angels and demons and you never get home in one piece. Socially awkward and positively demotivated, I am clinically depressed and on pain killers about half the time. The rest of the time I spend trying to get some sleep.

I’m not old, I’m just very tired. It was nice to have someone hold my hand at night. I fell asleep on the couch for a few hours and dreamt of good things.

Jakarta, January, 2011

on My Coffee

2011-01-07T14:52:00.000+07:00

I just realized I can't really make coffee. The maids are gone and I make my own coffee and I realized I'm incapable of making coffee that taste the same from one cup to the next. Maybe I should keep notes.

on a Quick Trip

2011-01-07T01:42:00.003+07:00

Singapore was exactly as I hated it the last time. It was dry, humid and sterile and extremely boring. I had one meeting to go to and it was done by noon. I tried calling Laticia but her roommate said she was away on a long haul so I spent the rest of the time just waiting for the flight back in Changi.

At the airport, it occurred to me that I didn’t really wanna go back to Jakarta. Recently, the city have become too unbearably overwhelming. I was constantly on the edge and just the thought of being away from Jakarta was a relief.

Princess sent a car to pick me up with the dog – I had to leave Verbal with her cause the maids were away. He was ever so happy to be riding in a long drive to the airport and it was nice to have him there at the airport. It’s silly how much I missed my dog after an overnight trip. I didn’t actually see her at all, she was elsewhere doing her own thing. I bought her an ashtray from the airport and left it with the driver. I’ll talk to her tomorrow and write about it some other time.

So far, 2011 is a mess. I need to get my priority straight. The dramas are exciting to write but really, I’ve not the time nor the energy to deal with most of this shit happening. I need to sort out my finances and I need to do it quick. The stuff with Alice and freaks on twitter and every other shit must wait. At the moment, it’s me and my dog against the world.

on Being Owned

2011-01-06T15:57:00.000+07:00

from @gapingvoid

on His Girlfriend

2011-01-05T01:51:00.003+07:00

Like a penniless debauchee, kissing and gnawing the battered breast of an ancient whore, we steal in passing some illicit pleasure, which we squeeze very hard, like an old, dry orange.
~Au Lecteur, Baudelaire

Not that I think there’s anything much to say, but it’s still interesting to note.

Why do you think a man would gossip on his own girlfriend?

This Dude told someone that I was shagging (or nearly shagging, whatever) his girlfriend. This was told in confidence in an apparent scandalous tone, out of some deep dark concern of his to save his presumed girlfriend an embarrassment.

Of course, I’ve never even met the girl in question so the whole idea seemed completely bonkers.

Considering that I actually knew everyone in this group – except for that girl that I had allegedly intercoursed with – the whole thing I also find a little mindboggling. Surely, someone would’ve and could’ve bothered to fact check the ridiculous assumptions. None did.

I don’t think she’s aware of what’s going on and Olive said that I shouldn’t say anything (I’m very much tempted to just copy paste entire emails of correspondence just to illustrate how ridiculous this whole thing is but I won’t).

I think he’s a fucking idiot, most probably with a miniscule dick and almost certainly clinically insecure. Personally, if I had a beef with me, I’d go to me right in the face and not going around the bedroom of my girlfriends to do it. That’s just too pathetic.

The rest of it is a story I will tell some other time.

on 2010

2011-01-04T04:26:00.000+07:00

Could've been, would've been, should've been. Schmucks. Could've been nothing at all.
~Me

How’s ur New Year all? I hope they’re better than mine. Not that mine sucked completely, but it could’ve been better. All things considered though, I’m quite certain that your average straight male would gladly have my New Year’s Eve.

Vivian came with what was probably the most reasonable suggestion for a normal person, that I go to Alice and talk to her. I didn’t. The whole thing skidded from a Snow White to Little Red Riding Hood quicker than I had time to prepare and I just slipped.

I was still spending time at the cancer ward, mom was moved to a better room after the operation so it was easier to sleep with and I mostly took the night shift. Mother would be asleep until her morning nurse arrived and some other relatives would come and visit in daylight and I would go home to catch some sleep proper.

I was probably upset that she didn’t come and visit. At some point, it was pretty shit and I was wishing really hard that she would come but she didn’t and it probably annoyed me more than usual. Vi didn’t have an explanation for it. She thought women are just supposed to be women. I wasn’t making things any easier but it’s not like I was given any chance to. I was pissed but ready to just move on with 2011.

I saw Chummy a few nights after Christmas but before the new year. He looked much better these days and seemed to have been making money handsomely. I asked if he had anything for me. Something with a medical coverage that would pay for chemotherapies and fisiotherapies and probably a whole lot of other therapies. Not that we’ve a real market for such leveraged derivatives but I get points for trying.

The work situation was something I had in mind. Between the hospital bills and my frequent emergencies I need a viable longer term plan and lots of things went wrong in 2010. Too many things. He heard of my recent outburst at the Council members and he was concerned.

Is life really always so black and white? One minute you’re a friend and next you’re not? Someone had a little bit too much vodka that was that and so be it. He didn’t get why I was so upset. Frankly, I probably didn’t either. I spent the rest of the night losing a game of chess, trying pretty hard to pass out. I’d lose either way.

He was concerned with what the rest of the Council would think but I was beyond the care point. I honestly don’t give a shit what the others think – there’s only so much pushing around that I could allow. They fucked around with deals after deals and numbers that seemed to shake around wherever the wind blows. Old white haired schmucks in fancy cars always got the benefit of the doubt, however fucked up they were and really, I get that. I got that very well. I draw the line at people getting physical. You laid hands on me then it’s all fair game beyond that.

Chummy pointed out that I’d lose either way. There’s no getting out of it. Reason would dictate that I follow the righteous path and listen to the council. It was a whole lot of bollocks.

There’s a seafood place right by the water in Kowloon. I had no idea what the stuff was called but the food was delicious. J Ho taught me how to get there by the late night ferry and I went there to get pissed and just stare at the water. There’s a half court near the place where the local boys played at night and I went in to play once. I understand no Chinese in whatever form so it was just the basketball for me. I just worked it out of my system. I asked Chummy to find me something to do in Hong Kong. I might even do it on a one way ticket these days. So long as it pays.

In any event, 2010 ended pretty much in shit. Mother is in terrible mood. The whole damned thing is just a big blind darkness. Alice was lost in Wonderland. I lost a few kilograms and am pretty much stuck where I was at the beginning of the year. However way it goes, 2011 will be better.

That is somehow interesting.

I sipped a drink and ignored the rest of the questions.

on This Blog

2010-12-27T16:31:00.001+07:00

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

~Robert Frost

Every once in a while, I write only about this blog. I keep more than one home on the internet – some of them aren’t even indexed. I have no really obvious reasons as to why but mostly because all of them were originally intended to be just a place to keep my close friends updated. Here's a quick FAQ. If you're really that curious, here are posts exclusively about me.

My blogs are mine and mine alone. Everything I wrote I generally do it under Creative Commons license but since I quote and link freely to other content on the internet, you should probably best to drop me a note before reproducing anything. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t care much for it – I just don’t want you to steal other people’s work without their consent.

The picture I use as an avatar is from a painting by Daniel Peacock, a very talented painter from San Francisco. I wrote to him years ago and asked his permission to use it as my avatar. I don’t use it for anything even remotely commercial. I just really love the painting. The Happy Holiday sock puppet was from his email greetings, not his best work, but I hope he doesn't mind).

The stories on this blog are true. All of them happened. However, in stories as is in life, truths are only as good as they’re told. The characters of this blog are often composite and most names are obscured. Posts are not published in actual chronological order, although I usually write them in diary form for my personal notes. I just publish whatever I like, whenever I like it, bandwidth permitting.

This particular blog is mostly about my private life and as it is, it intersects with the private lives of many others. How I keep my life private while allowing the voices in my head to come out is a constant struggle. My writings don’t always make sense. Read it at your perils.

A lot of these are about girls and relationships though I wouldn’t say exclusively so. I made extensive notes about my World Domination Plan here (the more comprehensive posts will be on the other blogs). I also write about Death and I occasionally rant about the 60s social revolution in long incoherent posts. Other times, I just write of Greek Goddess.

In short, there really isn’t any rule for this blog, except that I write what I like, whenever I like. You could find me on Buzz, Twitter, Last.Fm, Wordpress, Politikana, YCombinator, Digg, Salon and probably half a dozen other places. You could also drop me an email at a.treespotter(dot)gmail.com.

For my dearest German future wife – yes, will write you a mail soon. Hectic times.

Happy Holiday all!

on Miss Kryptonite

2010-12-26T23:51:00.001+07:00

Situation with Alice degraded to a new low last week - the night before Mother had her operation - so I managed to pay attention less to it than I would have had I not been preoccupied with finding a cure for cancer.

The operation itself went well. It was a few hours longer than it should have but eventually the one of the Green Robes came out and told us things were okay. She came around a few hours later and seemed to have been recovering well.

Presently, she's staying with some relatives somewhere so I have my lair back to myself, free to plot my Domination Plan as I see fit.

Mortality mortified her. I could see it in the last few weeks as mother brought with her a dark cloud of unprecedented pessimism and brooding disaster. I been told that this is common with cancer patients and the condition with mother was medically certified to be considered pretty serious. Nevertheless, it took its toll.

Like I said, the situation with Alice didn't help so I just blanked it out. There’s a point in life where you just couldn’t handle everything at once regardless of how badly you’re wanting it.

Ex called from California. She was just calling to chit chat about mom but we got away talking for quite a little bit. Apparently she is still a lesbian. I felt a little nasty tinge but didn’t make a fuss. I asked what the weather was like. Apparently she doesn’t do much outdoor. She told me she drives an Audi now. She said it’s very fast. I believed her. I drove an Audi A4 in Hong Kong last year and I’m still giddy.

She asked if I saw Princess recently and I had to answer truthfully. I replied a firm no. Women positively give me headache and Miss Kryptonite isn’t a good idea. In fact, she was never a good idea. Just the thoughts make me giddy. I wondered why she asked and it was explained that someone sighted us in a club somewhere.

Which is not entirely untrue.

I saw Princess some party in some club somewhere. I was going for the bathroom and went past her table and she grabbed me on the way back and we sort of had a conversation. By conversation I mean she talking and me nodding and grabbing for more drinks and trying really hard not to look into her eyes. It was a case of me stewing in unadulterated lust in front of a magnificent bad dream. When I went back to my table I started doing tequila shots because I honestly thought I needed them. The boys picked on me for the rest of the night but that was that. Nothing happened.

You noticed that every time I mentioned this girl I insisted that nothing happened? Yes, really nothing happened. It’s just bloggable, that’s all.

on Music This Week

2010-12-26T16:53:00.000+07:00

I thought my music from the last seven days makes an interesting link.

I been using Last.FM for several years now - it culls from all the players around the house, the iPad, iPod, iPhone. I'd say it captures approximately 99% of music I heard since I rarely listen to anything else. I don't do radios. Last.fm makes the data available in XML and RSS feed so every so often I toy with it. Just to see if my music taste develop (it doesn't). It also gives my mind lesser concerns to tinker with.

Have a wonderful Christmas, all.

on Christmas and Football

2010-12-25T04:19:00.000+07:00

I have it on good authority that the Indonesian Army now runs a football school. They've some foreign trainers and currently sometime thru the first year. The first sergeants are yet to be tested so I was thinking they should probably play a game against the national team.

Yes, the Indonesian football team is going against Malaysia in the first leg of the AFF final on Boxing Day and the country is gripped in suspense. I might go to the final game.

Have a jolly good Christmas, all.

on Lost Thoughts

2010-12-20T03:34:00.000+07:00

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
~Hunter S. Thompson

I could feel my head imploding. The drugs don’t help much. At some point, nothing works. I just sit quietly in my corner and read books and stuff.

The other night was spent online again, partly I was busy asking Sam about genetic anomalies but mostly I was just following random links around the internet.

When I get completely bored I play computer games but there’s a faulty memory chip on the game rig and it keeps booting up for no reason. I know it’s a hardware thing but I couldn’t be bothered to open it up and fix it.

I accidentally electrocuted myself with the mosquito racket. It’s pretty powerful. Zipped me right out of my mad daze and for a second I considered using it on the cat but I didn’t.

Vi was in town. She brought me a few Christmas present and later took me for a haircut. I hate hairdressers and most of the time I wanted them to do their job as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Vi took me to her usual hairdresser and treated me for a head massage. I love head massage. In return though, I had to answer all her questions.

I suspected Vivian have a new boyfriend since she was uncharacteristically noisy about my relationship. I figured she would have a personality shift now that she’d given up prostitution. I asked how much money she kept stashed away nowadays. She stubbornly refused to answer.

I explained the problems with Alice delicately. Really, I could devise a massive chart detailing the potential problems of this particular relationship but what it really is something else completely. I can’t deal with insecurities. It bothers me to constantly provide a construct for everything. I naturally deconstruct. It’s against my instinct. I have no idea what I’m talking about.

I realize the confusing grammar. I think my English is getting sloppy. I write a lot more in Indonesian these days so it’s probably a trade. Vivian didn’t give a shit and insisted that I explain better.

I went to East Java a few weeks ago and I literally ran into her daughter. Literally. I was having lunch and I heard the people on the next table mentioned something and later I realized that it was her daughter. I’ve never seen her before. Never in person.

I saw her ultrasound and I knew that her name was taken from a pink hard cover book from Kinokuniya and I knew who her father was. I don’t think he knows.

I asked Vi if she was planning to maybe someday tell him about his daughter. The little girl would ask eventually. This is the sort of secrets that send people tumbling around their lives for many years. I wouldn’t know what to do so I was genuinely curious of what she thought of it. She shrugged the question. Maybe she’s still thinking about it.

I wonder if things were always so black and white. I think in binary terms but that’s only because I wanna think faster – not better. I’m only trying to survive.

Vivian said something about our birthday. She wondered if everyone else are also having lives as surreal as ours. I told her August 19th was the birthday of Aphrodite. There’s a small temple in Rome where they do stuff every year, on our birthday, for centuries. I plan to go there for my birthday someday.

My Fire Dragon Leo Cosmic Twin advised me to stop muckin around and actually work on something. I was supposed to be good with decision making mechanism. I need to make my calls. I’ve been putting it off for too fucking long. She noticed I lost weight. I actually do. It’s an body metabolism equilibrium of sort: I don’t lose or gain weight. This is the only time I lose more than 3kg and even I noticed that.

She asked if I’d any thoughts of going back to England. It’s out of the question for now since I should be with mom but I am thinking of going for a short trip to Europe soon-ish. Mom is also being treated from Germany so might even have a very good excuse to go.

The head massage was very good. It felt so much better and easier afterward I actually went to have coffee with a Guy I Didn’t Really Want To See. He’s been wanting to see me for a while and even though I had no idea why, I went to satisfy my curiosity. It wasn’t at all interesting so I won’t bother you with it.

I’m doing a ton of writing on the other blogs – and some notes. Some makes more sense than others. There’s not ever a rule saying that I have to make sense.

on The New World Order

2010-12-16T02:48:00.004+07:00

I'm so ugly, that's okay
'Cause so are you
Broke our mirrors
~Lithium, Nirvana

At some point in mid last week I was up for about sixty hours. Even I noticed I was losing weight.

I wasn’t feeling well by most definition and yet, magically enough, I was never too tired. I went to clubs and drowned myself in the noise and distractions but it didn’t help much. I remained completely sober for days and that only got me even worse. I couldn’t even nap. My head was imploding and somewhere nearing the end, my body couldn’t take it.

I hate doing cocktails but sometimes it’s easiest to take drugs. Normal people probably do a few Xanax and feel terribly fashionable about it. I hate doing any drugs. Man, body and soul. I’m good enough without any chemical enhancements.

Most of the time I would be on the computers. I’m now back on the grid and though I’m not entirely comfortable with it yet, I could spend a lot of my waking hours online. I don’t code anything anymore though I still like to spend countless hours experimenting on things.

The Miley Cyrus salvia video is hilarious. She was giggling the whole way. Must be the good stuff.

Years ago I went to find the good stuff. It was a good excuse to travel to Mexico. In a hike trip off Tijuana, I knew someone who knew someone and someone prepared a rather potent concoction, the Diviner’s Sage.

In a camp setup in the middle of nowhere, they prepared the stuff and tourists paid $200 to try the local cuisine, a small barbecue and a small bowl of the soup. We didn’t smoke anything except for the soup.

I can’t quite describe the experience for myself. I had none of Miley’s giggling – people have said that salvia varies in effect when consumed in different forms. Digesting it in a fresh hot soup – not exactly creamy more like tea but thicker – it took me to a whole new level of psychedelic experience. In my life I have never felt so disconnected to reality. In many ways, it was scary.

I didn’t see monsters and dragons. I just saw me – only not this one and not in this time. It’s like living you in a different dimension, completely detached to the life you’re currently on. In a different life, you could’ve paid attention to different things and everything could turn out to be completely different, and yet they’re as likely to happen as your current edition. My understanding is that was the reason they call it the Diviner’s Sage. It’s like an alternate reality moment.

Paul Theroux gave a good description in Blinding Light although Slade Stademan used it continuously for a few weeks. I tried it only for two nights.This isn't to be confused with Bono's blinding light.

I called Samantha in California. She’s on Skype now so it was easier for me to chat since I don’t have to hold the phone. She said she would write me a legal prescription for Singapore if would use the video but I kindly turned it down.

I felt like life was crushing in on me. An anonymous chat with a voluptuous blonde might just cheer me up and we were on it all night. Sam had Phd in biomedical engineering so she knew quite a bit more about tumors and bad cells and genetic malfunctions. We had mammographs and stuff sent over to Europe the other week. I was waiting for someone to explain it to me in human language.

We ended up talking about mood altering substance and reality shifting applications. Presumably if you could toy around with the edge of the neural pathways at the right places, you would be able to ignite enough of a complete sense to lend you an alternate life. They tested this with rats and stuff. Samantha worked on a project for her lab although her interest was for the genes. At the neural level, reality is mostly about the right wiring, if you could alter the wiring, then you could shift reality.

I noticed that her breasts were a little larger on my new 22” screen and I offered to have the camera if she would take her top off. She said she couldn’t do it from the lab so I alleged that she was only doing it for distraction.

There was a Michael Crichton book with semi scientific references to a number of experiments but you could also Google this stuff. In private labs all over the globe all sorts of very smart people are already figuring it out. This is where science literally escaped into science fiction territory.

This is The Matrix territory. The rules are there – except for the chosen few. With a little practice (and more than just a little help from a whole lot of wiring), you could literally create whatever reality you want. It requires you to fasten the seatbelt, or pick the right pills.

The Matrix was full of references – it was drawing on the comparison of Alice’s Wonderland trip, Kansas going bye bye. The Oracle was the Mother of Know It All. She had all the answers though apparently there wasn’t much that she could do about it anyway. The oracles are divine portals through which gods replied to their questions, although not necessarily giving them any answers.

Morpheus is the Greek God of Dreams. One of the Oneiroi, they live on the far west end of the world, the embodiment of the dark land beyond the path of the sun. Morpheus was the most prominent among the children of Nyx as he imitates human. His other siblings include Icelos (who imitate animals) and Phantasos (who does lifeless things, aka. Fantasy). They wear a black garment with a white one over and they have black wings to fly noiselessly to visit sleeping mortals.

The drug Morphine was named after this man. I asked Sam if she knew of any references to serious – and continued experiments with chemical engineering in the brain other than the Manchurian Candidate. Scary as it might sounds, I consider this future inevitable. Prozac nation will eventually deliver a cocktail future.

Ritalin for example, tinkers with dopamine – the neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates pleasure. Lithium triggers serotonin, the neurotransmitter regulating happiness, most known as the happy hormones. The cocktail works slightly differently to different people but mostly within predictable parameters, although not necessarily probable without.

Ginsberg calls it transcendental experience. The sufis call it divine revelation. The oracles interpret dreams. Lucid, almost real, but not quite. In London many years ago, we were walking along the Thames and there was a Salvador Dali exhibition near the very long queue to the then newly opened London Eye. They had this mini sculpture of Dali’s minotaurs for sale but I couldn’t afford it. They’re like, numbered collector item art stuff, slightly beyond my bank account but I would probably pay good money for a Salvador Dali if could afford it.

Treespotting Board

Sam asked if I was seeing anyone so I told her about Alice and rambled on for a little bit. Good thing Skype is cheap. I was mostly at home and glued to the computers and reading an awful lot about all sorts of random stuff. One Master Jedi recently bought me The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong. We know so little about how our head works and thus it is far too much to assume we know too much about life. I’m also reading Stories, a Neil Gaiman collection. Last week I was stuck in the traffic and I read Moby Dick. I suspect my brain is probably nearing a meltdown anyway so it was just consuming a whole load amount of stuff almost indiscriminately. Sam asked if I was taking any pain killers and I assured her that I’d done no pills whatsoever after my teeth crisis. She suggested I keep a very detailed account of what pills I take and when and I agreed.

I’m depressed but I’m not in pain. One should be good enough to be aware of the distinction. If you could engineer reality, why wouldn’t want you to engineer only the good stuff?

I asked Sam if she would consider a corrective surgery to restore her saggy boobs. She used to have the best pair of breasts I have ever touched. Now, on low res Skype video, they look aged and pixellated. She asked if I saw Yayang recently. Yayang is an ex. She is now a lesbian and lives in Los Angeles. Sam recently spent time with her and from what I heard they had a whale of a time.

Sam said that my lesbian ex was looking better than ever. Yayang was and is the most beautiful and sexiest creature I’ve ever laid my eyes and my hands on. The last time was a few years back and we were too overly drunk. To my recollection she didn’t have an orgasm.

By the edge of Thursday I was completely trashed and could no longer be responsible for what I did. I left the house and took a few pills to keep myself manageable. Mild anti-depressant in minimum dose. By the evening I need the fucking pills to knock me right out. I haven’t slept for sixty hours and it was well nearing a breaking point.

In Moby Dick, much of the energy was spent on Ahab. His single minded obsessiveness in going after the whale. I held that Ahab thought the whale was evil. Sam thought I was overanalyzing thing.

I think not. I think my head is just losing it completely as it was absorbing totally random shit in copious amount. Copious amount. I wasn’t overanalyzing a single thing. I was just taking it as the shit hit the fan.

I told Sam that I wasn’t sure if I could handle it. In my entire fucking life I had never felt like I couldn’t take it anymore but I felt like this is it. I now feel like I am standing right on the edge and looking into big black fucking void. Cocktails don’t scare me anymore. I could practically write a prescription for myself. She thinks I should be on valium or something. Knock me right out.

I saw no different. There’s no difference between having me knocked out into the black or experimenting with neurotransmitters. I could take a careful note about it and blog it. I blog in a number of places, not even Google could keep track. Eventually the medium would be the extension of you, the only way to keep the message out of the medium is to turn it completely anonymous. It’s an identity suicide. In many ways, reality bending.

Samantha mentioned Candice. That was weird. Just the mention of her name gave me goosebumps. I was supposed to be in Singapore this weekend for Zouk Out but I purposely sabotaged the trip just to avoid her. I wasn’t even sure that she was in Singapore last weekend but I didn’t feel like risking it. Candice scares me. I can’t say that about too many people.

Maybe it was all very sentimental and she was really the love of my life. Maybe she was just too good in bed. Maybe I just don’t like her as much.

I felt betrayed and that hurts in a whole different way. In many ways and in many occasions, it wasn’t so much the damage as it was the reckless abandon. It was said that the House of Dreams has two gates, one of horn and one of ivory. The gate of ivory was shiny and fake while dreams that escaped thru the gate of horn would be true. It wasn’t much about being pretty.

I haven’t seen Candice since we broke up a few years back. I wouldn’t even recognize her. I wish her well now.

Nearing the end, I was seeing double. I stopped taking calls and I could no longer handle any real time social. I felt my life shutting down, reality tumbling down in medical bills and avalanche of hubris. There were just loud voices and nowhere to go.

I told Sam that I need to pay my fucking bills and I’m running out of time playing social radicals. Samantha didn’t care. I don’t think she ever did. There was no moral to it, everything is neuroscience to her. I think it the evolution of man.

The medium being the extension of man. Chemically, biologically, electronically, digitally. Networked, they all just work differently. It’s trying times for the evolutionary challenged.

It’s time for the New World Order.

on Brutes

2010-12-14T03:30:00.006+07:00

We're all just different sized brutes with random articulation skills. In the end, you cling to a fucking coffin.
~Me, Twitter

The last few days feels completely crap. Maybe because it’s completely crap. Mother was talking about dying all the time and that’s just not something I am used to at the moment. It feels crap.

My grandmother died. Not that I felt much for her. She’s 93 or something. In my entire life I never felt like I was ever a priority on dad’s life anyway and I never saw much of her. I just couldn’t feel much but I did go and pay my respect. For what its worth.

The incident from last week still bothers me. A Jedi council was convened cause everyone was worried that I was going to kill myself (Half the Jedis are tru-born idiots) and the guys were sort of talking about it. I don’t like people hitting me, or laying their hands on me in any ways or form and I find it very hard to reconcile. At the moment, I’m trying not thinking about it much but it bothers me a great fucking deal. The boys thought I should sleep on it.

If I were a guy worth a few more billions than I am and driving a Porsche, I bet I wouldn’t get slapped in a middle of a stupid fucking drunken discussion with a bunch of creepies. I wouldn’t know, I guess.

I went to Stadium, the club. It was one of those nights where everything went dark and I just wanted to go somewhere dark and drunk and loud. Very loud. The operative word there was loud since I was actually sober for most of the night. We left the place at four in the morning or so and I woke her up at six am. How many people on the planet are up at six am?

She gave me drugs. She always does. She couldn’t handle me then and she can’t handle me now so she just gave me drugs. That morning I was actually hoping that she’d given me enough to a different place. Somewhere I wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning.

She didn’t. She gave me enough to knock me out and actually slept for a whole twelve hours and I woke up with the nastiest hangover ever. She had soups ready, one with cream and mushroom, hot. Very hot. I love hot soups but they gotta be really hot.

I wasn’t in the mood much for talking so we didn’t talk very much. I had my hot soup and went back to the bedroom and slept some more. I wanted more drugs but she didn’t give me any. I knew better than to ask why so I just turned the aircon to 22 and went right back to bed. She knew better not to ask me questions so we were good like that.

Morality is just a whole load of bullshit. You’re a big fucking hotshot and you got to slap around a few more guys than you should. You’re a dude with a dick unleashed and you might just got lucky. A lot depends on what you drive or how much you got on the plastics. We all knew this. We know this to the heart and most times we keep to the rules. Except that at times you don’t.

You just don’t get to slap around whoever the fuck you want, whoever the fuck you think you are. Bad hangover – or bad condoms – who the fuck knows? They could all have a conscience in the morning.

I wasn’t gonna think about it. I think I was just angry. For everything. For a whole load of things. So I just didn’t wanna think about it and wished I could do enough drugs not to think about it. I was only smart enough to know the exact amount of drugs that would have a good chance of actually kill my bodily function and I didn’t have the guts to do it. I still didn’t want to wake up and a little bit more cocktails wouldn’t hurt.

When I woke up in the afternoon, Vi had cleaned up the bar and I didn’t have anything in the apartment. No alcohol and no drugs and not much of anything at all so all I could do was a hot shower and I went in to sober up and reflect on things. Reflect on things that didn’t happen. I missed my dog.

There was nobody at all in the apartment and the phone rang so I picked it up. She asked me how I was doing. I told her I was okay. I lied. I felt like shit. Everything felt like shit. I was angry. Very angry. But mostly I was sad. I was hungry, too and I asked where the food was.

Vi said she’d send the car over to pick me up and we could go for some nice Thai and I could be a kindly little prick. I ordered tom yams and water.

A lot of things could happen. A lot. I wouldn’t know what. I have no idea what could happen. A lot of things I wouldn’t know how to handle when they do. She just sat there and watched my rage built. I stared into her eyes, pretty, unmoved as I was telling her a lot of things but I don’t recall my words at the present. I don’t think I want to remember, so I just forget everything I said to her. She just listened.

She even took the bills and I didn’t object. I was very tired and apart from being very angry, I can’t remember very much at all.

I asked to drive home in her nice little merc and we cruised along down Jakarta unclogged road. For no good reason at all I was going through the longest way home and she pretended like she didn’t know. I knew she was tired and at least just as angry. She didn’t say anything about me taking the long way home.

I’ve got me no reason at all to be so mad, except that someone hit me. I don’t take kindly to it. She keeps saying that she knew what it was. Boys are boys and she’d met all kinds of boys. It’s the sort of conversations you don’t really do out loud so you just push the fucking buttons and cruise.

I arrived home. Met my dog. Wished I was happy and I’d more drugs.

on Pirates

2010-12-09T11:15:00.000+07:00

"Call me Ishmael"
~Moby Dick

I've been playing He's a Pirate all morning from Pirates Remixed by DJ Tiesto and others (it's an orchestral remix from the soundtrack). Don't ask why, but if the neighbors are wondering, here it is.

You could listen to the music here.

on Real Time Social

2010-12-09T06:06:00.000+07:00

A few things happened and before I completely forgot about all of them, I might as well jot them down.

I went to see the Indonesia vs Thailand match yesterday. First time ever I was in the Jakarta football stadium - almost full of people - some 65,000 spectators were apparently there. It's a large stadium, built for 100,000 and named after Indonesia's first president Bung Karno.

I don't really understand football and I couldn't livetwit anything because there was no data connection inside the stadium but it was pretty cool. The crowd were very civilized and proper and the food was okay (you get donuts or tahu sumedang, but all sorts of other stuff were available). No alcohol, but you get Coke with ice. The toilet water overflows but I've seen worse toilets.

I also went to Ariel trials in Bandung. The trial themselves were closed - Rob keeps a regular update of the trials so you better off checking his website. He is also currently investigating of whether Miyabi is in town. Mind you, Rob tags his posts as full frontal nudity (although he never actually post one, to my knowledge).

Also, yesterday I was profiled on the My Jakarta section of the Jakarta Globe.They did the interview over emails and the questions were fun so I obliged. I'm happy that the Globe actually publishes them in full. The subject of my anonymity is really totally overrated as it is but now i've a chance to clarify on a dead tree edition. The interview appears here and Rob wrote about my World Domination Plan here.

I've also spent the week reading about Centac - a super agency within the DEA that deals specifically with multinational criminal organization. The news were mostly about Wikileaks - Julian Assange was arrested in London and a group of hackers started attacking Visa and Mastercard in retaliation for them stopped processing Wikileaks donation.

I was sitting with @kopikretek the other day. He was reading a book on Deep Throat.I don't think of Wikileaks as technical issue anymore - this isn't a matter of how a bunch of guys evade authorities or gain access to restricted areas, the discussion ought to be about how societies - mankind - evolve along with the now ever present network.

The future is here, a lot of of people will have a hard time understanding this. Especially the older ones.

Speaking of older ones, a random discussion one night turned physical and I got very edgy. I don't like it when things get physical - it just tickles the wrong fucking way. I normally choose not to socialize with uncivilized brutes but I guess sometimes things just happen. Not always in the way that would wanted it to be.

I got very depressed when shit like this happen and shut down completely. I'm also reading a lot on breast cancer and stuff and these are hardly cheerful times. We sent a bunch of stuff to Europe the other day so I would learn more in the next few days.

I've had enough of real time social for the week and will probably remain in my lair for the next few days. I promise the dog some fun given happy weather.

Later, all.

on Not Much at All

2010-11-19T04:49:00.000+07:00

The last two months have been extremely intense. A lot of stuff happened and now a lot of stuff are about to make a big bang. It’s pretty weird. I wrote tons of notes here and there but I’m not sure I could actually write things down as it happens. I like it the old bloggy way. Shit happens, I write. I write some other time. Easier that way.

Anyway, as always, I’m still figuring things out. Will let you know when I’m done.

on the Lunatics

2010-11-16T03:47:00.000+07:00

Many things happened the last few weeks, I don’t have much time to write. Mother called and told me she had a bad tumor. She said she needed an operation at Dharmais Cancer Hospital soon. As in within days and the docs needed to meet me in person. I didn’t know how to react and I still don’t. I’m still processing I wish I could just go on processing that forever.

The earth is getting angrier and angrier. Merapi coughed up a few times in a few weeks and the dead numbered in hundreds. Sad sad weeks.

Gayus went to Bali and saw a tennis match. That’s also some creepy shit. I didn’t even have the time to breathe Obama.

Anyway, I saw Joko Anwar’s Onrop today. It’s a musical satire based on the current events right here in Indonesia. There was a scene where Bram, the book writer was tried for using the word ‘naked’. Luna was sitting next to me and she just got the word that Ariel is going to trial next Monday. The press will pick it up soon enough. The way they time this shit is getting overly obvious.

Anyway, the musical was really good. I haven’t seen any musical since London and I never thought I’d enjoy something like that in Jakarta.

Weird shit.
Write later.

on Black Dahlia Tag

2010-11-02T08:07:00.000+07:00

on a Week that Was

2010-10-29T05:35:00.002+07:00

Putting this week in a list format wouldn’t make it any easier to understand. Monday arrived almost exactly as I expected, except for the weather. The weather went apeshit. There was an episode with the Attorney General Office giving three different explanations in one day and as Tuesday dawned, the rest of the week was set to go with it. Heavens cracked and Jakarta drowned in muggy water with half the city stuck in traffic for the rest of the night. I got home only after getting on a boat. For real.

We bought a $500 Eyefinity video board to power a set of four 32” screen and I was pretty excited about it except that power supply on the box was a wimp. I told them yesterday that they needed a bigger box to do it but nobody wouldn’t listen, so there you go.

Alice was on one her swings. These days she does it every weekend so I’m pretty much fucked for pretty much half the week. Relationships scare the living shit out of me. Still, it bothers me a great deal more than I thought it would.

I went to visit Susno Duadji in prison. He was smaller than I thought. The trip there took some four hours in the worst of the year’s traffic. By the time I actually got there the mood was somewhat sour – he was also stuck for hours on his way back from a court date in town. It was well beyond the allowed visiting hours so the guards were weary and everybody looked dodgy.

I wasn’t sure why I went. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for really but I’m kinda glad I did it. There’s a whole lot of things that you could explain just by seeing.

This half of the week was a lot better than that half. The weather was better and I didn’t spend hours in the traffic. I was working on the book thing and I managed to actually do a few pages. To be perfectly honest, I’m kinda glad I’m doing. Let’s hope the thing gets done.

At a dinner party somewhere in the posh end of town, someone asked me what it is that I do. It’s the most awkward of all questions. I think I said in straight face that I was a Collector of Information. I really was going to say that I am presently working on my World Domination Plan. I have no idea how to explain what I do in any meaningful way to anyone. Doesn’t matter really, I don’t really have to explain myself to everyone. Generally speaking, if you failed to see how I could be useful to you, then you probably couldn’t afford me anyway.

A couple drove me home. Or maybe not a couple but they looked a lot like a couple and I couldn’t bring it up to ask. Really, it’s none of my business. Both of them were pretty much trashed and they cracked bad jokes and laughed a lot on the way home. I was wondering if anyone was smoking anything fun but really there weren’t any. The night was cold, I now wore my black scarf from London everywhere. It’s a bit hot in the day but Jakarta night’s getting colder and wetter every day.

The city’s fucked.

on Personal Bandwidth

2010-09-19T03:46:00.002+07:00

I'm rearranging the network at home again and it's been troublesome.Two external 500GB drives that I used for backup and recently failed and since i haven't got new ones yet, it will have to do with an internal 500GB drive on the Game Rig.

The problem with the Game Rig is that the power supply doesn't seem to cope well with the extra drive and it crashes every 16 hours or so - requiring a total shut down. Also, it's only connected to the others via wireless so file transfer is ridiculously slow.

I was at Master Mickey's the other week and he showed me his new rig. He's using two solid state drives (for program and OSes) and attached another two 500GB for data. From what I gathered the performance boost is very significant though it's still very pricey these days. The drives (128 GB) are costing him about $400 each (price ratio of SSD/HDD is about 20:1).

Solid State Drives are drives without any moving parts, they use much less electricity and well, obviously, much faster. This is the stuff you find in your iPods and iPads and it's bringing the magic everywhere else.
Since processor technology developes quicker than storage, the lag time on data access (when the discs spin looking to retrieve the data you requested) means processor often waits for the drive. SSDs address this problem.

That and I need to upgrade the network somehow.

Do you have any idea how much bandwidth do you require for your own personal use?

on The Pentagon's Cyberstrategy

2010-09-18T17:02:00.001+07:00

This is from the Foreign Affairs, a paper called Defending A New Domain, The Pentagon's Cyberstrategy by William J. Lynn III. An interesting read. The full article is here.

In cyberspace, the offense has the upper hand. The Internet was designed to be collaborative and rapidly expandable and to have low barriers to technological innovation; security and identity management were lower priorities. For these structural reasons, the U.S. government's ability to defend its networks always lags behind its adversaries' ability to exploit U.S. networks' weaknesses. Adept programmers will find vulnerabilities and overcome security measures put in place to prevent intrusions. In an offense-dominant environment, a fortress mentality will not work. The United States cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls or it will risk being overrun. Cyberwarfare is like maneuver warfare, in that speed and agility matter most. To stay ahead of its pursuers, the United States must constantly adjust and improve its defenses.

on Presidential Cancellations

2010-09-17T05:17:00.000+07:00

Indonesian President is not going to the US for the ASEAN Summit. This is peculiar. Everybody knows how the President is always excited about increasing his international exposure and not attending a summit with President Obama is uncharacteristic of him.

Since elected to office, President Obama cancelled on his trip to Indonesia not once, but twice. There was a lot of huffs and puffs about it – Amien Rais went on talk shows and practically booed SBY’s foreign policy. Anindya Bakrie said, “Actions speak louder than words in international diplomacy, paging for Mr. Obama in Indonesia.”

President Yudhoyono took political hit for those and adding to his problem here at home, it doesn’t look like he could afford to take a high profile absence from Jakarta anytime soon. Indonesians are very sentimental about Mr. Obama and the American President would offer a valuable photo op, provided that Mr. Yudhoyono was seen suitable as host.

His previous cancellation was originally scheduled just after the Century hearing – if I were to play what ifs, I’d hazard to say that given all things equal, things would’ve been a LOT different had Mr. Obama fulfilled his promise then. The two Presidents, in Blue, speaking to the dummies in Senayan. The world could’ve been a different place.(this is from my blog in February).

But he didn’t, time’s different and now Mr. Yudhoyono must take care of things at home. I am very happy that he actually said no to the invite – although it does seem a little out of character.

From the Foreign Policy side, I’ve been wondering for a while if this country is really sliding into a trade colony of China without the world actually realizing it. The trade surplus is getting into an alarming level while Indonesia is sliding into a deindustrialization. The country is holding up well in a global crisis but a lot of it’s trade with China is also off the radar – massive illegal logging trade came to mind. The US military embargo in the last decade means Indonesia had also been acquainted with support from other countries – Russia and China. Again, here, I’m worried about things we didn’t see.

The other thing is Malaysia. Indonesia is already underrated as it is and the world’s most irksome neighbor will be peddling their wares there with Mr. Obama and Friends.

Really, how many more of these tribal kingdoms are the Americans planning to prop up around the world?

on iPad/Penguin Fashion

2010-09-16T03:27:00.000+07:00

This I just gotta post.

on August, 2010

2010-09-15T03:41:00.002+07:00

Actually, Ramadan this year was quite interesting. I was out quite a bit more than usual – which means I went places to meet strangers and eat good food. Well, some of them were good.

I went to three dinners with Indonesian DPR members. Worth mentioning cause the politics are heating up and sometimes I enjoy watching them in their natural habitat – their homes. Actually, only one invited me to his home, the others were in some fancy restaurant.

The Golkar guys were itchy. You could tell cause they all look smirky and jerky. Not that that was unusual characteristics for this lot but still, they were more itchy than usual. We went to Al Nafoura for dinner, which was good food, the cheese was better than the conversation. I gleamed nothing of interests and I went for a drink later with some reporters. Journalist, as they call it in this town.

There were also dinners with three cabinet members. Yes, I’m fairly high up on the social food chain here. Meh.

The Minister of Commerce and Trade and Whatnot didn’t actually serve food on her own dinner invite so that barely count towards the food count. It’s the fasting month and she had the tables cleaned out before some of the guests had dinner – I wasn’t the only one left out – all because she was showing off a Powerpoint with charts of her twitter follower growth or something. I didn’t quite follow cause literally, I was starved in a dinner invite.

What kind of dinner invite have PowerPoint anyway?

Another dinner was arranged in private and without too many guests and the minister actually bothered to serve good food. That or his wife knows how to cook. This Dude I’ve known for a hundred years and I know how his other wife cooked dinner. I asked him what the President is really like and if he had any thoughts as of when the President would start growing some balls. He laughed out and offered cakes.

I was let out to the balcony to smoke at some point – I love the magnificent wind of night time Jakarta during Lebaran when it was deserted and less smoggy – and the Dude followed me outside. He said someone was looking for a man nearing my qualification, and if I was interested in taking a role with a political party.

It’s not like I ruled out ever working in politics, I’ve no moral qualms about getting in politics, I just never thought of an idea good enough to work with. I could always play the devil but then again, I won’t be cheap.

I asked Vi what she thought of me getting in politics and she didn’t seem too happy with the idea, saying that it would “only bring the worse in you.” Politics and prostitutes, really, at the bottom of it, there’s not much difference between the two. Vivian is a prostitute and she works regularly with politicians, she should know these things.

They had a dinner thingy at the studio too and I went by one night to say hello to the guys. We basically locked ourselves in the big box and watch Stones in Exile in a very large, rowdy crowd, including at least two young men armed with full amped guitars. My head felt woozy about halfway thru the disc so the very large crowd went out and decided to play some fireworks. It was decidedly fun. I learned how to do a proper Molotov cocktail.

I was in Salihara one night and there was a decent sized crowd for a discussion on Twitter and social movement and stuff. It was kinda interesting and I ran into some interesting people and we stayed around kinda long.

Does the internet really bring a social change? The real catalyst to finally tip Indonesia over to a more civilized and more deserving times? Disruptive moments, the Kodak moments of history – the time right before things go one way, or the other. Interesting times.

I bet it is. In fact, I’m sure that it is. It’s just too many people take internet for granted. It’s like they can’t remember when their Government last denied them a technological (and social) leap not 12 years ago. Indonesia is a curious place. Ten years ago, she had neither an internet connection nor democracy. Nowadays, it’s drowning in both. Kodak moments, it could go either way right the moment after.

I’m bored and tired of the twitter chat. Really, I think talking about twittering is a bit weird. Not because it’s rude or fancy or whatnot, but really, you already twit it, why would you wanna converse it again? It’s like if I twit every conversation I just had with everyone else, I would probably be dead today.

One thing i know tho, these fresh breed of QWERTY politicians, come election in 2014 - we will obliterate them. Now it's keeping it this way til 2014.

By the third week of Ramadan I was hitting that social fatigue point where I stopped responding to external stimuli and paid very little attention to the world allegedly happening around me.

On the eve of Indonesian Independence Day this year, the whole country mellowed out and then all flag waving after the Malaysian fishing boat incident. We were out all night in Coffee War talking about all sorts of stuff Indonesia til the late hours. I think this country needs a vision readjustment. They need to start looking forward.

There was a very nice dinner on my birthday with a full table of Jedis with tons of good food and dessert. Then Alice came to pick me up and we went for more dinner with the Russians* and I had tons of fun. Someone mentioned something in Vietnam and I thought that it’s probably a good idea to get away from Jakarta for a while.

I dunno. Work situation was at some bizarre, highly-unstable-tho-frequently-familiar phase, I’m actually wondering to myself how I survived this far. It’s very weird. I’m going to have to sort this out and presently, Vietnam sounds tempting.

The thing is of course, I really shouldn’t go back to playing with that social reset button. I know what I’m like, and I hate myself when I do it, and I’m trying my best not doing it. I lost my phone last month. It just happened.

The very last night of Ramadan was a nice dinner at the C Grill at the Hyatt, which is probably my favorite hotel restaurant these days. Our host was good with good food and the mood festive. Not overly victorious, more celebrating the fact that we’re surviving this far. Freedom, really is a state of mind. I went back to see Alice and stayed til 3am talking gibberish.

Was most fun. Very August. Hope you all have a good month.

Later, all.

*(and other Europeans, Russians sound most dramatic)

on the Return Mudik Trip

2010-09-14T23:54:00.002+07:00

Lebaran was a few days ago and everything quiet down a little from the victorious theme, the weird and pathetic stuff on the news giving the country a sobering nod, I guess. That and a few millions Indonesians who are currently on the roads, heading back to Jakarta and clogging the road for miles. I wish everybody a safe trip but obviously, it's not. It's costing lives at some hourly rate or something. I just hope my maids get back here okay. I'm expecting them back all in by next week.

Meanwhile, my laundry is piling up and I'm on my third row of tees. I will last exactly another week, then I'm gonna have to recycle it back from the top.

Let's all pray for the maids to make it home safe.

on Lebaran, 2010

2010-09-11T03:56:00.003+07:00

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.
~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Finally, the festive times. Most of the day was spent driving places, driving mother to see a few relatives. I ate a lot and slept for the most of it and it was generally okay.

The world on the news however, was less sparkly.

There is the Qur'an burning situation out of Florida. A lunatic church with some 30 followers are holding the world hostage over a threat for burning books. Not just any book of course, the Holy Book. There were street riots in Kabul and condemnations from all corners of the world - from Glenn Beck to President Yudhoyono of Indonesia. US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates called the Reverend and Gen. Petreus explained the security threats. President Obama spoke. Twice.

Personally, I think it's a twisted situation and likely, not as simple as it looks. This minister, Terry Jones demands for the mosque to be moved from Ground Zero in NYC. President Obama came out and reiterated the inalienable rights to practice religion freely in America. The minister said the is presently thinking of not burning the Quran. Of course, there was no guarantee that he would change his mind. He already did once.
Very fragile. Too fragile.

At the moment, all the major outlet are reporting this. BBC, CNN, FOX News all carry the news, and also Google News. I can't say what's on his mind but i bet you Terry Jones had never experienced so much attention in his life. Ever. Not that most people would crave the attention of Glenn Beck or Hamas. The fact that this stuff is being reported effectively in real time, with live broadcasts of Loons and Presidents from all over the world, means that the viewers are demanding some sort of closure. A climax of sort.

Book burning always get people very emotional. Michael Saletan at Slate has a good piece on this.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, 21 million lives are affected by the flood they're fearing the country could collapse. And this country has nukes. Makes you think of the precarious balance of this little, fragile, world.

Celebrating the Day of Victory, President Yudhoyono held an "open house" today. 3,500 Indonesians went to the Palace today and one man was trampled to death. One blind well wisher died, for wanting to wish his King.I'm telling you, this stuff is ominous. I'm getting all the dark vibes.

Pictures stolen from detik.com, taken from the gates of the Presidential Palace, Jakarta.

Every once in a while, man must sit down with his demons.

Happy Holiday, all.

on Stoned Senators

2010-09-09T05:03:00.000+07:00

I was out all evening and ended up in Coffee War until some ungodly hour. No time to write anymore useful stuff, but here is from Politico, a senior economic adviser and at one time worked on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was arrested today for attempting to bring marijuana into the Hart Senate Office Building.

Apparently, this isn' the first time this happened. According to the same Politico report, in the past year and a half, more than a dozen people have been stopped for bringing marijuana into the Capitol complex, along with other drugs, including at least one instance involving cocaine.

Now, Indonesia on the other hand, no system of such. We let all sorts of idiots into the House, stoned or not stoned.

on August, Virgos and Pipes

2010-09-07T22:57:00.000+07:00

Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter.
~ Bernard Baruch

Fourth day without the maids. The house is okay and the dishes are manageable. I’ve gone further back into my cave and I haven’t seen a human being for almost two days and spent most of the weekend on the computers. All the wonderful things you could do with Yahoo Pipes. I had something in mind I’d like to try though it’s been mostly a distraction. Most of the time I was reading or writing, sorting things out in my little head. You wouldn’t want to believe how much shit is going on.

August is always difficult, and Virgos scare me but this year Fasting month comes in overlapping both and making it even harder. I never really go anywhere during the holiday cause that’s usually when the maids go home and that means the dog is all by himself in the house. I like being alone. Sometimes, people are too much hassle. Sometimes, we spend it at the villa but I need to work on the internet.

The fridge is well stocked so that’s not a worry. I even have ice cream.

Lita was here some weeks ago. She was back in Jakarta for a few days and called me up for a drink so we went and had lots and lots of hot chocolate. I used to date her back when we were 16 or something, then she turned into a full time lesbian, then she went away to live in LA. Somewhere during the implosion of my divorce, I found myself stranded in LAX and she came to pick me up. We ended up in Las Vegas and we took a Dodge Viper with racing stripes for a drive to the canyon. Proper red, proper stripes, proper fast.

I feel like driving really fast right now.

Nothing happened with Lita, we had a drink for a few hours, exchanged old stories, then she went back. I didn’t even go to the airport with her, the traffic here sucks.

Nearing the end of the fasting month, everyone draws back to where they come from, the people they’re comfortable with. Jakarta gets quieter and somewhat more bearable with two million people going away. The news goes into the traffic cycle and everything else gets left behind.

I just go back to my cave. Next year, I’ll have the maids around so I could go somewhere.

Later all.

on Parampaa and a Happy Holiday!

2010-09-06T19:29:00.001+07:00

Someone created me an avatar on twitter. Kinda like it so it'll be there for a while. Apparently, it's called Parampaa - i'm still trying to figure out what it is exactly, but it does look kinda cool. There's a mini gallery, here.

My usual avatar is from a painting (Puff) by Daniel Peacock, who was kind enough to let me use it here. I been using it for a number of years, the parody above is based on the original.

This is from some while ago, Happy Holiday wish from Daniel!.

on the Last Week of Ramadan

2010-09-05T05:02:00.000+07:00

Last weekend in Ramadan, the maids went home tonight. It'll be me and the dog for the rest of the holiday. I've a few projects so most probably I'll be spending most of the free time either reading or working. I've a new book called Stories, an anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, and I'm pretty excited about it. The last short stories I read was an Edgar Allan Poe collection, each story with a commentary from the likes of Nelson DeMille and Stephen King - In the Shadow of the Master.

There's also a few other things that I really better get on with.My Chinese horoscope reading says something about relying on your intuition instead of embarking on tedious calculations.Tedious indeed.

There's a horrible incident in Sulawesi somewhere, so far with seven people shot dead and some worrying signs of less random violence here and there. The end of the holy month - the most testing of times. Let's hope we all get out alright.

Btw, I been out at Coffee War quite a bit recently. It's a nice cozy place with a lot of good people. Kinda nice. Found this picture on the internet.

on Breakfasting

2010-09-04T03:45:00.000+07:00

I was stuck in a stupid meeting all day and got away to meet with some people, old time journos including a stodgy one from Indonesian Broadcasting Comission (KPI). She didn't like me much, not that i could say that I like her any better.

It's kinda weird, things happening all in a weird, weird way. I would probably write a book someday that would make more sense out of this shit.

Seriously.

on the Last Week of August, 2010

2010-09-03T02:29:00.001+07:00

The last week was a lot of things. We worked on the petition thingy - some 1000+ names demanding the President take urgent and immediate measures to address corruption problem within the Indonesian law enforcement. It was an interesting exercise. I sincerely believe that the only way Indonesia could move forward is if all of us start doing democracy properly - in well mannered and civilized way. Democracy just doesn't work any other way. You can't get on the street everytime.

We raised enough money for a full page ad on today's Jakarta Post, so we'll see how it goes. I'll keep you posted.

The crazy thing is that of course, that's not the only thing happening this week. Things with Alice are going thru some bizarre and unfortunate phase that i couldn't really say much about at the moment, but it's pretty intense. I'm not sure yet where this is going but it could only get better.

I'm exhausted. My body clock is going in some weird bizarre turns again and it's taking the toll. Will sleep now, update tomorrow. Below is the latest draft of the petition as i received it. I've no idea what it would look like tomorrow morning.

on Gadgetries

2010-08-27T03:38:00.000+07:00

I don't have much to write now. This is my desk.

on Icons

2010-08-14T06:23:00.003+07:00

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
~Frank Zappa

Sometimes cultural icons change and you witness the experience subconsciously. What I really mean is you actually realize it and remember the moments. I remember when Michael Jordan retired and I was very sad when Kurt Cobain killed himself. Soraya loves her Princess Diana.

The other week, Iwan Fals played a short gig at Potatohead. The lead musician for an entire generation of estranged and abused Indonesian people played a gig at Yuppies Central. It was a good show as always and everyone seemed to have enjoyed all four songs gracefully. Apparently they did a poll among the regulars and they wanted Iwan Fals to play so Potatohead had him for four songs, solo with acoustic guitar. I had a good night.

Franky Sahilatua, another musician cum social activist from the earlier generation fell ill last week. His friends arranged for a fund raising event in the city and I popped by for a sneak peek. There were some interesting, eclectic mix of people – pop musician and at least one king of Java. I’ve never met Sri Sultan before and I didn’t converse or anything, just watching from a different seat, he didn’t look much like a king.

Speaking of icons, Slash – of Guns N’ Roses – was here too. The show was fun and I ran into a few old friends. It wasn’t quite Guns N’ Roses and I couldn’t resist the idea that I was somewhat being duped into a GN’R Lite concert, but it was still a lot of fun. I don’t think anyone else could get away wearing that silly hat.

I’ve the new version of Heroes of Might and Magic V. It’s a radical departure from the previous games – now in full 3D with fancy special effects and stuff – and whole lot of new and different creatures. I’ve been playing dungeon and dragons since the earliest days and yet there are creatures out there I don’t recognize.

It takes a bit of getting used to even tho some of the new creatures are look familiar in a weird and funky way. The stone gargoyles holds a big tablet inscribed what looks like inscription taken straight from Matrix, in monochrome green. This creatures attack its enemies by smashing the tablet against their heads. There are still various dragons, of course, but they look a lot like T Rex and some are obviously Velociprators.

A world of Gandalf and Morpheus, set in a Jurassic period. I’ve been playing it for four or six hours and so far I have not encountered any dwarves.

I guess computer games probably do simulate and absorb cultural shift in the most efficient manner – being a multi-linear story telling platform, it’s most suited to adapt to the escalating pace of modern life.

I ran into Faisal Basri – the economist – and I asked if he was concerned with the economy, I was particularly curious of what he thinks of budget planning and national competitiveness (notes on this are on the other blog). He’s read the same Harvard report and had apparently met with some of the researchers to discuss the findings. I don’t think anyone really think of technology seriously here yet but at least now everyone is getting on twitter.

The beginning of Ramadan this year opened with a rather public debate on pornography and an internet censorship plan by the Government. I do feel embedded to the debate – both on the porn as well as the tech side – but so far it’s been a very frustrating call.

Perhaps because most people were just responding to the callous proposal by the Minister, the public debate is more a moral one instead of a policy shaping argument. It’s probably not worth debating ‘what is porn’ for Indonesia today, but I think it’s critical that some of us start thinking about how technology could bring about real change to Indonesia. It’s about time.

This is important for my World Domination Plan. Future updates will follow.

on Random Air

2010-08-04T01:47:00.000+07:00

Communications disruption could mean only one thing: Invasion
~Star Wars

I was reading about a certain spoofing demo of GSM signals. Creepy stuff. Wireless remains the most vulnerable distribution model, but the more effecient one. It sets you up for a whole different game.

Legitimate surveillance models for phonecalls - eg. law enforcement stuff - require cooperation from cellular provides. Over the air active eavesdropping is problematic because in deploying man in the middle (inserting a device between the caller and receiver) is an active method and spoofs base towers to trick handsets, effectively and potentially, all the handsets within the vicinity, therefore technically interrupting all the connection equally - and not specifically the targeted source. Therefore this is a gray area at best.

Plus the technology isn't perfect - assuming you're actually located the conversation you wanted to target, other calls in the area would be intefered with, plus the signal strength of the base tower you're pretending to be. Large base towers in dence urban areas handle massive capacity and you need serious hardware to do it if you want to do it serious. The industrial scale device are rare and price and most probably illegal.

This guy in Vegas did it with a $1,500 equipment, including the laptop to run it. Scary stuff and I wouldn't know how to do it.

Theoritically, this is classic stuff. Wifi signals are notoriously susceptible to this sort of attacks. Everyone now carry an iPad or a wireless laptop - and take them to work from all over the place using any available free signals. Locating them at some wifi void and spoofing the signal with a pocket sized access point - connected directly over 3G to fool your laptop into thinking it has found an alternate route to the internet - is childplay.

If you're doing it from a nice comfortable angle with a bigger pipe - say an office space in one of the high rises facing stupid slow traffic jams - then you could do them in real numbers.

Random stuff are not always random. Most likely, it looks random relative to your point of view but it might make complete sense from someone who was looking at a bigger - more complete picture. To make random less random, you add more randomness. Eventually, something would make sense.

a Mondrian.

I Miss Being A Tree

2010-07-31T02:14:00.000+07:00

from @chibialfa - many thanks

on The New Template

2010-07-27T03:06:00.002+07:00

Everything on this page is scripted. In a sense that I don't really get to decide in some random arbitrary manner about what to display here.

The most recent posts are always displayed first. Occasionally, I repost things from the archive, sometimes there are other treespotters around with things to say and sometimes - but very rarely - I schedule posts. I pull in content from other website at all times.I write about anything, mostly nonsense.

The pictures are pulled in from the web - mostly Picasa and Flickr - as an open content stream using APIs, widgets and other stuff, based on simple basic keywords. I change the keywords every so often.

Usually, the visuals are just there to break your attention and very rarely actually relevant to the posts I write. Unless google thinks otherwise. Other slideshows are screenshot of this blog over the years. Snapshots, also stored in the cloud.

The news headlines are pulled from Google News - where they've already been indexed and ranked - again, I only provide for the keywords and I change this whenever I like.

The twitter real-time feed are pulled directly using simple twitter searches - keywords provided by yours truly and rendered using Google real time search backend. Lags happen all the time so it's not actually really real time. I think.

I add and change elements to the page as I experiment with different code, widgets, APIs and other online services. Most of the times, I use only available public codes or free service. Any changes I made or contributed are thrown back there in public domain.

Naturally, there’s no way I could guarantee that everything in this page are free from copyright claims but I do my best to respect other’s work and I generally don’t pull without explicit consent – or any off the book methods. Since the feed are provided by large clouds – Google and Twitter mostly, I don’t use Facebook and I don’t like walled content – the copyrights arrangements ought to be compliance from their end.

If you spot anything you didn’t like, be sure to let me know and I will take it down if necessary.

Edgelings

2010-07-21T02:58:00.001+07:00

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
~Hunter S. Thompson

Sometimes I get really paranoid and I worry about big people coming in to drag me out of my house. Short of recreating entire concoctions of absurdist allegations, they could conceivably cook something more plausible, like a sex tape or something. Maybe even for allegedly having put a kitty in the fridge. You wouldn’t know really, never under estimate the Indonesian Police.

I am trained to be careful and genetically programmed not to be stupid most of the time but occasionally the brain just wants to shut down. You just wanna shoot the whole day down.

Things are coming to August, Ramadan, otherwise known as The Month. Mother is also returning in a few weeks. She is in Europe for the summer and I was just happy that we had a time out for a while. Things were overly ugly between us I don’t think I could handle mom the state I am in. Plus it’s never a good idea to deal with her when I’m having money problems. She gets perky at that sort of things.

I was in Bali the other week and I was just really thinking about getting a place by the sea, away from all shit that happened and not to have ever read the news again. Just to sit there with cold drinks and watch the sea. I’d take the dog with me, too.

I think I understand my head a little better these days. I have less the intensity that I had and I am more easily tired these days. In slower turns, I could understand my head better. It makes it easier time figuring out myself. Not that I actually control myself any better. But any less than this mean I’ll be clinically insane. At which time I promise to shoot myself.

Vivian didn’t like the idea of me seeing anybody at all but she actually suggested that I get a proper girlfriend. Someone that I would probably listen to, someone I would be happy to go to sleep with. Make dreams easier. I thought the idea does have its appeals.

In any event, I promise myself to write more, just in case. I’ll be here and on the other blogs and generally all over the place.

PS: I need to rid myself the fucking facebook.

on Being Good

2010-07-20T01:42:00.002+07:00

"If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up."
~Hunter S. Thompson

There was a car parked in front of my house earlier tonight. Eerily out of place but most probably innocent. I just notice that sort of stuff.

I stopped at the studio on the way home to see some people. Everyone was there playing pool and shooting tequilas and getting generally yanked out. I was feeling rather stupid myself and there are times when I don’t really feel like being alone and getting shitfaced and so I chose to go shitfaced wholesale in group instead.

My teeth are okay and I wasn’t getting anymore of the head pain. Except that things are just generally volatile with work and finances topping my list of concerns. My personal safety came a close third and so getting happy and shitfaced are really pretty much number four and five respectively and I only do that very occasionally these days.

Except the thing with the tooth and the head problem was that I couldn’t possibly function normally without extreme dose of painkillers and at this point, the painkillers are probably working their way through my digestive system, resulting in significant reduction of the necessary stuff and minerals intake. Throw in this diet irregularity with clinically reprehensible ADD and chronic sleep disorder and it is actually a biological wonder that I am physically almost as fit as the next guy – if skinnier.
In any event, this wasn’t a nominally happy conclusion and in fact it was rather depressing so I left to see the guys and get shitfaced instead.

A lot of what we did was actually gossiping. Boys don’t do it as often as girls do, but when we do gossip, we do it in obscene intensity, so much that very few boys would ever admit that they had, in fact, gossiped so much.

I have my thing with Alice and I think things are really somewhere between here and there kinda thing and the pressure is rather intense although I usually just tell myself that really, it isn’t so intense. I’ve been thru hell and back and this isn’t the sort of stuff that rattle my cage but obviously things are different. I am now older than when things are nuts and it was all sex and rocknroll. The Jedis now have kids and are supposedly living their own respectable lives. We’re older. Things are different.

Someone asked if I was worried. Do I worry?

I’m not sure. I don’t think I got the question right. I do worry about the future a little bit. Between now and then, I saw some pretty mad things. Things I could’ve been better not ever knowing. I know that things are very often entirely not what they seem and they could, in fact, be very ugly. We live by ignoring them the best we could.

In a way, that makes me a pessimist. But really I am not.

I genuinely believe that things will generally get better. In a way that better is the only way forward. That for us to move forward we really have to do one better. We will prevail. We are better than that.

It is much harder to be good.

~Lady Chatterley’s Lover

on an Impending Doom

2010-07-18T23:02:00.001+07:00

The maids been working for me for some four years or so. They’re in their early thirties, I think, or maybe late twenties. They work like magic and they run the house – cook, laundry, garden and the occasionally necessary fixes.

Once every year – during the last weeks of Ramadan – they go home for their annual holiday and I have to do everything by myself. Well, me and the dog.

Thing is, with them gone, I wouldn’t know where they put everything – chops, mops, the whole lot. They seem to intentionally hide these things just so I wouldn’t sell them or something.

Anyhow, so every year I buy new things. Chops, mops, the whole lot.

It’ll be time to go shopping soon.

Have a good week all.

on the Pleasure of Women

2010-07-12T23:24:00.003+07:00

An earlier chat about the Politics of Fucking lead to a guest post - in order to complete the picture by giving men directions. As we all know, you're supposed to read the manual. For the good of mankind, here is the first part. Next post we'll give you another 25.

Thank the ubergorgeous CDC who volunteered us, the Pleasure of Women, Part I

Don't put so much pressure of a women's body. We die to have "the body" like Megan Fox or Victoria's Secret models, but the fact is, we are not them. REMEMBER, we women love to see you with a Hugh Jackman or Gerard Butler's body but the fact remains that you are not. So shut up.
We women loves go down on you. But sometimes, you are rushing it. Give it a bit of time. If you try to enjoy the kissing part, you'll get a service with a smile.
Yes, sometimes we like it romantic way.. But women loves fucking the hard way too. You think we're too sweet? Think again.
There's this saying that said that men's odor is attractive for women. True, but not completely right. Take a shower first. The feeling of a clean body after a shower is a turn on.
We love and willing to try new positions, even the weirdest and uncomfortable one, but remember, its only for trying, not to make us have the big O.
Care to ask what position and what efforts that will makes us have an orgasm. We don't come as easy as you are. Leave your ego elsewhere and be patient. We appreciate it if you care. Or you won't get another. That's that.
Role playing is fun, but the point of having sex or make love (if you do it with the one you love) is the rush of endorphines. And that is the fucking itself. You want so much of role playing? Go watch a sinetron.
Never, ever share your experience with other women, or men to a woman you're with now. Each sexual relation is special and different. If you don't like what we do, go and don't come back. We can find another. No worries.
Yes, women can fuck without love. It called fucking. But don't you dare called us slut. Get a mirror, you are no better than us.
Women and Men are equal sex partner. If you want us to suck it, make sure you eat our pussy. Period.
We women loves when you praise us for our skills. So keep it coming, it'll makes us even better.
Don't complain on how we expressed our pleasure on bed. We moan, we scream, when we want to. If we don't moan, maybe because its not good enough.
We do loves too hear you moan too. Too quite can sounds a bit boring. But too much can make you sounds like tarzan on spongebob. It's just wrong.
I know its biological. Men sleeps right after sex. Hey, we want to get some rest too after that sexercise. But do you mind to say a few words first and not just playing dead?
And hey, when we haven't had the big O, after you had yours, we sure can give you a couple hours to get it hard again, but an effort for the second time would be nice and fun too. Of course, if you care to try, or if you are strong enough.
Women love oral sex.
Women love the fingers too. Give us the clean, well trimmed nails. If you have long dirty nails, you can just forget it and find the door. OUT!
We understand when doing it for the first time with a new sex partner, you came fast, maybe because you got too excited. But try too keep it for at least 40 minutes to give us a good impression. How? Do your homework boys.
As much as we are responsible to make your dick hard, you, on the other hand, are responsible to make ours moist. Foreplay is a must!
A brazillian wax is for the pleasure of your visual sense is very painful, so do yours too men: Get it trimmed.
Some women don't mind wherever you wanna come, inside, on the boobs, or our mouth and some do. So don't just spray it like u don't give a shit. Its our body, we have the right.
Sometimes we swallow, sometimes we don't. Its personal. Not that we don't like it, we love it, but very picky to those who can get it. So work your way to earn it.
When it comes to safe sex, use condoms. Don't makes us buy those, you buy the condoms, we buy the pills. That's how it works.
Don't get lazy using condoms. We women can make it fun. We use our mouth to put it in place. Never see that one before? Maybe you haven't met the queen.
Duration is IMPORTANT! And hour or more is what we enjoy. Again, we don't come as easy as you are. Think about giving boys. Say goodbye to your ego.
But if you can't keep it long enough, we understand. We are a loving creature. But please do find a good doctor. For your own sake.

on Recent Logs

2010-07-07T11:15:00.002+07:00

Here's an actual screenshot from my blog search keywords analysis. People googled these stuff and that's generally how they find me here.

Seriously people, what on earth is "happy tails at kinkfest"?

on Being Sexy

2010-07-07T02:45:00.001+07:00

"If there is reincarnation, I'd like to come back as Pamela Anderson's fingertips."
~Unknown

I was chatting with Olive earlier, she asked why I thought she was sexy (I very much do, still). I heard many girls ask the same question. They wanted to know what guys find sexy and honestly, I’m not sure you could ever figure it out.

When it comes to their sexual appetite, I think guys operate much like some crude, primitive machine: so long as certain parameters are satisfied, they would be happy to entertain most impulses. The complication arose when it comes to identifying those parameters and their precise theoretical boundaries.

For illustration purposes, tonight, we will be talking about breasts. It’s widely known and accepted that a) Men are obsessed with boobs and b) Women are almost equally obsessed about boobs. Just about the only thing they have in common is that both men and women are obsessed about the same thing.

Women are notoriously insecure about their boobs. Younger women thought they’re too small, older women complained that they’re saggy. I ran into a cosmetic surgeon the other day on the plane and he was explaining to me the latest trend in nipple colour and saturation. In fact, women are so obsessed about their boobs entire new fields of elective surgery, organ transplant, bio-enhancements and whole lot of other stuff. Billions and billions of female dollars are spent on their boobs.

I happen to know a girl with a well executed boob job and in the name of research, she let me touch her enhanced organs for verification. To be perfectly honest, I can’t really tell the difference except that her boobs were certainly bigger and firmer than most. They also cost some $5000 more, so that’s probably money well spent.

However, needless to say that any other home grown, organic boobs also have similarly arousing effect in my bio machines. Just because she was a magnitude bigger doesn’t mean that I was twice as attracted and the exact shade of nipples became somewhat mere theoretical if you think about it. I could get just as easily aroused. I suspect most boys out there would testify the same thing.

Back to the question of being ‘sexy’ – I really don’t think is about only one thing or another. You could be very sexy in 140 characters, absolutely tempting and indefinitely attractive – when you look just as stunning in real life, a girl could probably knock a guy off his senses. Easily and completely. Even without some radically enlarged pair of breasts.

Or you could be kind to mankind and give him a little time to figure out his own toys organically.

#JustSaying

PS: This is also a post about boobs, by far the most popular post in the history of Treespotting.

on Things That Matter

2010-07-06T02:42:00.001+07:00

What's wrong with you, with us,
what's happening to us?
Ah our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
~Love, Pablo Neruda

I forgot to mention i saw Princess the other day. It wasn’t like a date or anything of the sort, we literally ran into each other at Loewy and I stayed for courtesy. She was nice as always and she smiled a lot these days. I like her that way.

I told her about the book thing and that I am thinking of writing things down and that many more people might read it and if she cared to have a thought about it. It’s not like we have a sex tape or anything but it might be of some consequences. I wanted to know what she thinks of it.

Loewy was rather busy and travelling in her company always attracted unnecessary attention so we didn’t get to talk much. She asked if I’d be getting any money out of it. To be honest, I understand why she asked and she probably should. I told her that I most probably not gonna get anything out of it. I certainly am not expecting anything. It just sounds like a thing to do.

She asked me to read a script and tell her what I think of it. I had a glance and it didn’t seem like much. I have no sense of what the Indonesian kids would like to see these days but I promised her to read it in full.

For no good reason Princess also asked about Alice and if there was anything going on. I told her that I might very well be falling in love with someone but as it was in any other time in my life, I honestly have no idea if I was and I’ve even fewer ideas of what to do next. She wished me good luck and stuff and we politely bid farewell.

on Man, Mice and Leos

2010-07-05T22:38:00.001+07:00

And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.
~King Rat, James Clavell

I’m not feeling too well. I think the whole toll is finally taking it’s toll, the eternal tooth pain, the painkillers, the lack of sleep and the other bad luck in general. My joints felt like crap and I feel woozy and last night I had a nightmare.

A small rat, squeezing its tiny self among the bookcases and when I tried to scare it away, the damn thing bit my fingertips. It didn’t hurt but it stung and my whole hand was numb for a while. The excitements attracted my cat, in all her fury, Koshka then hunted this little mouse and killed it. I wanted to make sure that the damn thing was dead so I stayed and watched my white cat ripped it apart. Literally, i could hear bodyparts stretched off the small creature and there was blood everywhere. Then i was shook awake. It’s the most unpleasant thing.

The quote above is from my fave James Clavell – something to do with the rat. They were all talking about Mr. Bakrie’s rat statement today.

Things have been weird recently. Very weird. I think it has to do a lot with the star alignments and stuff. Something that specifically makes life harder for Leos and utter shit for Fire Dragon Leos.

I saw Vivian a few nights ago, she has the exact same birthday as me and i consider her my cosmic twin. She’s a very high priced call girl and salaried escort to some fat old man somewhere and her life makes a good yardstick on how much excitement you should have in one life time.

Vi had her C-class so i asked for a drive, just a mad dash to Puncak and back for a quick coffee on the mountain. She was in a whole new drama these days but seems to be holding up quite well.

Leos are tough like that. They’re good at building a strange protective barrier around themselves. I draw back to my cave and pretty much don’t do phones, often for days at a time to keep my perspective. To withdraw from whatever shit awaits out there and prep myself for it when i eventually walk out, that’s more my thing. Vi parties and dosed herself in tequila.

To the rest of the world, Leos are proud bastards - female Leos are impregnable and suffocating in their presence – but really, that’s most often when things are really wrong. I think we need that proud facade to maintain some sense of order in the world that all too frequently making no sense whatsoever.

Vi said Leos are natural survivors. We just do. We survive the way lions do, but we’re no rats.

As in other times, when I got into one of these mood, i read the same stuff i read before. In this case, It’s from the best book ever.

Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, there was something wanting in him --some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say.
~Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

G’nite.

on Things I Feel Like Doing

2010-07-05T00:33:00.000+07:00

I just got home and the dog just broke the couch. Here are the things i feel like doing tonight:

- Drive back, really, really fast
- Grill the cat
- Call her (I don’t have her number)
- Dark Side of the Moon, really, really loud
- A haircut
- Ask her number (I don’t have the guts)
- Rob a bank
- Not think about anything at all

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out why I want to call her.

on a Crash

2010-07-04T03:29:00.002+07:00

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
~Pablo Neruda

By my own rules, any piece that started with a Neruda quote is a shitty one. Tonight is one of those.

Tonight I’m stuck in a hotel room with no hot water and no World Cup broadcast, though we do have cable so I was watching U2 360 from Rosebowl earlier. Wasn’t really watching but they’re always fun.

There was The Hunt for the Red October on telly, which I’ve seen for like a million times but never really mind to see again, tho really, I wasn’t actually watching cause I was busy with the iPad. Then the iPad was out of battery and I need the plug converter for the Blackberry and the laptop and stuff and I didn’t really have anything to do.

Then I was trying rather hard not to play with the phones and stubbornly writing text messages to nowhere.

Then I got utterly bored.

I’ve no idea what’s going on. Really, I don’t. Something happened, on Friday, I think, then the shit hit the fan. It was all very surreal. I was really looking forward to Friday. For many reasons, but mostly because I knew I wasn’t going to see her again for a while. The maids were gone and everything and in my own awkward and quirky ways, I was looking forward to seeing her and spend a little bit of time. The week was crap, everything was crap and it just seemed like the only good thing to happy in a little while.

It could’ve been the expectations, I might’ve expected too much out of nothing. Maybe I just refused to believe that it was all nothing so then Friday came as a shock and everything just went to pieces. I didn’t go anywhere and stayed home with the dog to watch the game. Verbal has a new toy – a squeaky tennis ball that no longer squeaks – and so he was beside himself with excitement. I dosed myself with a cocktail of whole lot of different shit and finally passed out in the wee hours of Saturday.

Last I heard she was saying she hated me. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it tho experience beckoned that when a girl said she hated you, then you really probably shouldn’t say anything anymore. You shouldn’t even try to figure out why.

I don’t know much really. This is all new. I’m not very good with girls and I’m certainly not best for relationships but this is a whole different thing of new. I’ve no fucking idea what I’m doing.

I’m wishing myself a plane crash.

Porn is a State of Mind

2010-07-02T01:51:00.000+07:00

Porn is a state of mind.

in the Middle of the Week

2010-07-01T14:52:00.001+07:00

Well, so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.
~Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I barely answer phones these days. Someone bought me a Blackberry a while ago and these days i socialize almost exclusively over it and the laptop only. Blackberry Messenger for immediate conversations and twitter for the rest of it. I find it easier to communicate with dogs, cubs and machines than with I do with human. Somehow it makes my life easier. It's the best excuse for the antisocials.
We need machines to interface with another. Think the Matrix.

That and i have my World Domination Plan to keep me busy. These days, it's progressing well into the execution phase and i think i am now ever closer than ever.

The creepy shit with an Indonesian DPR member who posted my names and address on the internet was creeping in nicely and i have developed a healthy paranoid lifestyle around my post-facebook sense of privacy. The new rule is, if you don't exist on google, you don't exist.

Which, come to think of it, is completely untrue. I need my passport renewed sometime soon.
I'm presently trying to write more regularly in Indonesian, which is more difficult and complicated because a) Indonesian doesn't have as many words and b) it's really hard to be funny in Indonesian. Where i might sound like a grumpy old man in English, i risk sounding assholistic in Indonesian. No matter, i'm practicing.

Things are again going intensely funny. I'm not entirely sure how this one will go tho i genuinely hope that it would go well.

There's not much to say in the Girls Department. I had several disastrous dates - mostly it's me being completely stupid and obnoxious, the girls are pretty as always. I just don't chronicle them as often these days. I might occasionally still write about it tho. Wouldn't dare to rob you of your gleeful fun.
Anyhow, i'm slightly busy with treespotting redesign. Presently, a fresh look is being built. I have no idea when it's going to be ready but it will be soon.

Bestest Regards

on Trampled Souls

2010-06-29T18:01:00.002+07:00

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
~Hunter S. Thompson

The story begins like most stories do, with a very pretty girl and a date. She returned with her honor preserved and I with a bruised ego and dashed hopes. It's one of those things where i did everything wrong and just wished that i could do it all over again.

Let me start from the very beginning and before that, and list everything i did wrong.

It was actually a sort of blind date and i googled her just the night before. I probably should've assumed that anyone who looked ridiculously pretty in her pictures would've looked even more ridiculously pretty in real life and picking her up in a cab was probably a mistake. Not that the taxi cab wasn't decent or anything - it has a tv set with satellite channels on it - but that it put us awkwardly close to each other for the first time and i get giddy around ridiculously pretty girls.

She had a sort of small gray-ish dress on with black leggings, i didn't have much to stare at except for her stunningly sculptured face and fake eyelashes. If she'd been crying before i surely couldn't tell. In fact, i couldn't tell much at all. It's one of those face that looks pretty whichever way you look at it.

For the first hour or so, i could only think that i probably shouldn't have asked her out. Well, really, i would love to ask her out but maybe i shouldn't have asked her out that night. The day was utterly miserable and i don't make a good conversationalist on miserable days. Plus the pretty face was very distracting. I'd hoped that someone told me she was that pretty, the pictures i found on google wasn't very telling. Maybe then i wouldn't have asked her out at all.

We started doing tequila shots after a while so it wasn't too completely botched. Or if it was then i wasn't so completely aware of it. She laughed a little bit and smiled a lot and everytime she threw me off balance. The lime helped a little bit but really i couldn't be any less prepared. Truthfully, i wouldn't recommend anyone doing tequila shots on a first date but the moment seemed to call for it.

No, i don't often imagine myself lost for words. There seems to always some inexhaustible reserve in the back of my head, of words rushing to get out, except that nothing seemed appropriate. I felt like just to relax back and watch her but that would be even more unseemly, so there was only this awkward silences and tequila shots to fill in the gaps.

I dropped her home sometime around three and could only hope to see her again though i couldn't really tell for her part. She said i wasn't really her type - i need to put on weight she said. I think she was being polite.

Anyhow, nothing really happened. That's probably all there was to it, however much i wanted it to be otherwise. I'm never good with the date thing. Sometimes, you let back, relax, and let life takes over.

PS: This list requires updating.

on the Night Italy Went Home

2010-06-25T04:13:00.001+07:00

The boys are starting a drinking joint of some sort. It's not exactly a drinking joint cause it doesn't really have any drink but beer. I don't really drink beer.

In daylight the place is actually a body workshop, machines of all sort. They worked a Carrera 911 recently and currently working on a Rolls Royce Phantom in the back. We were testing a 530GT earlier and i had it at 180 in the rain. It's that kind of work house. By night it has a few benches and snacks and screens for the World Cup game and i think them lot just like to hang out and watch the game together. It beats staying late night at home with my worsening sleep disorder.

Mom was here the other day. She's leaving to Europe for the summer i think. She's been spending more and more time there. Maybe it's better that way though it's certainly more expensive that she does. Not that i had anything to do with it, i'm just making a note.

I'm reading a colection of classic tales by Edgar Allan Poe, each accompanied by an essay, thirteen in all, by everyone from Stephen King to Sue Grafton. It's called "in the Shadow of the Master" and so far it's been most entertaining. Maybe i'm just missing her a lot.

I've a red t-shirt with a yellow "CCCP" and a small hammer and sickle in the corner. You wouldn't really notice unless you do but one night someone at the club did. This was at the Red Square and i was pulled out by two soldiers cause i was wearing a t-shirt with the communist symbol, roughly 5 cm large on my left nipple. That's how ridiculous this place is sometime.

I'm not going to talk about any girls today. Everything i said will be wrong and really i shouldn't be doing anything wrong. There's a time for everything.
Work wise everything been mostly crap. I can't really quite explain it in details for fears of retribution but let's just say that there are more nonsense among the stuff that i really have to deal with rather than the stuff that i don't really have to deal with. Not that i regret my choices, i just learned to make the same choices all over again.

Later, all.

on a Collage

2010-06-20T03:27:00.000+07:00

This is an unedited collage made using Picasa. Nice tool.

on the Heads of Men

2010-05-28T04:39:00.001+07:00

Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps,
Not on the ground but on the heads of men
~Love Symposium, Socrates

Little Johnny came to the house for advice on women. He was in some sort of trouble, I think. Something about girls always trouble big men in the weirdest way. I theorized it’s the Alpha male thing. Women are programmed to seek the sole strongest male in the pack, if you’re not it, you’re shit out of luck.

I never celebrated a party in my life but Princess did one for me some years ago. I didn’t really like it at the time and I still don’t like it very much now though I appreciated the effort. A bunch of my friends were there. Some people I was happy to see but mostly less so. I generally don’t like people and I don’t like it when a bunch of people are involved in some arbitrary ritual of drinking sub par bubbles for no good reasons.

I like things for a reason. Things without reasons have no good cause for their vicarious existence. They make me feel uncomfortable. An arbitrary birthdate is one of them. I like parties only when they serve good bubbles and good people. If I were to have only one of them I’d go to the pub.

Princess was somewhat obscuredly annoyed by my reaction. She didn’t think I was being appropriate. I was being mentally rude as if we were having a sort of platonic relationship, the two of us clocked in a telekinetic sex proportional to the proverbial orgasm. The orgasms were good however so we tolerated it. In other words, we fucked.

It wouldn’t be a good way to put it so I guess it’s most appropriate if I would put it differently and make nice of it. I didn’t know how and I wasn’t much for trying. Trying are for sissies. I told Princess that she was into me for it exactly so to change me would’ve been to change the only thing I was good for. To tell things like it is. And I’m also good in bed.

Girls like to see a strong man. One better than others. Like monkeys do. I told Little Johnny that he really should stop being a pissy little shit and own up to it. Girls smell losers miles away. Like dogs do. They know when you wag your tail the wrong way. Then you’re shit out of luck.

I guess Princess throwing a party somewhat made me feeling one less than others. Like that she was and I wasn’t. Being a Princess she did that quite a bit and after a while I learned to live with it. I loved living with it, to be quite honest.

It was harder to do as you say and say as you do as you move forward and done more. Then you’re shit out of luck.

It’s always a good advice not to lose your head.

on Superpup

2010-05-16T02:51:00.001+07:00

Sorry, i don't really have much new to post. Writing, but not posting, for reasons i can't quite explain at the moment. Here's Verbal.

on End of Stories

2010-04-20T11:43:00.002+07:00

Wouldn’t you want to know how the story ends?

Sometimes, it’s better not to know. It makes life more interesting and livable. Bearable.

I used to know a girl who stocked tequila in her apartment and drank herself regularly to oblivion. She was living in that new apartment complex behind the Sahid Jaya Hotel and called me in the small hours for company. One time I arrived she looked like she was dying of alcohol poisoning.

Nothing too dramatic happened. I don’t remember much, I doubt if she remembers anything at all. I once cooked her breakfast so she knew I could cook.

I saw her the other week, very sober and good looking. She now dates someone foreign looking. Very fancy and she doesn’t drink tequila anymore. She also no longer live in that apartment.

It’s better not to know how story ends. It’s really bad not to know when it does.

I didn’t just wake up one morning a divorcee. There were whole long months of awful discomfort. Senseless pain and the loss of reasonableness. Like nothing makes sense. Nothing fits. And it sucks.

It sucked big time. It sucked a lot more for Heather so it made the whole thing doubly sucked. My sleep pattern went the most ridiculous during those days. I stayed up for days at a time. She was doing no better and nothing we tried seem to work. She bought me a Dr. Phil book. I was too stubborn to look it up in the manual.

I didn’t do any drugs and neither of us drank any alcohol then. We were sober as birds and yet we fell. Hard. I completely crashed and burned. At moments, there were spectacular. I moved to a new house, she moved to a different hemisphere. There were dramas in Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, London, Brighton, San Francisco, Melbourne. There were dramas in my head, rehearsed lines and spontaneous bursts of silences, of things unsaid.

Very sober moments.

Heather’s a shrink so she probably knew more of my head than I did. Not that she gave me any pills or anything. Maybe she knew what she was dealing with, just not knowing how to deal with it. Maybe I was being a jerk. Most likely, it was a life stretched out of Wonderland.

It felt like shit for years but it eventually healed and I’ve had many better stories since. I wasn’t really blogging back then as I was too busy writing letters for my lost wife. This blog - and its earlier forms - were the online versions of those letters as I eventually stopped sending them. Then I stopped writing altogether. Nowadays I just blog.

I haven’t seen her since though. Things changed and life moved on and stories end.

We can’t choose our happy endings.

We don’t even know how the story goes.

#patahhati

2010-04-20T05:56:00.000+07:00

on the First Week of April

2010-04-11T07:05:00.000+07:00

The only thing harder than getting what you want is know what to do with it.
~Patrick Henessy, The Junior Officers Reading Club

This is the sort of post that would upset just about everyone, so consider yourself warned. I would be talking about girls, hot girls, legs, best legs, vodka, best vodka, multiple orgasm and tons of juice.

If I were to go all the way to the beginning, I’d need to start with Alice and how much shit was happening over on that side and how my head was about to implode. Weird as it sounds, I was missing her far too much it was unhealthy for everyone concerned. When I get mellow, I get cranky and I’d rather write than get cranky.

The week’s been long and somewhat blurry, Monday was a massive session at the studio – the rest of the guys were leaving for Thailand and we made up a farewell bash for a lousy excuse of a debauchery. Master Chubby bummed his head on the amp stack. I was at home most of Tuesday playing Civilization and Thursday was a Z’s birthday bash at Rooftop in Kemang and I felt like getting out to do some damage so I went with Juliet.

The club was unusually packed for a Thursday night and we had trouble even walking in. Z had some some leggy looking Russian girls in the crowd though none I found too interesting. There were too many distractions so I just drank and blazed thru it like I could. I needed some downtime, phones off and the mess all to deal with tomorrow morning. I even danced a little bit.

There was that girl from the other week at Loewy, small green dress with a cream top, hands down the best bod in the whole fucking club. Just the sight of her gave me a hard on. She gave me the same hard on for about a week after I sighted her the other week. I went to say hello, she spotted Juliet and was a little awkward about it but I had no problems with being a complete asshole. The vodka helps.

We were driving in when I saw P walking in with a few guys. Like all the other good girls she was in some small dress that showed off magnificient legs. I ran into her on the way to the loo so I stopped for a chat. It’s a bad excuse but there it was. It was all very weird. She saw me walking in with Juliet and asked too many questions that I didn’t feel like answering. She asked to be introduced but that would’ve been too much trouble so that didn’t happen. We sat at the opposite ends of the club so she was easy to get away from. The memories less so.

No, I don’t really need you to tell me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to reinvolve with the Little Princess. She looked too good to ignore and I said hello and that was that. I didn’t even text afterwards and was rather proud of it.

Juliet danced and I enjoyed watching her dance. Random boys perked and gutted and asked for her number and I watched for a laugh. You can’t help the idiots for wishing too hard. She looked too good. I’m still not too sure what to make of the whole thing, deep in the back of my head I could saw the unstoppable train of troubles but maybe I just feel like trying my luck. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know.
Frankly, I don’t think know what I’m doing. We’re finding out.

So the parties were fun and the crowd pretty and the nights long and loud and there were too many things in between. I doubt that you’d want the excrucriating details. It was all very hazy and I don’t feel like pondering the bits too much. We live only once and at the end, I sat alone figuring out what the fuck was that all about.

PS: Multiple orgasm will make it to the next post, i couldn't figure how to squeeze it in. Happy Sunday

on Lapse of Reason

2010-03-02T04:38:00.001+07:00

Just finished with Juliet, Naked – a Nick Hornby book. It’s a bit different to his other books – somehow older – but similar in style and characterization of an out of the way relationship and people madly doing things they’re not supposed to do.

There was a Dragonfly crisis of sort – not mine – but someone fell in love. Why would one call me for opinions on these matters I have no idea. I am no stranger to Aphrodite’s various ways and means but seriously, people do stupid shit every day in the name of things much less interesting than love.

The biggest problem for using Love as an excuse is it is largely an unobservable phenomenon: the only people could testify of its existence are the parties involved and these are hardly unbiased. Everybody else are free to call you stupid. Much like religion.

Love is great and all – but really, is it worth it? You don’t always know why you’re doing something but you should always know what you’re doing. I often fail trying to explain why I do what I do, but I usually take a double check on knowing what I’m doing.

Among the dangers of Love is that it offers all sorts of flexitude in judgments, morals, ethics, etiquettes and even common sense. It’s a lapse of reason. Bierce called it temporary insanity.

Knowing what you’re doing isn’t easy when you’re not seeing right.

I met a very kind girl recently, one that was nice enough that she had for all practical purposes, reinvented a sort of me in her head – except much nicer and sensible. I was chatting with The Muse in Paris the other day and I was telling her about an impending date. I was telling The Muse the problems I was anticipating: I would make myself available for a few hours and this girl would have a few hours to recalibrate her expectations.

You can’t fall in love with something that only exists in your head. You can’t be in Love and not know it. I can’t help work things out for you, at the heart of the matter, it is a problem for you, and you alone to solve.

The Year of The Tiger

2010-02-26T23:38:00.002+07:00

I been staying up again. The mind trick doesn’t work anymore and I’m back to my I-can’t-sleep-mode. Just random crazy shits in my head and I can’t think properly. I’m not sure you even need to know what currently goes out in my mind so let’s keep this one simple.

Twitter is fun, tons of fun, but I’m currently bored of Twitter. It’s not really the troll, but really Twitter just feed on my boredom and it was getting tiring. I’m on a Twitter diet.

The politics on telly is fun to watch but much less interesting these days. I don’t really get much of what’s going on except that this is democracy in over time: the losers are still demanding for a recount and a cabinet rebalancing. Life goes on.

It’s the Year of the Tiger now. Apparently, it’ll be bad and volatile for a dragon. I don’t get it, it happens every year to dragons. No wonder they’re very nearly extinct.

I can’t think of anything else. Tons of other things, but I can’t think of anything right now. It’s that kind of staying-up night.

I don’t really like it – it keeps me tense and unbalanced. It’s hard to focus and I get really tired after a while. For the most of it, I think it was just the hard-being-alone part. I can’t stand most people, but sometimes, I hate being alone so much, it keeps me awake.

I usually just blog and it makes me better. The more I write, the more twisted I am – I have it logged and trended for the past four years. This is the part where I’m getting totally socially dysfunctional.

There’s another wedding this coming Sunday. I was apparently invited, which was nice of him.

His father – my late uncle – taught me many different things but mostly he taught me to write. I was really small and was pretty much living in my own Dickens novel back then and he was always a comforting man.

Some twenty years ago or so, he died of a stroke. The doctors required us to sign for the papers so I went out there to the wild suburbs to locate my cousin. I was back from England and I didn’t know the roads well and he was nowhere to be found.

We finally tracked him down to his room, somewhere in the genius over-achiever part of the uni and I told him they wanted to unplug his father. We drove back and talked over a few things and saw the docs and the man was unplugged. We later washed his body and put him on the ground and all. He was the first dead body I’ve touched and washed then.

Mother came this afternoon, I think she wants to make sure that I go to the wedding. She brought some food and drank her tea quietly while playing on her laptop and we had mostly a peaceful coexistence with not much things said. She brought cakes, too.

I’m still in my worst, vilest depression nights and I like it better that I hurt as few people as possible these days.

Don’t worry so much if you don’t get it, by most measures, I am completely sane. And happy. I have a very happy dog, too. I just write about my problems, you people keep them in your own pretty little head.

It’s just a pissy start for a new year though I know my fate will improve. I no longer date rodents, so that’s a plus point.

on a Twitter Troll

2010-02-21T15:52:00.002+07:00

I caught a Troll. This time it’s a Twitter troll and due to my lack of experience in dealing with these, I caught him a bit late.

First off, whatever your excuses are, there’s a line between ‘cute’ and ‘annoying’ – the same thin line between ‘creeps’ and ‘sociopaths’. You could often tolerate a cute creep, or a cute sociopath, but never an annoying creep. That sort just freaks me out.

Nanny Oggs’ Cookbook – by Terry Pratchett, part of the Discworld series – has a chapter of Trolls. According to this desktop reference, “Trolls have a reputation for violence, and this is because they are naturally violent, or, I should say, extremely physical. Back in their homelands it is considered good manners to beat another troll over the head with a club when you meet him for the first time.”

I’ve to admit that I’d a strong inclination to actually find this guy and beat him over the head with a club – or at least send my henchmen to go over and do it for me – but really, I was busy during the week and couldn’t be bothered.

I failed to see the humour of faking a person and intruding into their lives. Identity theft is serious business when you do it for material gain and it’s most probably a crime in many jurisdiction, including Indonesia. When you do it to chat up girls and hit on my friends, it’s a whole new level of creepy and I was pissed. I feel violated and it sort of ticked me off.

Most Trolls are really oversized idiots with mommy issues and hormonal imbalance but this one managed to steal pictures and accounts and stuff and doing it with a few hundred people on the internet. He’s obviously not as stupid as the others, which unfortunately also made him less funny than the others.

Despite my inclination to bludgeon this bastard to mush for a weekend entertainment, I felt that the authorities are really better equipped to deal with such matters and took precautions to ensure that they were aware of the problems. Twitter reigned in and the appropriate measures were taken and things took their natural course of unraveling.

Nothing happened except for a whole lot of people getting annoyed for a whole lot of nothing.

I know that the Troll is a he and he works for a large marketing firm, presumably where he learned his tricks for identity theft and mass phising on social network. I know he doesn’t get laid much because he is a fucking troll and he stalked girls I chatted with – over Twitter.

Seriously, #gofigurethatWatson.

I know that he ever pulled such tricks again I would be happy to take him on with Troll rules.

PS: If you’re the Troll then you’re more likely to be reading this than any other non trolls – so allow me to say this to all of you sad little shits: I don’t mind social defects. All of us have our mommy and daddy issues and we all need to get laid every once in a while. I could tolerate freaks of nature and I am prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt. You come after my friends, I will go after you – your work, your house, your twitter, your facebook – your nightmare.

You stare into the abyss, rest assured, the abyss WILL stare back into you.

Chapter I

2010-02-20T14:32:00.000+07:00

Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps,
Not on the ground but on the heads of men
~Love Symposium, Socrates

The story really should begin in Jakarta four years before Kaosan. It seems like it does.

I first saw her stumbling out of the coke room in a Jakarta party, lean and slender legs, a molested angel looking right in place under the epileptic lights. A little wet, a little more messy and very obviously drunk. She held a margarita glass with two fingers, her hair was in it, I politely pointed this out on the unisex mirror. She looked at me and smiled for an imaginary second and walked away.
I saw those legs in pictures and magazines but never up close. I needed to refresh myself.

A few minutes later, on the dance floor, she was still holding the same margarita glass, dancing to a decadent disco tune from the 80s when everyone was gay.

Angels on pins, I never knew how they do it.

She wore a white dress, small and careless with a matching pair of shiny shoes. She looked like she smiled all the time but it could’ve been the lights. She had glitters on her skin and I was probably staring for a while. Her shoulder bones white and bright, almost shining. She looked very pretty.

She noticed my staring after the song and walked right up, thrusting her empty glass for a refill and I poured shots of agave juice while we wait. She asked if anyone had any joint left.
There I was thinking that grownups only do pills.

As it was, she was 26 and we had exactly a skinny joint left. The music was too loud to attempt for real conversations so we mostly smoked pot and drank tequila and flirted. I had then the option not to fall in love. We were right where we belong.
She asked what I had for breakfast.
I asked what she wanted.
She said she wanted to die.

(And she gave me her number.)

on Girls, Theories and Why I'm Always Right

2010-02-19T17:18:00.000+07:00

People hate those who have theories about other people
~House, MD

Something bothers me and I am not sure what exactly. It could be a wide range of things, including a bruise I had on my lower ribs. It didn’t hurt that much until today and now I feel a bit yuck.

The other stuff I probably shouldn’t be writing about since it’s likely only to make things worse. Some started as jokes that got off wrong and glided worse with my own twisted humor. Others were wrong from the beginning and even less funny to start with.

The most of it are things I best don’t talk about. Not now. Maybe later when I’m old and wise and I understand things better.

House said people hate those who have theories about other people. Somehow that makes sense.

It does, doesn’t it?

Maybe it’s because you’re feeling all left out. Maybe it makes you sound like an elevated asshole and it just makes you harder to fit in. Maybe you just don’t like the food. I don’t know. Maybe it makes you a less pleasant dinner guest.

More often than not my theories were proven to work. Of course, it’s easy to say that my theories are always right because they are mine. Your misunderstanding of my theory doesn’t put me at fault ergo, I am always right.

I was invited to a dinner in Bali. To be honest, the dinner was the only thing I did – the rest of the time I spent lounging in the pool and scourging the second hand bookshops in Kuta. I sulked, completely and comprehensively while thoroughly enjoyed myself.

What happened was at this particular dinner, my lady host referred explicitly to my uselessness in front of a good friend of mine. She was probably joking or maybe she wasn’t but my friend picked it back in the car so it was obvious that I had zero interest in local Balinese politics and was much more interested in good food so he took me home and I was served some decent Balinese home cooking instead. The dogs were very happy to see me, the family kept six Labradors.

I don’t underestimate my own uselessness. I just don’t like it when people do it during dinner in good company, so I sulked.

I don’t have a theory for it – sometimes I get more annoyed than I usually do. My ex wife called it a bipolar disorder. She is a certifiable academic and diagnosed me from 6000 miles away – over chat – so naturally I contested the findings.

At this point one should probably consult the nearest certifiable chemist but I digress.

It’s also a long held rule that Fluffy is always right.

This happens a lot with the female types – getting into unnecessary conflicts – and there have been various theories. The current record holder for the Girl Who Dumped Me Most theorized that I do it as preemptive strikes – and those always deliver some collateral damage. I apparently have the tendency to do it excessively.

Preemptive conflicts are often necessary to avoid bigger, more major fallout. Once I saw the effing truck coming at 200 miles up ahead, the only thing to do is to play chicken. Economists often able to prove this so talking to Olive sometimes helps. She thinks I’m having baby blues.

I am my own Karl Rove.

I was right with the PKS call on the stupid RPM Konten thingy. The Minister is trying to pass a piece of internet censorship law and I called it on PKS and today the President actually told him off – the Minister, not me. I had nothing to do with it.

A Moslem friend of mine called and was soundly irritated with the tone of my rant and he accused me of doing it out of spite. He was offended by my brutal treatment of the Islamic Party.

I asked if he was really expecting me to be any nicer? I’m not good at trying to be nice and in any event, PKS members didn’t see it necessary to appear nice while doing their whole eight hours a day, sixty working days orgy and indulgence in hubris, in succession in front of millions of Indonesians.

It took the President a few days longer to figure it out and called them on it and the rest of his Demokrat entourage pulled out and clawed on it. If you think any of those clowns actually listen to me then you’re wrong. To assume that the President was somehow under my influence is ludicrous, so I was merely pointing out at the obvious. They are so perfectly capable of making an ass out of themselves, PKS hardly needs me to make them sound any less likeable.

The President is politically weak and these bigoted power freaks are just too hungry not to bite. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in this country of 250 millions to have noticed. I called them on calling on God while doing it. It didn’t seem appropriate.

He thought I was doing it out of spite. Presumably, I hate God. I’m sure the man keeps plenty theories of why but I didn’t exactly bother much trying to find out. He just dislikes my theories.

The problem with the way most people hold their religion is that it puts them at pain just to prove that they are indeed a believer of something.

It’s like they’re keeping a badge of something – which really, put the scriptures at the same league as my Jedi skills. I expect to be forgiven on grounds of stupidity.

Most times, I just don’t know how to handle things so I go with the next best thing – I play chicken, sorts out the knucklehead stuff. Come as you are, let’s see what happens.

You will be excused for having no clear idea of what I’m talking about.

Vivian said that it is because I am a Fire Dragon Leo. Like dragons and other imaginary beasts, I often pummel endlessly at something - and blasted the shit out of everything while I’m at it - not at all realizing how much damage I was doing. Picture the baby monster from Cloverfield.

The Year of the Tiger will not be doing me any good, she prophesied. I could’ve figured it out all by myself – I was twice dumped by the same girl over the Valentine weekend, this year coinciding with the Chinese New Year weekend plus a different girl kicked me in the ribs the other night.

That and I caught a Troll.

Star alignment isn’t exactly rocket science and I ought to be ready for a whole lot more crap coming my way.

I ran into a rather interesting character at some dinner last year. It was not completely random but my intention I thought I made very clear: I was there to ask questions. I was all very vague and secretive and I’m feeling all conspiratorial. I was filled with theories I couldn’t prove.

Until a few days ago when I figured out what they were talking about. Funnily enough, I figured it out because he has a Facebook page and a few clicks confirmed what I thought I thought. Now it sorts of make sense. The theory was right.

I call them freak occurrence – just the one more random stuff that you say out loud and turned out just right – they call it theories. Some people just can’t handle the truth. I am channeling Jack Nicholson. Maybe I see dead people.

I guess theories make them most vulnerable.

Girls are so prone to this, it’s almost a gender issue.

Some of them are too desperate to promote their own theories they feel most vulnerable and exposed to theories. House was right. She wanted to see what she had in mind so bad even when she saw the other side of him, she refused to recognize it.

Lord Rochester said the world inside my mind is always more interesting than the world outside my mind.

PS: I have my own theory on Chocolate or Roses but that will wait.

on Jealousy

2010-02-14T00:20:00.002+07:00

O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
~William Shakespeare, Othello

I wasn’t really sure how or when or even why but she arrived . I’ve seen her first a while ago, some random function somewhere, she caught my eyes unexpectedly and the image remains indefinitely like dead pixels.

She had a black and white dress of short, nice contrast to the white shoulders, the hair jet black and falling all over the place. I think it was probably the shoes - some heels in black and white that made her legs looked nice.

Up close, she had two large doll-like eyes, a sharp nose in between and a largish smile. It was noticeable but even if nothing really happened. She was just a thing I noticed. To her credit, she never really talked or said anything to me. Not then.

There was probably a husband or a boyfriend or an ex with a mean jealous streak or something, I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe I should’ve been paying attention but I didn’t and things went from awkward to awful to worse and in the end, I was called a lot of names by a number of different people and the whole thing turned into a scene. I got bored or maybe tired and just a little bit mad so I left.

The other in the pub a few guys were around and they probably noticed that my head was screwed right. Vicky wasn’t very happy with me for some reason, in his drunken stupor he was certain that I was sleeping with his girlfriend – now ex. I didn’t bother to present a defense since the whole idea was just preposterous, there was not a shred of truth in the suspicion. I had never even as much as asked her for numbers or anything.

We went home together once but I stopped at my girlfriend’s and she took off in a cab and I had never seen her since. I didn’t know that Vicky broke up with her that night and I wasn’t aware of the discontinuance of their acquaintanceship. I had no idea of the nature of their relationship and I care shitall really. I’ve more important matters to contend with these days.

Regardless, jealousy is a poison to mind. Turn saints into the sea, says The Killers. We did the song the other night and it felt good to call for Mr. Brightside out loud. I saw Rosie on the way out and she asked if I was alright, I didn’t look alright, she said. I had no idea how looking right was supposed to look like but no, I wasn’t feeling alright. I was probably jealous.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if we were supposed to sit and pontificate over jealousy elaborately. At some point or another, jealousy might be a justifiable normal response. The rest of the time it’s a bore. Over the course of the thing with Princess for example, I was consumed by jealousy to the point of it being a straightforward, bloggable laughing matter.

Coupled with my nonsocial tendencies the whole Princess affair was torturous and in the end, the easy mind prevailed. It was too much trouble to get jealous, but really, you can’t help all the other arses, however much you want to feel sorry for them. To her credit, Princes never said she was embarassed to be around me. Never out loud.

Still, I was actually interested in her. The reasons for which I need none, I was quite simply attracted and some freak jellyfish got in the way. I thought that kinda sucked.

on the Beach

2010-02-10T12:15:00.001+07:00

Qi sent a car to pick me up at Ngurah Rai International, he said I didn’t give enough notice so he couldn’t free himself until well in the afternoon. As it happened, I missed my morning flight and didn’t get to Bali until late so we met up at the Ocean 27 lounge by the beach in Kuta.

Roughly my height and hardly any bigger, Qi was darker and now sport longer hair, just below his ears. He had a new tattoo on his arm that said “sh*t” and recommended I get a matching one. I noticed the car no longer had his custom plate, when he first bought the Mercedez it had his wedding date embossed in metal. Cheap metal.

He drank only beer and was in his usual polite manner – quite voice, almost whispering occasioned with reserved chuckles. We were waiting for Laticia who was arriving at four, the beach lounge was 10 minutes away from the airport and we had plenty time to catch up while waiting. I asked how his sister was doing, we used to have a thing many years back in England but I see her only very rarely these days. He asked of his ex wife but I also didn’t see much of her in Jakarta. I ran into her here and there, Jakarta being a small town and I could say was that she looked as voluptuous as ever. I knew only what everybody knew. Qi knew better.

He fixed me and Laticia and two other friends in a small hotel villa right by the beach in Kuta. I could get internet signals anywhere on the hotel ground and was mostly busy on twitter with some one thing or another. I think it was President Yudhono got pissed over the bull.

It’s probably a Javanese thing that The Prez didn’t says thing out loud, unless when it’s absolutely necessary and that is only when his personal self worth was attacked. The Indonesian President rarely made sense anymore and he is growing less and less popular. Qi didn’t think he even knows that he is less popular, he thought the polls were rigged. I thought so too.

The typical SBY response to the plunge in the polls and a street rally involving the presence of a bull in front of his palace was to build a better fence and the government now considers hiring public relation professionals.

He also won a date with Obama next year so we could see how the two presidents might bond. Ineffective government, banking scandals, bickering house and plunging polls. President Yudhoyono should teach President Obama a little about polls.

I went for a book shopping in Kuta. I like 2nd hand book shops cause they always have quirky collections, I suspect is the reader traveler types read only the most interesting types of books and the most amount of airport novels. I found Neal Stephenson’s Anathem – 1000 pages long like any other of his books and a much smaller book about the Rat Pack. Humphrey Bogart, the Rat in Charge of Public Relations described it as “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”

The evening we spent lounging by the beach with lots of food, Laticia insisted on sending someone to acquire a bucket of prawn something from Bubba Gump and Qi was handling buckets of beer. A lounge next door had seats arranged in ankle deep pool with tables and all and we ordered shisha in some funky flavors and whiled away in conspiracy theories.

Around end of dinner, we were joined by two more girls, very pretty with creepy clean porcelain skin. They came from “north of China near Russia.” I didn’t quite get where but the way they pronounced it sounded really cute I asked twice. We went through their iPod and found Oasis so there was a sing along session like proper nutters with out of tune Don’t Look Back in Anger.

There’s something about girls from communist countries that I always have a thing for. I think more women should be made ideologues. Women are more persuasive than mankind. They are different, subtler but wildly effective. Most often, they’re also morally more advanced than men. I pictured them in their quasi military party attire with large red poster of Chairman Mao in the background. They were actually wearing simple tees and short pants.

The sexy part is probably because the image of centralized form of leadership in the Communist countries - an official moral compass. To fuck with the authority just comes naturally sexy to most.

Sometime nearing midnight the movable feast stumbled into the alleys of Kuta and into a refuge called Twice, a hard core punk hole with really cheap drinks, great music, no seats and the Ramones on the wall. In one corner of the room was the drum kit and speakers and amplifiers and most of the walls were covered with graffiti and vintage posters. Guests either took the limited seats on the bar or sat around on the floor and all the way to the alley outside. There was a tattoo parlor by the entrance and everyone was covered in ink.

Jrx, the drummer for Superman Is Dead was doing a solo session for a bunch of street kids in quirky hairdos. The whole atmosphere was very much out of the ordinary of what you’d find on the street of Jakarta. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’ll be out of place anywhere in the world. Very nice crowd, if a little unconventional.

Laticia ordered those fiery drinks served in tupper ware tubes, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was but they weren’t too bad or evil or anything. A local dealer called Made brought us a bag of mushroom and we each took a bite though I had absolutely no effect whatsoever on me. Everyone was chatting of one thing and another but I was mostly enjoying the night out.

By the time we made it to the beach, the stars were out and the sky was clear. The stars were everywhere, I tried to point out the different signs but really I knew too little about any of them.

I’m not entirely sure what’s really on my head. I could’ve been thinking about the girls or the music or the stars or Frank Sinatra from the book I was reading or maybe Bali or New York City where it was probably snowing this winter. There was that thing in Jakarta that I had to deal with, and another and all the other stuff that I’m going to have to deal with sooner or later. They can wait.

on Bookshelves

2010-02-06T18:11:00.003+07:00

I just rearranged my bookshelf. I’m running out of space so some of the stuff now go to the boxes in the back. Due to the limited space there are only so many ways I could arrange them – no way to get creative with Dewey or anything – they just go in my own particular order.

Travel books – they got their own corner box, even some of my old Lonely Planets. I don’t really keep a diary so the travel books serve a purpose in remarking where and when things happened. I guess nowadays it’ll go on the gadgets.

Bill Bryson gets his own shelf too cause I have so many of his books. The Platypus goes there. Candi bought me a platypus doll from Oz cause I was making a fuss about the animal looking too funny.

I’ve removed all the law books and put them in their own rows. These are the most boring shit but for someone breaking the laws as often as I do, I need them handy. Next to them are the Religion Stuff – several stuff on Islam, mystics, History of the Order of the Asassin, Karen Amstrong, Sam Davis, Richard Dawkins and an audio books of the Politico – Divine Will of Imam Khomeini that I got in Qom. I don’t understand Persian at all so it sits there helplessly like a tourist attraction. I’ve a mini statue of Michaelangelo’s Pieta that I bought in Rome sitting there, too.

There’s a full shelf of Books About Stuff. A signed copy of Phillip Bobbit – The Shield of Achilles – is a book about war, Down and Dirty Pictures about Miramax and independent films, an Oxford History of World Cinema, Edwin’s DVD collection of short films that the director was kind enough to send me, several books about machines Goenawan Mohammad’s Catatan Pinggir collections, a few more on advertising, dogs and The Pursuit of Oblivion – A Social History of Drugs.

Michael Crichton, John le Carre, James Clavell, Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham earned a dedicated shared block for being quality crap. The rest of the airport novels are going into boxes in the back.

Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace and Tom Wolfe also get their own space along with other oversized books. This is the Diet Shelf. There’s The Strain, first in the vampire trilogy by Guillermo del Toro – the director who did Pan’s Labyrinth and a few Hunter S. Thompson books. They’re not really in any particular order for being comfortably within reach from my desk.

War and History books go on the center shelf – along with the Holy Books mostly because they look presentable and that’s the only shelf that’s fit. I’ve an old brass antique needle thermometer on it just to be safe.

I’ve set aside a shelf for My Books. Stuff I don’t lend away. Mostly they’re books that I read again and again plus some poetry stuff to make me feel sufficiently cultured. I’ve Baudellaire in French, Neruda in Spanish, Nikolai Gogol in Cyrillic even though I read none of that. Heart of Darkness, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Junkie, Naked Lunch, Catch 22 and Farenheit 451.There’s a treasured Jack London’s White Fang - very first book I read in English, i was about six or seven and its about wolves and dogs and men – coolest book everrr. I’ve a copy of Tim Burton’s illustrated Mellancholy Death of Oyster Boy, an illustrated hard copy of Ralph Steadman’s collection, Budha on Bhagavad Ghita, Communist Manifesto, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Che’s African Dream. You take touch any books from this shelf and I’d shoot.

Someone stole my Ambrose Bierce Devil’s Dictionary – I will hunt you down and cut you to small pieces.

Really, I was only bored and the stack on my bedside is just growing. I usually read a few books at once but I have lately got to the point where I don’t actually read any. Just shit lying around everywhere. There should be a shelf for books I don’t read.

I’ve a Jedi wedding this weekend, so have fun all.

on Speed

2010-02-01T02:53:00.000+07:00

Well now then Mardy Bum
Oh I'm in trouble again, aren't I
I thought as much
Cause you turned over there
Pulling that silent disappointment face
The one that I can't bear
~Mardy Bum, Arctic Monkeys

I tested a brand new E class today. Late night, small hours of Sunday and I took the German beast for a run around the outer ring road. There’s a thing about speed that you just leave everything behind. For a brief window of time, I can’t think of anything else but the road ahead. The five seconds of road ahead. Everything else is for later.

So a lot of things happened this week. A lot of it I can’t probably right properly. I generally don’t write about things as they happen because it’s too hard to put them in all the right words to make sense. A lot of life never really make sense until they’re well happened. At the moment, I’m just busy keeping up with stuff. Making sense of it is too hard.

I went to a ballet performance in the weekend. Not that I do them cultured stuff very much but I kinda enjoyed it. The music was certainly nice and the dance was enjoyable – I think it was about a relationship of a man and a woman – push and pull and how time goes and grows between them. I’m not entirely sure – I meant to find out but didn’t quite get around to it.

I’ve a thing for upsetting people. Almost like an out of control, uninhibited talent – superbly efficiently, succinctly and frustratingly effective – to annoy just about everyone regardless of colours. I stopped caring a while ago.

Still, some nights I need only to get in the car and speed through the city like a mad man, if only not to think about all and any of it for a while. To think only of the road ahead. Everything else is for later.

My dog, he sits with me whenever I sit on my desk. He likes the cool aircon in the bedroom but most times he’ll be wherever I was sitting in the house. Sometimes I think he gets bored of me, too and he goes to the back and hover around the maids, most probably in some puppy hopes for food or games, but only until he heard me doing something – at which point he’d be running back into the house and keep me company. Dogs don’t lie and they’re almost always happy. They’re easier to deal with than human.

Dogs and machines.

I’m better with dogs and machines.

on Growing Old

2010-01-24T21:38:00.000+07:00

The Sunday I spent mostly at home. The weather was nice so I played with the dog a little bit and saw Season 7 of 24 together. He doesn’t like Jack Bauer much.

I was out and about in the weekend, Social House was nice as always, I like watching Jakarta idling weekend traffic from the large windows, light conversation of some one thing or another. Dragonfly was for a birthday party but I didn’t stay for too long. There was another party at X2 though I remember little of the details already. Lots of very pretty girls.

There was someone I wanted to see at Dragonfly but didn’t manage. Wasn’t even sure if she was even there, maybe some other time.

I love the wilderness of Jakarta. There are simply no rules. Everything is possible so long as you don’t get caught doing it. Dragonfly, of course, is always best for that sort of stuff.

A few times I went there they stopped me at the door. Not entirely sure why, I think it was the dress code, once my red-yellow hammer and sickle tee was a problem as they require me collared. The club is anal about their patrons looking the prettiest and it looks it.

The drinks are overpriced though their cocktails are excellent. Service is generally okay but in the busy nights it is entirely tip based. The crowd is of the thirty something types and all of the male patrons have slept with at least one of the Azhari sisters once.

You can get away with many things in this town so long as you look best doing it.

I have a knack for making people feel uncomfortable – a natural talent to be a nuisance. Most of the time I am quite aware of it and I use it to my maximum advantage. Some other time I get carried away and push it as much as I could just to see what would happen.

Anyhow, I behaved myself and stayed quiet for most of the weekend, nothing substantially illegal or majorly. Nothing really worth getting caught for. I might be getting old.

How’s that for a Sunday?