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Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Six Sentences


1. When Michel Faber was writing his most recent, and last he says, novel, his wife was dying.

2. Writing is a solitary career: you have be alone and uninterrupted to write, he told the interviewer from Guardian Books.

3. You can't write a novel and yet be physically with the woman you love, even while she is incrementally dying in the next room and you know your days together are limited.

4. But she wanted him to keep on and to finish writing the novel, because she loved him too and knew that he needed to finish writing it, perhaps because it was a novel about love and separation, coincidentally.

5. She offered him a compromise: That he write six sentences day.

6. This he did, and he finished the novel before she died.



(paraphrased by) E@L


[I couldn't quite place his accent - is it Australian? I had always thought him Scottish, perhaps because of Under The Skin. Turns out he was born in Holland, went to school in Australia, where no doubt that soft, ESL, accent was developed, and now he lives in Scotland. All these countries claim him as their own.]

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Tontine Therapy

The trusty old CPAP has its benefits, that is for certain.

A recap:

Among E@L's many deviations is his septum, thanks to his nose's interception of a speeding, suddenly expanding in size and eclipsing the batsmen and the steel pole of the net off which it ricocheted, cricket ball, way back when No1 son was a rising star in the juniors and his own weaknesses in those left-arm round-the-wicket mediums were becoming obvious, slipping to well-bashable slows and he was ignominiously dropped to the 3rds, were no one could bat so it didn't matter that he could no longer bowl (shin splints, rotator cuff). Add precipitous weight gain to that, also thanks to cricket, viz: the copious beers and sausages in wrapped white bread and ingested in a thrice weekly ritual (the game and training) integral to the social aspect of playing in the 3rds, in a 2nd Div district league of a non-descript provincial city in a distant country girt by sea, and you have a person who snores, a person whom someone can easily HATE. E@L has told you all this..

That shattered ethmoidal plate has restricted his air intake capacity too, and he finds it difficult to breathe with sufficient efficiency when right lateral decubitus. Those BreatheRight nasal strips help, but only so much, and they don't prevent his snoring.

Industrial strength snoring, as mentioned. And eventually he developed sleep apnoea as well. It took an inordinate time for E@L to discover this, and its severity, sleeping as he used do back in that land-girt, open-cut mine, alone. No doubt much of the blame for the brain-rot which afflicts his cogitative abilities and his (what was it again?) memory can be directly directed at these frequent near-ischaemic episodes. There was no-one there to prod him, gently or otherwise, out of his semi-comatose state, to rouse him, to shake him, to kick his shin, to stuff a pillow over his face and press, press, press until the snoring stopped.

So E@L snored on: he dropped his soft-palate, stopped breathing for 20secs and, spluttering into state just below consciousness, took a great last gasp in order to breathe again for a few seconds. And the cycle of little-deaths started, and so he grew dumber and dumber and... [fuck, this is starting to sound like a fairy-tale!]

~~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is using his third CPAP, one especially designed for travelling: it's lighter, smaller, etc... His main machine sits at home, unloved for long periods like this current three week stint in Thailand, and it has a humidifier, which makes it a bit bulky to cart around. The small portable one's base is a bit slippery so he places it (upside down so it doesn't suck in all the bed-bugs) on the bed next to the pillows. The hose he wraps over the pillows and the nasal-plug mask is light and barely noticeable if he keeps his nose-hair and moustache trimmed (hence the hipsterish half-height mo). It is a simple matter to turn off the machine, easily de-nasalify the plugs and trundle off to the toilet...

AIYAH! those bathroom lights. Why so fracking bright!

~~~~~~~~~~~

There are several advantages to sleeping with CPAP.

Well, number one, fucking obviously, is that he can breathe properly and not wake the sleeping hooker(s), nor, in the cheaper places E@L stays, the guy in the next hotel room and his hooker(s). And not choke and effectively cut off the blood supply to his (E@L's, not the guy in the next room) brain by dropping his oxygen saturation to coma level in that apnoeic half-minute.

Second, or third if you count the last sentence which is really a follow on from the number one benefit, he can sleep under the sheets.

Third/corollary to Third/Fourth/whatever: he (or his hooker) can fart while his head is under the sheets because his air supply is coming from the CPAP on the outside! Brilliant!

Fifth (fuck it): E@L has never tried this, but he supposes he could use it as a cunnilingus snorkel if he were that way inclined (to sexually gratify a hooker, pffft!). Carefully clean with an antiseptic wipe after each use.

And sixth, he can sleep on his stomach, face into the Tontine, and not suffocate. Awesome, as he often tosses this way and that as he tries to drop off, and might end up face-down [end UP face DOWN ha!] a few times.

But why (other than the hypothetical cunnilingual point) is E@L under the sheets, you ask. Not just to see if he can Dutch Oven himself faultlessly, but also to hide his alcoholically lucifugous eyes and, by extension (the optic nerves), his brain, from the all those hotel room lights: eerie green and red USB chargers, the red glowing fuse-confirmer of his multi-plug extension cord, the slow blinking fire-detector, the ineluctable glow through curtain which never quite closes off the big city's 24hr bright lights. But all this candle power is never enough to light up the path for his 4am trip to the bathroom and to enable him roughly determine the correction of his direction. And so, on go those retinal blasting lights every time.

But new on the scene is an eyemask, one from Singapore Airlines. Black. From First Class, the time he got that well-overdue upgrade. (Yes you can ask for them anytime, and you get them in business class, but not the black ones - it's like the black Amex, they are only for the high, um, fliers.)

What E@L does now is sleep with both the CPAP and eye-mask on. And, get this, with the blinds open! That way, when his bladder wakes him there is enough ambient light to either wake the AEI-worker for another go with his piss-hardon, or to trundle to the loo and not turn on the lights!

Why didn't he think of this simple life-hack earlier? It's brilliant, amazing, life hacking, he means life-changing. He is even considering sending it to Corey Doctorow so it can go viral on BoingBoing, or even LifeHacker itself.

~~~~~~~~~~

But! (There's always a "but", like when females tell you that they love you, bu-u-ut something about why they hate you as well. "I love you bu-u-ut you fucking snore like a fucking demented animal, getoutofmylifenow!" for example.

Bu-u-ut, the dye in the black eyemask comes off.

Oh NO!

It's not onto E@L's face thankfully but, to the horror of the hotel's laundry (he anticipates), it does silhouettes of itself onto the pillow, like the shadows of evaporated humans on the walls of Hiroshima. You can almost track E@L's nocturnal movements (body movements, not bowel) from its telltale marks. Oh dear.


Ah well, he sighs and admits to his privileged, arrogant, white-mans-burden, post-colonial self, it's a small price to pay for not having to turn on the bathroom lights.

He means it may be tough on the laundry staff, but it's a small price to pay for

E@L

Monday, November 03, 2014

Gone

The thoughts have flown, as they always do, 'twixt shower and computer, and I seem to be at a loss for what it was I thought so urgently a few minutes ago, under the aquatic flux, needed to be said.

It was important, deep, worthy of writing in stone. It has instead been drained in water.

~~~~~~

It was, I vaguely recall, on the loss of the muse. A frequently expounded theme.

I was looking for something back in old posts and couldn't find it - perhaps it was on the previous, pre-Blogger, no-longer-visible (some PHP parsing change has completely fucked it) E@L blog. But this allowed me to wallow in some nostalgia with the 800 odd posts still available here on Blogger.

Fuck, I was funny. Even when people didn't think I was, I was: I knew that jokes were nevertheless hidden in there. Jokes only I cared about, only I got, because they were so personal and obscure. I don't even have that anymore.

I can't do that anymore.

I can't even sit down and write properly anymore: instead I wallow in this disgusting and unreadable self pity.

~~~~~~

Hey! Great bottle of way-overpriced wine at Gaucho's, the generally overpriced Argentinian restaurant in BKK. (Makes my Woolloomoolloo places in HK and Singapore look ... about the same). Torbreck's Woodcutters - their easy, early drinking Shiraz. I normally take a bottle of The Standish, but this tasted superb after a coupla months of my eschewing of red-wine (mostly, Monday didn't count) as it gives me all sorts of unmentionable intestinal issues (never trust a fart!). Beware the next coupla days.

~~~~~~

Now I am still a little pissed and aware of my failings.

How about you?

~~~~~~

But I did a review for Goodreads. No wonder I am feeling melancholy.

~~~~~~

The Nice Old Man and the Pretty GirlThe Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Ah. Ah. The characteristic mild mix of pathos, ironic humour and profundity that permeates all of Svevo's work.

An old man (about my age) falls in... love? lust? with a beautiful young woman as she drives her trolley (what we in Melbourne might call a tram) in Trieste at the start of the Great War. Well, we've all been there (I certainly have), falling in love, I mean, with a lovely, clean (she bathes once a day) young woman, inappropriately. She comes around to see (euphemism) him at his insistence a few times, and he gives her some money, but he decides to slow it down for it seems his conscience is troubling him. Then he has a severe angina attack (we've all been there - I certainly have) which makes him reflect on both his mortality and then further on the morality of what they have been doing.

He decides to write something to instruct her (as well as continue to send her money) - but this turns into a larger work on the morality of the responsibilities of age. What does youth owe to old age, and how should old people instruct young people; those who, although they are incapable of understanding this, will become old and near death one day themselves? As his heart keeps giving out (not a metaphor) he tries to prepare this treatise for publication, hoping that it will explain the moral dilemma he faces to the world, but his doctor, who listens to his arguments, is not impressed...

What is to become of this quandary, what will his treatise achieve? As he admits on his last written pages: Nothing, nothing, nothing.

~~~

This is stylistically not his best work by a considerable margin, the story doesn't flow quite perfectly, but Svevo nevertheless skewers the guilt and regret of men as they age, as he did so remarkably in Zeno's Conscience and particularly As A Man Grows Older. And I am currently experiencing it.

The term "tragico-comic" could have created just for Svevo. Or for me.



View all my reviews

~~~~~~

Yeah. Sad old man.

E@L

Saturday, August 02, 2014

Religious Certitude 101



20 When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. 21 They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Joshua 6 (NIV)


~~~~~~~~









Gaza = Jericho. Discuss. Calmly if possible.


E@L

Friday, July 25, 2014

Dinner For All


Just a little indigression on food to avoid posting food pics and waffling on in a most nostalgic way on FB.

~~~~~

As you all know by now, E@L and Izzy (SPGica domestica) and her beau Danijel (how many frackin' guy called Dan does E@L know? fuck!) traipse off around the world a coupla times a year. Summer here, summer there. Often with Odette, Izzy's sister, as well. Absolutely the best times of E@L's recent life.

We've done the Croatian coast, Cambodia and Laos, Tuscany, Belgium, and Cebu. Probably some other unforgettable places that E@L can't recall just now. All fantastic. E@L only had two heart attacks on these trips. One involved an inappropriate lust attack in Hvar and the other involved an inopportune angina attack in San Gimingaino. Won't tell you which was the more painful.

 Cat, Izzy, Danijel, Odette: Split, Croatia

Arty-farty camera tricks: Luang Prabang riverside, Laos

The front lawn/breakfast/dinner nook in Tuscany

Six types of lobster: ?Antwerp, Belgium

The ferry from Negros to Cebu, Philippines

~~~~~

And now, as in soon, as in a few weeks, we are going together to Malta.

Malta.

At first, like you, E@L be thinkin': Malta? Meh.

But as it happens he had recently read Empires Of The Sea, about the 16th century siege of Malta, amongst other nautical shenanigans involving the Ottomans and the Kerniggets Hospitaller the Hapsburgs, and found it fascinating - educational and entertaining, erudite and mildly erectile. And speaking of which, of course, as E@L twigs eventually, Thomas Pynchon's V. is set for a considerable chunk of pages in Valletta (as imagined from his Baedeker and library researches of the place) - so E@L reread that not unsubstantial tome. And realised there were several obliquely prurient scenes that he used to masturbate to as younger man. (Hmm. Not on the plan to revisit those periods of his life, but hey, whilst the tissues are handy...)

The reason for this trip to Malta, much less sensually, seems to be that Valletta was used in some outside shots as Kings Landing in Game Of Thrones, first season.



These friends of mine are obsessed.

~~~~~~

Another of the things that Izzy and D are passionate about, as are all cool people, is good food. Or at least expensive food. And home-cooked expensive good food. On our trips they usually have a hit list of top places to eat and sometimes we have to book in advance to get seats, but also they like to experiment in the kitchen - with food, E@L reminds you correctively - when back home in their cozy nook in The Hague just up the road from the Escher museum.

We experimented with poached eggs last time E@L was there, for example. And roast carrot soup and jellied tarragon infused vodka or something...





All sorts of activities in The Hague (note the crisp sage leaves).

~~~~~~

So E@L is currently working up a dinner plan for New Years in response, when they (E@L presumes) come to Singapore for a few days prior to our next Southern Hemisphere trip.

The experiment tonight was Roast Cauliflower Soup, with a few of his own crispy sage leaves on top. Why the fuck not.

Step One: put the oiled up cauliflowerettes into the overheated oven and burn the fuck out of them in 15 minutes. No photo, lots of smoke.

Step Two: walk to shop and buy new head of cauliflower.

Step Three: oil up, etc, but don't have the oven as hot and keep checking!

Step Four: sweat onions and garlic then add chicken stock (not home-made) with the browned cauli and simmer for 15-20mins.


Step Five: add coconut milk and whizz around in the Kenwood Over-The-Top-Complicated (it was on special) Food Processor what E@L used for the first time today.


Step Six: Put in bowl and garnish with brown-butter crisped sage leaves and a rescued roasted flowerette and observe how it looks for all the world like hummus.

Tasted very good, but it was too thick and the cauli was still slightly rice-like. Maybe E@L didn't put in the complete 3 cups of chicken stock, or maybe the cauliflower was oversize for the proportions of the liquid... And perhaps one could mash it through a sieve or something to make it look smoother.

~~~~~~


Followed up by some lamb chops supposedly encrusted in thyme and rosemary salt, cooked to grandma's specifications (i.e. well done so you can eat the crisp fat without gagging) and with some simple steamed veggies (and a dobbed knob of butter).

Mmm-mmm. Definitely maybe the start of a menu for the anticipated end of year dinner party at E@LGHQ.

Keep checking your mail for the invite.

E@L

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Storming Of The Pastilles



Happy Bastille Day!

~~~~~~~

Showing his mastery of Photoshop is...

E@L

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Lost in Public Transit

When your town's founder is some rascal who ripped it off from the local Sultan (Raffles had signed a treaty with the Sultan's brother which meant little) you end up with a plethora (veritably) of landmarks eponymous to the much-lauded (except by his senior in the Navy) pioneer.

Wikipaedia lists quite a few places: hotels (one offs and chains), notable sights, schools, businesses, hospitals, streets, shopping centres, etc... around Asia and Australasia which have the dubious honour of bearing his name.

Statues.


A well-liked person. Attractive to the ladies.

~~~~~~~

Raffles Hills Jakarta
Raffles City
Raffles City Shanghai
Raffles Hospital
Raffles Hotel
Sir Stamford at Circular Quay
Sir Stamford Double Bay
Stamford Grand Adelaide
Stamford Grand North Ryde
Stamford House
Stamford Plaza Adelaide
Stamford Plaza Auckland
Stamford Plaza Brisbane
Stamford Plaza Double Bay
Stamford Plaza Melbourne
Stamford Plaza Sydney Airport
Swissôtel The Stamford
Raffles Class (business class) of Singapore Airlines
Raffles Holdings
Raffles International Patients Centre
Raffles International Training Centre
Raffles Investments Limited
Raffles Medical Group
Raffles Tailor
Stamford Global
Stamford Hotels & Resorts (Singaporean hotel chain based in Australia)
Yantai Raffles Shipyard
Raffles College (currently National University of Singapore)
Raffles College of Design and Commerce
Raffles Girls' Primary School
Raffles Girls' School (Secondary)
Raffles Hall, National University of Singapore
Raffles Institution (Secondary)
Raffles Institution (Junior College)
Raffles-BICT International College
Raffles International Christian School
Stamford Primary School
Raffles Country Club
Raffles Cup
Raffles Marina
Raffles Town Club
Raffles Avenue
Raffles Boulevard
Raffles Institution Lane
Raffles Lighthouse
Raffles Link
Raffles Place
Raffles Place MRT Station
Raffles Quay
Stamford Road

~~~~~~~~~

Which may (Understatement Alert) create confusion: for example - how does the intrepid steak- aficionado get to the illustrious and soon to be famous Wooloomooloo Steakhouse (plug intended, please spend up big) in Swissôtel The Stamford by public transport? Despite it's unexplained absence from the Swissôtel The Stamford's website, or indeed in any signage in the hotel, it is there in reality if not virtuality.

Woolies hides itself away demurely on the 3rd floor of The Stamford Hotel on Stamford Rd, at the Raffles City Shopping Center. Got it? Stamford, Stamford, Raffles. Wooloomooloo.

~~~~~~~~~~

Let me tell how NOT to get there.

Take the EastWest Line MRT (underground) and alight at Raffles Place MRT Station.

Half-asleep thanks to the soporific sultriness of the clime, half lost in a pod-cast on climate change or in the dream-world sounds of some ambient stuff recommended by No1 son ("No1 Son, did you leave the washing machine on downstairs?" "No, it's music." "Oh.") such as Carbon Based Lifeforms, Ulrich Schnauss, or Shpongle, I rouse myself as the train judders to a stop... almost to stop I mean, as it judders (jolts and shudders) briefly again to align itself with the outer anti-suicide doors and I fight my way out against the tide of prams and grannies as, I notice, the train on the opposite platform, going in the opposite direction, takes itself off.

The crowd looks and acts the same as in any situation, train-mall or large shopping mall, I can't tell yet where I am. A pulsing swarm-unintelligence rushing, pausing, floating, obstructing, ever-alert to inanimate things like clothes and watches, but nasty with indifference to non-members of the shopping swarm, as shopping is all the crowd does. I have to join for the flow through the turnstiles, or get crushed, eaten, assimilated and ejected.

So I come up from the depths of here, wherever that is, unthinkingly choosing one exit and slapped in my eyes is light. I am coming from a gate at one of the delightfully colonial pavilions of colonial architectural provenance, brilliant white in the sun in a small rectangle of a tended park of manicured lawn and low trimmed hedges that is standing defiantly dated, dwarfed on three sides by looming bank offices of Raffles Place, of course. Over the peak of the pavilion in the dazzling azure, I see the towering round tower of the hotel I had been expecting to find one hell of a lot closer, like all around me. The Stamford, Raffles City.

I am nowhere near where I should be. I realise that I have gone one stop too far again, yo-yoed up and over my public-transit bird-flipping ring finger. City Hall is naturally closer to Raffles City than is Raffles Place. Do'h!

But, seriously. Why the fuck would a station called Raffles Place not deposit you at a shopping centre called Raffles City? It's a fucking mystery. I've made this mistake three or four times now - but being who I am, I never learn from mistakes - how plebeian.

~~~~~~~~~~

The building itself, Swissôtel, The Stamford, was once the tallest hotel in the world, for about 20mins (it is 221 meters at 73 stories). It was designed by our buddy I.M Pei, the guy who fucked up the Hancock tower in Boston when all the windows fell out, and the guy who built the much more iconic and impressive (and stable) Bank Of China building in Hong Kong. Tall and round, it is a great hotel to jump out of the windows of - recent case of a lady landing on the roof of the al fresco Starbucks, no doubt quite a shock to the green tea lattes consumers there. (Apparently, while they were retrieving her body, it fell further, through the parapet and onto the ground! May even have been a murder...!) The Formula 1 race takes a corner right at the window of Woolies at the base of the hotel.

It's a cool place, but I am not there. Yet. Back into the depths of the MTR... And, yes, the train to doors close, beep beep,just before I attain entry...

E@L

Belief and Knowledge


E@L saw somewhere recently a woman defending her atheism (someone look it up for me). And was asked if she was not rather an agnostic than an atheist. She dodged the question. Some guy on the video comments criticised her for not quite understanding the bias of the question.

Agnosis is about "knowing." Atheism is about "believing". You can, he said, be an agnostic atheist. They are not mutually exclusive. You don't KNOW, but you BELIEVE.

[And I guess, for the believers, if they BELIEVE that they KNOW about LTUAE, then they have what to them is a FACT in their hands. Which is why you can't really argue with them. But let's ignore this for the purposes of the blog, as it's already having been written. E@L]

So E@L is looking for an analogy and he gets as far as Schrodinger's Cat, at least initially.

~~~~~~

Heisenberg: Imagine, E@L, that this cat was put in its metal box several hundred millennia ago (but by whom?) and the nasty radioactive substance has been decaying and threatening to release the hydrocyanic acid gas to kill the cat ever since. Not counting the cat suffocating in the first 30 mins, or the hammer mechanism seizing up, etc... Say the cat has been there since around about when human's started thinking about the afterlife, and all-powerful tea-pots on the other side of the sun (Richard Dawkin's analogy) and Santa Claus and the like. Say that we can never open the box to confirm one non-probablistic result or the other. Let's look at that box.

E@L: Amazing material, what is that box made of?

Heisenberg: Omnium.

E@L: Cool. From The Third Policeman. I get it.

Heisenberg: Is the cat dead, or is there a psi-function following the Copenhagen principle that Herr Schrodinger (zat traytor!) has set out to mock, that still allows the cat to be (calculates decay of that radioactive substance over time) only 99.9999999999976% dead and 0.0000000000024% alive?


E@L: If I didn't see it for myself, I wouldn't BELIEVE it! You did all those calculations on a fucking slide rule! Dude, you 30's scientists fuckin' RAWK! Anyway, to answer your question, I do not KNOW that the cat is dead. But fuck you and your fuzzy photos of reality, I BELIEVE that after all these thousands of years, the cat is dead. It has ceased to be.


~~~~~~

Good analogy? Not really perfect is it? There is still that tiny, teeny weeny chance. (Cue Sfx: muffled meiaowww)

~~~~~~

How about --

Schrodinger: E@L, you and I are locked in your bedroom behind the closed door FOREVER! How comfortable are you in your sexuality? OK, joking. But, you're typing this blog post and I am indulging in other wave-function related internet activities, and I hear a noise in the lounge room.


E@L: I didn't hear anything. Are you sure? The footy is on TV: the Cats are trouncing Melbourne.

Schrodinger: No, it was more of a big thump. Man, I reckon there is an elephant in your lounge room! In fact I BELIEVE there is a baby elephant in the lounge-room. I'm going to pray to it!

E@L: Pray for a Cat's victory and pray for it not to change the channel. You can't prove that about the elephant.

Schrodinger: You can't prove otherwise. You can't tell me for certain that the elephant is not there.

E@L: OK, I admit it. I don't KNOW if there are elephants in my lounge-room or not, however I aggressively and vehemently BELIEVE there are no elephants in my lounge room. It's 3/4 time. Score check.


~~~~~~

Or, (and this is more my true position) --

Rosen: I moved an invisible and intangible table through time and space (from the Emu Heaven shop, yesterday) into your lounge room next to the other one.

E@L: Where? What the fuck are you talking about?

Rosen: You can't see it or feel it, or use it, but it is there.

E@L: You're a fucking nut-job.

Rosen: Don't you have FAITH?

E@L: In an invisible table? No.

Rosen: Einstein told me it is there - you trust Einstein, don't you? There are spirit photographs of the table on the web. I heard a podcasts about it. I believe there is a table in your lounge-room. I am going to pray to it.

E@L: Einstein has been misquoted and misinterpreted since forever (relatively). If I can't see a table or touch it or use it for any practical purpose, there can't be a table there. A table that is not manifest in the world doesn't in effect exist.

Rosen: But I have seen the photos! This table cured my niece of hiccups! It has an aura! I can see it.

E@L: Those photos are fake, just painting done up with photoshop - it is so fucking obvious. I scared your niece into not hiccuping in a manner I will not divulge. Your aura is a migraine coming on from me about to thump you.

Rosen: How do you KNOW that?

E@L: Because there is no table there. I'm looking: No table.

Rosen: Oh table, grant E@L the faith to believe in you.

E@L: I don't need to BELIEVE that there is a table there or not. There is no table. Repeat. There is no table. I KNOW there is no table there. However, I BELIEVE a cup of tea from the Great Tea-Pot on the other side of the sun would be nice. Milk, no sugar.


E@L

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Distracted


I have a task/meme that has been put to me by Philip Willey, who may or may not have once blogged under the pseudonym of Dick Headley, to answer some question about my blogging (or more appropriately, the lack thereof). I have been working on this, Philip, and I promise that before I die or maybe soon thereafter, I will submit this to my vast reading public to add to the circle of responders.

~~~~~~~~~

In the meantime I have been finally, as in at last, hit with a load of genuine, employment related work, as in preparing some training PowerPoints, most of which have been written already and just need translating from Japglish into Australglish. The question for me is what the fuck are these people talking about, mostly.

Example: "Both X and Y are possible to cope with different purpose." It is almost understandable, but not quite right. What is purpose? Do they mean situation? Aiyah! This is one of ten lines on an over-crowded slide (this is not an iPhone launch) and I have maybe 150 slides to rewrite.

~~~~~~~~

There are two training sessions. One is two days of new product introduction to be given to our distributors. This was meant to be held in the sunny, smiley land of Siam in May, but political matters have intervened at the cusp of our triumphant "press this button then press that button" sessions. So the initial numbers of 80+ will probably drop to about 30 as the venue has shifted to our office in outer sticks of Singapore. Pain in the arse.

Secondly, I have a day and half to teach salesman of one of our partner companies about the basics/advanced physics and technology of ultrasound - something that took me 12 months to study and 30 years to, um, master - as well as do the "press this button then press that button" routing on a machine from my parent company that I have hardly ever used. Sigh.

For this second session, I have become bogged down continually rewriting a presentation that I started 14 years ago to explain visually quadrature phase detection so that I can talk about it without getting lost and without having more than 50% of the audience start snoring. That's a tough job, even though... zzz... zzz...

~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile I have been asked to run this week's Pub-Quiz at the salubrious venue of the Sportsman Bar in Singapore. Come one, come all. The spectacularly predictable task is for me to set up a series of obscurely-themed questions that make me sound smarter than I actually am (not a difficult task), ask the questions to the hopefully full-pub (maybe 30 people), get the results tabulated, and then announce the winning team - they get a free drink! Whoopee! - all in a suitably E@L-style of flamboyance, intellectualness and culturality. And to avoid mumbling throughout.

But being much more a visually communicative person (see above) than a non-mumbling person, I am putting all the questions and answer into -- wait for it -- a series of PowerPoint presentations. To show my style I have used several of the default PPT themes. Awesomely crap.

~~~~~~~~~

So guess on which of these tasks I have been spending the vast majority of my time?

~~~~~~~~~

First Round, Mysterious Persons:

Q1: Who and why is...


E@L

Monday, April 14, 2014

George Saunders: Ex Ayn Rand Guy

... They worked four weeks on and two weeks off and in the down time would be shuttled in helicopters to the nearest city, 40 minutes away, and then from there fly to Singapore.

“I’d been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that,” he said. “And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and genuinely suffering and hadn’t gotten there by whining.” While on a break in Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by an excavation site and “saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And then I realized the shadows were old women, working the night shift. Oh, I thought, Ayn Rand doesn’t quite account for this."


Saunders, George (2013-01-03). Tenth of December (Introduction: p. 2). BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING. Kindle Edition.

~~~~~

E@L

Sunday, April 13, 2014

The Truth of The Beauty of A Bloom Is That It Fades


In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai.


Kata, Phuket, after midnight...



Late decision in the tuk-tuk back from Patong: he would go back to the Luv-You Bar again after all. He asked the driver to drop him off at the bottom of the strip near his Kata Beach hotel (the hotel that wasn’t the hotel he thought he was making his booking at, but hey, it was a rushed job, for a spontaneous mid-week golf holiday [being single rocks] and the hotel was just next-door to the other). This meant three nights in a row now he would be talking to Noo. He knows the Rule of Three, hey fuck he wrote the rule, but he was powerless to stop himself (which is what the Ro3 is all about). It was late for this part of Phuket Island, about 1am, and he didn't really expect her to be still there, to have waited for him, even though she said she would. But if she was there, and not bar-fined, he would take her to his room for another 4am session. He wanted to hold her again, to look into her eyes as they made love. Maybe he could make her cum this time.

He could grab a few hours kip before his airport taxi came at 7am. He would sleep all weekend.

She was there, he saw her at the back, in one of the small yellow lounge chairs near the billiard table where he had played ten indifferent games of pool with her, or with Gap, the bar-manager who punched the air every-time Bruce made an error - it’s cultural, not rude, he had reasoned. She was squeezed in the chair with a Thai man about, how can you really tell, 30. He looked, let’s not kid, like a Thai hit-man - long-hair, deep eyes, thin lips, sprouts of a goatee, sun-lined face, and a dark shirt, in jeans and with shiny black boots. She did not notice Bruce as he stepped up to the bar, she was talking and laughing with the Thai man, yep, her boyfriend obviously, the one she said she didn’t have on the previous two nights. He paused. He tried to stop himself moving forward, to halt completely. He should have left quietly before she saw him, but what may have been merely tragedy slipped into farce when he found he could not leave and, despite a flash of awareness of his breaking all the laws he often had admonished others about, approached her chair.

Hoping against the hollow sense of his own human frailty, against everything he thought he knew well enough to overcome, his head spinning with the Thai music from the karaoke-player, he stepped closer, small steps. Eventually her eyes looked away from the man she was cuddling, they unglazed (she liked rum shooters) long enough for her to see him. She must have been trying to place him and then, presumably it clicked and she stood up, a bit shaky, from the chair from the hit-man, paused for balance, and then came towards him. He took her all in: triangular face, petite, a loosely crocheted top over a pink bra, belt-sized jeans shorts, bronzed skin (getting fairer, she hoped, with that skin bleacher she was shooting up each night in the bathroom) and he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn away away. And his face froze just below a smile and he said, Hello, and kicking himself later he added, I just came to say goodbye…

Which is not what he had really intended to say at all. The boyfriend, professionally slippery, had already slipped away, and Bruce saw too that no-one else in the bar was looking at him (he would imagine their bursts of laughter when he tried to sleep later), but their faces were down, away, focussed on other, suddenly fascinating, things.

Noo came right up to Bruce and put her arms around his neck and looked up. A very sad, what-have-I-done face, a look somewhere between feigned apology and feigned pity, a look that said I thought you were one of the ones who wouldn't fall in love, who only pretend to believe when I pretended to like you, but I was wrong (Beware The Ro3!), and she asked him to buy her a rum shooter. Pathetically, he nodded and indicated he would also have a beer he didn't want or need, and, here’s the kicker, he said again, I just came back to say goodbye.

I'm going back to Hong Kong tomorrow, he said and she looked even sadder as she saw 3000Baht slipping away with more plastic surgery and her boyfriend's motorbike repairs held off in the distance still, and she pouted her lower lip. Which must have done something inside her mouth because she slowly unwound her hands from his neck to tighten the stud in her tongue and she smiled, against the flow of Little Miss All-Forlorn, as she did this. But his confused mind was made up, probably, and he would leave now, now that all his dignity was shredded and burnt in offerings at the bar’s small shrine. He took his beer, drank most of the bitter razor-blades quickly, called for the check-bin, paid, then placed a 100baht note tenderly into her bra, making sure it was right against the nipple (he wondered later if those firm breasts were genuine, or part of a job-lot with the silicone nose-bridge she was so proud of), and he kissed her cheek again (it struck him that she hadn’t kissed him properly - only pecks - on the lips in all their time together) and somehow, not through courage, not through reason, almost accidentally, he managed to leave.

He cursed himself audibly for being the cliché he always mocked as he walked down the strip, crushed a 20Baht rose underfoot and, neither sober nor drunk but flushed and giddy, turned left at the quiet road to kick at stones and cans along the footpath and to fend off the occasional katoey on a scooter for the half-K back to his wrong hotel.

E@L

Monday, March 31, 2014

I Can And Do Choose My Books By Their Covers.


If you go book browsing and see something you like but there are several different editions, do you take the cheapest one, or do you go for the more exotic and colourful one that will add colour, size and general variety to your bookshelves?

For example: Wes Anderson's new movie...


... has a dedication at the end to the writings of Stefan Zweig. Zweig is one of those early to mid 20th century writers who have been rediscovered of late (late 10 years or so) and make you wonder how many other exceptional writers are out there, their stars dimmed only by time and the lack of making it to school reading lists, who deserve to be cherished and read for all time but are lost in the seemingly exponentially growing flood of newer books and the screaming white noise of the best-sellers. As a Stanislaw Lem character pointed out in His Master's Voice "Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million."

Wes Anderson has no hesitation in admitting his indebtedness in this interview in the The Telegraph. Very impressed.

Several of the smaller presses (twee hipsters?) have done a sterling, sterling I say, job of bringing a lot of these literary needles out of the, um, literary haystacks, and thence to my jaded attention at last. They seem to have been publishing his English translation since the mid-noughties. Also Penguin have had an edition of his novella Chess out since only 2006 - which I read a few years ago as it was referenced in some other book about chess somewhere.


So there I am in Kinokuniya Singapore, killing time while a cheap leather worker fixes my expensive but friable Timberland belt, and having seen the movie last weekend, and having been perked up at the end of this pushing at an overdose of twee movie when that "Based On The Writings Of Stefan Zweig" dedication at the very end came up (my friend noted a change in my attitude) and I thought, Respect!, and therefore I had to grab another/all of his books then and there to read on next week's trip to Australia ("work" - am expecting maybe 6 hours face-time with customers over four days.)

But which editions to buy? There was a New York Review of Books copy of Journeys To The Past, but I had the NYRB copy of The Post Office Girl in my bag. NYRB books all look the same - a rectangle just above middle of the front, plain colour spine, fonts always the same. Cute when you only have a few spread here and there, but they are starting to create their own bloc European in my library, particularly in the Russian section (Victor Serge [unread], Andre Platinov [reading], Vasily Grossman [unread], Yuri Olesha [read]). Reminds me of the fields of Penguin orange that once were triumphant across the shelves when I was a beginner bibliophile.


So instead I chose two collections of his short stories/novellae from Pushkin Press (who have comprehensive list of alternative/forgotten/ignored geniuses as well): Letter from An Unknown Woman and Amok because the covers rock!


Cute, different, uncool, awesome, heh? Bound, as it were, to be great.

It's no quite the same as using the jockey's colours to bet on horses, but it's fun and breaks up the monotony.

E@L


Friday, March 28, 2014

The Eyebrows Have It


If you type "Electric hair trimmer Philips" into Google -> Images, you will not see the model I am about to talk about, but no matter. I'll paint words pictures around its ingenious construction and you'll get the true essence of its form.

It's an electric hair trimmer made by Philips.

What?

Why, is that not enough? OK, it has a detachable comb, duh, but there is only one comb! Because with this model, and this is why I was trying to get a stock image for you, the bottom part of the handle is also a rotating switch which adjusts the setting for the hair length by varying the retraction of the curved spindle which is a key part of the comb, where it attaches itself by being inserted into, or invaginating, the body of trimmer. It does not have multiple combs, is my point. One comb, and by turning the bottom section around, it goes in or out. Setting goes up by threes.

The more recent model - a sliding comb adjuster! Must have!

I no longer use it to trim my head however. When I first bought it, I'd use the No 3 setting, go all over the skull, cropping, buzzing, several times. Down this side twice, that side twice, up the back, up the back again, around this ear, around that ear, at the temples and the few hairs left up top, once over all again, then I'd take the comb off and I'd guesstimate the area back at the neck and sweep down under my collar area to take all that zombieness away.

But of course I'd do an amateurishly crap job at it, always leave little tufts here and there, despite my most meticulous efforts. If I tied little bits of yellow or white ribbon to those tufts, I might look cute but instead they make me look like a klutz who doesn't even know how to drive an electric hair trimmer! Keep him away from important things, people! Like complicated medical devices!

~~~~~~

There is $10 haircut salon/cupboard that I use now at the small shopping mall about 15-mins walk away from E@LGHQ. They do an excellent job, although I have issues with the lack of a symmetrical method of one of the ladies. She doesn't do exactly the same motions when she is doing my right side than she does on my left side. It's not a handed-ness thing, she just approaches the sides with a different pattern of trimming, a random technique. I'm always thinking that she's going to miss out on that little tuft of almost invisible hairs at my temple, just forward of my upper left ear. She nails it on the right side, but not the left. She comes close, but her strategy for the left side is asynchronous. She passes just near it, hovers above it, below it. Until finally, often on the last sweep across, she eventually clips the ones she has missed. It's just that I am sitting in the chair, nothing to do but think about this. I call it people watching. Not judging, watching.

Once a month, usually on a Saturday (Sunday might also be good), I buy a ciabatta at Cedele, have a hazelnut-choc spin and two wholemeal-raisin cookies at Spinellis, then get my hair-cut and day-dream about losing weight while the buzz of the hair trimmer white noise blurs away most of my other cares - except for haircut technique symmetry. Most other Saturdays (or Sundays), when I am in town, I buy a ciabatta, have a hazelnut-choc spin and two wholemeal-raisin cookies, and don't get a haircut, but maybe pop down for a massage at the local R&T-shop instead.

How was your weekend?

Thursday (yesterday now), I had a haircut because I had flown in from Bangkok on Saturday evening, and on Sunday had gone to watch Wes Anderson's new one, The Grande Hotel Bucharest (the fact that is was based on the writings of Stepan Zweig sent me back to The Post Office Girl , looking for resonances) and it had thrown my schedule. So I was working, ahem, from home, ahem. And that's why, today, I got my hair-cut.

~~~~~~~

You will be pleased to hear that I do use my own electric hair-trimmer, that money was not completely wasted, but only for my goatee (setting at No 6, once a fortnight is enough) and (once a month, after the hair-cut - not needed after the R&T) when I set out to tame the politician-like prominence of my bushy eyebrows...


So this afternoon, I did my overdue goatee, shook out all the trimmings, and I set the control at the bottom of hair-trimmer to No.12 - an adequate level to correctly balance the brow's bushiness between "gone-to-seed" and "youthfully trim" without appearing PR-advisorly sculpted - and I started on the left eyebrow. No need to look in the mirror...

~~~~~~~

At first there was the sound - like a large strip of velcro being ripped open. Then came the sensation of tugging, my eyebrow's skin being pulled across - this sensation should not happen, there was something WRONG...

NNNNOOOooooooo! I shut the cabinet door to look at the mirror...

I saw it then on the bathroom bench, right in front of me, the comb. I had detached it from the hair-trimmer to shake out my goatee hairs! I had not replaced it! OMFG! It was unmodulated clipper-teeth biting into my eyebrow! Setting 0!

~~~~~~~

Now you can be supercilious if you like, but I think this might turn out to be a crucial, positive, day in my life.

Not only do I know appear as if I was auditioning for the role of Grima Wormtongue in LOTR - played with such malign oleaginousness by Brad Dourif, who shaved off his eyebrows to appear more sinister (not dexter?) - but I can finally accept that something has been affecting my cognitive facilities.

Yes, it must be the meds! Drugs, medications, chemicals! Out with them. Rid my body of these "scientific" toxins in tablet form, these capsules of calamity and contra-indications. [Aside: it's the side-effects!]

I can't keep doing things like this to myself. Can't keep losing things, forgetting things like all the things I forget or lose. Names, faces, phones. Lost, forgotten. Those painkillers are killing me. It must be painful dear readers, for you to have observed this gradual (some might say precipitous - I was coming from a great height) decline in mental and physical dexterity (and sinistry. I am ambidextrous, I mean ambisinistrous.)

It must be the meds!

~~~~~~~

Sorry? What did you say?

That I have been blogging about my cognitive incompetencies, my inability to deal with inanimate objects or with WiFi connections, with my brazen obtuseness in trying to comprehend simple instructions on various mobile phone operating systems, that I have documented all these things in over 10 years of Expat-At-Large, from way back when? Way back before I found a competent, dogged and persistently experimental (avoid Cimbalta people - ciabatta is OK), but eventually successful neurologist who gave me all these meds and made the pain go away? Mostly. (Neuropathy, people, in case you have forgotten, of the feet. Worst kind of all - idiopathic.)

Really? I'd forgotten that.

Ah OK, so it's not just the meds. I've been a bumbling fool forever it seems. Yes, that's true. Those thoughts, those horrible memories do come to me, they come too often. And I cringe now, to think back on some of my foolish bumbles. Oh fuck yeah, I've done some clumsy and some stupid things.

But not many as clumsy and stupid as this...


Brad Dourif - separated at birth

E@L

Saturday, March 15, 2014

FB and E@L and Blog


A rough guess. Mmm, say, 97% of the crap E@L posts on Facebook he should be posting here. It's the stuff he USED to post here. (And LOOK, he using capital letters instead of the full suite of his HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML tools for astounding typographical legerdemain.) He once would have posted here.

For the life of E@L, he don't know why-y, but it's less and less frequently that he can get into the long-winded mode he preferred back when he was writing... here. Sometimes he'd sit down to start with some words floating out there - an idea, a feeling, a thought bubble, an article in the NYT - and then he'd think of the many hours it would take him to get his thoughts out of order, to make himself seem confused, and to wrest from the clarity of his expressions at least six types of ambiguity - id est, to the E@L rambles that you, his long-gone readers, once appreciated, or claimed to. He'd be up 'til 3 (it's only 1;15 now), rewriting, reposting, looking for funny pics.

Not to mention carefully going through the post to insert ellipses (is that possible?) and to mix up leeters like as ifm cuondt; ptye.

~~~~~~~

Fuck Facebook. It's ruined E@L's blog. Cut, paste, insert witticism, post, return, LIKE!

~~~~~~~

And ditto goes for any fiction stuff, or even any reworking of the Bruce / Expat-Angst / Gone-Troppo type material. He just can't start. He can't concentrate. [And fuck! About four devices just went *ping* because someone has made a move in WWF.]

It's all too big. There's so much effort that needs to be made, there's so little belief that whatever might come of it, it would matter at all, let alone that it will be any good or that anyone would care.

(No, that is not a plea for people to contradict E@L and say, "Oh, but we care!")

And there's seems to be so... little... time.

~~~~~~~

Ah, perhaps he'll stick to Facebook after all. Instant gratification. Epigrammatic, telegraphic.

~~~~~~~

Or perhaps this post is un cri de couer from the worn sleeve that... his damaged heart... from... Yep. Or maybe an ejaculation of intent from an erstwhile impotent soul, an afflatus of aspiration/inspiration, a clearing of the enthusiasm pipes...

So, he has a week in the middle of nowhere (Lampang, Thailand - yes! E@L's thoughts exactly), let's start again and see if we can't revive the philosophically ailing output of

E@L

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Cyber-Posses and e-Lynchings


There's a viral thing going around Singapore that I would love to comment on less obliquely, either here or on FB, but I feel that my opinion on that matter, whatever it may be,.. hang on, I don't mean my opinion, I mean the fact that I, as a non-Singaporean living in Singapore might even HAVE an opinion about an issue that involves non-Singaporeans living in Singapore and might wish to express it safely in a polite public forum where reasoned debate could ensue (say, SammyBoy's Café), that I could expect a serious backlash - and not just being told to go back where I came from (Hey, I thought Aussies had the dibs on that phrase!) - from an island-full of self-righteously aggrieved citizens.


One could surmise from the evidence of the issue I am referring to, that there is a certain class of people who wouldn't even care to read, let alone attempt to understand what my opinion might be, should I have one, before attacking me and cutting me down to the size they think is appropriate (i.e. mincemeat?) for whatever opinion-crime they assume I have committed - but not just with an insult-exchanging "flame-war" as it used to be, but with real, life-impacting, personal, damage...

Read all about it... That woman who tweeted a poor-taste racist joke at the airport and was sacked by the time her plane landed...


If my comment got out, and was misinterpreted to be racist, or culturalist, or elitist, or post-colonialist, or pre-colonialist, or anything "-ist" by this type of people, then, pushing out their pique in a cascade of reTweeted or FB-shared comments could create enough ruckus (and not just on social media, but "real" media) so that their opinions on my less than 100% approved opinion could go Gangnam to a point that my employer would not be able to ignore it and they might feel they have to sack me - with all the enormous financial repercussions that might involve - home loans forfeited, hospital bills unpaid, Dropbox subscription expired (AIYEE, THE HORROR!), blah blah...

Not happy with that, those out for justice might, as they typically do, decide to attack, abuse and humiliate my family (yeah, even to the seventh son of the seventh son). Maybe they'd turn their attention to any of friends who'd stuck up for me (if they would be stupid enough to raise their heads in this Politically Correct environment), and then they'd hack into my computer and republish those embarrassing photos of me at my 50th birthday, the ones with the blue sparkly 50 sign stuck on my fat tummy and -- oh, those pics are already out there on FB!


And, you know, my opinion might have only been along the lines of, "Just chill guys," and/or "HTFU". But I have opted for the self-censor because I read on Facebook every second day exactly what happens to smart-arses on Facebook.

Because even such a timid comment as my typical ones might incense people further, for, as we know from recent experience, insults can be sort of homeopathic, in that the smaller the intended offensiveness of the comment or act, the greater will be its perceived offensiveness. This may extend to the point where, say, flashing your car's high-beam at the rear of a bad-driver is tantamount to declaring war. (See previous post)

This overreaction happens all the time - road rage being only one instance - because we are all wired to take a disproportionate offence at certain types of mild insults when they threaten certain aspects of our social expectations. Like when you feel you are being slightly cheated by a cunning taxi-driver taking an unusual route (and who might only be trying to avoid $4 ERP charge on your behalf), or being cheatingly slighted by your drunken life-partner at a social gathering where the morals are generally getting a bit lax and the lights are getting dim...

~~~~~

Seriously, free speech is being curtailed everywhere these days - here's me self-censoring! I certainly never expected to see that day! - and it's not (only) by the fascist governments and the despotic tyrants we typically point our quivering fingers at, but those cyber-posses of hyper-offendable "flesh-hunters" who troll the web-prairies looking for ways to destroy the lives of those others who might not be, to their unstated standards, perfect human beings all the time.

It's the somewhat peeved public on their iPads, not the evil overlords, not the Stasi, not the NSA, not KGB spies, not the minions of Big Brother. These are the ones keeping tabs on whatever we write, whatever we show, or whatever we think out loud in a brain-farted Tweet these days. And punishment is as swift as electrons and as profoundly justifiable as 140 characters can make it.

~~~~~

What has gone wrong? The PURPOSE of the internet used to be just that back in the good old days - it was built to offend and annoy people! That, and document collaboration, And porn. What? Has? Gone? Wrong?

"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.

~~~~~~

The Wild West ain't got nothing on the e-lynchings of these days.

E@L

Sunday, January 05, 2014

Christmas With Mad Max

E@L is calmly driving out of the satellite town of Leopold towards its mother planet/city of Geelong (we are in Australia already!) on the morning of Christmas Eve. He stops, with a few other cars, as the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill turn red. There are three lanes for each direction at this intersection, the inner ones of each dedicated to a right turn. He is going straight on and is the front car in the middle lane. This would be the "fast lane" or overtaking lane, but here, still in the Leopold township, it is a 70km/h zone and this would not be an issue, you'd think.

About 500m or so further towards Geelong the township finishes, just after the Coles supermarket complex, the speed limit then becomes 90km/h. In this area, for about 5km, are the small hobby-farmers, or the toes-stuck-in real farmers; people who sell organic produce, like sacks of horse-shit and tubs of freshly laid, unwashed eggs, and who might have a few paddocks gone fallow for a few years, and a few where dumb-as-fuck Hereford cattle graze under the enormous high-tension electricity towers that feed Geelong's last remaining triple digit employer, the Alcoa aluminium smelter, out on a finger of land by the best harbour in the bay.


Out on "the main road," if E@L was on the inside or outside lane it might make a difference. If drivers were foolhardy enough to push too far over the limit they'd risk drawing attention to themselves especially during the heavy traffic-police presence on Christmas Eve. [Increased safety, or raising funds to pay for a police budget that has already been overspent?] But here, still at the lights, E@L doesn't think he has any particular irresponsibility to be a drag-racing petrol-head loon. Particularly as he is setting up the Bluetooth from the iPhone to the car while waiting there.

When the lights change to green he gently accelerates away (but that is not saying anything much) in his little Korean rental car because, hey, he is in no hurry and does not need to rush to jump out first, plus the phone just needs a little touch to connect - 'beep' and there it goes - The Fray.

The car in the slow lane on his left is going a little faster and is pulling away slightly from E@L. Big deal, we are still in the 70km/h zone. After about 150m however, another car, or a van in fact, comes up on his inside, in left lane, and hovers beside him. It presses urgently closer towards the car in front of it, dangerously close. This van does appear to be in a hurry, and now, with only half its length past E@L's car, it appears to be contemplating changing lanes! This would likely result in it pretty much sharing the same coordinates of space-time as E@L's car which can only happen it they are both Bosons, the Force-carrying Particles, but not possible when, as is the case, they are made of Fermions, a.k.a. matter (according to the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.)

"Hey, hey," thinks E@L to this driver, "don't be a fuckwit - this universe works fine as it is!" But here it goes: The van's indicators flash on and almost immediately it starts to swing across towards him. He is forced to jam down on his brakes and drop back quickly as the van lurches into his lane, only avoiding the front of E@L's car by a meter or two, thanks to E@L's prescience and sharp braking and the way he cried out, "FFUUUCCCKKK!"

The driver of the van, obviously not 100% aware of, or not seriously caring about, the danger he just threw E@L into, puts his thick, hairy, deeply tattooed right arm out the window and effects a conciliatory wave. "Woah, you idiot," thinks E@L and automatically blinks his high beam once at the van, which is already prematurely accelerating away in anticipation of the upcoming higher speed limit. "Ha," thinks E@L as the light-beam, hardly a laser, hits the back of the van, "Take that!" 

But the van driver doesn't take it well. The waving hand that had been retracted, emerges again, this time with its middle finger raised. It seems this driver doesn't appreciate it being pointed out to him that he nearly killed someone a hundred meters back there.

Oh dear. While the physiological effects of his fright peaked early in one way - the hyper-reality of pure shock - now some other concerning signs are rising. His chest is tightening and his mouth is drying. He is angry and frustrated and a bit panicky. [E@L would like to point out that in this region (not on this road, but near Geelong) a few of the dramatic scenes from the first Mad Max movie were shot, back in the late 70's, and that the movie's ultimate road rage attitude still permeates the traffic culture round here. E@L once had a Geelong acquaintance who cheerfully told him that he always carried a small crowbar under his seat for resolving differences of opinion in these incidences of mild traffic-related personal losses of face.]


As the stream of traffic moves towards town, E@L is himself driving a little closer to 100 than to 90, perhaps because he is now so rigid with tension, and noting that the urgent need for speed that van had before is not that important after all, and E@L is catching up. Oops, did E@L say he was catching up? The van has moved back to the outer (left) lane again, and another set of traffic lights is coming up with E@L still in the right lane. E@L wonders how this will work out if the light turns red - there are two cars in front of the van and one in front of him.

What is the etiquette due to a person who flagrantly tried to kill you and then flipped the bird when you objected to this? He wonders if he should ignore the van (i.e the sensible thing), or if he should he stare hard at the driver with a tightly accusative, seriously affronted face (wrong) - but this is a matter of being a man or a mouse, right? He feels the tension continuing to rise in his chest - wonders if this is another heart attack in the making, or anger, or fear, or whatever - and stomach acid is pouring out prior to a possible confrontation. This could be a suicide decision. He has no perfect knowledge of who is driving this van: He has only seen an arm, a hand and several fingers (at least initially), although he is moderately certain that it is *not* someone's little old grandmother. 

His heart does falter a bit when [as you expected] the lights they are approaching turn red. Slowing down to come to a stop, E@L passes the van's driver window slowly and he foolishly decides to give the driver a look, blank but uncompromising! But the driver is already staring back at him (in anticipation of E@L staring in the first place of course), angry and sneering. He is a big man [as you also expected] with a face like an unscrubbed potato out of which glaring eyes spear hatred at E@L. He appears to be in his mid-forties, his long dark hair is thinning and wild, he has a scruffy beard, and wears a dark shirt. He has turned in his seat to better face E@L whom, in his meek little rental car, goes slowly past, towards a position just ahead of the van. 


E@L sighs deeply. Belches out his acid fumes. Great; The bad guys from Mad Max have all been reincarnated in the van driver.

When the traffic moves forward again, the van has become trapped behind some slower cars (they had better watch out!) and E@L is soon quite a few car lengths ahead of the van. He is able to move over into the left lane, the same as the van, and the speed limit is about to change again, down to 80km/h as the density of suburban industry increases.

He still feels an ache in his ribs and burning of acid, and he needs to let the incident fade away. He chants: little book of calm, little book of calm, trying not to think of the fucking idiot driver, trying to kill him and then getting angry at E@L for just a brief light-flash, little book of calm... Relax, breath out slowly, be calm. Oommmm... Thank god that's over. 

Until... another set of traffic lights turns red. [You expected this as well, right?] As E@L comes to a halt, he sees in his mirror that the van had already pulled out into the right lane again, now on E@L's driver side window. The van, a big van, monstrous, surely too big for this planet, snorting malignant fumes of an infernal internal combustion, approaches menacingly (Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear) and E@L assesses it will stop right next to him. Which it does.   

E@L notices only then that there is decal on the side of the van. It is a small notice promoting a motor-cycle repair service (no doubt provided by the evil driver). In a burst, it dawns on him that the dark shirt on the screaming driver is in fact a leather jacket, perhaps with a bikie group's denim colours on top. [Another quick bit of background for you: Geelong is known for its chronic and frequent motorcycle-gang-related violence, including several recent murders...]

The anger displayed on the bikie's sneering face earlier has only swelled since the last visual-only interaction - he seems to have been steaming up fury to unleash, scalding hot, against E@L. The wild hair and wild eyes are even crazier, his potato face gone to a bright Russet. Leaning over to his passenger-side window, he roughly rattles it down. E@L casually presses the button, once he finds it, on his door and his window slides down with a smooth electronic burr.  

E@L has a fair idea what Mad Max the spud-man is about say, so he instantly runs through a few of the witty responses he can make to the varieties of acerbic invective which are about to be spat from the mouth of this demon with severe anger management issues. Should he tell him to take his anger out on the wife and kids as he no doubt usually does? No. Should he tell him to learn to go fuck himself with various motor-cycle parts? No. Should he suggest that he file a police report if he feels he has been legally slighted by E@L's irrational following of the speed limit? Probably no, also.

So when the potty-mouthed bike-repairman lets fly - and he does most colourfully and effusively - E@L opts for a softly-softly, more passive than aggressive, approach.

"What?" he shrugs, with a slight suggestion of irony playing around his mouth. "What?" he shrugs again. (This is roughly what he meant by the shrug:  What are you so amazingly angry at *ME* for, all *I* did was blink my lights!... You don't scare me!)  

And this interaction goes on for the ages contained in an enormously relativistic three or four seconds, maybe two. 

And when the red-lights go green, as they must, E@L's sweaty fingers seek the window-up button, but before it rises, he looks at the potato-faced man and says loudly, in a voice as close to pleasant as he can manage, "And have a Merry Christmas..."


And so he drives away, satisfied that he will not necessarily be murdered before he gets home, and slightly smugger than he was a few seconds earlier, and also confident that the bikie van driver will have completely missed/ignored E@L's ironic point about Christmas Spirit. Or he'll be still sitting there dumbfounded. Or maybe humbled and apologetic at E@L's devastating implied criticism. Or maybe even angrier than ever at E@L's high-horse arrogant cockiness.

But, whatever, you know? E@L just wants to calm down, he wants the tension to dissipate, he wants to do his shopping - cereal for his mum, milk and bread for his sister, antacid (now required) and a AED for himself. He turns into the next (The Woolworths) supermarket car-park and was pleased to note that the van kept on going up the road towards town. And he sits for a minute in his parked car, breathing deeply, repeatedly and slightly shaking. And he feels for his pulse - he is alive, yes.

"I really didn't need that," he says, with a hand against his chest: in prayer or in defence, he isn't sure. 


Then he thinks: "I just bought a house in this town. Fuck."

E@L

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