Question: What equipment do you need in order to escape from a highly-secure detention centre, operated by a secretive anti-terrorist agency, filled with highly-trained guards, in high-tech Singapore?
Answer: Toilet paper
I got off the taxi early today. It was 2am and the streets were still lit. I said goodbye to my colleague, with whom I shared the cab. I said I wanted to buy something to eat at the 7-11 but I really got off because I needed to walk.
Here where I live there are few cars this late in the night. I think this as the taxi drives off behind me and I enter the 7-11 where a middle-aged woman stands behind a counter. She is wearing a badge I think but who cares about her name? I decide I'm not hungry and buy a bottle of chrysanthemum tea. She asks me if I want a plastic bag and I say no.
I am electric with nervous energy. I leave the shop into the equatorial night. It is warm and humid and its frequency is the cricket call. It is also calm, stiflingly so. You need that sometimes because the life of a sub-editor is an exciting one. Especially when there are breaking news and you have already busted offstone for 20 minutes but the newspaper computer system was written by angry, underpaid robots with a touch of Downs' Syndrome because it opposes all human logic. You need it to work now now now holy shit.
By "I" I mean the other subs. The only emergency I got was when I realised one of the copytasted cartons on my page had already been used in another paper yesterday and I had to do a rewrite 15 minutes before offstone. But you feel it. The panic surrounds you. There is tension. There is yelling.
That's why I need the glorious, sleepless night. On neighbourhood roads there are no human sounds but the clanks of my footsteps on drain grilles.
There is no danger walking here. This is Singapore. You can't even get chewing gum on your soles. Well, to be fair, recently there was a robber on the loose. He had a knife and had robbed several people in the area. I was not aware of this until he was caught. I don't think there are too many other weapon-wielding criminals lurking nearby. Even if there were, I think they would be asleep, like most reasonable people.
A few cats cross my path. None of them are black but I'm not superstitious (touch wood). I pass a temple, a large ornate Chinese one that was standing across the road from me. It was bright and workers are walking about carrying chairs and tables. It seems an act of worship had recently concluded. By now all the believers were probably tucked in their own beds, maybe dreaming of whatever they prayed for. In dreams all things are real.
I walk on. A tall Indian man crosses my path. I feel, I admit, a tiny bit of fear, probably more than if it had been a black cat. Latent, inherent racism? It doesn't matter if the conscious brain understands that people, like cats, are mostly the same regardless of coloration and the differences don't have that much to do with melanin content. The reptilian part of the brain never forgets a prejudice. Unsurprisingly, the man does not, in fact, lunge for my wallet.
I was thinking this when suddenly, a massive roar overpowers the combined song of probably hundreds of crickets. A chopper whips past a bend, revving its motor as it went. Such noise from such a small engine! However, the roar has its own velocity, disappearing as quickly as it came, and the night is silent again
I am approaching the exercise park. Just a few days ago when I walked there at a slightly earlier hour the benches were filled with couples, men and women holding each other, whispering words of no significance except in the universe that exists in the space between two hearts. There are no lovers tonight. They have all gone home. There was only one man on a bench in a far corner of the park. Like me, he was alone.
I hate it when people say that. You've had a thousand years of religious rule. Somehow I doubt more religion isn't the answer to the problem of people kidnapping a woman and the poor father being forced to marry her off to her kidnapper.
Even for love?
Did they get it right? I mean the ancients, the non-Jewish types, who saw something all-too-human in the churning ways of the galactic winds. Could it be that the engine of fate is driven by many hands, not One? And that they, the gods, are vicious and backbiting and jealous of man and yet they burn just like man. They have no plan, not for you, nor their children, nor themselves.
But they are swift and they see.
The gods despise heroism as one can see from their treatment of Prometheus, he who stole fire to give Man sustenance. Zeus so hated this petty transgression that he had Prometheus tied to a rock where a vulture eats his liver every day, which isn't the sort of thing one really gets used to. Incidentally the punishment for Man was the sending down of Woman, which if you ask me blatantly violates the principle of punishment in proportion to the crime. Pandora the first woman brought in her proverbial box all suffering and death.
It's a universal principle that the powerful prefer obedience to heroism. So that's how it is in myth, and that's how it is in the world. But what are we really obeying? Gods and madmen!
On a positive note, if we didn't have death we wouldn't have death metal.
To breathe cool air again!
I feel terribly misunderstood. Right now, more than ever. I can get away with shit when I'm being mean; never when I'm being nice.
Recently I got moved to the sub-editing desk for a three-month stint. It is compulsory for all reporters in the newsroom, presumably so that us frontline grunts will get to know better the news production process.
So for the past week I've been doing subbing hours, which for my paper means going to work at 4.30pm and reaching home at around 3am. It means sitting on a van with other owls on a long and very roundabout way home (unless of course the driver thinks yours should be the first stop). It means walking through the very dimly-lit distance between my home gate and the door and crossing a long, quiet and lonesome living room, up wooden stairs cool to bare feet, feeling that special kind of desolation that comes to one at 3am in the dark.
I'm not going to proofread the above paragraph even though it is probably full of errors because fuck that, ok.
I know it is because my subbed copies and my Chinese translations are awful. I blame the Chinese translations actually. How do I write succinctly when I don't understand half of what I'm reading? And constantly flipping a dictionary wastes too much time. The subbing team is the final line in a newsroom. It also works on tight deadlines. I wish I had paid more attention in class.
Also, I totally suck at arranging the elements on a page. And I have a sore neck.
