Raymond Chandler on the detective as hero

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor--by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is in all things.

"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks--that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

"...If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

--from The Simple Art of Murder

when the eternal footman

holds my coat, and snickers, I want to be able to give him a cutting glance because my life meant something to someone other than myself.

Laundry List

• I see the urologist at Singapore General Hospital on Wednesday (I say that like there's only one, and like I know him/her). I look forward to bringing along the stone in a ziplock back and waving it around while saying proudly 'Look what I made!'
• I have promised the Son that I will buy the nicorette gum. And to drink more water every day. Nothing like a five year old to keep you honest. (by the way, I do not smoke around the kids).
• If I can survive the next six months, I may be able to eat something other than instant noodles.

That is all.

Sickness update

It was a kidney stone.

a personal discovery

tonight I realized that the relief of pain is a much finer feeling (to me) than the application of pleasure is. There is a clarity that comes as pain recedes, whereas pleasure just befuddles.

tomorrow I see the doctor, unless the pain returns in the night.

very, very sick.

been a long time since i had the kind of fever that gives me chills when I step into air conditioning. also have a cough that sounds like a rottweiler got stuck in my throat.

on the plus side, the whole world seems to be just a little bit lighter and fluffier. I even had some hallucinations last night as I tossed and turned in bed.

yay, sickness.

Now that it's over...

I can talk about the collision of Hari Raya and the Hungry Ghost month in Joo Chiat.

It was bad.

Hari Raya wasn't all that bad, actually. Lots of stalls set up, yummy 'street' food, pretty lights. The main problem was the traffic, and the rubbish. The main issue was that of the many, many, many stalls that didn't sell food, they all sold curtains. Curtains, curtains curtains. Would you like to buy some curtains? Why no thank you, I don't believe in them. Well how about some curtains then?

The Hungry Ghost month was less pleasant. Some lowlights:

• People burning bales of hell notes. I swear hectares of rainforest were burned here in Joo Chiat. I mean, is it love or fear that prompts one to remit billions of dollars to the departed? I shudder to think of the runaway inflation in the afterlife. Zimbabwe? Meh. The Weimar Republic? Pffft.
• The greasy coating of ash on everything, including my white tile floor. See, my back door doesn't close. Through a fiendishly complicated system of raffia connecting the back door to the rubbish chute, said door is always open. (I didn't create this monstrousity; it was like that when I moved in. Some people might say I'm just lazy, that I could cut it and be done. The truth is I'm in awe of the mind which devised the unholy mess, the unnecessary(?) tangle of pink raffia that connects handle to handle thorough a convoluted series of twists and turns. I suspect said mind was either brilliant or deranged, and to destroy its work would be almost sacreligious, and very probably dangerous.) Since my back door is always open (so to speak, if you can climb threee stories and squeeze through the wrought iron security bars (much like a former bosses' open door policy, come to think) and since the prevailing wind comes from the rear of the house, the ashes from all the burning billions ended up in my house every. single. day.
• The chanting monks. To the rear of my dwelling is an open field, which allows me an unobstructed view of, among other things, the Gateway Hotel, East Wind Foodcentre (Vietnamese Favourites!) and Pub 88 & Karaoke. None of these fine establishments has ever annoyed me to any extent comparable to the three chanting monks that set up shop in the open field outside my back door. In a cheerful little yellow tent, they chanted for hours one night- which would have been fine, actually, if they hadn't felt the need to use a PA system. Why (on earth? in hell?) would the dead need a PA system? WHY? They're dead, not deaf.

So. They're over now. I wonder what else Joo Chiat has in store for me?

8 days

8 days with the kids. It was good. I like being a full time dad, waking up with them, going to bed with them.

Now back to my regularly scheduled existence.

Interim

It feels as if my life is being crammed down into a haiku.

I'm sure you remember your school teacher at some point forcing you to write haiku; it seemed like a good idea to them at the time, a three line poem, the 5-7-5 structure. 'Yeah, kids can do this,' the well meaning English teacher thought, 'and more importantly, I can teach this.'

Only haiku are incredibly difficult to do well. You strip down the essence of one thought, one idea, one emotion to its purest form in 17 syllables. You ruthlessly sift and strip away everything that is not the business end of what you want to say. The beauty of a haiku is the beauty of survival- these words have survived to express my meaning; no others, out of the entire language, were fit to do so.

And in the end, it's all ephemeral. Desperately important, but ephemeral. Like life.

A big cardboard chunk of my childhood just arrived in the mail

So who wants to play?

If you really really loved me

You'd buy me a plush facehugger for Christmas.

I tried and tried...

...but I just couldn't come up with a witty remark about Argentina and crying.

(un)AWARE

I should feel bad about the fact that AWARE, Singapore's premiere women's advocacy group, has been eaten hollow by a group of Dobon-esque fundamentalist militants. And I do. But I also think they brought it on themselves.

There are two main points that I can't get past. First, that the old guard could allow it to happen. That's just plain complacency. If they got blindsided, it's because they weren't paying attention to their own membership.

Second, and this will be an unpopular opinion, I think the very fact that AWARE is a women's advocacy group is a weaknes that lends itself to just such exploitation. It's too damned general. Over half the people in the world (and Singapore) happen to be women. And guess what? When an organization purports to represent such a large population, there are bound to be some inside that population who disagree - vehemently - with the aims and goals of that organization. In this case, fundamentalist Chistians who don't like the idea of lesbianism, abortion, divorce, and/or women working outside the home.

I've always had a problem with organizations whose reach exceeds their grasp. When you presume to speak for everyone, when you presume to speak for an entire group or classification of people rather than as an advocate for a particular belief, it smacks of hubris, however well intended. And sooner or later hubris attracts assault.

Couple hubris with complacency, and you get the current AWARE debacle.

'tis the season

Too many things to say, really, with no real idea how to say them. Inside, there is much bubbling, and if you listen closely, you can hear the faint high hiss of escaping steam, but the lid is firmly on, my friends. For now.

At some point, at some point I'll put it all down.

Meanwhile, I hope your Chirstmas was tolerable. Machineboy reveled in his toy guitar, his off-off brand gameboy, his Tom & Jerry cartoons with a preface from Whoopi Goldberg telling us it was allright to enjoy these old cartoons with racist trophes, and he was only mildly put off by the fact that a couple of presents from well-meaning but forgetful adults required, but did not come accompanied by, batteries of various sizes and styles.

As for me, I received only one gift, from a friend, but it was alcohol, so that's allright.

Here's hoping nobody else gets trampled to death in pursuit of post-season deals.

non-announcement

I suppose this would be considered liveblogging. I'm sitting at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the base of Suntec Tower Four, my habitual haunt. It's a Sunday afternoon. I have an internet connection and a laptop, and I'm not afraid to use either. It's just that I don't have much to say.

Or rather, there is much to say, but I don't find myself particularly interested in saying any of it. All of it is either too mundane or to full of portent. That's the way it goes, sometimes.

But still, I'm alive, I'm kicking, and just wanted to report in.

You may resume your regularly scheduled surfing.

New Gar the Pitiless Post

Apparently Gar has been suffering from insomnia, and getting scant sympathy about it.

Dear America: Your New Survival Handbook

What follows are a few tips I learned while suffering from extreme poverty in the US. This is personal experience, suited for a single person, but a little ingenuity can be applied to shape some of these ideas for families.

If you smoke, don't bother trying to quit. You're already in a position to be miserable, and your attitude is now your greatest asset. You should, however, buy the cheapest, foulest, most nauseating cigarettes you can find so that a) you rate of consumption will go down and b) instances of people bumming off you will go down, both saving you money. You'll only smoke when you really need one, and nobody will bum off you more than once.

Secure some form of reliable transportation. If you don't have a vehicle, your work options are severely restricted. Depending on your situation, public transportation may or may not be an option. At one point for me it wasn't, so I worked two jobs within walking distance. If this is you, walking distance now means at least two miles, better four. A reasonably fit person can walk four miles in an hour. But remember the vehicle doesn't have to be yours, it just has to be reliable. If you can really rely on family and friends, do so, but make sure you pay your fair share of the gas, and don't think of borrowing the car or bumming rides as your right. It's not. Be grateful someone is willing to help you out.

Sort out your housing situation. Boils down to four options really. Your own place, a semi-permanent place with someone else, couch-surfing with friends and relatives, or sleeping in your vehicle. No, sleeping under a bridge is not an option. You might as well go get yourself a shopping cart and start collecting cans. Once you're that far down you should be contemplating how you can get locked up while avoiding maximum security.

Which one is best for you boils down to how much you can afford. More on how to figure that out later. Suffice to say, if you're already in a place, renting or with a mortgage, you need to do everything you can to stay in that place. There are only two ways to come up with enough money to do so: Increase what you earn or decrease what you spend. Probably you'll need to do both.

If you can't stay where you are and have a semi-permanent place you can go (family, good friends), make sure of two things: That where you are going is not psychologically unhealthy (many families are toxic) and that it affords you good opportunities for work. Wherever you go, don't stay there for free. That's psychological poison. To the best of your ability, you need to stand on your own two feet for your own sake.

If you have nowhere to go but have a vehicle, you're still all right, relatively speaking. You can maintain your independence, and keep working. You have two main concerns: Safety while you're sleeping and keeping presentable. Getting killed is a piss-poor way of getting out of poverty, so you need to choose where you park to sleep carefully. It's better to get woken up and harassed by a rent-a-cop than park somewhere more private, but much less likely someone will hear you if you scream. Which reminds me; if your vehicle doesn't have an alarm, get one. They're cheap, especially if you can do it yourself. And Do It Yourself is what you're all about now. You should also have a mobile phone, both for 911 and because you need to stay as connected to everyone and everything as possible, for jobs, for family, for friends, for sanity.

How you stay presentable is quite straightforward: Laundromats and free showers. Laundromats are self-explanatory. Free showers are where you get creative. You might have friends who will lend you their bathroom. A YMCA membership is cost-effective, with the plus of getting you out of your car and doing something healthy during off-time. If worse comes to worst, soldiers have been bathing in staggeringly awful conditions for a long time. You can stand to do a quick sponge bath in a gas station sink upon occasion. Just make sure the door locks.

A word about living out of your vehicle: Keep everything organized and clean at all times. Your life is full of enough chaos and confusion as it is. Don't make it worse by finding your last pair of clean underwear wedged behind the gas pedal.

A word about pets: Make other arrangements for them. You have to take care of yourself now, so you can have the chance to take care of them later.

A final thought about living out of your vehicle: Spend as much time as you can in public settings. The price of a cup of coffee is a small price to pay to stave off the inevitable sense of isolation that comes with vehicular sleeping arrangements.

In any case, don't fall into the motel trap. It's a fool's game. If you've made enough enough for a motel room for a night or a week, odds are you're only two months away from having you're own apartment or rented room. Sure, it'll probably be a shithole, but at least the sheets won't have been splooged on by truckers.

Work. If you don't have a job, your job is now to find a job. If you have a job, guess what? You don't make enough there, or you wouldn't be in the situation you're in now. You need to be doing two things: Looking for a second job, and looking for a better job.

You'll probably need two jobs. Consider one in the food service industry, so that you'll know where at least one meal a day is coming from. Don't whine or complain, even to yourself if you work two jobs. What are you going to do with your off time? Endlessly admire the corinthian leather seats of your mobile abode? Watch Jerry Springer?

Final Thoughts:

Every dollar you earn is a rung on the ladder you will use to climb out of the hole you find yourself in. Every dollar you spend is a rung taken away. Make sure you spend for good reason: Health, safety, sanity, or as an investment in yourself (haircut, alarm clock, etc.)

Always be on the lookout for beauty. In a sense you are no longer part of the community; you've gone into the desert. Now is the time that real meaning is most likely to appear. Be ready for it.

Keep clear in your mind a series of concrete, achievable goals. "When I have $xxx I can put a deposit on an apartment." "I made it through the week with $xx to spare." Don't let your routine turn into an endless loop.

Pay back people, fuck corporations. People are real. Corporations are faceless money-eating machines. The guy that loaned you $20 for gas will likely suffer down the line if you don't repay him; the bank that ate your house is getting bailed out by Washington as we speak, and the CEO that ran the company into the ground is getting millions in severance pay. Now is not the time to worry about your credit score. Now is the time to worry about your dignity and humanity.

Endless marathons and the human heart

The Sept. 4 issue of the Straits Times ran an excerpt of an interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien loong, entitled 'Running the endless marathon'. When asked what Singapore sees in its future, PM Lee replied:

"There is no end in sight. We have a saying - 'the endless marathon'. In ten years, we hope to see a different Singapore, We hope it will be a Singapore possessed of greater culture, with a transformed economy and a new generation of political leaders who understand the wants, needs and habits of a new generation of voters."

The truth is, I respect Prime Minister Lee greatly, and believe that as a whole, the comment quoted above is on the right track. Though I may disagree with the proposed pace of political reform that would lead to such a future, I m sensible enough to understand that too much change, at too fast a pace, carries with it a risk of political instability that Singapore simply cannot countenance. One need only look northward to Malaysia to see the effects that political instability can bring about in many areas, including race relations.

In a broader, more semantic way, however, PM Lee's choice of the metaphor 'endless marathon' left me feeling... grim. as a writer, I have a healthy respect for the power of metaphor, and that particular one is powerful indeed.

I don't wish to take PM Lee's remark out of context -- he was clearly referring to the challenges that Singapore's government faces when he referred to an 'endless marathon'. As the government goes, however, so goes the nation, and a nation is composed of flesh and blood individuals. If Singapore as a political entity is committed to the idea of an endless marathon, then Singaporeans as individuals will be affected by it, and expected to operate under it as well -- where they run to reach a goal that will be forever out of reach, and consequently have embarked on an unwinable race that will consume the entirety of their lives. A chilling thought.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting PM Lee's analogy. Likely so. He's down in the arena, and I'm up here in the cheap seats. The history of the marathon is thus: Pheidippides, a professional runner, carried the news to Athens of the Greek victory over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. On arrival, Pheidippides shouted, "Rejoice, we conquer!" and then keeled over of exhaustion.

Perhaps PM Lee views Singapore's endless marathon in that light; as the government will never see the day where they can shout 'rejoice, we conquer!' and then take a breather (or keel over) due to the endless nature of governance, then it can never allow itself to fail, to rest, to stop. And as government is an abstraction, without lungs to burst or a heart to fail, or legs to give out, he would be right. But surely government should have a wider aim, beyond gazing into the murky medium-term future, beyond picking the path fraught with the fewest perceivable perils. For without a clearly understood, deeply cherished destination, there is as much (or as little) reason to stand still as there is to keep running.

Human hearts do give out eventually, for reasons emotional as well as physical. An endless government should always recognize the frailty of those it serves, who, each and every one, have very definite ends in store for them. And for all the material wealth Singapore's government has brought to its people, there are considerable portions of the population who long to be able to say 'Rejoice, we conquer!' in areas far removed from the purchase of a car or a condo. In areas such as the dignity and inclusion for foreign workers and domestic helpers; in areas such as legal equality for homosexuals; in areas such as draconically Darwinian education and the chronically poor.

Some were not fashioned to run a single step, much less an endless marathon, but everyone should have the opportunity to rejoice, in their own fashion.

To all the posts I've blogged before....

Content coming this week. I'd say that I promise, but that would be a lie. Smooches.