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So I'm chilling at my girlfriends place in Subang when I decide to pop out to have a cigarette and discover the panties. Lacy panties, granny panties, all kinds of panties, clean and fresh, strewn about the drive way in some kind of demented psychotic ritual of praise to the three daughters that lived in the house. Today, he one uped himself. Instead of throwing the panties in the air like confetti, he instead neatly folded the laced selection onto the rear windscreen wiper. Perhaps this was his attempt at being 'polite'. So somewhere out there in Subang Jaya, a man with a huge bag of panties is constantly scouring the house of USJ 6, flinging panties in every direction, not unlike Happosai in Ranma 1/2. A mad, demented midget with a thirst for female undergarments, chucking them amongst the populace like Santa Clause bringing gifts to the kiddies. "What do you want for Christmas, son?! Laced or thonged!?" I mean, why?! Why the hell would anybody want to throw panties at a house?! What does it mean?! Thousands of years from now, will archealogists believe that it was a mating ritual of the 21st century?! Will books be written about it? Will half hour shows on National Geographic be devoted to the 'Cultural Phenomenon of Underwear Projectiles in the early 21st Century"? If any of you precious few who read this happen to be a panty thrower, please contact me. You fascinate me. I wish to one day follow you in your exploits and join in the underwear flinging. Do you get used ones and clean them beforehand, or do you go out to the nearest Giant and buy a Supersavers pack? Is there a club? Do you get a card and a badge and everything? Do you have meetings? My girlfriend and her sisters believe whoever's throwing the panties must be a serial rapist with quite a few marbles missing from his Congkak set. I don't. I'm pretty sure that at home he plans these eents meticulously to the setting of the sun and the lunar calendar, that deep down there is some serious philosophy behind flinging underwear at women's houses. At least their not stained. Sometimes I sit around with my guitar in my bedroom and think about why I play my guitar in the first place. Why do I bother writing music and playing in a band and working in a recording studio/venue when the benjamins are obviously not rolling in. Hell, I even tried to put it into words into a blues styled song. Unfortunately, my bassist turned to me after hearing me playing and said it sounded too much like Kid Rock. That f*cking white trash Run DMC ripp off motherf*cker. So why? I used to live in a flat in Subang. With my yearly bonus of my old corporate monkey boy job I bought myself a computer, a bed, TV and playstation, I had a kick ass pad. I went to work every day in a shirt and tie and earned my pay. Now I live at home in my same old bedroom with the same old Ratpack poster facing the framed magazine spread of my first ever appearance in print (Konsert, review on the Ramones Tribute Gig at Blue Planet), my four year old brothers grafitti plastered all over the walls, the bed smelling faintly of kitty poo from the last time Mummy Kitty felt incontinent and decided that my Transformers bed spread which I had since I was four would be an ideal spot to poop on. My dad keeps asking me whether there's any future in music and my mother keeps telling me rather blankly that there isn't. I'm 24 years old and living with my parents again. The reason I've really begun to think about it all is thanks to my phone ringing last friday with an unknown yet familiar phone number on the screen of my Nokia. "Hello?" I asked. "Khairil," said the camp voice on the other end, "why didn't you tell us you had left Gas Malaysia?" It was one of the top big wigs from FCB, the agency that my previous company used to deal with and led to me becoming a part time unpaid 'male model' for the company's print ad, my ass blown up to about a meter wide on the 50' X 50' wall banner on Pusat Bandar Damansara. After some idle chit chat, he got to the point: "Have you ever considered working in advertising?" I paused. Ampire Studios/Paul's Place was beginning to pick up. The acoustic fest was working out and a few calls had been made for bookings and recording time. But it wasn't there YET. The benjamins weren't enough to cover the rent yet. When dad wasn't looking I was snooping in his wallet for a fifty he may not notice was missing. And working for a 4A international advertising company had its perks: I was allowed to be creative, plenty of intensely hot air headed bimbo's in said industry, lots of fun to be had with expensive Apple Mac's for future office terrorism. Hell, the prospect of a guaranteed monthly salary and free internet was already enough to get me salivating. But it would mean giving up Paul's Place. And I LIKE working in Paul's Place. I HATE working for piss poor pence, I HATE having my girlfriend pay for all our dates, but I LOVE music. I guess that's what it comes down to. All you need is Love. To think that the answers to life really lie in a Beatles song. The interview's tomorrow. Their gonna tempt me and lure me. They'll buy me dinner. I may bend. But, godammit, I love music too damn much. I love my Danelectro, I love my Epiphone Les Paul, I even love my Encore Strat and my beat and broken Tanglewood. I love Triple6Poser, I love Y2k, and even though it's gone I still love Khaimano. I can't imagine living without a guitar within reach. I can't imagine driving without AC/DC pumping out 'Highway to Hell'. Strange. I just started writing for the sake of it, with a question in my head that I thought I may pose to the public. In the end, I f*cking answered it. When I was about eight I found my pure white baby kitten dead in the living room, it's stomach slit open from neck to nuts, lying in a pool of blood for the ants to dissect. I can't remember it's name, I probably named it Timothy the Third or Fourth. At that age I had a thing with naming cats Timothy. I loved cats in general, and Timothy IV (I think) was the first kitten I had. A white long hair fur ball. I remember coming home from school and it would have all of it's 'tahi mata' stuck in it's eyes and I'd have to peel it off because he didn't know how. I'd keep him in the left chest pocket of my white short sleeve school shirt with the school insignia ironed on it. Unlike my other cats, my mother wouldn't chuck him out at night fall because he was young. We were living in Taman Tun at the time, on Jln Burhanuddin Helmi 1. I was going to Sekolah Kebangsaan Sri Petaling in PJ, and came back home on the big yellow school bus, my back pack stuffed with huge and heavy text books and self made comic books drawn from ripped out center pages of excercise books. The house was quiet. The maid was sleeping. I walked into the living room, making my way to the kitchen to get a drink, when I found Timothy dead. I stared at Timothy, and my reflection in the blood. I watched the ants entering it's innards and the sad look of death on his face. I observed the matted blood on his fur and the precision of the cut. I was frozen. When I came too I was yelling for the maid. Later in the day, after Timothy was burried in the Pet Cemetary that was my back garden (where I think TImothy II and the Turtle That Shat On My Dad lay), my maid told me it must've been a dog that snuck in and whacked Timothy. A f*cking dog. I may have been eight, but I wasn't f*cking dumb. I didn't get another cat until I moved to Damansara. I remember when we first got a Windows powered computer. I was a hardcore non-Gates kid for quite awhile, but my Amiga 500 plus was no longer the super powered kick-ass machine I once thought it was. I mean, after all, this brand new PC powered with Windows 95 had ONE GIGABYTE. Kick ass! And it came with Weezer's 'Buddy Holly' video preinstalled to showcase its video playing capabilities (kicking off an infatuation with all that was guitar based rock, but that's another story)! But the main thing I used it for was to write. I would write my ASS off. Before this, I'll admit it - I never had a typewriter, I had never used a word processor. Now, now I was off the hook. I wrote my first script on that computer, a story about three friends meeting up in a house on New Years Eve and discover a dead body. During GCSE's, I had two weeks to come up with two years worth of coursework for my English class. I sat in front of the computer and wrote a ton of material : a novella based on 'Taxi Driver' and a news article about a gang rape, a script about narcotics officers having a very strange and trippy day, a short story about, well, absolutely nothing, basing the style on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a three page story about an abusive father and his two sons, told entirely from each of their thoughts, the list goes on. I handed all these in and got an A. I remember how one of these pieces almost got me into trouble. A friend of mine, a guy named Omer Ahmad, had this major crush on this girl in the year above us. He was writing poems to her, and the plan was, on the final poem, he'd reveal himself. I wrote a script based on it and came up with my own ending (which wasn't very far from what actually happened). Unfortunately, after he confessed his love, the girl said no. Once all the kids in school found out, they got her number and called her up at night, bugging her, claiming to be Omer and leaving rude messages of an illicit nature, often involving kebabs. Thanks to the script, I became a suspect. Even after that, I could still write. During my A levels, on an Easter holiday, I searched high and low for a typewriter, and set it up in my room. Two of my friends were staying over for the Easter holidays and we'd take turns typing poems and observations. THese were all compiled in plastic folders and binded to become what I like to call the Banana Book. I have no idea where the Banana Book is anymore. Even without a typing machine of some kind, I'd still have my notebooks, and scribble ideas and thoughts into them. It wasn't till Uni that I had to go back to some serious long hauls of writing. I first wrote a few scripts based on my halls of residence. Nothing really happened with them and I don't know where they are now (thanks to crashing computers). Then my second year. I was one of the Head's of the Uni's Drama Society, and it was decided to do a revamp of a Shakespeare piece, 'Much Ado About Nothing'. After awhile, nobody seemed to writing it. Nobody seemed to come to the meetings. I knew that if nothing was done nothing would happen. I sat down with the book and read it twice. THen I got onto the laptop. Two days later, a first draft was finished, with a lot more dick and fart jokes than Shakespeare could've ever intended. Then, my favorite - a rewrite of Alice In Wonderland, set in University. Alice, a young, naive, American exchange student, notices a girl dressed as a playboy bunny, and follows her through the halls of residence as she meets wonderful characters that show her to be herself: the Mad Hatter & March Hare were drunken rugby players; the Cheschire Cat was a smooth talking South American player; the Catterpillar was a white rastafarri. I loved that script. I loved directing it. I loved the cast. I loved the performance. When I came back I even tried to push it to Faridah Merican at the Actors Studio. She never called back. I later realized she also held the only copy of that script left. It seems all my scripts go missing somehow. Anyway, those days are long past, and now I've had the longest writers block in my whole existence. I can't write anything except exactly what I'm thinking. No stories come to mind, no characters live in my head, no dialogue springs forth from the tips of my fingers to the keys on the laptop. And I hate it. So, until a story finally pops up into my mind, I'll be talking to you. I've got that feeling in my belly again. The same feeling I had in Egypt almost a year ago. The feeling that something bad is going to happen. The funds are low. I'm skimming where I shouldn't. I haven't been to work at the studio for the past two weeks. I haven't been feeling much love for the studio for the past two weeks. Or myself. I can't write. I can't think. I just feel... blah. I'd like to blame it on this city. I'd like to say that it saps me of all the creativity I once had. But it's more than that. Got an sms just now. The person on the other line (who shall remain nameless until we ride this crazy torpedo till the end) says he wants to meet. Says he has bad news. Very bad news. The thought about my future has also been stirring in my brain something chronic. As has my past. As has a lot of things. And for some reason I'm writing it down here, for you, dear reader, to read. Why? Haven't a fucking clue. Either way, I feel it in my belly. |
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