MateRealistic

Power, status, cars and the plastic cards… The current needs of the society. A shift in the human necessities, the evolution of the pragmatic race in accordance to Darwinian’s theory. Have we evolved for the best or for the worst? I guess only one will know…

The realistic mates want us to have something in our name, a car, a house or anything that’s worth something. Yet we yearn for the social affections of what the opposite can provide, to assuage the furtive loneliness in our hearts. To complete this other half of our realistic needs. Be it sexually, physically, emotionally. We needed them like how they needed us… That’s what we are, sentient beings enraptured by our own expectations, tempted by or our inner desires… In this world of hikes and inflation, we just have to be realistic to our materialistic needs…

The pursuit of perfection; an epitome of impossibility… A futile struggle against the inevitable… Yet in between we strive for the fullest of what this transient life can offer, the materials that made us happy. How have I fared in this race to perfection? Having succeeded monetarily yet failed miserably in the affairs of the heart. Am I perfectly flawed? Or am I just passing through time like how it should be… Step by step, piece by piece, disintegrating along with the ticking of time…

The World I See

I see, destruction along the fiscal motivation of captilisation. I see, death beckoning on the sides of freedom and revenge. I see, information packed in packages called zips and traded for gratification. All in all, I see manularity facing extinction.

A future where plastic keyboards becomes the canvas of artists and scholars, speakers and soundcards replacing the once harmonious melody of instruments. Metallic hands and artificial intelligence subrogating the nimble fingers and the rationalality of a surgeon. Wars will soon be fought by machines and numbers, not men. Fingers, signatures and emails will be the tools of war, not guns... Sacrifices will become mere statistics, tabulated to lay the pages of histories. We are entering into a world of automation... Soon, even we will be automated...

Soon it will not be us inventing things, but the system that we have built upon the eons of human knowledge and evolution. Soon, even our thoughts will be a hardware, even ourselves will become slaves to the abominations we have created...

When the time comes, we can kiss this derelict vapid world goodbye.

Friends In My Heart

Another year has passed since death has taken him from us, and it’s been another year since we last saw him… Along our busy lives and schedules, we carry on with our existence, by being the slaves we are to this master of time and reality. We seldom get the chance to think about those that have left, about those whom chronicles of life has a part of us… That is until I saw his picture again today…

Being back to his humble abode, I could still see him, shadows of him and the past memories. Times shared and spent together with. Though it has become but a distant reminiscence, but somehow I guess all of us still lives with him in one way or another.

Some friendships can never contest the ravages of time, some friendships stays on in life and some other transcends life and death. But nonetheless, they are still friends in my heart… Its amazing how time had passed and how he has left us and yet I could still feel him, here in my heart…

Valenight

Opposites collide, glances entwined. As our sights locked upon each other, we did not look away like what every stranger does. That is until a smile from her broke the trance I have drowned into, I responded with a toast to loneliness and to her. She responded to my cue, and we drank till it’s half full. We just looked at each other on Valenight, divided by the bartender and his arsenals, sundered between words and actions. The occasional disturbance and cuts in between proves futile to disrupt this mysterious yet magical connection we shared… There were no dialogues, no pick up lines, only mere minor gesticulations; overtures through little actions that meant so much more than words.

Intentions opened, deliberations denied, for I only intend to chill here just for a night. A night to get away from the couples that encroached this civilization, away from the apparitions of held hands and oral copulation; away from the lovers that I used to be and never would be. The previous player in me would have seized the opportunity and give her a night to remember, but the contemporary me wanted nothing more than just a simple night of emotional respite at a pub. Women and sex are no longer on my agenda, like how love and hate has never been my prerogative.

I thought my existence will never be noticed in this dim lit place, I thought I had coalesce into the dark like how I had lost belief in hope and faith, and I never thought I would ever share any special connection with a woman again…

She gave me her number, I got no phone, but a piece of paper… But I think it ended up in the washing machine… There goes the magic, erased and dissolved right down the pipes and chemicals of launder… I’m back again… Back to reality, back into this loveless mythology.

My 22nd Valentine’s Day… Who wants to my date next year?

February the 14th

The clock strikes 12, and the second hand unwinds... A second past the 13th of February, a second into the 14th of February... It's that time and day again... The time when I am casted out of this society where I once belonged...

I think the world will be out, people in twos... Coupling the apologue of this thing called love. In the tribute to this one man that made fruition to cross cultural and status love. A sacrosanct bond that transcends all condemnation, disapprobation and religious barriers... Yet I live in this ironic loneliness of high density living in a culture of strangers and social affectation.

We buy the plastic hearts because they symbolise the replica polyacrylic nature of our poignant lives. We smile on cue, swoon at the appropriate moment, simper and furrow with whatever sincerity we can muster. We go through the motions of humanity, the gears that made us love... Replicating romantic ideals, like those right out of a korean or japanese drama.... Like every good android should, we obey the principal matrix that media has programmed onto us...

Because that's what we are. Casted in the image of women and men - We are robots winding down at the end of all history. Yearning for a time when everything meant anything. When we could finally ignore the logical drives that has made us, us... When ignorance let us believe in love as a transcendent quality instead of an evolutionary device or an all too temporary psychosomatic affliction.

Plastic hearts and dead flowers. Fatty carbs and casual sex. Sacrifices to a dead saint on the altar of consumerism. If ever we needed a punchline to this joke we call the human condition - This is it:

Happy Valentine's Day.

Casinoist

Away from the traditional quintissential home visiting, I travelled away, through the roads that stretched over 300 kilometres... Up to the hilltop, in a place where dollar and cents change hands faster than the speed of light; in this place where fortunes are won and lost in just a matter of seconds. I took my chances here on an annual basis...

It’s amusing how casinoists are scientists one way or another. They analyse a certain field and come up with thesis for the winning strategy; Some of which became a theory that probably lasted for only a few minutes... But more often than not, the probability of winning in a chanced game is often on the bankers end. Even though they realized the odds are stacked against them, they still took their chances, including me...

Ill gotten gains, acquired through the smile of Miss Lady Luck. Gratification upon the losses of many others. Realizing my materialistic needs through the anguish of ill lucked people... Will I be pardoned of this sin, that I only commit as a yearly affair...

Chinese New Year

It’s that time of the year again… New clothes, new hairstyles, new cars, a new year… But some things remain, like people, like me, like broken hearts… This annual déjà vu is but a fleeting moment, but somehow every year I face this same scenario with a different sentiment.

House visits, cash for presence exchange, carbohydrate loading and friendly façades. We see the same people, played the same sets of cards, asked the same questions and replied with stencil answers. Every year, we rinse and repeat, at times with new additions to the revelry, at times with an empty seat at the corner where one used to be… No matter what, no matter how, this ancient Chinese tradition carries on…

I don’t understand why I still look forward to such things again. All this celebration, these congregations, it’s just like a video tape replaying round the circumference of days… And I am just following through the motion…

If only I could just play back last year…

The End of Nothing...

Today we drew a clear line between the lovers we once were and acquaintance we eventually are - A final full stop to the end of this love hate relation.

She wants the return of her physical belongings; I want nothing more than a faint physical memory. She wants to clear all her debts to me; I want nothing more than the monetary emotions I once purchased to be. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, for she has already taken everything from me.

Alone at her doorstep, I could hear her from behind. Behind that wooden divider that seperates us from vision, that block that stopped me from feeling what I should and would feel, that barrier that forestalled my tears… She’s so close yet so far, so near yet she can’t hear… In this deafening silence, echos of her voice rings through my head. Flash backs, reminiscence, recollections of past happiness all rushed back to me… But I did not make a sound, in this lull of stillness, I’m just telling her “I love you” in silent consonance. She can’t hear it… But it’s there…

I’m shipwrecked, drowning in this sea of emptiness… Marooned on this loveless ship that she has rabidly escaped… Now she’s just tying up all the loose ends, so that she could start anew with this new vessel she now anchored her heart upon. And I am left to survive on my own…

We are strangers but not that alien enough, we are friends, but not so close again. In this cleft between the mixed connections we now shared, perhaps we are just familiar strangers… Strangers that will probably never meet again…

Emptiness

Scorned by the repetition of fate, I thought severing the bonds of affection for her would meant the end of seeing her. But circumstances deny, refuting the psych barrier I have built up on them... I thought I would break down, I thought I would be engulfed by mixed emotions. That is until I saw her again... After these 3 months, has time finally expunged the humanity in me together with the memories I have for her? For all I can feel is this hole in my heart, this hole that have discerped me from all cognitive and volitional states of consciousness...

We just sat in silence, drowned by the background of several others. Stuck and muted by the quandaries of speech. Random topics just spawned out of my mouth, trying the break the stillness of the night between me and her. After such a long time, I finally saw her again, but I feel no pain, no anger, no more emotions... Just this void between me and myself, between me and her, between the space that seperates us.

This emptiness, is it a form of acquiescence at the final stage of breaking up? Is it the final phase of this great project called love?

After some recent revelations, I guess broken hearts are just meant to be forever broken. My lifelong affinity to bachelorhood and the prerogative it offers just got shaken somehow. Replaced by an unexpected emptiness that seemed to have grown day by day, hour by hour... The vacantness of solitude and uncertainty... All I could think of now, is how she is shattering the tenuous silence I have in between my guilty conscience and my inner monologue...

What am I looking for? The long elapsed past, ticking away with every second of the clock? Or the distant future that is seemingly filled with endless possibilities... What I am searching for, is not the past that has forsaken me nor the future of what I dreamt it would be, but the opportunities I have relinquish my grip on...