I was shooting at this amazing apt cum office last night. Was there from midnight till 8 in the morning, mostly waiting around

I dreamt about a very beautiful boy that I used to know when I was a child (I haven't seen him since I was 10). He was quite tall and lean in the dream, and got tricked into having "I'm a drunk, I'm a loser, I want to rape you, I want to fuck you" tattooed across his torso He was also very good at drawing things. He made a movie about a mexican in a sombero having a drink in his living room, with a ring of dancing candles for company, and it was a joyful piece. But he was a very sad person, and I watched ihis little film many times, and I felt envious that he could draw so well. But also sad, because he was so beautiful, but he seemed to think it mattered that he had those words tattooed on his chest.

We were on a train that never stopped moving, and none of us ever got off it, although we knew where exactly we had to get off. It was an island, where we would go diving, and I was afraid that the train should reach our destination, because the weather was very bad. It had a station to stop at, once a day, and every seven days, he'd get off and buy me a present that was a comb and a pencil, and I thought it was very throughful of him, because I kept on using up my pencils, and I kept on using my combs as rulers (rulers didn't exist in this world because in real life I actually have a really bad habit of forgetting my rulers), and the combs got dirty quickly.

He could become extremely violent when he wanted to, and he beat up some of the other people on the train that became, in a rather distant way, my friends. They were all jealous that he could draw so well and they couldn't, and his tattoo gave them a reason to be rude and hurtful towards him. He starting beating them up, and I got very angry and frightened and sad, and there was nothing I could do about it. Because I didn't dare talk to him about it, and I started to think he was an awful person because he was so violent.

He still bought me the pencil and the comb, and I finally asked him why he still did that, and he said it was because I was still his friend. I wanted to say more, but he walked away, and I went to watch another thing that he had drawn. It was beautiful and his line style was so delicate and smooth and curved and natural. He had gentle hands, and I wondered how it was possible he could be so violent.

I went to find him, it was late in the evening, and the sun was setting behind a drab horizon broken by uniform blocks of flats, flashing in the windows of the train as I walked up away from where I was used to being, into another carriage. His carriage. People there was much less nasty to him, they didn't talk to him mich, but they talked to him politely, sometimes, and they loved his work. They were all gone to another place, and he was quite alone.

I went up to him and pulled up his shirt. He did not resist, and let me peel it all off. The four lines of demeaning text were indeed tattooed harshly on his torso, covered by piece of medical gauze that stuck to him like cling film. I peeled it off, and asked him why it was such a big deal. They were just words. I found it easy to ignore them. He shrugged his shoulders. I held him for a long time, my face against those words, and I didn't understand why he was all these things, but the only thing people noticed were the mistakes written on him.

***

Richard's company is in dire straits again, and his ex-wife (who is also the company's biggest client) might just be about to leave her job. We were talking about it, and he said it would be funny if I got to work under her someday (she was a great animator in her time -that was about 10 years ago, when she was still animating, before she turned to producing and managing creative, as opposed to doing it herself).

I told him I would love to. Why should it matter that they were once together? It botheres everyone -his family, my parents- except the three of us. She's glad I made him happy after the marriage failed, I'm glad she's a very good creative (which is very rare in Singapore) and she generates fun work, and he's glad because she's still friends with him, and I'm with him. So we're all good, and I don't give shit about the state, and I don't see why they should 'sort out' their marriage. Because iot is sorted out, except on paper. And what business is it for the state to intefere into people's personal affairs.

Arse, Arse, and fucking double arse.

I haven't had loadsa time to blog and keep up with general internet activities lately cuz school just started.

I spent the whole day animated a sausage. It's quite funny. I'll load it on You Tube and post it in a mo.

In the meantime. I posted the following blog on my other (more local) site and it got hacked into today. It's just So annoying. these $£%$^%^.


****Let’s play the Discrimination Game.
August 12th, 2006

I get really mad when people try to be politically correct and say Islam is ok. Of course it isn’t ok, neither is any other religion that doesn’t make any rational sense whatsoever. The human mind works on logic, not on leaps of faith based on unproven miracles. Indoctrinating it into working the wrong way is not healthy. At best it obscures certain truths of the joy and purpose of life, at worst, it insidiously brain-washes you into thinking that killing yourself, and others, is a good thing to do.

I just came back from London, via Heathrow airport of course, and there had been enough ridiculous checks already, as it was. Some of it I don’t mind, but after the foiled attempts to blow up the American planes, some of it is really getting extremely stupid. Now, would a middle class white lady from Essex with a baby, disguise bomb fuel as baby milk? Would regular Christians/Hindus/Buddhists etc. hide time bombs in books for the sake of blowing people up? No. ‘Course not.

Now I can see the problem if people start discriminating by skin colour. I mean, yeah, most of the Terrorist so far happen to have dark skin mostly of a certain kind of dark, but that doesn’t mean the next guy with skin the colour of a cafe au liat will most certainly be a terrorist, think matyrdom is a title worth aspiring to, or even that there is one God and that some people are more special than others. Because that is what those people think, and clearly all those people on the plane they were going to go on, weren’t special. If they’re gonna discriminate, then we should discriminate too. In natual selection, the species that are pacifist Die Out. And we’re not pacifist, oh hell no human beings ain’t. Try to be as politically correct as we might, but oh yeah, in our heads aversion, pity and the fear of being politically incorrect, wrestle when we think about the Middle East, Islam and headscarves.

On the one hand, we feel as if the average Muslim (and most Muslims are just like you and me, only that I don’t believe in a God and they do. Which I feel can make a very big difference or no difference at all, depending on how that affects the way you behave in this life, and the way you feel about other people -whether or not that are as ’special’ as you.) is probably a decent chap and a productive member of society. On the other, we see all this shit on the news, and little girls being made to wear head-scarves in blistering hot weather, and stories of honour killings, and, man, do we hate that shit. Whenever I see a little girl sweating in a headscarve, I think, fuck, how could her parents do this to her? I don’t think her parents are evil, just confused. And I know exactly what to blame for that confusion -the intrinsic love for imitation and blind following that is imprinted into our genes. This makes it a hell lot easier for myths to be passed down and for them to be taken in without question, believed and acted upon, however irrational.

Fact: Some beliefs are irrational, and they must be discriminated against.

Ideally, airport staff should be sensitive enough to discriminate between different groups of people. But how do you discriminate between the suicidal Muslim and the average bloke who just so happens to believe that God really did write a book and although that book is the word to live by, other people should not be killed just because they are infidels (I would find this a hard position to take, if i really believed in the Koran, and statistics taken throughout the Middle East have proven that although most Muslims are not likely to kill ‘infidels’ they agree with or condone Jihad.)

You can’t give ALL Muslims ’special treatment’ either, because that’s like saying, ‘You’re Muslim, you’re evil, you must be scrutinized.’ That’s not being politically incorrect, that’s just plain wrong.

Instinctively, I am thinking, if this is a war of beliefs, than we must get these so called ‘extremist’ to denouce their destructive beliefs out loud at airports. Get Islamic scholars to sturcture the sentences such that there is no way around it. The people that say Islam is a religion of Peace and believe that life should be in the hands onf ‘god’ and wholly in the hands of ‘god’ wouldn’t have a problem.

If they can use the bible in court as a measure of making sure they got the truth out of people who believed in it’s intrinsic worth (there must be a reason why that practice is prevaliant. I know today it’s nothing but an antiquated ritual, and that people still lied anyway. But clearly at some point, some people must believe that breakin gan oath on the bible would send them to hell) if they can do that, why not do the same now?

But anyway. It’s kinda silly, I know. It will not work and will probably make things worse… it’s just the solution I came up with, instinctively. I doubt it’ll make things any better at airports. I just think that the people doing the checks should be more emotionally sensitive to the vibes they get from people, and if someone looks like they really ain’t gonna be a terrorist, there’s really no need to get her to sample her baby’s milk formula to make sure it’s not fuel.