information failure.

"I bought this new induction cooker today - made by Induc. I've not actually heard of that company, but the cooker looks pretty good - it's hundred percent stainless steel, solid; it's light, easy to use, easy to clean. I got it for a good price too! It was... what, hundred and fifty, right hun?"

"Nuh it was hundred and fifty nine."

"Yeah, about hundred and fifty. Much cheaper than what we'd be paying in Australia anyway. I can't wait to try it out back home!"

"Wow, hundred and fifty is a good price. Where was it made?"

"I don't know... it didn't say on it label, did it, hun?"

"Nuh."

"That's strange. They normally print it somewhere..."

"Yeah. I've got the instruction manual here," she said, turning to beckon me, "Can you help me find out which country this is made in?" I took the booklet from her. Their eyes couldn't possibly sift through the ant font on the manual. Maybe it would've been possible (though barely!) to inch through it with their readers on, but it was always so much easier to employ the aid of younger eyes - and so they often did.

"Mmmm, it doesn't say. Can I see the box?"

She went into her room, returning shortly after with the packaging.

From the box alone, it was easy to see why she had bought it. The sleek design - a simplistic combination of a metallic grey background, a bold, red brand name in the orange title-box slanted in the corner, and the general, smart print for the other text forms, all in English - made the overall appearance legitimate, contemporary, yet edgy enough to charm housewives into buying it. It had the winning balance between looking both fresh and "established" as brand.

I quickly scanned through the box a few rounds. Nothing.

"How about looking it up on the internet?" she suggested. So I did. Google was always trusted for such situations. I keyed in "induc induction cooker"; enter. The results yielded a perfect match. I clicked on the appropriate link and all the information I needed was, strangely enough, there.

"It's a Chinese company."



Her mouth gave way to a choking moment of breathlessness. Everything she had ever feared had come true.

zoom zoom zoom.

The street - it was unusually bare today. And, the only other difference was that horrible droning deep in the background. It was some barely distant vacuum, like a vast vortex, that was sucking, sucking viciously, sucking the neon night-life out of the city streets...

Then again, it might have just been the sounds of excitement and tourism and economic growth. Ho hum.

frustration.

I write trash and nonsense and weird expressions. I am an academic failure.

an angry man is a foolish man.

Is it wrong to be angry? It is, like sadness, a forbidden feeling. Like a secret sin. The public eye must shun it with stares if it were exposed. Or is that merely the inability to compose any proper reaction? That they fear that their own hidden feelings might, too, come loose? But, why? Maybe it is bad. It is bad to be angry. Because, like sadness, anger is the suspension of reason. You become vulnerable, unstable. You are in danger to say, "I feel", and mean it.

Perhaps what we really fear is the power if anger. Anger brings change; it is inspiration far more powerful than melancholy. And, unlike sadness, it is unpoetic. It is a wild, ravenous monster, violent, strong. Unrelenting. It is a murderous instinct which makes us Kings of the Beasts.

Maybe we hate anger because it great strength, not wise.

like catching stars.

And that moment of Beauty-
     it was just another moment

   lost. It lived
only for so long    before
       it was

   forgotten.

we were born rational

I am a cold, surgical knife
Sterile
Glist'ning in the professional
White lights
Ready to cut myself open
To bleed me dry of
Every last feeling
That should impede the trains of logic
I shall be the perfect
Tool, precise
To three significant figures
Purely mathematical
With unwavering conclusiveness
Backed by pertinant evidence
Like the surety of trained hands
Specific and
Empirically tested
With all soundness and cogency
I am a cold surgeon.

the fool's cap with my name all over it

I can't help but feel that I have removed an important part of my brain to be handed in with my scripts and essays such that I remotely remember whether or not I had it to begin with. At least it wasn't painful, though.

home sweet home

With a turn of the key
We enter back into
Our lodging,
Tired from the full day out,
Groggy from the long ride home,
But still, we scuff our way
To our individual rooms
To undress, removing
The clothes that decided
Whether we were
Stylish Formal Casual Trendy
For today
Into our homey shab
- only safe to be worn
As beddress -
And relax our posture
Into repose
And when the picture we painted
Is stripped back to its
Unsightly plainness,
Naked we return to the
Solitude of our bathrooms
To face the unlying mirrors of
Reality that tell us:
Our hair is messy,
And the under-eye is swollen,
And we have a fresh pimple,
And we seriously need some
Serious jogging
Then once we quietly
Convince ourselves of
The dire need to fix up the
Bad hair and the
Bad bags and the
Bad skin and the
Bad bod tomorrow,
We dive back into the sink
To wash away the residual smiles
That we had garnered in the daytime
And remind ourselves how
Glad we are to be
Home sweet home

fear and insecurity

When definition fails, only uncertainty can follow. Much like how Nothingness is neither stable, nor volatile, nor constant, nor changeable, nor free, nor contained, nor shrinkable, nor expandable, nor inert, nor passive, nor active, nor reactive, so will anything be when Definition and the boundaries that we imagined are rejected.

this is only preliminary.

It is a strange relief to be trapped in meaninglessness, long and toiling sentences, and, to be buried but dwelling upon the mass-printed dullness of words that do nothing but toy with your mind to make it less of the Devil's Workshop - so it is often called.