Extant

The machinery called Time sings its age-deaf tune.

A change of digit is the cure to the watch-maker's stone heart.

Change is Nine. 

Firestarter

I want you to be my light,
Even if it were an old fool's gamble.
Because you are not the Queen of Diamonds

But my Hearts of Fire. Fire! Fire! Fire!

Don't anyhow fire!

Taste It

The feeling of being alive and having breath, so that you can see things change for the better. Yes, things suck now. But tomorrow, and more tomorrows to come, we'll find a way out. I can hardly get myself to think properly to write a coherent entry these days.

Wake up! I'm alive, and I'm on your side.

Magic of the Moment

The road for this year is closing soon, conversely one year has passed since we departed on a wind of change. I didn't make my peace with some facts and people who had left my life until June when their places eventually got taken over by others (which explained why there are no blog entries for this period). This was a year that reality got grim, but the crazy people I met taught me to take things with a pinch of salt. This was also the year that my photography fling grew into a big mistress, who now siphons a considerable maintenance off my monthly allowance. She goes with me to distant lands, enjoys ogling nice food, is always there when the lines go down, but pity I can't bring her to the theaters. LOL.

My trip to Malaysia was pretty good in regard to previous ones. When each day flies by in an eyeshot and I didn't have time to shoot enough pictures, then it is a good trip. I got to take the lumbering old KTM train ride back, which was rather leisurely and enjoyable watching the world fly by, the way it should be when you're on holiday and forgetting home.





Nice to know someone missed me while I was away, you know who you are, some songs for you, haha.

Sweet Distance

At great distances fortified
Our mighty war draws blows
Not of the pen or the sword
But with silence perennial
Speak softly...
Now hush.

We will walk by as strangers one day, laughing these off, miles to cover before we sleep.

C-ing Stars

I'm exhausted and my eyes are star-stung. But I have not ran out of words, not just yet.

Are you with me?

Quiver

When I woke up today, it seemed just like any other day, chilling and glowing orange. Except one year from now, more than anything, I will be free.

I felt a momentary sense of relief to be back in school for the reunion last week. The familiar smell of the auditorium air-con, words and faces. The ground and its people of which I had spent 6 years with, that had inspired this place into being. The people who have undocked, left, sojourned and returned. I wish I had better stories to tell, but let's just leave it as just that till we know how the story goes.

11:11

Momentarily, I had a glimpse into an alternate future. It looked foreign (expectedly), with a different face, and I felt I had to like to what I saw. Having all five senses intact is not enough to make sense of the world.

Damaged goods shouldn't be sold again, even if it was to people with lower expectations.

Act of Time and Space

You come with nothing, you leave with nothing.

Consider this statement. What then does the time in between this duration of entry and departure matter for? So that you may change the outcome of your departure, the same one that everyone shares. So that you may manipulate the spaces that you come into contact with while your body still has life. I would like to believe that we are much more than detoriating biological machines, and that coincidences are all part of a greater plan.

It has been some time since, I keep thinking that the game play would have changed.  These are trying times, more so than before. I concur, I repeat, achieve, fall flat. Resolution is not at hand, the long engagement marches on like a rock sinking through the pool. Existence continues, at the debt expense of my future.

Shine A Light

... unto and magnify the familiar. Promising and bold words that have reached my ears lately. I have found a new but familiar chapter to pursue, but what this begets remains to be seen. Diving into dark water, a little calamity makes life worth talking about.

After bagging a D90, I met Xin for a visit to the Singapore International Photographic Festival party at Old School last Saturday. Ten months on, I think we are all trying to be bigger than ourselves somehow.

The other project is coming along. I can't say much now.

Reskue Plen

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that twenty centures of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As Is

One shining column after another, is a masterpiece. But truth, it is not.

Milusion

I have been having some phenomenal dreams centering around my own death. One of the stranger ones involve my chopping my flesh away bit by bit with a knife. Honestly, I have no idea why I would be doing that, although I do envisage car accidents or cardiac arrests as more plausible ways of death. Nevertheless, the best of all is still death in sleep. Sleep tight, I'll see you tomorrow morning. 

Sarabande

If only that was a lollipop, and not uncertainty that it stands on. The clarity that was begotten has enabled me to have the blurriest vision around. Put the two together, and that's an art.

Quer

With all that talk about financial turmoil, I'm wondering between this and moral bankruptcy, which one leaves a more bitter taste?

Reitmotif

In a relative state of boredom, my co-worker helped transpose a random original tune I was humming to myself. Personally I abhorred it for being a tune that literally sticks in your head like a bad case of glue abuse (not that I ever tried). Luckily I quickly forgot about it over the course of the day. If not for it being recorded down, it did be another lost composition on my part. How now? This fleeting tune we play with recurring themes.

Over the weekend was the ever necessary class reunion, which I believe by other classes' standards, ours would have been excessive. Nevertheless, the outing enshrouded the last nine months of the year in fog that made everything seem just so yesterday when red blue and gold pinned over my chest.

My choice of lens for my kit reflects that I'm now conflicted over clarity and ambiguity: the versatile but distortion prone 18-200mm and an ultra sharp 60mm macro. Rather than choose between one, I went for both. Is choice necessarily a hindrance towards progress?

Return Ball

Whilst engaged in a screening of Black Hawk Down, a co-worker told me that thrown into a war, he would leave no by-standing civilians alive given his ill regard for the Geneva Convention and other worthless treatises. I had to eat my own words.

Fiançailles

A Long Engagement to a Way Home.

I wonder where people got the idea that I was all smiles and everything. 

Tonight

I still dream of a reason to stay and watch this World grow old.

Viva La Vida

Life is over!

D.espite.

You are still part of my conscience and instinct.

Eggs cannot be unscrambled.

Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Inshallah

Dear God, if you are there, please make my heart stop for a moment tomorrow.

Statement

I'm finite.

But what's harder to remember is that,

I'm a work in progress.

Witch of Portobello

Perhaps it comes as a surprise for some that I'm still writing here even though this blog or rather its writer has been declared dead for half a year under a convoluted string of circumstances. The writer, blessed be he, may be gone, but some ideas still live on beyond the date. I'm merely a guest writer in his stead, and its my hope to keep the story running alive.

I was inspired by this particular book of a witch whom had likewise died without a trail. The entire book being the post account by people, some who knew her or knew her not at all. So how well did we all know Joel? I knew he could be jovial but was oftentimes wandering about in thoughts. Thoughts are dangerous when complicated, and I believe that was what that killed him.

Changing Alley

On my journey homebound, the voice from the air caught up with me.

And rising from a whimper, it chattered ardently about its distant farings. Wielding the wave of a wand like a skilled conjurer, it frolicked and beat the grass savannah into life, frowning upon their idle existence. Amidst the aroused dust and ricocheting leaves, its invisible face emerged, complete with a scowl, gently bleating upon my face. And there I stood staring into the eye of someone, or something, that we had long parted by. There and then, the ground started to shake upon my disjointed knees. Panic. I jumped to catch that elusive face standing in front of my eyes. 'Not meant to be' was what it said, right before I lost sight of it in the moment I blinked...

That day I walked on, not forgetting what I saw in that elusive moment, knowing that it would happen again.

Perhaps that is why my camera is always within an arm's reach whenever I walk along that alley.

Eight

I made this image a few years ago, back when I used the pseudo-name ID8 for my photography. Those were hopeful times, even as many things didn't come to fruition the way I hoped. The silver lining being that over the course of this blog's running, I have definitely gained more precious memories than I have lost in brain cells in IB. Tomorrow our cohort makes history on January the 7th.

Tomorrow, today is 2008. And ID7 is no more. Au revoir, so long....