Recently in Analogies Category

A story based on discussions at last night’s Open Room. An analogy of the relationships between storytellers (old and new), their audience and advertisers.

You could say I’m blessed. I’ve been coming to the same watering-hole for the last 2 years. The lounge lizards still turn and stare at me whenever I walk through the doors, all of them hungry for my attention. I know the game; I offer them fleeting glances from time to time, feeding their hope. Some do get lucky, but mostly out of my whim. It is amusing to watch them scramble about, wondering what it is they did “right” that night. As if my choice were a direct result of their action. The guessing keeps them busy, and I get to maintain the titillation of intrigue.

Many people ask why I keep coming back to this place. Simply put, there is no better bartender in the next 4,000 miles. Oh, and the drinks are free. Or at least they were.

You see, John, the huge bloke sitting in that corner, used to pay for all my drinks. I used to give him the time of the day, but less so these days. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m not as into him as I used to be. It’s probably because of all the new guys in town: all interesting in their own cute way, and terribly distracting. Not all of them were good guys, a couple tried to get Bill the bartender to slip pills into my drinks.

It was embarrassing the first time I ordered my usual vodka martini (twist of lemon rind) and was asked to pay up. Didn’t Bill know who I am? I was infuriated that he would quibble over so small an item. For god’s sake, it’s just a bloody drink. Not wanting a scene, Bill finally caved and continued giving me free drinks.

That was 6 months ago. Now Bill says he needs to close down the bar because of financial reasons. Stupid bloke should have seen this coming before he set up shop in this god-forsaken town where I’m his only customer. I only hope I can still hit him up for a few more freebies before he heads out of town.

Pay for drinks? Are you friggin’ kidding me?!?

Faith, Anne and I were having breakfast downstairs this morning. After a few mouthfuls of toast and a few spoonfuls of soft-boiled egg Anne decides to grab a spoon and help herself to the egg. She’s not really making great progress, but manages to smear her face with egg. Things get a little messy and we end up using half a pack of tissue paper to clean up the mess.

A train of thought ensued:

1. Maybe we should buy toy utensils so Anne could play with them and practice feeding herself without the mess of splattered food.
2. What if she associates all utensils with play? That’d make a heck of a scene in a restaurant.
3. Should we stop her from playing with utensils altogether?
4. But it’s a necessary skill that comes with growing up.
5. Maybe she already is old enough to feed herself real food, and there’s no need for the plastic toys.

This was, in my own opinion, a perfect analogy of the decisions the Singapore government have before them with regards to online publishing. Are they going to take a sandbox approach? They would have to realise that online publishing has and will continue to step into mainstream media. Will they clamp down on it with an iron fist? This would definitely stifle the maturity of Singaporeans and cause a mass exodus of the slightly more intellectually adventurous.

But the big question is, are we mature enough we feed ourselves?

Anne, with a face full of egg, thinks she is.

Eduardo stared at the letter, stunned. The logo of a black stallion on a bright yellow background emblazoned the corner of the envelope.

Ferrari wanted to see if he could race for them.

Ferrari. His heart pounded in his chest.

But he had just started racing for Señor Rodrigo. In the short time he had made friends with the other drivers. There were so many questions: what if he didn’t do well at Ferrari?

Should he exchange the known for the great unknown?

It’s the funny thing about death. The death of someone you love comes with such suffocatingly saturated emotion the loss seems insurmountable; then in a blink of an eye the world continues revolving without having seemed to have skipped a beat. Some people never recover from it; most other people live on - slowly losing their grasp around an intangible memory of a different life now past. As to which is worse, living in constant grief or an unfeeling amnesia, I do not know.

It has been almost a month since Livia’s death. Eduardo still carries a picture of her in the knapsack he carries around. He carries it not to remember her, but because he always forgets to take the picture out. And when he does remember, some part of him refuses. Taking her picture out of his bag feels almost like killing her all over again.

Just as Señor Rodrigo planned, Eduardo’s nickname “The Donkey Boy from Guaiba” was short-lived. The newspaper reporters, like locusts, have moved on to more saleable stories. Eduardo was now just another racecar driver in Rodrigo’s stable. He would have to work his way up the ladder like everyone else. The new glamourous life he chose was analogously summed up by his driver’s outfit.

Built for its specific purpose, form fitting close to the point of suffocation and with a full-faced helmet that isolated Eduardo from the world, and the world from any show of emotion behind the mask.

There was a young Brazilian boy named Eduardo who loved cars. He wasn’t just content looking at them from afar, mind you. He was in love with the dream that he might someday race cars for a living. He spent countless nights lying awake, wondering what it would be like to zoom past the chequered flag and take his place on top of the podium, hearing the Brazillian national anthem play as the crowds chanted his name.

Eduardo came from a poor family who planted crops for a living. Whenever he could, Eduardo would ride his little donkey to the nearby go-kart track and watch the richer neighbourhood kids race, often imagining himself behind the wheel instead of on his saddle. After the races, he’d get on his donkey and head back to the farm. Sometimes the meaner neighbourhood kids would scare Eduardo’s donkey by honking loudly as they whizzed by on their new motorcycles.

The donkey was the only thing Eduardo owned. The only thing that was his in the whole wide world. He bought Livia when she was just a foal, or a baby jenny as young female donkeys are called. The stable dealt only with horses, and sold Eduardo the donkey at a very cheap price. It took Eduardo all of his life savings to afford her.

He became known as the boy with the donkey. Some villages joked about how Eduardo was the Brazilian version of English Mary, who had her little lamb. No one knew if Mary loved her lamb, but everyone who saw Eduardo knew that he loved Livia.

Maybe more than his dream of driving. Maybe.

And therein lies the dilemma, and the start of my story.

Whenever people see the poppy plant, they assume that someone planted it for the opium. I remember giant fields of poppy plants back when I was a child. They used to grow wild near the farm where I lived.

It was only much later in my adulthood that I learned of entire nations crumbling to the addictive smell of burning opium. Then they came.

The soldiers came with orders from the government that all poppy plants, wild or otherwise, were to be destroyed. It was an offence to have wild poppy growing even in fields that nobody owned. The landscape of my childhood would be forcibly changed into one that was acceptable.

I love the poppy plant. The way it stands upright, so beautiful and strong, unlike the grasses which sway in the wind. I love the way it grows: it starts off tender and vulnerable, slowly gaining strength and character with each sun-filled day. I scarcely remember it now. All I remember is the expanse of poppy stalks, all mercilessly decapitated.

I have often thought of planting her in secret, just to relive what I once knew so well. I would have if I were a nomad or a hired hand, but the stakes are too high now that I have inherited my family’s farm. I stand to lose everything if caught even with one stalk anywhere in its vicinity.

My life straddles two pieces of world history: one innocent and poppy filled, the other with stark reality and poppyless.

Maybe it is for the best that I am unable to revisit the plant of my youth. Now older and worldly-wiser, I may be tempted to crush her and smoke her, leaving me with neither the rejuvenation of childhood memories nor the security of present day life. I would be a husk, like the millions of opium addicts whom history has vowed not to recreate.

Is it impossible to love for love’s sake alone and not for self-centered pleasure? The worldwide extermination of my childhood symbol deigns the quality of our love tainted; that to love purely is nigh impossible.

Maybe they’re right. But what a price to pay, half a life lived - never to be lived again!

Pride is like holding a mirror up against another mirror. When you finally look past one image of yourself you come to another. And another. And another.

In my phototaking I’ve come to learn this: that the images that aren’t aesthetically the most beautiful may actually matter most.

The revelation was made after thinking about Tucson and what I missed most. Images of the Golden Phoenix Chinese restaurant and the steps of McClelland Hall as I pull up to pick Min from school fill my mind. It is such a pity that I have no photos of them simply because they don’t make “great” photos.

It’s the same with people, relationships and moments in life. The ones that affect you the most profoundly are often not the ones you’d expect.

While walking out to buy lunch I saw a group of mynahs (small black birds found everywhere in Singapore) standing around in a circle making the loudest din. They puffed themselves up and stood as tall as they could in what was apparently an effort to secure leverage of some kind.

We, though non-feathered, hold meetings like that every other day.

Part of my aunt’s treatment for her cancer revolves around acupuncture. It has come a long way since its traditional roots, and now utilises electricity-induced needles and other contemporary household appliances. Oh, and magnets. Don’t forget the magnets.

My aunt has tiny magnets taped on various points of her body, some to alleviate headaches and stress, and others to help keep her immune system up and running. I’m not a non-believer. There are far too many things our miniscule efforts at medical and scientific research have yet to discover. I do wonder, though, that if magnets can help a person’s health, an MRI (magnetic-resonance imaging) must be majorly messing up people’s well-being everywhere.

After her short acupuncture session we went to have lunch at a small mall. Must have been the work of the magnets, but my aunt tore off on a shopping spree. She went into every jewellery store to window-shop, browsed through the children’s toy section for birthday gifts, past, present or future. Clothes. Men’s, women’s, teens, babies.

Being a member of the male populace, shopping is a high-stress activity. Some study not too long ago discovered that shopping has the same physiological effect on males as flying combat aircraft at high-speeds. The trip to the carpark seemed at times like a quest to carry an extremely powerful magnet through a maze made of iron.

The trick, gentlemen, is to loosen up. Flying a high-speed aircraft can be stressful or exhilarating, just as a ride on a roller-coaster can be. It is a conscious choice.

After what seemed like decades of incessant torture, I chose. I got involved.

About two hours and four shopping bags later, we stood at the lift to the carpark, the end of the maze, the holy grail.