Everything this person has written for TUNETHEPROLETARIAT
You got some free time; I can take it
Plants and Animals – Control Me
I’m sitting on a plastic chair at a bunch of hawker stalls drinking Heineken. It’s almost 5 bucks for the bottle, but it’s 640 mL. I guess that’s a fair price, it just feels like a lot since nothing else is more than $2 here.
I don’t want to go home.
There, camped in the living room, is Nida. She’s Nick’s Thai girlfriend. Kind of. She decided to surprise him with a visit, except he decided to move to America permanently without telling her. So she showed up midafternoon with some light knocking on the door. Ray let her in. I was sitting in my office editing, the music blaring.
“Uhh, hey, dude. Nida’s here.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Shit.”
Nida doesn’t speak English. It took us half an hour and the help of Google translate to explain that Nick left and he really wasn’t ever coming back. We knew we’d gotten through because her face turned stern and she stopped asking questions. She sat in silence for a bit. Then she started crying. Ray went and got a box of kleenex, which seemed to me the most gracious, kind-hearted, tender act of all time. I was hugely relieved, since I had no fucking clue what to do.
I’m sitting at Soho, a bar downtown, sipping a black Russian and talking to two tourists from Fresno. They know my roommates through a friend of a relative. I call Nida the “pit of despair camped in my living room.” I drink some more.
After Ray and I got through to her that there’s nothing for her here, she perked up and started acting happy. It was unsettling. But we explained to her, via Google translate, that we had to go back to work. After a while she came to my office and asked if I was busy. I was.
When I finished my shift, I asked what she needed. Nothing. She just wanted to talk. I tried to nod politely and smile reassuringly as she said the same things over and over. Said how Nick told her he’d be back in a week. How they used to go shopping together. Excetera. I tried to maintain that Nick was gone forever; she merrily ignored me. Eventually I gave up and said I had to go. (I did).
I’m walking alone downtown. A small man with an unbuttoned polo slinks up next to me. “Chinese girl?” he asks. I wave my hand no. He walks with me a ways, and I keep waving him off, so he slips away. On the sidewalk a tubby dog sleeps, hind legs splayed awkwardly. I shove my earphones in.
I had gone back to the house between errands to bring Nida some char kuay teow. She scarfed it down. She wanted to know which bus to take to the bus station. I don’t know, man. I don’t take buses, just my bike. I don’t know what to do in general around heartbreak. She wants to crash on my couch (we sternly informed her that someone else had moved into Nick’s old room, which was true) and I don’t have the heart to turn her away.
Soon it turns weird. She hands me a slip of paper with her contact details and the sentence, in English, “I want to be your friend.” Later, she will send me a series of unrequited emails in broken English saying things like, “Are you free time.don’t forget to email me. I wert to be your friend.you very good,” and, later, “I wert to take care. I like you. Drop me a line.Please let me hear from you.”
Existence in general is surreal, but this sequence of events particularly so.
Where are we?
The eerie emptiness of an apartment, freshly vacated by a soured roommate who spent the last two days of his tenure throwing an almighty temper-tantrum, the most passive-aggressive of strops – slamming doors at odd intervals, blaring Hindi Internet radio from his laptop speakers with the door open at 4 a.m., leaving a note about the smell of your sandals as pitifully childish revenge because a few months back you had to confront him about leaving sweaty socks in the living room – leaving behind not so much a lifting of the oppression but an uncertain, vacant quiet. [Saturdays = Youth.]
I turn to smoke when you need air
There’s one cigarette I miss above all. Months after quitting, I’m still bumping into smokes I miss: the drunk-at-2-a.m.-out-on-the-balcony cig, the fuck-my-job-end-of-shift cig, the I’m-feeling-emotionally-insecure-but-bet-a-cig-would-make-me-look-cool cig. But the return of MLS reminded me of my favorite: the I-filed-three-times-at-that-game cig. Brown-papered cloves would wait in the cup holder of my Civic. I would sit down at the steering wheel and sigh, exhausted but fulfilled. I liked to dangle the cig in my mouth for a few minutes, winding down, tasting the sugar-sweetness of the filter, staring into the dark mid-distance, resting my wrists on the wheel. Fingers that had so recently clanked away so many thousands of keystrokes would flick the lighter and crack the window. And then: inhale.
Goddam. Glorious.
I miss that. [The Knot.]
A way of crystallizing the bad times
I was typing on Skype to someone I’ve met in person twice when the screen started to sway. Then the ground dragged my feet back and forth and the whole apartment was lurching.
I lived in California for a while so I’m used to earthquakes. I remember once letting a tame one rock me back to sleep during a sunny mid-afternoon nap.
But this one just kept going. On and on it rolled. My nocturnal roommates woke up, screamed “earthquake!” and filmed the fan shuddering back and forth. I walked out to the balcony and tried to see how much the building bent back and forth. Other families crowded out on their balconies, pointing and exclaiming. Many shuffled down the stairs to stare up at us from outside.
Later that day, after the vibrations eventually stilled, I took the elevator down to grab some grub. Some neighbors piled in. They asked me if I’d run outside. “No, I figured if the building collapsed I would die in the stairwell anyway,” I said and they laughed, half out of nervousness at the thought of the building falling on top of them and half at the idea of this white guy talking rapidly at them. One of the ladies in the elevator had run out without sandals, and they told me about it, laughing again. I chuckled and snuck glances at the daughter’s pale thighs.
The earthquake which prompted the tsunami in 2004 was a 9.1-magnitude. This one was an 8.7, with aftershocks as powerful as 8.2. But apparently there’s a difference between vertical and horizontal impact, and there was no tsunami.
I refreshed a liveblog news site on my phone and eventually didn’t make a run for it. But I had planned it all out inside of my head. I’d shove my laptop, headphones, mp3 player, phone, voice recorder, my passport, my grandfather’s ring, a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son, and two pairs of boxers in my backpack. I would take off on my bike up Penang Hill. Past the temple, I’d park at Ayer Hitam (Black Water) Dam – from there you can see the entirety of Georgetown.
Later I did the math and realized my placement on the far side of the island from the ‘quake meant my condo would have been safe in the first place. Still, I was morbidly excited by the thought of watching an entire city destroyed, safe with my only valuable possessions strapped to my back.
Later that night I filtered off to bed. Lying on my side, I stared open-eyed out the window, where silent bolts of lightning illuminated the entire room, Nature coldly reminding me it could destroy me in a blink.
I want you to wander silent past my outstretched arms
I found this song a half hour ago. It’s now my life theme song.