strawberry swing  

yup... i'm still chilling. managed to get another 30 days in sing though. after a border run to malaysia on sat. it was relatively uneventful. but thought i'd let you know. just in case you were worried. 

anyway, so the only exciting thing that has happened recently is "drinks club". "drinks club" was formed as a rival organisation to the girls' "book club". only "drinks club" is a little more honest about the activities that take place. being a "drinks club" the primary activity is drinking. it says nothing however, about abusing large-chinned coroner girls. chin-up. about watching venus williams perform live karaoke on stage in a high-class-pick-up-joint. about smashing champagne glasses on the floor. just for a drunken laugh. about being escorted out of the high-class-pick-up joint. for smashing champagne glasses on the floor. just for a drunken laugh. about heading to orchard towers. better known as "the-four-floors-of-whores". classy joint. basically it's a place that has four floors full up with whores. about pulling out the old-school break-dance moves. think the worm. this goes down well with prostitutes. apparently. about getting home at 5.30am. about waking up in the morning on the kitchen floor clutching a half-defrosted steak. not that any of that stuff happened. that i know of anyway. but if it did, the title "drinks club" wouldn't be entirely honest. 

another exciting piece of news is that i've become known in sing circles as unemployed-soon-to-be-employed-dave. which is nice. considering the names i've acquired previously. aussie-dave. dangerous-dave. dodgy-dave. liability-dave. dick. 

just finished "the power of one". good book. easy-to-read. a touch disappointed though. i guess i had super high hopes after speaking to others about it. thought it would be more profound. and possibly a touch more realistic. but a good book nonetheless. i'm on to the "tao of pooh" now. right up my street. a touch more intellectual.

loving the new coldplay at the mo. track 9. strawberry swing. quality. now the sky could be blue. i don't mind. without you it's a waste of time.

an observation

the world is bullshit. in my opinion anyway. i came to this conclusion whilst drinking last night. conclusions are often best drawn whilst drinking. bullshit. it doesn't matter how many rungs you climb on the ladder. you can't escape the bullshit. because, as it turns out, the ladder is the bullshit. kurt cobain knew this. he got to the top and saw it for what it was: bullshit. and, most of the time, shit stinks. unless you're a dung-beetle. in which case, you eat shit.   

i funkin hate interviews. they're bullshit.

she lives with a broken man

a cracked polystyrene man

who just crumbles and burns

he used to do surgery

for girls in the eighties

but gravity always wins

and it wears him out

an update 

hmmm... well... i'm still chilling... pretty much.

last friday myself and pete ventured over to errr... somewhere opposite boat quay to have a few quiet beers and wind down the week. pete managed to use his foreign charms to jump the queue. love the old-style colonial attitude here. let the locals fuckers waste in the queue... that's what i say. with beers costing $15 (R65) a pint, it was defo only gonna be a couple of beers. 

fuck me. did we get shit-faced. pete missed paddling lessons the next morning. pete never misses paddling lessons. he loves backstroke. at 3am the bar had locked up and we were still outside swaying on our bar stools. pete still trying to convince me that some dreadlocked fucker's american idol version of "somewhere over the rainbow" is the greatest song in the world ever. wtf? there's no excuse for that type of behaviour. even if you are super rocked. 

anyway, so in the interests of saving cash, i've been surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, beans on toast, and tuna pasta. and i don't eat fish. it just doesn't smell right. but it's cheap. like dopey's last round. 

so when andrew "toot-toot" joubert told me that he was staying in the 6-star ritz carlton, i was super envious. we were locked up in an air-tight capsule in singapore's millenium wheel (picture london-eye) with a bunch singaporeans (who are ultra-conservative at the best of times), and all he kept banging on about was the food: 

"the food bru. you must check the food. there's sooo much. chinese. japanese. thai. indo. malay. indian. prawns. lobsters. crayfish. stingray. scrape the chilli shit off though. and they have these fresh cooked strawberry cream pancakes. with ice cream. for breakfast dude. it's friggin incredible. and it's free. it's heaven. just don't touch the national fruit. what the fuck is that shit? oh my god. it's fuckin awful. i nearly fuckin gagged on the table. what the fuck is up with people's taste-buds here? it's like rotting meat bru... jussis, i need a huge fuckin shit. must be that fuckin national fruit." 

he then let out a ripper. quality. 

i can't waste time 

so give it a moment

i realise nothing's broken

don't need to worry about everything i've done

live every second like it was my last one

woochop

so it's nearly the end of my second week in sing. it's still friggin hot. although it has rained a whole lot lately. which gives the weather a sort of steam room effect. but there seem to be lots of very good looking oriental ladies wandering around. so it kinda evens itself out i guess. which is good. women are good. men are bad. i think. it feels like every arbitrary dude i walked past could knock me the fuck out with a bruce-lee-roundhouse-fly-kick to the head and a "wataaaaaaaahh". must fight like dragon. breathe in. breathe out. wax on. wax off. paint the house. scary man.

ja... so that's about it for this week. although i did get invited to the nomura asia equity forum on wednesday. by a very nice saffa dude who's name is daniel. although we call him niel. not sure why. just because, i guess. never really did get to the bottom of it. 

anyway the conference was good. and great for my mandatory cpd (continued professional development) hours. and interesting. we talked about the global financial crisis. it's not looking good folks. time to hang in there and hope for the best. weather the storm. the food was nice though. and very expensive. japanese fruit. fifty times the price of normal fruit apparently. goddamn those peasants starving to death in the 3rd world. lets eat fuck off expensive strawberries and talk about their problems. and look at the good looking oriental ladies. gotta love it man. god bless the bourgeois. thank allah i'm one of them.

oh yeah... and also i got to have a personal audience with the minister mentor. impressed? you should be. he's kinda like singapore's nelson mandela. cross mr miyagi. he ruled the country from 1959 - 1990, overseeing the rise and rise of singapore. bright chap actually. very charismatic. some of his better sayings (africa take note):

• the western world may accuse us if not being democratic, daniel son. of restricting opposition political parties, daniel son. but no-one can accuse anyone in government of being corrupt, of being fraudulent, of cheating or stealing, daniel son. and if you do, i'll sue you, daniel son. 
• if we in the government make a mistake, daniel son, it is because we made a mistake, daniel son. no-one profited from that mistake, daniel son. 
• what we don't want to create, daniel son, is a situation where the people expect to get something for doing nothing, daniel son. 

buttercup?

so i haven't heard from buttercup for a while. and it was beginning to worry me. buttercup was one of the trio who grew a tach and set off through africa braving wild animals, deadly diseases, and deep-heat. but since he returned to europe i haven't heard from him. so i asked pumpkin for an update. seems like buttercup is doing just fine:

"buttercup is still around and his usual self up to the same old same old. he announced to all that he is in fact a hermaphrodite and has a mexican male lover, who he has been seeing for some time now with thoughts of a family. he is partially blind in the one eye and suffers from narcolepsy, which is not a good combination. on good days he goes to work, on the bad days we see him wondering around masturbating in front of shop windows, squinting horribly and laughing hysterically. i get a call from the police once a week to come and pick up his unconscious unzipped self from outside java's coffee house. there is something about the coffee that sets off the narcolepsy. but not much has changed really, still nothing as exciting as when he went through his mid-life crisis."

ahhh. good old buttercup. a true gent. one of the very best.

full up

"i am"... that's the hard bit. "i am". really get around to saying that and you're home, really mean it and you're full up, you're all inside. you don't have to want things outside you to fill the gaps inside you. you don't leave bits of you hanging around on objects in shop-windows, in catalogues or on advertising boardings. wherever you go you take your whole self with you, you don't leave bits lying around to get stamped on, you're all of a piece, you're what mister god wants you to be. an "i am", like hell he is. hell's bells! all this time i had thought that going to church was in order to look for god, for praising him. it didn't dawn on me what mister god was doing. all this time he had been working overtime to knock a bit of sense into my noddle, trying to turn an "it is" into an "i am". i got the message. that was the sunday i really signed on.

i was beginning to get the hang of this "i am" stuff. considering how important it was to mister god. i was finding it not too impossible to cope with. the tricky bit was looking inside yourself to see what bits of the works were missing. once you'd overcome that hurdle the rest was fairly simple. my first real peek inside myself caused me to slam the door in a hurry. "that's me in there!" holy cow, i looked more like an overgrown gruyere cheese, full of holes. "you're full up fynn", i now saw as an encouraging statement rather than a factual one. 

after getting over the shock, i opened the door a crack and took another peek. it wasn't long before i was able to identify one of the holes. it was shaped like a motor-bike. what's more, i recognised that hole. it was an exact fit of the motor-bike in the shop-window down the high street.

after some practice it became more and more easy to identify the holes: a rather super microscope, one of these new-fangled television things, and a clock that told you the time in bombay, moscow, new york, london, and a few other places, all at the same time. there were bits of me all over the place, leaving identical holes inside me. i was, to say the least, spread out a bit. somewhere down the line it had all gone wrong. i was certain i wasn't born with these holes. it was those damned banners that kept on cropping up: "get on", "get ahead", "a motor-bike makes you someone", "a car is even better", "two cars, and, brother, you've hit the jackpot". i had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. the banners were inside me and they were rooted in pretty fertile soil. the more banners inside me, the more bits of me were outside me. "most of a person is outside." you can say that again.

- mister god this is anna

singapore 

it's friggin hot here man. super hot. i have sweaty palms. and a sweaty crack. going commando here can be quite slimey. it sure was bad planning only packing 2 pairs of jocks (to be used for emergencies only). i need some more jocks.

anyway, so i've been here for four days. it's gone so fast man. i'm currently staying in an apartment on the 17th floor. with peter. my mate. it's west-facing. i know this because peter told me. and we have braai's in his lounge and watch the sunset. it's weird. not only how east and west are relative, whilst north and south are absolute. but also having braai's in your lounge. it get's quite smokey. and you have to keep hanging your head out the window and waving and smiling so nobody calls the fire department. but that's singapore i guess. weird. and hot.

so no real news. other than that i haven't managed to get a job yet. and the canadian chick has yet to phone. which is surprising. i sure did make a good impression on her at the backpackers lodge on saturday night. jet-lagged and drunk. mumbling on about the ukraine. it was a pleasant evening. we ate dozens of little curried pigeon eggs on the way home. 

today i bought some towels. it is useful to have a towel when you choose to leave home. as you may need to shower sometime. 

i woke up this morning and got myself a beer

the future is uncertain and the end is always near