Pepper Lunch, I think Not.

If you want trouble, you will get trouble, that much is certain. Then, there's good trouble, and there's bad trouble, and I much prefer the former where the difference is that you get away with it. That is, waking up on Monday not 100% fucked and in the slammer about to be butt-fucked. And oh... If how you wake up on Mondays is a good gauge for how much good trouble you've been up to, mine have been pretty sweet.

The weekends hanging out with Joris started weird, ended up weirder, and has stayed here at an all time low. Every Friday I think, "Gee, it's going to be hard to beat last weekend." but by Sunday night I'm convinced of how wrong I was.

Sunday morning I woke up in a cab in Geylang to find myself heading to a Dim Sum place with Mistress H., Danielle, and the Ultimate Hobo Rob. Joris was there of course and there were a couple of other people who I absolutely can not recall.  The all time low was when Joris took out the vodka, Danielle spilled the pepper and someone suggested snorting it. No, wait, the all time low was when they actually started snorting it.

It was supposed to be a 'quiet one' originally, when we started out from the point of me about to fall asleep on my bed (as opposed to some random hovel) to meeting up with my little sister and her friends, to utter randomness. But random is good, the only plan we had for Sunday was to head to the beach. 

So we were at the Supper Club, which on this night was playing remixed radio hits, and making up for it by giving free Martinis to women. At some point one of her friends passed out, my sister had to go home, and Bastiaan arrived. I guess we would have gone home if he hadn't (yeah right), but he did, and he just had a pretty lame night, so I suppose I felt slightly obliged to carry on the party. There was also the other problem of having consumed so much vodka red-bull that the end was no where in sight.

I was about to give up and give in to a tame night just sitting around drinking when I bumped into Danielle, who was fairly drunk, had blisters on her feet and needed to be carried down the stairs. She immediately invited us to a party in Sentosa, so we went, after faffing around trying to purchase liquor from the 7-11 (not sold between 2 - 6 a.m.). There was also some faffing around on her part on whether or not she wanted to go to this thing, and I had to make sure plans did not change by staying in the same cab with her and her bro while the Dutchies took another cab (unlike the rest of SEA, standard international taxi carrying rules apply here, no Vietnamese family on the back of a scooter, sorry).

Yes, I was desperate of some excitement. I mean, how else do I find content to put in this blog? Very soon it will start taking over my life again...great excuse for living fast and not dying young. I mean, you can't maintain a blog from beyond the grave now can you, unless you're Woody Allen.

"We fulfilled our goal for Sunday." I said to Joris when we got out of the cabs. "We're at the beach... Sort of... Really damn near it anyway... Fuck it. It's not a real beach in the first place."

There was the strangest collection of random people in this hotel room. The best was Rob. Oh my god, he's an inspiration. I asked him what he was doing in Singapore, and he told me he was here on a VISA run. He is actually a professional hobo. He teaches English in China, but it's the same thing. He showed me all the money in the world, which was $29.90. D'oh. I heard him mention something about living behind a refrigerator in Toa Payoh. He also had neon pink paint on his face from a girl it was rumored later he wanted to get it on with. No, that's not fair... he fancied her.

I asked Bastiaan about his lame night with his colleague and he told me it started with him passing out in the Jacuzzi from drinks since brunch and waking up finding out that this guy and taken all his clothes and his money, along with the key to his apartment. I suppose you could give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say he was taking care of his stuff for him, but it's another thing when you get your wallet back and find out all the money is missing. It's a bit stupid isn't it, stealing from a colleague. Most peculiar.

Sunday just petered out after the pepper snorting. Joris, Mistress H. and Danielle came back to my place and passed out. Danielle sat on the couch and didn't manage to get out of it till 1 p.m. Joris sat on a deck chair by the pool and slowly migrated to the pavement by the grass path to avoid the sun (that was weird) and Mistress H. and I dozed under the blazing, cancer causing, tropical sunlight. For 5 hours.

Cake, Death or a Holiday on Brighton Beach?

Because I got bored telling my own stories, I will now tell the stories of others.

I used to say to Mark that there were two types of people in the world (actually I tell everyone that there are always two types from a subset of a subset of a certain type of person in the world). In this particular black and white view of life the universe and everything, there are people that are helpful to have as friends, and people that are content. That is, they don't have their shit together, but you still hang out with them because they're interesting, and one day, you just might write that best selling novel about your stupid life and all the stupid people in it. But of course it isn't really like that.

If you know Mark at all, you'll understand what it means to feel a certain type of English. I.e. Life is shit, the weather sucks, The food tastes of arse, everyone thinks you're a cunt, but somehow, we muddle through.

Do you know Richard Billingham ? He has a collection of photographs, Ray's a Laugh, that exactly encapsulates this certain type of Englishness I'm talking about. You can see his alcoholic father throwing the family cat here.

A month or so back Phillip and I were at the wine connection, and we tried to get Mark to join us, but he told us he had just arrived in Essex on family matters after having disembarked from an SQ flight completely drunk off a bottle of vodka (all of it) and having just lugged 20 or so kilos of photographic equipment from the railway station (he believed in doing everything the hard way).

The message was kind of unclear, and I think I sent something like, "Are you finally listening to your parents wishes and opening a photo-shop in Brentwood... finally?" Which was not a very nice thing to say really, and I probably did not say such a thing, but something like it. When he replied, it was pretty... unpleasant. Something about a close family member being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

That wasn't very nice, I felt quite sorry. I even remember having met her in Essex the first year we were dating. It was a real treat you know, being in Essex. Really. Most fascinating. It helped me put all the British comedy I love to watch in context.

Philip sent him a message saying he was sorry; I mean what else can you say. Mark replied, "Life goes on. I'll be back, and she'll be dead."

We laughed. It kind of funny.

Mark did give me a few things to take away from that relationship, the most valuable one was his sense of (romantic?) irony. I don't think I could have quite gotten it from anywhere else. Also how when you think things are shit, they can get worse still. But it doesn't matter, you'll live.

It reminded me of the period when my grandmother was dying (the one I liked, not the one I don't know). My parents and little sister were going back to Kuching every month to visit her,  and reporting back on her unstable condition which was always "getting better" but actually, not really. In January, they returned and I asked them how she was, and my sister said, "Oh my god, Uncle Dave died." Now that was bizarre. So here they were, visiting Grandma, waiting for her to get better or die, and then while they were there Dave died quite suddenly (he was not an old chap) and they had his funeral instead.

You know in Fooled by Randomness, N.N. Taleb has a term for how things tend to happen in clumps? ...Now what is that term...?

Oh on on the subject of Englishness and Essex: Check out the New Yorker article on Phyllis Diller. Hilliarious! Women should aspire to this.