On never having been in a police raid, chillout music, the left hand of god and the nature of love...

Oh i'm spending Sunday morning listening to Chillout Music. It's fabulous. Everyone has left for Donegal and i'm here, to savour the rest of the day on my own.

Outside the greeness of spring is giving way to the greenness of summer, and inside, i'm just enjoying the silences.

Reading bits and pieces, here and there. Surfing, youtubing, answering messages, cooking leftovers to nibble on. It is pretty glorious i must say.

I watched TV for about eight hours yesterday. I just flopped. It was Fraiser, Friends, Sex in the City, Dr Who, Live at the Apollo, Have i Got More News for You, Van Helsing, The Breakfast Club, Eddie Izzard.... and a bit of Sexetra... the last one was a news item on this website whose name i forget... it was mostly about fetish, bondage and something else... and i was kinda hard not to flip past these people getting dressed up in funny coloured rubber and have hot wax dripped all over their bald heads. And that was just the women. But then i got bored...

Anyway, I love Hugh Jackman. I keep thinking he must be a better actor. Someone so wonderful looking with a body to die for must be a better actor. I suppose he doesn't have to be a better actor what with being the sexist man on the planet, although to give me my due i did prefer him when he is thin and wiry not pumped up like a steroid filled EU sausage. But Van Helsing was such an awful movie. It really was. It was one of the awfullest films i have seen in ages and i just wonder why does Hugh Jackman do this to himself? The money, the cat suit, the chance to work with CGI monsters? What? He was great in Australia though, but then again it was a Baz Lurhman movie...

Anyways, then i watched the Breakfast Club which was really interesting because it made me realise that i had never watched it before, even though i thought that i had. For a start the film would have never made it past the Singaporean censors in the mid 80s and survived in a coherent form. Sex with minors, strong bad language, self harm, etc... despite the fact that most of it takes place in a library and all the kids are doing at talking. Today what they were talking about seems quite tame and dull, but back then, whoa!!! It was all so innocent.

The other day we were at a Prohibition Party in Slide, when they were going to simulate a police raid by some burlesque dancers, don't ask, anyway, i said, i've never been in a police raid before and everyone looked at me with great pity. It would seem that police raids were de rigeur - like a rite of passage here. Sometimes people even get arrested. 

This made me think about the seamy underbelly that doubtless exists in Singapore, it must, and how the contrast between the upper and lower worlds must be pretty strong - certainly while i was growing up. There was so such thing as a little bit illegal. It was either really dull or very illegal - and you are going to hang. Singapore still up holds the death penalty for the possession of drugs. Small amounts too. Very small ones.

Anyway, my point being, we lead squeaky clean lives and being naughty was going to a friend's house in the afternoon without telling my parents and coming home late and having to do homework at night instead of in the afternoon.

I think i did that only once.

BUT the point being is i still have not been in a police raid.

I asked friends what they had been in raids for... mostly parties with drugs at them. This is very odd since i have never been to a party which i knew drugs were at. Apart from dope. Some friends had dope growing in their houses. Others sold dope. One had their bong confiscated. Drug use is something i really don't have extensive experience of. I can't smoke, which kinda rules smoking dope out of the question. It's not like i haven't tried smoking. I have. I just can't bring myself to inhale. I'm the really dull one who passes on the joint because it's a pointless exercise. I don't get anything out of it.

Anyway, after sitting and channel surfing for eight hours i felt really ill and disgusted with myself and then i went to bed. I must say i miss the kids, although i am glad of the space, and i look forward to the rest of the day on my own, to listen to chillout music, wander about the house in my dressing gown and take a hot soak at some stage. Then i might go for a run...

So this is turning out to be a typical surfing nothing to do day... I'm looking up the Left Hand of God, who is Van Helsing, aka as Gabriel, and immediately wander who is the right hand of god... or is that just his right hand?... oh of course, it's the Messiah... that's god's right hand. Jesus christ, or the Son of God, or whoever he's supposed to be...

Of course...

The Left Hand of God sounds a lot cooler than the Right Hand of God though. It's like the dark side... the side that does what God really wants to do, if he is honest. A friend did a note about Love in the Muslim Tradition, which explores what love for a beloved, a lover, should be, and it made me start thinking about what i hoped love with the beloved would be... and in truth, how i never ever experienced it on a long term basis... not because we were inadequate as lovers, but because the feeling, the scope of the love which i thought should be there was really, i can see it now, much wider than can be held by another human being... that is the feeling i have when i enter nature, when i read a piece of poetry that i connect to, a music that i feel, or perhaps that flash that enters when you have an immediate connection with someone. But it can't last, by it's very nature, that intensity cannot be there all the time... it is not humanly possibly. It's like eating clotted cream for every meal, as every meal.

... and so what happens the 99 per cent of the time when that wonder and fascination have to recede in the background? The ho humness of the everyday then takes over... and then paying attention to that is critical too...

...so i think back to those moments, the days and the nights and the places where that connection takes place and know, that was then, that was enough...

...but what about the everyday?