The lab phone rang, I answered it. Some dolt called to look for Mojo Jojo.

dolt: “Hello may I speak to Mojo Jojo please?”

Me: “I’m sorry, Mojo Jojo has gone out for a training whole day today.”

dolt: “So, he’s not in the lab?”

Me: “If he has gone OUT for a training today, of course he won’t be inside the lab.”

dolt: “Thank you.” [hangs up]

That dolt’s a ’she’.

I saw one of my old school bully during my lunch today. A couple years my senior, this guy used to be the meanest motherfucker during my secondary years. He was in the local gang or something, and was one of the members who went around to extort money off lamer students. I don’t quite know him nor encountered his notoriety before but, his reputation precedes him. A face where every student recognizes, and the last person in school one would ever want to mess up with.

But today, he’s just a humble guy running a small business - a noodle stall with his orcish looking wife. Instead of holding up shirt collars and threatening punches, he’s now taking orders and nodding like a servile slave with a tired smile… a far cry from his heydays as a tough brute who’s all so macho and badass.

I was thinking, how would he react if one of the students that he had beaten up many years ago, happened to stumble into him running his stall today? Would he feel bad about what he had done to them? Feel ashamed of himself for giving priorities to the wrong kind of interests? What happened to his aspirations to become a successful gangster? Or perhaps a drug dealer? How could someone of his calibre of violence, be found by any of his ex-victims, to be in a state like this? Who would have thought that he, would one day, depend on his own smile and obeisance to strive for a living?

It’s karma, people. It’s the fucking karma at play. I had a good look at it today, and it’s formidable.

Names. Everytime I see names, my mind will automatically project an imaginary face to go with it. Sometimes, it even goes with the characteristics of that person as well… you know what I mean? It’s like, an unconsciously automated stereotyping that’s hardcoded in my head or something like that. One that’s totally out of my control.

I don’t know why I’m like this. Maybe it’s something about the way my complex mind goes, but then, this also probably has got to do with my long past experience as well. I just don’t know why. But whatever the reason is, it’s not making me think like a good person. Because of it, I prejudiced about a person by the name before even meeting him/her.

Just like yesterday, when one of my colleagues mentioned about a girl who goes by the name ‘Evelyn’. Almost immediately, I remarked about her as:

“…either that girl has got to be the ugliest shit around, or she’s just gonna perform real bad in sex.”

And I haven’t even met that ‘Evelyn’ in person before. The impression that the name paints on me, is suffice to say, not good in nature. For no reasons. Maybe there were, but I cannot remember.

Amongst the names that always give me negative impressions:

Raymond - a salesman with a protruding jowl and face full of acne craters. Speaks quickly & rapidly (you can hardly understand him) like he has a gene of a housefly…

Robert - some fat businessman who’s balding… and would take any opportunity to sexually assault any female species (or a minor) anytime, anywhere, anyhow.

Anthony - a guy next door like any common dude you see on a street. But hidden behind him, is a dark side of his split personality… which goes about raping corpses and dead animals. Most Anthony’s… I imagine them to come with a goatee.

Mary - an extremely obese girl who can’t clip her toenails because she’s too fat to even wrap her outstretched arms over her gigantic belly. Some little hint of BO around her, like a wet mouldy carpet or a wet dog, whichever’s more accurate.

Denise - a moderately obese girl who overdresses herself to the extreme. Also somebody who likes to pretend that she’s very popular and would flirt around with basically any male species in her office. But somehow, everyone fucking hates her.

Steven - a scrawny geek with thick specs and testosterone level equivalent of a Pikachu soft toy. Usually has super thin & hairless pair of legs, with convoluted networks of green veins visible underneath that seemingly transparent layer of livid skin.

Mark - a muscular tanned guy with curly hair. Has a pair of rock hard butt and a penchant of dressing himself up with designer clothes. But he’s a fag.

That’s to name a few. There are many more. Might probably offend too many people to list them all out here.

But of course, I acknowledge that the whole thing’s about me. Most of the time, I turned to be wrong about the prospected characteristics of the names. For those that I had projected right, I didn’t feel too proud either… for it is not something morally right for me to judge people like this… Mea culpa.

Maybe all these are signs that I’m fast transforming into a reclusive xenophobic old man. Or I could all along be psychologically disturbed myself. I think I may need some professional help here… (in the form of monetary aid, that is… give me more money, and I’ll definitely be a better person…)

(As for that ‘Evelyn’, I confirmed later that she happened to look like a Japanese AV pornstar, and she dresses like she’s the backup dancer to that cruddy Fast & Furious 3 teriyaki song)

It was a dark, cold, stormy night…

Ok ok, it wasn’t really cold or stormy. It was in fact, fucking hot and sticky. But it was dark alright. (Nights are always dark). I added those to make the whole opening sounds nicer…

So.. it was a dark night, when an old Malay man in a white skullcap stumbled into the petrol station. He looked exhausted and confused. He was looking for something for his employer (I later found out). It was ‘Nanyang Siangpau’, a local Chinese daily, first edition of the night.

But he had a problem, he didn’t know how does that thing looked like. I mean, to him, those Chinese newspapers looked all the freaking same. They all had the same kind of chicken scratch mark writings on it. How the hell could he pick the right one amongst the heaps of Chinese dailies for his retarded boss?

No shit, he figured that he’ll just randomly ask any Chinese guy who happened to be there. And he picked a rather slack one… who happened to be me, in my shoddy casuals.

Old man: “Maaf dik, you tau tak yang mana ni Nanyang Siangpau? Boss saya suruh beli, tapi saya tak reti baca…”
(translation: “Dude, you know which one of these is Nanyang Siangpau? My boss asked me to get him a copy, but I can’t read no shit…”)

‘Dik’. He’s addressing me as ‘Dik’. That’s ‘brother’ in Malay. A man of his age addressing me brother, that would only mean 2 things

1) He was actually a young man who partied too much and looked too old to be his age, or
2) I looked like a young man trapped in an old man’s body…

Whatever that was, I didn’t take a moment to reflect on either of that possibility, but lent a helping hand to that distressed senile chap instead. (that’s so thoughtful of me…)

MichaelOoi: “Maaf, bang. Saya tak reti baca jugak, ahahahhahkss!”
(translation: “Sorry bro, I don’t read no [Chinese] shit neither, ahahahhahkss!”)

But I then explained to him, that we don’t need any ability to read Chinese to get a Chinese newspaper. That’s because they all have this Roman phonetic writings on its main page header to aid us illiterates in getting the RIGHT vernacular newspaper for our spouses, grandparents or bosses. How convenient.

And so, I brought the old Malay man over to the newspaper shack at the petrol station operated by a Bangla, to look around for the Romanized phonetics on a stack of Chinese newspapers, and on my way out, I cussed an Indian fart who sped through the petrol station driveway like he’s drunk or something, and went off to buy a couple packs of Thai fried rice for dinner…

Aren’t we glad that we’re not fighting each other like those bunch of diaper-heads at Middle East? And that’s the only reason that I like about being in Bolehland - peace and tranquility (alright, maybe not ‘tranquility’. I’ve always wanted to shove a can of insecticide up my neighbour’s ass and implode it inside his rectum… for being such a fucking noisy sod… for waking up my Regine up every unforgiving night).

I’m just glad that the war’s over, for the time being at least…

Happy ‘impending’ Independence day, brothers/sisters (and now you’re as old).

Regine has been very uppity as of recent. She has been refusing to sleep and blackmailed my mom for milk at irregular hours. I was about to give her a father-to-daughter disciplinary confrontation about her misdemeanour… when she flashed me this megawatt smile…

Daddy’s heart instantly melted into a gob of mushed organic matter, and gave her a kiss instead…