Last Year, Day 365 (pt. 1)

Our train moved forward at turtle’s pace, gently swaying from left to right, right to left. The seats were hard and the air was hot. Everyone was sweating and the fumes from their bodily excretions added to the musky aroma in the air. It enveloped us, drowning us in what smelled like the body odor of a million hobos. According to my clock, we weren’t stepping on firm ground for the next 2 hours. I decided to curl up on the edge of my seat, and let the placid movements of the train slowly lull me to sleep.

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We arrived at Jatinegara. I was drenched in sweat and my shirt felt damp to the touch. I looked at my fellow travelers and saw that they looked as unkempt as i did, faces shining with sweat. The air was even worse than on the train. It was so humid and sticky that i started to sweat, and my shirt got wetter every second. It made the slightest gust of wind seem like an arctic blast. I sneezed. Mucus came flying out of my nose, saliva expelled out of my mouth. My stomach growled. Things were not going so good for this motley crew of clueless travelers. We needed food and shelter. Pronto.

The surroundings were completely alien to us. The streets outside were of a different planet. Sounds of honking horns and people shouting drowned our ears. Dust blinded our eyes. I guess this is how a fish raised in an aquarium feels when it’s released to the big ocean. The slightest mishap, any wrong step would make the poor bugger another fish’s lunch.

So on we walked, with no clear destination ahead. All we knew was to find a green Innova with our escort driver waiting inside. We found him waiting across the road. Our first step inside the car was like stepping into an oasis in the middle of the sahara. It was air conditioned, and drinks were aplenty. Our escort was a middle-aged man, of short stature and whiting hair with matching moustache. Glasses adorned his face. They gave it an almost comical quality. His name was Mr. Suhaimi. He turned out to be a jolly, talkative man, and a more than great driver. He drove us to somewhere we could seek shelter. To the house of one of ours.

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We all took baths to stifle the biting heat. It didn’t work. our bodies started to ooze sweat again 5 minutes after we walked out of the washroom. The lukewarm water we used to bathe didn’t help at all. Seemed like this strange planet had no mercy for the comfort of its inhabitants. The beings who live here everyday must have developed some way to cope with this suffocating heat. Maybe they developed bodily heatsinks, like the stegosaur. Maybe they scream and throw tantrums a lot to channel the heat into energy.

My stomach acids were starting to act up. We needed food. So we walked outside into the unknown, searching for a decent place to grab a bite. The main road was like a turbulent river. The cars flowing through it were seemingly endless and moved at high velocities. We crossed it frogger-style. A small tavern was all we could find, and we satisfied ourselves with some exquisite chicken soto. Where we came from a bowl would cost 6000 with rice. Here it costed 9000 rupiahs. It was still the cheapest we could find. The inhuman heat kept searing through our bones.

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The roads were hell. Our destination was Ancol, a popular new year haven for this planet’s inhabitants. Everyone was going to the same place. Everyone had no decent sense of manners. Everyone wanted to move forward. No one wanted to be overtook. Chaos ensued. We engaged in many heated honk wars before actually getting any closer. It was like being in the middle of a clogged sewer. You couldn’t move anywhere without getting some shit on yourself. Mr. Suhaimi remained perfectly calm, ever in control of his four wheeled chariot.

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We finally arrived at where we wanted to be. Outside the car was the stage where our favorite bands would be playing. Outside the car was our journey’s end. Our holy grail. Our fountain of youth. Outside the car were a million people. Outside the car was utter chaos. We slowly stepped out and walked into the holy mess.

(to be continued)

Every Man Lives, But Not Every Man Truly Dies

So i was browsing around on wikipedia and as you’ve probably experienced for yourself, i spent a large chunk of my night jumping from blue link to blue link, sometimes opening 6 separate entries at once (all in different tabs). Seems like every page has endless links to other articles with just the right combination of encyclopedic flair tinged with a bit of mystery imbued in their titles. Enough to warrant a click from curious people surfing the web with nothing better to do (me). After a few hours, i usually find myself ending up at some random entry (usually about an urban legend or a cryptid) that has no relation at all to what i was supposed to be looking for, with a head full of useless trivial knowledge that i’d forget by the next morning. I once started on pseudoscience and ended up on bukkake.

Amazing way to waste your time, actually. All hail the great Jimbo Wales.

Anyways. Last night after a frenzied clicking spree (i started on Marree Man, followed a link from Cracked) i stumbled upon an interesting entry. It was poignantly titled List of unusual deaths. I’ll let it describe itself :

This article provides a list of unusual deaths – unique, or extremely rare circumstances – recorded throughout history. The list also includes less rare, but still unusual, deaths of prominent people.

Unusual deaths. Like, the ones they give Darwin Awards for. They also conveniently divided the entire list by era in which the death occured; during the Renaissance people were apparently very creative at inventing torture methods :

1514: György Dózsa, székely man-at-arms and peasants’ revolt leader in Hungary, was condemned to sit on a red-hot iron throne with a red-hot iron crown on his head and a red-hot sceptre in his hand (mocking at his ambition to be king), by Hungarian oppressors in Transylvania. While Dózsa was still alive, he was set upon and his partially roasted body was eaten by six of his fellow rebels, who had been starved for a week beforehand.

Wow. Seems like those Hungarian oppressors had too much spare time on their hands. Before the arrival of television and the internet, apparently spare time was best spent brainstorming Saw-worthy ways of executing the next revolution leader. Another example :

260: Roman emperor Valerian, after being defeated in battle and captured by the Persians, was used as a footstool by the King Shapur I. After a long period of punishment and humiliation, Shapur had the emperor skinned alive and his skin stuffed with straw or dung and preserved as a trophy.

Some of the others were downright weird.

207 BC: Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunk donkey attempt to eat figs.

Yes, fatal hilarity (that’s what they call it) is a real way of dying. You know your life’s completely devoid of joy when you can laugh to death at the mere sight of your donkey. Poor greek philosophers. This one just sounds completely ugly:

1410: Martin I of Aragon died from a lethal combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing.

Indigestion and laughing. What more need I say? The next one sounds like an excerpt from an X-Files episode:

1959: In the Dyatlov Pass incident, Nine ski hikers in the Ural Mountains abandoned their camp in the middle of the night in apparent terror, some clad only in their underwear despite sub-zero weather. Six of the hikers died of hypothermia and three by unexplained fatal injuries. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, one victim had a fatal skull fracture, two had major chest fractures (comparable in force to a car accident), and one was missing her tongue. The victims’ clothing also contained high levels of radiation. Soviet investigators determined only that “a compelling unknown force” had caused the deaths, barring entry to the area for years thereafter.

Spooky. I remember cracked did a feature on this one a while ago. The name of the mountain they died on apparently translates as Death Mountain. And since we’re talking about russians:

1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, was reportedly poisoned while dining with a political enemy, shot in the head, shot three more times, bludgeoned, and then thrown into a frozen river. When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be hypothermia. However, there is now some doubt about the credibility of this account.

A smashingly badass way to kick the bucket. Well done, russians. The same can’t be said for some other people on the list :

1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was “unbreakable.”

2008: Marciana Silva, 67, died after her dead husband’s coffin slammed into the back of her neck during a traffic accident en route to his funeral in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Ooh, the irony. As usual i’ll end with my favorite item on the list:

1998: Every player on the visiting soccer team at a game in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was struck by a fork bolt of lightning, killing them all instantly.

And the players on the home team weren’t even scratched.

Secrets

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

These secrets range from comical, mischievous little thoughts,

to downright depressing dirges of melancholy.

Turns out that many people feel more comfortable with posting their deepest secrets anonymously on a public site rather than actually trusting them to people they know. Such is the modern age of information, online communities winning over real human companionship in terms of cathartic release. These postcards offer interesting insight on the nature of human psyche. They show that people find exposing their deepest, darkest secrets to virtually anyone as a perfectly acceptable way of coping with feelings of guilt and loneliness as long as they remain anonymous. Humans were born with strange pseudo-exhibitional tendencies.

And on a totally unrelated sidenote, i believe i’ve seen the postcards featured on some band’s music video.. Can’t remember the group’s name though.

One of my favorites :

My First Attempt at Coherent Posting

This is my new blog! Just erased the old one 5 minutes ago. I’ll be writing in english here. Don’t know why, but I feel like I can better express my thoughts in english: maybe because it’s a better-built language than Bahasa Indonesia. I mean don’t get me wrong, I love Bahasa Indonesia and I believe that it’s a language that really suits my people’s tropical, fun-loving nature: it’s just that I can’t write casual paragraphs in it without coming off as totally weird (for an example see one of my previous blogs). There are many people that can write very amusing blogs about everyday life in Bahasa Indonesia. I’m just not one of them. Of course I couldn’t live without it (it’s the best language for goofing off with friends). I just can’t write anything less casual than a formal scientific paper with it. But enough about my love/hate relationship with my national language. I shall now jump to the next paragraph without any coherent transition whatsoever.

I’ve always wanted to write a noir. Or a short story. Or anything longer than a few jumbled, incoherent sentences that meander around devoid of purpose or meaning. The problem isn’t that I can’t structure my thoughts into coherent prose: it’s mostly because I don’t believe any of my thoughts are important enough to post on the internet.

The point is, I keep seeing everybody post these long notes on facebook about nationalism, or philosophical rants about dialectics and logic. I just don’t get the point of writing on such heavy subject matter: eventhough i do sometimes find myself thinking about these kinds of things, i still don’t understand them completely. Yes, I do sometimes look up philosophical thought experiments (the brain in a vat hypothesis, that chinese guy’s butterfly dream) on wikipedia, but still. I don’t wanna write about something I don’t fully understand. I fear of looking like a pompous idiot who doesn’t have anything better to do than write out long, monotonous posts about ethics, just to look like i’m a deep kind of guy who ponders over what I can do for my country everytime I see another corrupt senator on TV. I’m not. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Or in more family-friendly terms, I just don’t care.

All I deem safe to post is in the form of cryptic, self-deprecating pseudo-poems about my seemingly perpetual state of heartbreak. I try to wrap them up in flowery, essentially unnecessary adjectives and nouns: to hide their true nature of being mere rants about self-pity and as a means to draw people’s attention. Very emo and adolescent, actually. I’m just trying to do what millions of attention-seeking teenagers on friendster are doing in a more elegant way. And writing these pseudo-poems gives me a sort of cathartic release from my usual daily state of moping around whenever I get lonely. But I haven’t had anything to write a seemingly poetic and thoughtful rant about for a while. So that’s why I instead ended up writing this unpoetic and unthoughtful rant about.. nothing, actually. Hehe.

So i’ll keep on writing here; and I hope I don’t fuck this one up again like my previous blogs. At least this’ll be my most well-concepted blog yet; more original writing and not just linking random, tasteless photos from 4chan or translating articles i found laying around on cracked or digg. Although there’ll be an occasional repost from another site, i’ll always post the link. And i’ve always wanted to write about music: so expect posts about bands i like, videos, or pitchfork-wannabe album reviews complete with download links (if i can find any).

Stay tuned, folks!