Tagamolilah (to Dennis)

Five words that came into my mind when this whole 'situation' befell our home land. Thank you for the tags.

1. hmmm (thoughtful..)
2. Hmmmm..(skeptical)
3. Hmm..(cynical)
4. Humh (acceptance..)
5. Hmmmm lets wait and see what happens now...

hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm.. reminds me of this Crash Test Dummies song.

P.S Dennis was an old boss of mine. Big guy, Filipino. Hair long and braided down to his waist. He's walking down Galle Face at night with one of his girlfriends. The hangers on at Galle face approach him (''cos you know that Chinese girls have a bad reputation..').

'Hey Brother!' they say

'Naaah, i dont think we share the same mother'..

'Hey Pal!' they try again..

'Naaah i don't think you and me are friends'

Dennis walks into dine-mor with a bunch of guys. They convince him that the appropriate way of addressing a waiter in Sri Lanka is to say 'ponnaya'. Dennis gets hungry and tired of the late service. It's the busy lunch hour and he has to yell and so yes the rest is obvious...

Dennis in the training room. His always calm disposition is awry today because a new top guy, self proclaimed nigga from the Projects (a Mr. Herb 'Chop-from-the-top' Kimble), is getting on everyones nerves.

Reza is sitting next to me. He is concentrating hard as Dennis lets loose his tirade. His chin is resting on his fist as his index finger taps on his lips. then suddenly

'Yeah Reza, f*** you too!'

Reza is dumbstruck. He's confused, realizes what may have gone wrong and manages a shaky..

'But Dennis, i was holding this finger' while holding up the offending article for all to see.

Dennis = non-plussed.

So What? in the Philipines THIS means f*** off!

i am yet to figure out the truth of this.

Pick up fine

We travel back in time a decade or so and...

There i am, a confused teenager wondering how the whole guy girl thing works. Slowly, pop culture exposes me to the phenomenon of pick up lines and i confront the holy grail of sexual pursuit; this is what i had been waiting for, this was the secret!

I put my newfound knowledge into practice. I started off with the lame 'have i seen you somewhere before?' line at an Interact event. A series of bemused girls say mixtures of things like 'er. i dont know hmm let me think about it', 'er, have you? where?' until, jackpot! one goes 'oh yeah at drama comp right?!' (i had never been to a drama comp in my life) i say 'yeaaah, i think you could be right!'.

So this one is really pretty and im all excited and manage to carry through a conversation and get her number and promise to call her sometime. Only i was so excited to have pulled it off i had to ask her three or four times afterwards for confirmation. Just to make sure it had really taken place outside the confines of my mind.

This other time, im at a rock concert and im walking up the stairs at MKOP. There are these two girls and one of 'em, as far as i could discern, was checking me (or possibly my friend, assuming she was slightly squint eyed) out while we were going up the stairs, so i go upto them and ask the one who was looking;

'Have you been feeling kinda tired lately?'

What can only be retrospectivey described as confusion, but disguised to my eyes in the heat of that moment as charmingly aroused curiousity, passes across her face.

'Uh tired? No?'

A pause, she was obviously not wondering which lunatic asylum i escaped from; Angoda or Mulleriyawa, and then she drops the question i've been waiting for...

'Why?'

So let her have the punchline.

And lean against the bannister and look into her eyes, not a lot unlike Elvis, expecting to see that brief moment when she would melt as her walls of restraint collapse beneath a river of uncontrollable adoration.

Instead I see horror. And indignation. And she blurts out;

'Excuse me but my mom is here!'

That was probably the only thing she could think of, but she was refferring to the 'chick' standing next to her, and the scary part is that I think that really was her mom, who was leaning on the banister like some rocker chick and giving me a look as if to say; where did you get the balls??

So i followed the first instinct of wisdom, I flirted with the mom. No, not really, I walked away before any fathers or brothers could materialize. See the thing with instinct is you gotta make sure its not too influenced by the latest installment of American Pie, or you'll find yourself getting into a sticky situation, rather like that unfortunate pie in the movie.

one line errs

it only hurts when im breathing.

have you got some sort of lung disease?

ah nononononono just some some lovey dovey stuff, some lovey dovey stuff

Creating Superman

Nietzsche by jdgomezmo

Reading the work of Friedrich Nietzsche we are welcomed into an armchair of volatility, comfortably immersed in insane thought. I think this guy invented superman, though I haven't actually followed the lore of the caped one.

Now the superman emerges from what was Nietzsche’s greatest work. Thus spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche, already established as a profound German philosopher, racked by illness, almost on the verge of death, speaks his last will and prepares to succumb. He is in his mid thirties. But by a miraculous as-luck-would-have-it stroke of fate, he is cured and then is overcome with the 'joys' of life. This sadly, does not last and in a few more years he is up in the Alps somewhere, in solitude, contemplating (you may be tempted to ask what exactly he was 'contemplating', I’m getting there, I’m getting there).

He writes,

I sat there waiting - waiting for nothing
Enjoying beyond good and evil now
The light, now the shade; there was only
The day, the lake, the noon, time without end.
Then my friend, suddenly one became two,
And Zarathustra passed by me.

He discovers a new religion, a new philosophy; he discovers the answers to his lifelong unrest with humanity, the human condition and destiny.

And he invents Superman.

Through the words and wisdom of Zarathustra, a close parody of the Persian prophet who spawned the religion of Zoroastrianism, he extolls the virtue of what is conventionally known as 'evil'. He exposes altruism, sympathy and every other 'good' sentiment held noble by the world's religions as 'weak'. He curses them to be the cause of dragging humanity to the dredges of mediocrity, of encouraging the great to become like the insignificant and helpless; the 'herd' or the masses.

He argues that for the human race to develop there should arise from among us a class of people stronger, braver, fiercer and more violent. A class of man that lives dangerously takes risks and explores new frontiers. A people not held back by sympathy to the weak, a people who exult in the glory of war; who conquer all before them, who will set the platform for the creation of the ultimate human; the Superman.

But the natural order of things is against the creation of this Superman. Nature favours the weak. It seeks to sustain the herd. It does not encourage individual human greatness. Democracy is the bane of mankind, for it only enforces the will of the herd, the will of the masses, thus preventing the rise of an elite class of human, preventing the progress of the species to a higher level.

What he advocates is simple. It is also kinda bizarre. We are weak. There is poverty and destitution. So instead of sympathizing and languishing along with the greater part of humanity we must individually shun the weak and only associate with the powerful. Breeding must only take place with other powerful people. Love should not be allowed to result in childbirth, because love knows no rationality. Children so born out of the powerful should in turn be groomed through education and conditioning to even greater heights, thus becoming more noble than the preceding generation. The goal of Superman is a dream, a dream that should be fixed in the eyes and minds of everybody, excluding anything else.

A socially engineered path to creating an uber-human is what his religion is about. Yes he created a religion, out of thin air, the thin air of the Swiss Alps. ‘He conceived of man as something that man must surpass’ – Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.

Nietzsche went mad in his mid forties, and died at fifty six. His work was largely disconnected and invited a lot of criticism, yet he succeeded in bringing a fresh perspective into established institutions and thought that had gone unquestioned for centuries.

And after the Superman? After the superman comes Eternal Recurrence. When everything will fall apart all over again and the whole progress of human thought will have to start once more form the primitive ages. This according to him is the ultimate and terrible truth.

Insane or what? And I ask that in all objectivity. And also, what a difficult name to spell eh..

Media Hogwash

Lost. That is what I am. Lost for words, lost in my dreams that render everything else insignificant, there is a despicable atmosphere of over marketed victory in the country. People individually are not the problem. But people collectively are.

The media is equally to blame. The nationalistic commentary on some media is positively vomit inducing. The government has obviously got to be behind it. Such corny fervor would not arise from any human brain other than one hell bent on control and a bullshit whitewash.

The new definitions of ‘race’; that of lovers of the nation and those that hate, are ambiguous and smell to me a like a harbinger of more oppression. Someone once said ‘dissent is the greatest form of patriotism’ and if not the greatest form, it is still a part and parcel of being a good patriot.

The greatest need for a ‘free nation’ is a free media. But the media here are cowed. They bow down to the will of the government; they are too scared to do their duty. There are rules and regulations preventing the broadcasting of certain events. That should actually be unconstitutional, these should actually be condemned, yet nothing is done. The justice system must be incapable of ensuring the rights of a free media movement, so does that mean the problem lies there?

These restrictions, whether spoken or unspoken, covert or otherwise, defy the essential values of the media movement, and therefore the media in the nation sadly does not amount to much.

Better to be deaf, than to have to listen to the hogwash in the media.

Dee's Peece Zeitgeist

So DeeCee is planning on putting her production skillz to good use and is calling for all you blog narcissists and not so narcissists to submit your video's in for a 'capture the vibe of the moment' project.

There are right now easily around a million bemused twenty somethings awkwardly blinking in the unfamiliar sunlight of peace in this country and this is probably one of those things that only happen when a thirty year old war finishes really abruptly, which is not often.

So help her out with your video submissions and if you're shy you don't have to show your face. Just express your righteous love for the flower of power by showing a pair of rubber slipper clad feet and jean clad legs walking over a massive map of Sri Lanka and dabbling in the cool lagoon waters of Batti :D

Im gonna start working on mine right away.. hunting for ideas hmmm...

Go check out her blog post here. for the nitty gritties..

Peace!

Come to Sri Lanka, see our war crimes.

So the EU wants to organize a tribunal thingamajig to investigate civilian deaths not only by the hands of the tigers but also by the hands of the government. Well, here's a thing or two for you to consider Mr. EU bigwig. We never claimed the LTTE posessed nukes, and we never used falsities like that as an excuse to indiscriminately kill people. We never bombed no wedding parties and killed whole families just because we suspected the bride's fifth cousin by marriage to have a nephew who once was possibly in the same building as Osama Bin Laden. Sure we don't have a lot of clout in the international arena, unlike some people, but we are human beings too, and therefore equipped with brains capable of intelligence to a certain degree, and your self righteous hypocrisy and cowardice is painfully obvious, even to us.

Why don't you bring down Bush to the Hague and try him for war crimes instead of letting him peacefully sit in his ranch watching his cows piss into the drying desert sand? Why don't you investigate all the accusations of torture and disappearing tourists instead of trying to poke your nose in places you are not wanted? Why don't you investigate the atrocities on the Gaza strip and the audacity of the Israeli's claim of being able to use precision bombing with the ability to target a single insurgent within one million civillians right before they demolish the UN office in an aerial attack (oops)? Come Mr. EU bigwig, we all know who lubes your ass every night.

But you know what we also know? we know your threats are empty. Oh yes Mr. Bigwig, we know the game you play. Its been played for a long long time and we are familiar with the rules. The first rule is there are no rules. Here's how it goes, you will use your clout to make us submit and you will proceed to own our asses. Yes you will secure the national resources and you will secure an 'open' economy and you will 'integrate us into the global arena'. And thank you very much we will too, 'cos maybe thats exactly what we need. Oh yes, you will try to bribe our leaders and if you cannot reach a compromise, you will roll us in the dirt and call us terrorists and rogues.

But you also know that this is not as easy as it used to be, oh no. You have competition now. And we have Iran on our side, and the Russians. Who aren't exactly on pally terms with you we notice. Also our geographical location puts us in an ideal position to take advantage of the regional economic boom, we only need to hope like hell our leaders will see these opportunities and grab them. Oh yes, we may eventually have to be owned by someone but at least now we've got options.

So come to Sri Lanka, try your luck. Here's the famous hospitable smile also =)

Defense report

May as well try an excercise to pull off a bit of a mental thread of meaning from my teeming head
As people die we wax lyrical on blogs but do we even try to stop the killing?
People are DYING and all we do is wax lyrical
lyrics so spherical you cant find an edge to grasp a bit of meaning

why write about things when you writing about it is not going to stop it
why not just ignore the deranged war of blood and flesh flying around faster than shrapnel
for writing about it devoids you of reason and accuses you of treason
woe be tide anyone who is against it

the dead are piling and no one who is on either side can stop it
we are in a place where people dying is a natural phenomenon of the ending of a conflict
they are bombed and they are ripped to shreds as propaganda attempts to weakly restore order
we over here are so eager for peace we don't really give a shit, if there is some 'mild' blood loss and disorder

The UN screams but they dont really seem to want to step in, lest they bury the sovereignity of this island
the EELAMIST bastards they just want a ceasefire to regroup, rethink and restore their battling order
the GOVERNMENT of tricksters, they are money twisters and yes im a critic
the morality we lived by is dead and in this carnage we are losing our soul to the devil, the devil, the devil.

the devil.

Nobody cares about the dead
not us not them not the UN, not really.
they are shelled and lost and struck a terrible revenge
for being at the wrong where, during the wrong when

Nobody really cares about stopping the dying
we are all utopians looking for a future of peace and loving
lets cast a grimace upon our healthy face
so that we can eventually have a hope of peace

Lets all go blogging and lets all write about politicking
the paining the gaining of winning
lets all take the topic and lets grind it and and wind it
now i dont mean to be a cynic but in this blood covered landscape, can we find it?

can we find it in a widow's dream?
can we find it in a mothers scream?
can we find it in the eyes of an orphan boy?
can we find it in the mournful songs of the days gone by?

where can we find it?
how can we find it?
what is peace?
where is it?

*yeah a little angst there.. call it a part of that license you're supposed to have when you write, and no offence to anyone writing about the war btw, writing about it is important, you should keep it up. This is mainly about the desperation of the IDPs. When it comes down to it, the situation right now is such that most parties/interest groups involved want it all to somehow finish. The plight of the dying seems to be a secondary concern. These are my sentiments, and i admit to feeling the same myself, which is sort of despicable isnt it?

Gangsta Rippin'

Many people have called me a 'poet'. And by many i mean about five. Many others have dismissed my 'poetry' as meaningless and many have meaninglessly referred to it as 'deep'. Still, many have speculated on the origins of my lyrical brilliance. Truth is it could be any one of the following.

1. Aliens implanting test chip in brain.
2. Accident involving Milton's Paradise Lost and a slippery floor. book ending up embedding itself in brain as a pshychological snapshot that morphed into a life of its own.

But i actually started off my 'career' writing gangsta rap when i was fourteen. And probably owe most of my poetic brilliance slash lameness to Eminem. That boisterous white boy who showed me how to be black and proud of it biatch! I wrote:

yo!
yo yo yo!
my words are like a death toll
i make the nay saying bastards' heads roll
an apostrophy lost
my grammer is like pus
seeping through the wounds of my broken english
but i dont let it stop me i get stronger with it
yeah im a wordsmith, with a mcahine gun
i scare your pants off and i make you run
i make you scream and want to find your mum
i'll make your m**** F***in bleed from your ears son

Im a gangsta rapper
with the shock treatment unit
its me agianst the world baby

I ain got no regrets
this is a battlefield
and i slip and slide like James Bond on speed

Yeah..Uh huh..

Or Something similar..

Pretty soon, my gangsta walk and gangsta talk garnered me a lot of attention. And nick names. And there was that unfortunate incident where i was adding a bit of color to the national anthem during assembly and this guy laughed his head off and gave me away to a prefect, who then proceeded to yell at me very loudly. for a long time afterwards.

never liked them, prefects.

But not everybody was a playa hater. I had a few fellow artistes in my crew see. Although only one of them was a fellow rapper (most of the others used to sing Westlife) and him and me eventually formed this band called the Shock Treatment Unit.

A few performances on stage are also to my credit, as are a few audiences of bemused people. Although i never got a chance to actually really get down to some cold hard gangsta rap on stage. A pity.

Anyways, my gangsta rappin days are behind me, i hear you breath a sigh of relief, and an era of rhymes simply followed. Followed by a few kind people who felt my work was worthy a compliment or two. I kept writing more because of them and have found that a lot of interesting things that mostly take place in my head and would be inexplicable in plain everyday descriptive language can be expressed quite accurately in the throes of a few jumbled words.

And when i write stuff like;

A dead poem breathed new life into a vacuum with its last breaths
it created pulses in the air with its dying heartbeats
the pulses became butterflies and created storms in far off places
changing many landscapes and changing many faces
the dying cries of the poem lost itself in the screaming wind
for now the storm of his heartbeats had come back to him
and he passed in peace within the matters of his own doing.
What more can a poem ask but immortality in the act of dying?

Sometimes even i can't figure out exactly what i mean.

Unresponse

Not long ago there was a time where i could write uninhibited by anything. By opinions, by the need to be recognized, by wants and desires, everything would just slip away in front of my verbal onslaught taking the sword to anything and everything that got in my way. But that time has slipped away from me now, this blog has changed me.

You know when your ideas are flowing right? and when you require next to no effort for them to come onto virtual paper? when you dont have to put pressure on yourself to come up with some witty remarks and keep pumping the joke machine like an emptily hissing bicycle pump?

Typing while trying to watch the screen is hard man, Iv always been a chap who'd look at the keyboard while typing. My imagination is dead man.

Or is my imagination a dead man?

My life just keeps flowing; ebb and flow ebb and flow. These are my darkest thoughts but i think i am a born pessimist, simply that self realization makes me want to stop all this and go back bed and sob into my pillow. Nothing happens to me that is interesting nothing happens that is worthwhile. I am a depressed worthless creature. And those who are foolish enough to love me, to follow me, there is nothing worse you can do. I suggest you fly away from this senseless pursuit now.

This is transmagoric, meaning it transports me somewhere on the mental plain but it only seems like i am on top of a cold ridge looking down on the blank depression that once was me, looking down on that seething mass of black monsters innocently playing around in a cleft in the hills. I am on the ridge now due to my thoughts having transported me. I am waiting on this ridge i am sitting on my haunches watching the cleft in the hill.

But there is nowhere for me to go. I will live on that ridge for a while and enjoy the cool breeze that ruffles through my hair but then i will just get bored and want to go back into that subclavian open air cave that is the mind that i am used to. A negative mind, a pessimstic self loathing mind. I have nowhere else to go and no other option but to live in my mind.

And in these dark confines, i reject all human contact and throw pity parties in which i ravage and bleed to my hearts content 'til the dawn breaks.

And as the cold morning air heralds the sunshine i forsee a new day, a new way. Absolved of all the bullshit of yesterday. Absolved of the negativity and the pain. Of the self induced delusion and the magnification of someone else's influence on you. Why fall prey to some worthless relief from the honesty of your soul? why be afraid to accept the uncoventional light that shines upon your insides? Why be afraid to accept the truth on which that light shines?

And why be afraid to let a part of you forever remain underground? you need that. you need that positive self delusion. delusion is not a bad thing, it is simply an interpretation of what is. What is can only be one thing. But our presence behind our eyes changes that one thing, and it is transformed as its glow permeats the backs of our eyes and its light is changed as it shines in on the inner chambers of our minds.

Therefore, the world is different to each of us. Subtly and radically.

Chinese Wake-up Call

Recently the chinese held a massive naval arms display and called it 'harmonious oceans'. Maybe the chinese people are genetically immune to the concept of Irony or something. Or maybe they really think the irony is lost on the rest of us. That somewhow we'd believe that a military display of such massive proportions could actually be 'harmonious'.

The Chinese are strong. And they know how to capitalize. They shifted whole factories from Europe to the riverbanks of China during the boom of the steel industry. Their burgeouning demand for recyclable steel was so great that cities like New York and Manhattan found that manhole covers were disappearing, going off in Chinese trading vessels, stolen and sold for scrap metal to feed the growling bellies of Chinese steel plants.

They have entered almost every single industry in the world. And are doing well. Their only problem is that most of their companies arent yet as upto the global standard as may be liked. India has far surpassed them in this regard though.

But unlike the Indians. The Chinese are hungry, they have a want and a need to conquor. Napoleon said some thing along the lines of leaving China alone beause she was a sleeping giant that could cause a lot of havoc if woken up.

They have already made empiricist style inroads into a lot of countries. Forming political alliances, and power brokering to secure diplomatic support, as well as natural resources. As a matter of fact 'harmonious oceans' was built around the idea of securing their global supply chains. To protect the ships that bring their shipments of oil and other imports. And here i was like a dufus thinkin that pirates were only around in the Horn of Africa. Theres an international coalition of Navies working at controlling the situation there, im sure the Chinese dont really need nuclear submarines for that.

And on the note of irony, i got asked by a friend if i was interested in attending this chillies lecture that was about 'creativity during tough times' and i said hey yeah, that sounds interesting. and so i made some inquiries and it turned out it costed around 7.5k for a two hour session. Geez man. Now im trying to imagine what kind of a target audience THAT was aimed at. Probably people trying to find out how to sell more by spending less, creativity be damned. I declined cos i could think of much more creative ways of spending that money. Considering these were tough times and all that.

Elephant Apocalypse

wake up and smell the coffee it turned into garbage in the night

wake up and look at your children they are zombies instilled with fright

school taught them to be robots and you encouraged their plight.

slavery is the norm, and you let your brains be mined

by the greedy and the power-blind.

you laze and muck about, your universe is small

it circles around inside the radius of your skull.

so wake up! and smell the garbage,

it is seething under your window

its is festering and mustering a truly terrible blow.

wake up and feel the heat

as the earth prepares you a complete defeat.

wake up and hear the distant boom

as the war drums are beat.

You hold the candle to the elephant's butt

and you are idling around not knowing

that when it farts it will send you, your kith and kin

blowing.

Trollonomics

Kottu has seen an increase in 'trolls' of late. At least, iv not seen as many trolls as we seem to have around right now. And by trolls i mean those whose main activity is to take the piss out of other people. First there was the Maharajah, then the tweets of YourBlogSucks and now apparently the self-proclaimed 'infamous' Padashow seems to have made a reappearance.

Style wise they differ. The Maharajah is more laid back and tries to project an air of bored indifference, probably hard to keep up and has something to do with the low volume of his output. YourBlogSucks and Padashow follow a similar pattern of direct insults and mass writings trashing things left right and center. YBS is on twitter exclusively, while Padashow seems to have revived his trolldom on twitter and re-embraced his old blog on wordpress. Even the Maharajah seems to have diversified his portfolio and is tweeting away, albeit at a rather slower pace. Also worth a mention is Podipada, probably a groupie off-shoot of Padashow trying to capitalize on the brand. Or maybe Padashow is also diversifying.

Some bloggers just blog for the fuck of it, others just want to get their views across to whoever might be interested, but trolls are specifically in it for the buzz. They need the thrill of controversy, they revel in being the centre of attention and will continue trolling until attention wanes and people drift away or until a conscience materializes and they feels sorry for thieir sins so to speak, given the unlikely prospect of the latter though, we can safely conclude that the chief motivator of a troll is 'attention' and that attention will figure higher on a trolls list of motivators than it will on other bloggers'. It doesn't have to be 'good' attention. 'Good' and 'bad' are merely subjective terms and no one knows this better than a troll who revels in unscrupulousness.

Therefore we can conclude that there is a reason for the existence of trolls in the 'lankanosphere' (term again coined by RD I think) and that is attention. There must be a 'need' for their existence, and that 'need' is the need of the rest of the blogsphere for whatever services a troll may offer, which are highly speculative, but interesting to mull over.

Disclaimer - deductions arrived solely based on reasoning based on observation and the general principle of supply and demand.

Bum-Napoleon (The One)

Yikes! he cried. As the goofy gondola crashed inside, it crashed in through the back wall and destroyed his slumber, the wonder and the illusion of his dream shattered amidst showers of fresh soil and manure, not the most pleasant awakening.

Snap! his bed cracked. and before he could say 'oh shat!' (after O Shah't the great general who'd once had a similar experience) he bruised his little bottom. oh what a connundrum.

Tomorrow was bottom inspection! oh no! he had meant it to look so good. he had meant it to shine and shame every other bottom worth its silly alien name, but now he'd fail.

Ah! the despair. Oh! woe is me. WHY the GReat Light in The sky! HEy! yeh im talking to you! Why!??

BECAUSE.

came the answer.

THE WORLD IS CIRCULAR AND YET IT IS ROUND. SO IS YOUR BOTTOM WHEN TAKEN INDIVUDUALLY, AND ITS PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS TURNED AROUND. YOU WILL NOT SUFFER LITTLE ONE DO NOT WORRY, THERE WILL BE A DAY WHEN YOUR BUM WILL ROCK THE VERY SCRUMS OF THE EARTH. AND THE HUMANS WILL BEND TO ITS WILL.

Earth what is that? said the little bottom fighter. The warrior, at least he thought he was. He was going to join the campaign tomorrow! everyone had said he could! his bum laser was strong now! He was crying, he thought about all the dreams he'd been having. He was going to destroy the stupid aliens. He was going to kill and fell their meta meta blitzer ships with his dehomonized advanced infraspectral bum ray, a special addition being the new ultra light ammunition reload dimension intesifeier, a birthday present.

And now he couldn't.

GHUT SBGGQWNX Q)()&*)*())*!!!

they let him wail.

The first Great Light in the sky looked at the other Great Light in the sky;

'nice work James!' he said. 'i almost flickered myself when you made that bed snap!'

'thanks Mac, a little bit of extra skill for the look of the thing' winked James.

They turned to the other Great Lights floating around in the vastnes of space.

'Nice work Boys!' they chorused. And laughed.

But the first Great Light only nodded gravely.

'He is young' he said. 'He must wait'.

Then they all fell silent. Thinking.

Freedom, Hypocrisy & Kottu

What is freedom of speech and how does society temper it? On the one hand you have laws and regulations on the other you have ethics, values and beliefs. The current prevailing ethos of 'freedom of speech', indeed, the very idea of freedom of speech, is utter bullshit.

First about the rules and regulations bit. I hate to harp about something so wasted already but take Nibras Bawa for instance, he was thrown out of kottu because he broke the rules and revealed personal details about a blogger, thus breaking codes of basic ethics expected of bloggers in Kottu right? That is all good and well, but what about the outing of Nibras Bawa's himself afterwards by other bloggers? why weren't they kicked out of kottu for going against the rules? or looked down upon with scorn or disdain. Effectively, what they were doing was taking the 'law' into their own hands, thieving from the thieves or murdering the murderers. This may seem justified in the light of the former's actions, but hardly seems right given the 'code of ethics' we adhere to.

I'd hate to see this place turn into some biased hell hole. Where there is a status quo controlled by the 'elite' bloggers whom everyone in turn feels like following and emulating. This destroys original thought and restricts the airing of diverse opinions and will turn kottu into just another pseudo intellectual frog in the well social group the like of which i was under the impression i was escaping through blogging. And lately, events have been giving me a slight feeling of distaste on the edge of my tongue.

Remember the Black Tigers

better than you
i am. i will be
seeing black
screaming in this silence
of a world gone quiet
quiet to me.

nothing but revenge
of an ancestral creed
an outlet of hate
an outlet of righteousness
to me. you will be.

the pain i unleash
the same. pain you suffer.
you will do no honour
in dying for the sins
of you and your kind

die my darlings
die. as i.
your torture is an instant
in return for an eternity
of mine.

pain, retribution
washing away in an instant
nothingness awaits
with its warm embrace
i am righteous.