foreword

Last night I dreamt of terrorism in China, where you never knew what would come next. A lady recounted to me that her child was just sleeping and when he woke the next morning his legs were gone – they had been chopped off.

Consequently I made up an episode of the Power Rangers television series while still out cold. Likely the very first episode of a non-existant series, where a bunch of people discover they have to save the world every week.

Dreams usually affect me even after I wake, so I may be a little odd today.

Am craving for curry. Bryani, maybe.

 I’d always thought I’d seen most of it – I mean, the only reason why I started taking interest in her songs was because I happened to stumble upon a bootleg of one of her songs, recorded off someone’s tape recorder while pushing other people around in a free-standing arena in a particular state. I’d heard some of her studio tracks before, but as well-written as her words were it seemed a little boring. But her live performances, surely they can take your breath away.

And so I thought I’d seen and heard most of it, after seeing her live performances on youtube, after having access to loads of bootlegs from her concerts that have occured within a range of 20 years, after hearing them so many times. I did wonder how I’d feel to actually see her perform right here in Singapore – would the magic have been taken away by all that I have already been exposed to?

Well I needn’t have worried. The moment she walked out on stage with the guitar and started talking I knew it would be different. I have heard recordings where people were cheering to every witty line, every line hinting at mockery towards the way the world is working, and here was a half-filled theatre containing people who seemed half-dead to the point where she thought we didn’t really understand the English language – “the grass is always greener… do you have that phrase in your country?” – but it was different. She was standing about 6 metres away (maybe 7, I’m bad with distances) and playing a two-hour concert in my country, in front of me. It was different. And it was mind-blowing. My brains splattered.

I’ve never seen someone rock out on an acoustic guitar as hard as she does, and I don’t think I ever will anyone else. I salute whoever had the courage to bring her in to this sad sad country, because it was an experience of a lifetime.

I can’t say that I’ll die happy now, but I am happy.

Now to go for a Tori Amos concert.

I am not a neat person. My table is untidy most of the time, I scribble like there’s no tomorrow, and I’m a messy eater.

Oddly enough, I seem to take pleasure in organizing files on the computer. I can spend hours at a time organizing my iTunes, or renaming files that were named without capitals or with underscores as spaces. Hours looking for files that may be out of place, finding homes for those stranded naked on the desktop. I am a benevolent, impartial e-social worker. So once in a while my desktop can go from being splattered with files of all sorts of shapes, colours and sizes (in bytes of course, since the icons on the desktop are pretty much the same size (as if you didn’t know that (you do… right?))), to being virtually empty. Virtual, with virtue.

It’s like therapy that comes with a headache.

No I’m not colourblind
I know the world is black and white

…Suddenly I’m one of those people who post lyrics as the post itself. How nice. But that’s just how the world goes round.

No matter how much you try and wipe, scrub, clean it out, it will always come back – the worst nightmare of the most mysophobic people. Especially on a dark coloured surface.

Dust.

I wonder how much of it’s trapped under the keys of my keyboard, among all the food particles. I wonder how much of it’s in my head.

Funny how the multitude of colours ultimately turns it grey.

Funny how both grey and gray have the same meaning – guess some people couldn’t mke up their minds on which looked better.

Dust bunnies hop. And they can hear you. Be careful, they are watching you. Do they growl? You betcha.