Bye Bye

Dear Valued Readers,

Recently certain events have prompted me to re-evaluate the role of the my blog “Just Stuff.” These events I do not claim to comprehend completely, partly because things have moved so fast and the only reason Darkness ever seems to keep telling me is, “it has to be this way, there is no other way.” By the looks of it, the rest appear to be quiet adamant as well. There are times, when you just know it’s useless to try to persuade them. You just know they will hold the line right down to the very last man. I don’t know the real reason why; they don’t seem to want to share. It may have something to do with the NLB, AIMS or maybe something they have not told me about (we would have to wait for the sleeper ships to come back and narrate the full account of the story – it is stored in folder 1889/08 and they have even archived it with their channel partners – Google – we will have to wait till then – I really don’t know and I don’t wish to embellish the situation by speculating further. One thing surprises me, they don’t seem too bothered and there is even an air of expectancy about it all, just like before a thunderstorm.

It’s as if, they are all standing in one line preparing to greet the beginning and the end of it all.

This evening I met up with Darkness and the boys for a spot of cycling in East Coast Park – it was an opportunity for me to speak to him face to face. During the ride, there was one moment when I asked him why? To which he remained silent and looked out towards the eternity of the sea. His demeanor conveyed the belief, he had seen it all before and it was really not such a big deal. Or maybe, he was simply putting on a brave front – it’s hard to say with Baby Darkness. 

I believe he was trying to comfort me. It became clearer when he asked the rest to go ahead leaving both of us alone.

We spoke for hours under the shade of a tree. Forgive me, if I say, I don’t feel comfortable to reveal everything – I wish to keep some of it to myself.

As the evening unfolded, the boy shared with me many things – I told him that I have always been fascinated by his stories since I first read them when I was only 22. I even told him, that has the reason why I read Law and subsequently stayed on to complete my LLM in King’s College, just in case, I had to defend the Singaporean Gangster one day. He smiled wryly as he listened on and when it grew dark. I asked him whether he had any regrets? He told me; if he could do it all over again, he would do it very differently. When I asked why; he intoned, he might have been wrong all this while.

Living he said in the age of the $2.2 million man imposes certain realities on our understanding of what it means to be a human being – one of them is that we have to earn as much money as possible and very little else matters. If you only have $2.20 in your pocket in the world of the $2.2 million man, “it’s no good, it just doesn’t come around Dotty,” not even if you have all the bullet points and Gandhi and Mother Teresa standing beside you. That’s what it really means to live in the age of the $2.2 million man – life has to be brutal, ideas count for little and the sum of a man’s thoughts is worthless – the only thing that can possibly command any authority has to be the power of money. If one had $2.2 billion in the world of the $2.2 million man, there is a chance something good can happen. That he said was something his recent trip to China imposed on his understanding. He even said, it made a “good” economic case to throw out everything he has ever believed in and to start all over again.

This he said was how the game would have to be played from this moment onwards. The rest was just talk and sweet fantasy amounting to very little. (That could be why I saw Astro Boy punching numbers into a small calculator – I think, he too wants to be rich and influential).

Darkness went on to say this is where he and the rest will focus on from now onwards – the enterprise of making money. Listening to him, I wondered to myself, how his recent visit to China must have changed him – there, he said, he saw the power of money to move mountains, to change society on a scale and speed that could never be imagined before – he mentioned how whole stretches of “Hutongs” had given way to fly-overs and over head bridges – that he said, struck him like a “diamond bullet” – “here for the very first time in my life, I saw clearly there was no God, no reason, no logic even, only the omnipresent levelling power of money and how it was linked to power. Dotty, it struck me with a force of a thousand freight trains! Imagine what we could do with that sort of influence? We could build schools, hospitals and even bring about real and meaningful change for the betterment of the people. The rest was simply rhetoric amounting to nought.” He went on to say, there were thousands of innovators in the brotherhood network, especially their foreign legion, he described it as a “land within lands,” where most of them now were just soldering lousy components and writing dumb programs in rooms where clothes go to die or in garages and sheds, but if this ramble could be mobilized into a disciplined supra- entity, they could take the world by storm and he could lead them as he knew each cell personally, very much in the way he once led them to conquer the virtual realms, only this time even governments would shake and tremble, because it would be real this time – so real that it would not even require one molecule of imagination as the cost would be so apparent that it’s impossible to deny. That he said had to be “The New Order.”

Through it all, the boy kept staring out into the sea and repeating the words, “It’s no good Dotty, it just doesn’t come around. It’s no good…..I have finally realized I am going around in circles, big and small circles, that’s all.”

I believe, he may have finally reached the finality of the realization blogging after all is just talk and amounts to very little – it doesn’t have the capacity to ‘change’ anything – only money can do that.

After the conversation, he took me home. I invited him in to which he said he would wait for me.

You see I have always loved those stories and the man who wrote them ever sinced, I could ever remember.

You could say that is all I have ever had, I am an ordinary girl, not too tall, not too beautiful, abit plum but always dreaming and I am not abashed to admit it.

I had bought him something recently in Malaysia for the New Year, but when I went out to the gate. He was gone.

I of all people should have known better, the boy simply can’t bear farewells.  

I knew it would end this way. I don’t feel sad. I am happy that I had this one moment in time to share, experience and live.

Standing by the gate. I thought of the last page of Swann’s way; the wind that “wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets.” The great passage of time that helped Marcel “to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses.” And his conclusion, like mine; “The reality that I had known no longer existed.”

Darkness, I finally realized is just an ordinary man. Cut him and he bleeds like any other man, slight him and he will take to anger…a very ordinary man.

This I believe was what he was always trying to tell to me.

This may not be such a bad thing; ordinariness; Darkness once wrote, “nothing last forever and all that life really teaches the wise is how to gracefully lay down the things, we once picked up…..so there is never any reason to be sad.” 

This was a lesson I’d gathered from my brief association with Darkness & The Brotherhood, so I shan’t feel sad.

Have a happy life Darkness, Harphoon, Astro Boy, Scholar Boy, Chronicler and the rest.

Darkness, I hope you find what you are looking for in life. You must believe me when I tell you, you of all people have the right to be happy.

See you again in my next life.

Love Always, Dotty Forever More.

Pls note that everything in this blog and every article that bears the Brotherhood Press tag has been copyrighted circa 2007 / December

In simple English, I will sue the shit out of you, if you archive it without my EXPRESS permission. Please DO NOT ASK either, unless you want to be publically embarrassed.

Trust me in Singapore, there are only less than 5 experts in this field. I happen to be one of them, not your BS variety that you pass off as “experts.”

I just made a big hole in your archive . I am happy, that was the very least, I could do for those boys.

Dotty