He who drives a Dustbin Car

During a particularly boring maths lesson about how to differentiate x to the power of minus 21 over y, Billy scribbled this at the corner of a page of his textbook, "if I knew music, I would write a song about he who drives the dustbin car".

He hated maths and barely passed his exams at the end of the year and went to Junior College to study maths and then drop maths. Billy's mother gave away his textbooks to her neighbour, who wanted to give it to a friend, whose son was going to sit for the "O" levels three years later, and by the time he reached Sec three, they changed the syllabus and textbooks altogether. So, Billy's textbook was thrown here and there and lost and forgotten until thirty years later a wise guy son of a karung guni started a museum of old school textbooks featuring authentic scribblings and included Billy's maths textbook.

As part of some publicity event, they held a song-writing contest. The theme was on Billy's maths textbook's "if I knew music, I would write a song about he who drives the dustbin car".

*

Mark Lee was one of the people who submitted an entry. He felt that he drove a dustbin car because he heard about the contest on the day his car broke down. And that since his name was Mark Lee, which he deemed sufficiently chimed with Billy, it might be fate that he should enter the song-writing contest and that it might lead him to something that would lead to something else. He did not know any musical instruments except for his discman, which has a faulty battery that does not take charge any more, and nobody made replacement parts for it so he listens to it when it's directly connected to power. His song went like this:

I drive a dustbin car
And it ran out of batt.
I was on my way to work
And the batt was flat.

Now my dustbin car
Is in the office car park.
I pushed it there myself.
I didn't call the tow truck.

I hope that my dustbin car
Is unlike my disc-man,
For which nobody sells
The battery already man.

Mark didn't have a proper tune in mind when he submitted his entry, but he figured by the time someone called to ask for it he'd have gotten something ready, if it were all meant to be.

*

Beatrice was one of the people who submitted an entry. The little girl had spent all day looking for her pet rabbit, Jack, full named Jack-the-rabbit-and-part-time-invisible-man because he went missing so often that Beatrice thought that Jack was a wererabbit (like a werewolf, but a rabbit) who was invisible since nobody saw him before. The little girl was tired of resorting to look even the unlikeliest places, like underneath rocks, so she sulked on the sofa and saw the newspaper ad about the song-writing contest and thought that Jack drove the dustbin car and ran away. And since her name was Beatrice which started with B as like in Billy, she thought it was meant to be, and she should write a song for Jack so that he'd hear it and come back. Her song went like this:

Hi, my name is Beatrice,
And my rabbit is named Jack.
He will change into an invisible
Wererabbit behind my back.

Then nobody can see him
Because he becomes the invisible man.
But when he has enough fun,
Then I will find him, I will can.

But I think this time maybe
Jack has ran away too far.
He became the invisible man
Then he stole the dustbin car.

Jack! Jack! If you hear this,
As you drive the dustbin car,
You better come back before I throw away
Your carrots and your favourite honey star.

When somebody called to ask about the tune and if she were prepared to play it live, she replied, "Nowadays, jack is gone, I got nobody to play with. Sometimes I play with jack's toys but mommy will scold and tell me to stop playing with jack's shit."

*

Billy was around 50 years old by the time he was contacted about his textbook and the song-writing contest. It turned out that he did write a song about the dustbin car when he was older and formed a group with some of his friends - an acapella group. They never performed anywhere but carolled a bit at some friends' gathering. Billy agreed to judge the contest provided that he and his group were given the chance to sing his own rendition of the man who drives the dustbin car. His song went like this:

Everybody knows the man who drives the dustbin car
You can always smell him coming from afar
He was known to people as Mr Bang-ga-lar
Nobody care about him like how nobody care about William Farquhar.

The man who drives the dustbin car will sometimes feel so sad,
Not just because his job sucks or that he always smell so bad,
But because he touched a broken glass or a soiled sanitary pad,
Or an open-faced baby diaper in which the baby shat.

So please lar, when you throw something down the rubbish chute,
Pretend you are Santa Claus and wrap your present like you should.
When you see Mr Bang-ga-lar driving in your neighbourhood,
Don't just kaopei that it's smelly if in your heart you really salute.

We must take it easy on the man who drives the dustbin car
Maybe next time he may not be Mr Bang-ga-lar,
Or Mr any foreign worker who had travelled from afar,
If he could have helped it, he'll tell you to do it for him lar.

Just like if we could play music then we won't sing acapellar,
(someone else sings) I would play the keyboard, (Billy sings) I would play guitar.
Maybe we would even join project superstar,
and we would sing a proper song for he who drives the dustbin car.

Billy and his group sang mostly out of tune to a crowd who did not empathised with the song, but it was okay because they had grown up by then and knew better not to be righteous. The most important thing was that they finally properly performed and had much fun even if they didn't know music.

Clumsy, the cat

There was once a siamese cat who had four left feet. They said it was a result of severe in-breeding by the cat breeder, who gave the cat away in disdain to a little girl from the other side of the town. The little girl did not know the cat for its pedigree descent, and decided to call her new pet, "Clumsy" because the kitten looked damn clumsy.

The little girl's brother was a dog-kind of person, and being a brother, irritated and scared his sister for sport. The brother would call Clumsy, "Drunk", and often threatened to use his toy drill to drill little holes through the little kitten's skull and let the blood out to make into blood pudding for the girl to eat. The little girl cried for a few days, until she realised that her brother was just joking, and then she coaxed the kitten to agree with her. The brother soon grew bored of his routine. Everybody got along with the cat and grew up.

Clumsy developed a coat of blue fur that matched his bright blue eyes, but he did not grow much bigger, perhaps due to some hormonal defect that stunted his growth. He looked set to live on for a long time. He was also no longer clumsy, and was smarter and easily trained and could understand instructions pretty well.

In fact, Clumsy was so trainable, that when the girl married, Clumsy was tasked to carry the rings on a ribbon around his neck down the ceremonial aisle. Clumsy easily stole the show with how the sparking rings contrasted against his pretty blue fur. A photograph of him was taken and submitted to a wedding magazine, in which Clumsy was eventually featured in an article on pets and enjoyed a two page photo spread to himself.

The pictures was even more sensational when cat breeders, who in their spare time also liked to get married and read the wedding magazine, saw the picture and went berserk about the blue cat. Some people even insisted that the cat was dyed blue, and it created a big woohah. The local news channel had no other local news to report on so went to interview Clumsy and his owner. It was stupid to watch, but it generated even more interest in the four left-footed bright blue cat. Commercials and products endorsements came Clumsy's way. There were even talks about flying her over to feature her in an episode of "Sabrina the teenage witch" which they were re-filming into another television series again, as one of Salem's visiting friends, but that did not come through.

*

Clumsy went on to live for another 50 years. He past away before his owner did, but the details of his death were intimate to the family, and we shall do them a favour by leaving it out of our imaginations. Before he died, he also did a lot of other things. We can imagine about those things instead.

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There was once a girl who loved Chinese dancing and took part in the Chinese dance society in her school as an extra-activity. She liked to dance in her second hand dancing shoes. She liked to dance with feathery fans and red silken napkins. Most of all, she liked to dance with her pink silken ribbon that was tied to a stick that she would wave around and make pretty patterns like how they do it on tv when the Olympic gymnastics was on.

One day during the Olympic season, the gym teacher was feeling inspired and wanted to recruit more people onto the gymnastics team. The teacher saw the girl practising for her ribbon dance, and recognised the potential in her. Behind her back, the teacher went to arrange with the teacher in charge of dancing to have the girl put under the gym programme instead. Recognising that the nation placed a stronger emphasis and higher recognition on schools' achievements in sports than in the arts, the teachers quickly agreed to have the girl transferred without asking for her volition.

The girl did not like gym as much as she liked dancing. She only liked the little bit with the ribbon twirling, but she hated the other parts of rolling around and swinging herself about the uneven bars. They made her nervous. She hated the balance beam the most because she felt like she would fall down. She hated how they were practised without music, and that she would always practise alone. In Chinese dancing, there were always other girls on stage. But she had no say in the matter.

When she was given another ribbon for the gymnastic routine, she resigned to her new past time, and she twirled up the one she used for the dancing and wrapped it up with the napkin and put them away with her dancing shoes and feathery fan. She put them into a nice box that she kept underneath her bed. She would sleep and dream and unconsciously, her love for dancing and her resentment for gymnastics grew. These emotions seeped through the pillow and bed and dripped onto her dancing things and brought them to life.

After some discussion, the dancing accessories decided that the ribbon should take up the responsibility to set things right, since it had always been the girl's favourite. In the middle of the night, the ribbon danced its way into the bag of girl, and the next day, went back to school with the girl. When nobody was looking, it hid itself in a corner of the school gym.

When everybody went home that day, and the gym teacher was locking up the gym, the dancing ribbon came alive. In a dash, it slashed at the teacher's face until the fake eyelashes fell off with some real eyelashes. The dancing ribbon then smashed the teacher's eyelashes into a fine ash. It did not want to smash other parts of the face or body into bits because it was a dancing ribbon after all, and it was important to be rhythmic and beautiful and not cruel. The ribbon then flew past the teacher, out of the doorway, and into the night sky and made its way home, using all the might of its magic powers to fly.

Traumatised, the gym teacher quit her job, and after she served out her one-month's notice, the gym team was disbanded. The girl went back to the Chinese dance society and was happy to dance with her dancing things on a fairly regular basis.

Light bulb

Contrary to what the Sony ad would have us believe,
there's no music playing in the round-lamp-shades-bubble-glass-helmets.
The panasonic light bulb liked music and singing and was optimistic at first,
and betrayed his friends to climb up the lamp
and was stuck there to be lonesome every night.


It would be bored to death if not for being made miserable by the insensitive leaflets of the hedge who would play amongst themselves and cruelly mocked the light bulb for having been stupid to believe in advertisements.

It had dreamt of entering American Idol if not for this.

It wanted to sing to the hedge, but alas! they could not hear it. So it thought nobody could hear it and sang to nobody. But the moth and ants with wings could hear it, so sometimes they'll be so drawn to its singing that they smashed themselves onto the lamp-casing and die. Some lived to fly into the lamp shade, and they would be driven berserk by the intoxicating rendition of whitney housten's "I will always love you", and they will flutter around like crazy until they died of severe dehydration. The light bulb didn't understand them, and just thought that they were just annoying to make a mess.

Kusudama Fairy

She was on her way to work on her birthday when an old man, who reminded her of a character she came across in a book, asked her for directions, which she gave. At work, she ate potato chips in celebration of her birthday. She was allergic to potato chips, and would develop sore throat overnight whenever she ate them, so she did not eat them often. The potato chips were unimportant, as was the old man, as was the book she read. They were just the things about her birthday that she thought were out of the ordinary. After work, she met up with her friends to celebrate, but she met her friends often and often ate what they ordered that night.

She summarised the past year in her head on the way home and fell asleep in the taxi cab. In her sleep, she dreamt of being a fairy from somewhere in Japan and who was in love with a samurai, who wore a mask, and she could not see how he looked like. She was wearing an elaborate kimono, which she felt was surprising light. She checked the sleeves and found that she was carrying a kusudama. This kusudama, which is something like a ball of origami flowers, was similar to the ones that she often made while she was awake. This recognition made her aware of her lucid dreaming, which excited her so much that she woke up before she remembered if the love was requited and what the kusudama was for.

She went back to her apartment feeling a little groggy from the drinks she had and the dream she half dreamt. She should have tried to fly. She had read somewhere that one can fly in lucid dreams. Unthinkingly, she went into her room and reached for a plum blossom kusudama that she completed last night and meant it for a gift to a friend. It was blue and green and yellow. The one in the dream was white in colour.

Then lightning struck, and it startled her, and she accidentally dropped the kusudama, and it exploded silently into one thousand little flowers. She did not notice the loud thunder that followed and didn't know what to do, or if she was dreaming, or if she was awake. She was suddenly unsure if she was just holding the kusudama at all, or she came home with a handful of little flowers and thrown it on the ground.

She squatted down and felt the flowers and verified that they were real. She felt a little ditsy and went to get the broom. If anyone was to wake up to see this, she'd say she came home and dropped the flowers which were a birthday gift. She wondered if she should try to throw another kusudama on the ground to see if it happens again. If so, she should do it first and sweep the floor after. But it would also be good to clean up the floor first, go take a shower to sober up, then, try to smash another kusudama to properly observe what happens.

As she swept, she felt that the flowers were hardly moving. Then she noticed that the broom was growing shorter. The flowers were cutting away the broom. They were not glass, but they could cut at the brooms. They did not cut her, but she needed to make new plans. So she sat down on the bed to think.

Then, she remembered what the kusudamas in the dream was for, it was for self protection, and it was a lucky charm that she made for the samarai - a gift of origami love. He was to use them by throwing them at his enemies to elegantly cut them into pieces. She could not remember if the love was requited. But the flowers were to remind him of her in the battle field, and that he must survive to return to her.

She wondered if the kusudamas not meant as gifts would work. And if it was the first time she dropped a kusudama or why this had never happened if she dropped it the last time. She wondered if it happened only because it was her birthday, and if not, she should warn her friends who had previously received such a gift from her. No, the flowers would not hurt them. The kusudamas were meant for them, and they would be protected. Would it hurt their loved ones?

She wondered about how to clean up the flowers on the ground besides having to pick them up by hand. She wondered if she should try dropping another kusudama or just vow never to make anymore and forget that this entire episode ever happened. She could just go to sleep and see what happens when she wakes up tomorrow. Or when she thinks she wakes up tomorrow. She remembers the potato chips because she felt her throat slowly growing sore. If she had not known it, she could not have thought that she was ever a kusudama fairy before.

(For Lay Suan and her happy birthday. )
(sneak.)

Freddy and Francesca

Once upon a time, there was a world of frogs and praying mantises, and they were at odds with each other.

Although they were small and did not wear clothes, they were not quite like the frogs and praying mantises that we know, because they sometimes walked upright and had sharp teeth and retractable claws. Their teeth were as sharp as the teeth of the venus fly trap, and were as tough as our nails. When they had nothing to do, they'll pick fights with each other.

Frogs will go and eat the young praying mantises, and the praying mantises will go and eat young frogs. Both of them usually eat other things, but they had nothing to do, so they go and eat each other to pick fights.

They did not fight with guns and nuclear bombs for they were too busy fighting with each other to invent new ways to fight. There were no police, no law, nobody to decide who was right and who was wrong, so that's how they lived everyday.

Freddy was a praying mantis in this world. He had killed off two females whom he mated with because they tried to eat him after have sex. He wanted to be a lover, not a hater, but what else was there to do? It was a matter of life and death. So, he'd pick on the frogs. Before he killed the younglings of frogs he caught, he'll rape them. The anatomy of how it worked is interesting, but beyond me to describe.

He did not want to kill the froglings at first, but he thought that if the frogling spilled about the incident, shit would hit the fan and coat it like chocolate coating a strawberry in a chocolate fondue. He thought about starting a "love, not war" campaign, but he was not charismatic or passionate about the idea enough.

One day, he caught this frog, whose name was Francesca, who was a bright and wanton, for a little girl. So, before Freddy did what he was about to do, she figured out what was going to happen. Instead of being raped and not enjoying herself, she thought that she'd act like a willing party. She proposed the idea, and asked "what is your name, mantis?"

Freddy is not as bright. He couldn't think of the consequences before he replied, "My name is Freddy, and you are a very beautiful frog."

"Freddy is a very froggish name. Did you know that?"

"No."

"In fact, I had two lovers and a brother who have the same name as you. Why do you love frogs?"

"I don't love frogs."

"Then why are you threatening to do this? Sex is an act of lOvE~." She tried to act sultry to seduce him.

"Is that what you think? For praying mantises, sex is generally regarded as an act of violence."

"That is so sad..." Francesca was in the age to like to say generic emphatic things. She took a while to wonder about how sex could be violent. "Are you going to kill me after this?"

"Yes. And then I will eat you."

"I wonder if there are any frogs named Freddy who are doing the same thing to your sister."

"What is your name?"

"Francesca."

"I have no sisters named Francesca." With that, Freddy concluded the conversation and completed the intercourse, and ate her up.

After Francesca, he did not hunt frogs ever again. He was afraid that he would be unable to help himself from asking for the next frog's name, and that Francesca could be a common name for frogs, and that he would find another Francesca who would make him realise that he loved the Francesca he ate, and that he was really a hater, not a lover. Then he would hate himself for being a farce and be utterly miserable.

He decided that if he needed to ever kill himself, he'd go mate with a beautiful but vicious praying mantis and offer his everything to her. It would be his final act of prostration to savage his self-image and the ultimate thing he could do to redeem himself.

At the Tarsier Farm

Fido and the tarsiers

Fido was an engineer by day and a tarsier farmer by night. Tarsiers were the world's smallest natural primate that used to be found in remote southeast asia. They were thought to be naturally endangered for as long as anyone could remember because of their elusive, minute, shy, and nocturnal behaviour. They have eyes that are almost half the length of their faces and that were almost half the length of their height.

Some time ago, some person caught enough of them to begin illegally farming them. Apparently, the meat of the tarsiers began to be touted as tasty as it was rare and expensive. It was lucrative enough for more illegal farms to be set up. Then it was lucrative enough to bribe government officials and all that jazz ensued and tarsier farming grew into an industry.

Fido farmed tarsiers for a different reason. He conducted experiments on the tarsiers and wanted to reverse engineer their remarkable eyes in pursuit of unlocking secrets to more efficient lunar powered energy and some other scientific things.

Actually, he didn't believe that he'd make any breakthrough, and wasn't really interested in the science of tarsiers. Fido had wanted to adopt research as an excuse to cut up the animals because he resented his first-ex-girlfriend even though he openly denied it.

When he was young, he used to like to eat tarsier meat, it was one of his favourite things to eat. When he went out with the first-ex-girlfriend, she convinced him that they were too cute and that he shouldn't eat them. So, he adopted a tarsier free-diet in profession of his love for her.

After dating for too long, she left him and the city of USED. She failed to qualify as an engineer and didn't want to live the second-class lifestyle of a Dependent in USED. Fidelius, which was Fido's proper name before he was more known as Fido, wanted to leave with the girl but she was reluctant, and she told him that he should remain to fulfil his destiny as an engineer which was what she loved him for.

Some months after leaving him, she wrote on her blog to confess that actually she had left him because sometime ago, about 3 years ago, she had met a tarsier farmer who convinced her to try to taste tarsier meat when he overheard her denouncing the consumption to her friends in a restaurant. She had never tasted it before and he did the old “don't knock it till you've tried it” routine, that never went out of style, and she tried it in spite and liked it enough to have tarsier a few more times. She would have eaten it more frequently if she didn't feel so guilty, but she felt like she betrayed Fidelius and the compunction soured the relationship. They already had the whole "we love tarsiers" thing so hyped up that they were supposed to name a kid or two after the animal.

When she left she broke up with him, because she didn't like him enough to want him to overlook the entire episode. She tried to defend herself or to lubricate the situation by reminding Fidelius that things could have been worse, in that she could have slept with the tarsier farmer and was in fact running off to marry him, but she wasn't.