langkau fiction

In reference to the previous entry about the visit to Sadir and the mission to retrieve my sunglass: it failed…miserably. I am just a sucker to a ‘matter-of-fact’ explanation. Without asking him, the guy told me “Hey, I’ve decided not to return your sunglass to you. It’s in the room but I leave it there as a memorabilia”. And I just said, “Oh..okeh” – and continued sipping my langkau while thinking about that simple fact. I am still in awe of his selamba-ness in informing me of his decision.

My boss summoned me this morning to have “discussion”. When I arrived at her office, the other two bosses were there. I have many bosses. That means it’s something serious and someone has to pay, thus the need for reinforcement. The issue? People have complained about my work and was told that I should reduce my doses of venom. I do not think ‘work’ equates to ‘venom’. So, which is the problem? It’s either my attitude or work, not both. People either say James or Bond, seldom both. In my case, when I do work my personal attitude is left behind. When my personal attitude is in play, my work is left behind. I do not talk about my work. Weekend langkau-ing is something else lah because I don’t get paid for that. In this case, work equates to politicking. So, which one is it, I asked? “It’s not that. Don’t take it badly…”, they said. I’m not taking it badly at all. I just want to know what is the problem? They said, “Ok, it’s about your work. People say about blah blah blah (amounting to the accumulation of nitty-gritty cowshit politicking that needs no elaboration)”. I said, well, if that is the case then so be it. But really, tell me which part of ‘real work’ have I not done and then summon me again for discussion. At this moment, I don’t realize that politicking is part of my job description. And so I left.

How small is our world that we have to bicker about this? Gosh. I badly need a beer now.

This week’s been so strenuous especially at work. It doesn’t help if the internet server at my workplace is consistently disconnected. I think it’s fucked. This morning, I received an email from our internet network department saying that they’re going to put the internet server out of action today at 6pm for the whole weekend. They might as well ‘put it to sleep’. It’s quite annoying to have the “Your network cable is unplugged” and “Your network cable is now connected” alert popping up alternately. For goodness sake, can you make up your mind?! Is it connected or disconnected?? (Of course, I didn’t tell the machine that…) Another sad thing is that my own laptop decided to just die last week and the computer technician told me: “I’ve got bad news. I went through your laptop and (said some technical gibberish that I couldn’t understand)”. So, I asked him: “Is it dead?” He said: “Yes, if you put it that way”. So, it’s dead.

Anyways, forget about my gloomy doom-doom story. Last weekend was good. Saturday was okay (had too much Bintang beers in Serikin). Sunday was good. I went to Sadir. I met David and Alaskan David at Havana a few days before the Sunday trip and casually invited them to come with me to Sadir for a langkau session. When I came up with the idea, I did not expect an immediate answer. David, with his annoying calm response, said: “Why not lah, bradder?” Although sounding very excited about the trip, I thought he would pull out of this excursion at the last minute, seeing that he’s a traditional Sunday church-goer (his spiritual belief is probably waning).

I picked up the two Davids and we made our way to Sadir just before noon. It was raining heavily and the day looked really depressed. So, on our way I decided to stop at a coffee shop and have some Tiger soups to warm up and psychologically warm up the day. We drank six cans of soup and true enough, the day was brighter. The next stop was at a small sundry shop at Kpg. Padawan where this old man is renown for his langkau. I’ve drunk with him once before and he’s got interesting stories to tell. But we didn’t have much time, so I just got us the langkau and left for Sadir.

My main purpose to Sadir apart from indulging in their langkau is to retrieve my sunglass that I left behind several months ago. We had too much to drink and I ended up sleeping in the village. Then, when I hurriedly left in the morning, I forgot to take my sunglass with me.

When we arrived at the longhouse in Sadir, most of the villagers had just finished their work in the garden. As I looked further, I saw two immobile bodies face-down on the longhouse verandah. I thought they must have had their rounds of langkau last night. When they saw Alaskan David walking behind me, they asked me: “You brought Jesus with you?” I said, no he’s not Jesus. I introduced Alaskan David and David to the guys who were sitting on the verandah, and I could hear some of the kids whispering: “That’s Jesus?”

I can’t see their resemblance…

We sat down at the verandah and the host, Majiko, asked me: “So, what have you got in your bag?” I pulled out two bottles of langkau and the conversation began. As usual, they brought out baskets of fruits for us. If I could trade five bottles of langkau with one of their fruit orchards, they would have been great! Just kidding! It’s the hospitality that you find in such villages that is rare today. Somehow, some of us have forgotten all about it.
Anyways, as we were sitting, talking, singing and making fun of each other, the guy sitting next to me, Medicine, said: “I think he is not Jesus”, pointing at Alaskan David playing the guitar to the tune of Dio’s “Holy Diver”. Medicine told me that his name should be “mankind”. I didn’t know why he chose “mankind” and at that moment, I thought he was being philosophical. Apparently, he was referring to the wrestler Mankind a.k.a Mick Foley.

Now, this is more like it…

So, Mankind was quite popular among the guys at Sadir. At first, the kids were terrified with him but I mean, who wouldn’t? He was huge, had dark beard, messy hair and with tattoos all over. And he was chasing the children on the verandah. But it took only a few moment before they got used to him and played around with Mankind. Mankind loved the durians as well and I’ve never seen anyone eaten durian the way he did. He grabbed 3-4 seeds and ate its flesh as if it was meat. “This is really good! I can’t understand why people don’t like this”, he boomed. Whatever you say, Mankind. And he broke “Don’t-Drink-While-Eating-Durian” myth. Who invented that myth in the first place? Seeing that nothing happened to Mankind while doing this durian plus langkau thing, David followed suit.

Yes, I think we all had fun. Maybe too much fun. David planned to be back in Kuching by 5pm. We left Sadir at 5pm! On the way back, we stopped at a small hill just to take in the view surrounding us. I didn’t realize that Mankind was really drunk that he couldn’t climb that hill. David had to assist Mankind and the way I looked at things, it makes the small hill look like Mt McKinley (or Denali) in Alaska!

Mt McKinley

…and the hill at Sadir

Now, that was quite a sight. Once at the top, Mankind immediately went to the ground and slept, while David and I were enjoying our warm Stella Artois. Being knocked by langkau is a normal thing especially when one is not used to it. I like langkau for the fact that I can drink it till I puke and then, continue drinking it till I go to sleep. If you puke on beers or other form of alcohol, you’d swear to yourself that you’d never want to touch that thing again. With langkau, it’s different. If you can’t handle the taste, mix it with beer. Beer sobers the feeling of drunkeness from langkau. Don’t believe me? Try it out.

These are the normal effects of langkau if taken too much. Below is the fall of Mankind.

Better go now before the internet dies on me!

A couple of days ago, I found a bar in town where I can do my happy hours. It’s called Havana. I’ve only been there once before and didn’t think much of it then. Mind you, it does not mean that I’ll dump my regular sepuluh-tiga outlets. Havana will just be an addition and not change. Anyways, I was there to meet up with a friend, David, who I’ve not seen for a long while. We meet occasionally for happy hours, like once in three months, and he’d usually start the conversation with weird one-line questions like “So, bradder, what’s the story with the severely disabled children in Prozor [a village somewhere in Bosnia] these days lah wey?” Or sometimes, his one-liner would be to quote one extremely subtle verse from the Bible. Sometimes, I don’t think those verses even exist!

So, when I arrived in Havana immediately after work, David was already chatting with this huge, hairy tattoed tourist from Alaska seated at the end of the bar. Incidentally, this Alaskan grizzly was also named David and not suprisingly, David (my friend) was always ready discussing the ‘world problems’ with Alaskan David. And accompanying David was a vaguely familiar face, whom David conveniently pointed as “an extra baggage lah, bradder”. Since David was engaged in his ‘world problems’ discussion, I introduced myself to his “extra baggage” whose real name is Brandon. Brandon also reminded me that I used to live in BDC, playing football every evening at the padang in the housing area. Then, I remembered who he was and I blurted that he was a kid then! “Yes, and now I’m a car dealer”, he said. I don’t usually consider myself old. But when you are used to seeing someone like Brandon, who spent their kidhood afternoons playing in the residential drains and now introduce himself as a car dealer, you’d really have to seriously think about old age time…

Oh and yes, speaking of ‘time lag’ and being a tech-illiterate, I was observing Brandon messing around with a machine sophisticated-looking device in his hands. I asked him if it was a phone. He said: “Noo, it’s a dopod”. hhm…what does it do, I asked. “Oh, now, I’m using it to online chat on Yahoo! messenger”, he said. It’s got internet, I thought. Then, he asked if my something-something has something about wireless (couldn’t understand what he was saying to me). Then, I showed him my phone. He was confused. I told him my phone can also access the internet but it’s a bit expensive. He said: “No, I was referring to your laptop in your bag. Does it have wireless because Havana has this (something about wi-fi) and we can use it for free”. So, I took out the laptop out of my bag and gave it to Brandon. He pressed a few buttons and voila! he was ‘chatting’ away. I didn’t know about….nevermind.

David is a friend from childhood and we grew up in the wop-wops of the state’s Fifth Division. In other words, he was my ‘first friend’ because I can’t remember hanging out with anyone else at my age then. Now, David has always been a character. When we were kids, he was as if ordained by god to be the bully and I was involuntarily annointed to be the bullied. Seriously, he taught me how to sneak into the flying-doctor’s helicopter and taught me the meaning of ’stealing’. Of course, none of us could fly the bloody thing. Then, there was also a time when he wanted to steal a bulldozer behind our house and of course, I had to be his accomplice. We were caught but I don’t know what did his parents do to him. My parents gave me a good long lecture (I forgot the contain of their speech) and a hitting. Oh yes, there was also the incident when my father banned me from hanging out with David. “Banned” is also another word that I learned then. I came home one day with a long bloody scar on my face. My parents were furious and even without me telling them who did it, they knew it was none other than David. You see, David had these finger nails that were Wolverine-like claws and decided to try it out on who-else lah. When we talked about this childhood incident a few years ago, he told me that he did the Wolverine thing because he was jealous I had more toys. hhm…no wonder war is so prevalent these days…well, our family left for Kuching when I was at the age of six. That was the last time I saw David until we reunited in Miri in the mid-80s. He still had his god-ordained powers then but fortunately for my face, I didn’t get to see much of his Wolverine claws as we grew up.

Once Brandon was engrossed on his online chatting on my laptop, I turned my attention to the two Davids. They were in the midst of discussing American politics when the Alaskan said: “Nowadays, when Bush intimidates other countries he’d just say ‘You better behave or we’ll bring democracy to your country!’” I thought that was funny…yeah, okay. Or his story on Gandhi’s comment on democracy Western civilization [correction on the earlier misquote]. It was a good laugh. Anyways, Havana is nice. They have urinals (men’s toilet only) named Dodo. Reminds me of that extinct bird.

I must be the dumbest idiot of my generation. For the past month or so, four of my friends asked me this question: “Are you on MSN?” Once upon a time, I went to school in a far, far away land somewhere down south. I met many people whom I later made friends with. I didn’t make friends with all of them, of course. Just those who got along well with me and who consistently said something nice about me. Anyways, I still keep in touch with them even though we’ve never seen each other since we separated a long, long time ago.

Now, the story continues like this. After this geographical separation, we communicated purely through letters. Yes! That’s L E T T E R S — or as the new generation say these days: “snail mail”. The process goes like this: I write, I put in the envelope, I post and with luck, it arrives 4-12 days later, depending very much on which country the recipient resides.

Two years later, the email came into the picture (well, everyone’s already been using it…it just caught up with me a bit later than anyone else). This is probably the most useful invention after the fridge, washing machine and toilet.

Then, there was this crazy thing called the handphone. I got my first handphone in November 2002 and my friends almost threw a party for me! It’s about goddamn time, they said. I also learned the art of SMS 2-3 months later!

So, I keep in touch with my four friends over emails and SMS because they live in different parts of the world now. Recently, they decided to abandon the email because they think it’s ‘too slow’. SMS is the viable option but only until the past one month. It’s too expensive, they said. What the fuck? It’s not like we communicate every single day of our lives. Gosh! It’s like, when I’m drunk, I’d write something like: “How’s it going fuckwit?” and he’d reply (in his language that translates into): “Laaan lah…got nothing better to do ah?” Then, I’d pester the other friend the same way and she’d write: “Gt smtg 2 lt u ft wot fkl tq?” (that’s how she writes and half the time, I can’t understand a thing!)

Then, the bomb dropped. They know I’m bad with all these tech thing. They asked: “Are you on MSN?” I said, no. They asked (not simultaneously lah), “Oh, ok..er…do you know what’s MSN?” I stayed silent for a while before I text back: “No” They laughed (not simultaneously). Naturally, they pestered me to get one immediately. Just last week when I was drinking, my friend asked me the same MSN question, and I told her that I’ll “apply” for it tomorrow. She said “Do it now! I need to ‘talk’ to you!” What’s wrong with SMS on the handphone?! Expensive, she said. I said, I’m in a pub and I don’t have time to go to my office at 12 midnight, log in into the internet and “apply” for the MSN thing. And there’s this thing about earthquake in Taiwan, didn’t you hear? I said. No reply.

Last week, the first thing I did as I got into the office was to type www.msn.com – how the heck do I know what’s MSN? So, I tried that website and that was it. I spent the first day cursing at how slow the Internet server served my cyberneeds. If my life had depended on it, I would have been dead. I gave up. On the second day, it was the same. The following days throughout the week, nothing practically changed! I gave up. It was only yesterday that I got access to the ‘application form’. And what a process! I had to apply for a Hotmail account, which took ages. I thought the government sectors were bad in their obsession over red-tapes. Hotmail’s not much different!

Once I got my MSN, I put all my friends’ names in my contact list and of other people I’ve never met before who asked me “Are you on MSN?” This is the second day and none of them seem to be online. I SMS-ed some of them asking them “Are you on MSN?” and when they said yes, I told them I’ve got mine registered. So, what were you going to say to me?

p/s: The MSN thing goes ‘on and off’ once in a while. It’s not that stable, is it?

Last Saturday, I lived a parallel thought i.e. being myself where I am and where I’m supposed to be. Ok, so it may not make any sense. To me, it makes perfect sense but somehow, I just do not have the ability to explain it in writing. Mind you, I’m not a philosopher, so I can’t philosophize you.

So, what happened? Well, I did my usual weekend visit to a village near the Bengoh range, and had the usual ‘langkau’ session with the people there. I was feasting on their delicious local moonshine and BBQ-ed pig head for the whole day until late in the evening. I often enjoyed this session not just because of the drink (well…) but also the kind of conversation we have.

Anyways, after that session, I left the village and drove back to Kuching with the taste of ‘langkau’ still lingering in my mouth. I was also thirsty because of that and decided to go for beers to neutralize the taste. So, I headed straight to a bar in town and gulped my first mug of Tiger. It was gone in less than 10 minutes before I ordered another one. Then, something struck me! Not physically but mentally. I thought to myself: “Shit. I should be in Singapore now!” As if reading my thoughts, a friend of mine rang me and said: “Listen to this!” There were noises of people screaming, muffled sounds of chaos and a beautiful music in the background. I couldn’t figure out the song but I knew the guy playing the music. Before my friend was back on the phone, I quickly hanged up (well, you can’t really ‘hang up’ a mobile phone, can you?). I was pissed with myself. Drank some more beer, trying to shutdown the thought.

It was Eric Clapton strumming the six strings in the background. In Singapore. At around 9.00pm.

The story goes like this.

Last October, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go to Singapore with him to watch Eric Clapton. Of course, I said yes. He had the ticket there and then, so I bought it from him for an equivalent of S$89. I was so excited! Eric “Running On Faith” Clapton!! I decided not to buy the air ticket then because it was still a long way to go for the concert.

So, October passed, November came. November passed, December came. Before I knew it, the concert was in two weeks’ time! And incidentally, I was financially broke…

(Well, not totally broke but y’see, I bought an AirAsia ticket to Siem Reap many months before I got the Clapton ticket, and it’s eating up a big slice of my proposed Kuching-JB flight. Yeah, yeah, I should have thought about it but I’m not the most organized person around, y’know. My trip to Siem Reap is in February and I thought if I had gone to Singapore for Clapton’s concert, that means I’ve to spend a bit more while in Singapore. Which means beers. And bers aren’t exactly cheap in the Singapore bars, I’m sure. Specifically, I am referring to the the concept of tiga-sepuluh or smuggled beers. As far as I know, it is none existent there. So, if my cash was spent in Singapore, I won’t be able to survive during my 5-day February trip in Siem Reap**)

** This is also another story. I went to Phnom Penh four years ago and traveled there for a week. My initial plan was to go to Siem Reap from there but because I *ahem* enjoyed the beers and night life so much in Phnom Penh, I didn’t have much cash left with me to travel up north. So, I couldn’t afford to go to Siem Reap. My trip to Siem Reap this time is sort of a “redemption trip” and hopefully, I would be smart enough not to indulge in Cambodian beers too much lest I wouldn’t be able to afford a US$60 3-day pass into Angkor Wat!

Less than weeks before the concert, I painfully decided to part with my Clapton ticket and gave it to my friend in KL. I could have easily sold it to him but I couldn’t make myself to do it. He’s somewhat a Clapton fan, and selling it to him just because of my stupidity of not being able to be present is nothing short of..hhm..exploiting him. Yes, so I gave it to him and of course, he was happy. Damn if he was not! So, my friend who sold me the ticket, and a friend whom I sold the ticket to, went to see Mr. Clapton instead. I specifically warned them that they must never ring me during the concert and let me listen to Clapton playing on the phone. They didn’t. But little did I know, I had another friend who went to the concert and she was the one who rang me up at the bar to listen. Why?? Why would anyone do that kind of thing?

So, there I was on Saturday night, drinking at the bar with my phone turned off. And at that very same moment, there was my friend with my ex-ticket in his hands, who was probably pissing in his pants savoring every minute of Clapton’s performance! And there was my other friend who initially sold the ticket to me, wondering how I could become so stupid for not being able to afford a cheap AirAsia flight to JB. And there was also my friend who was willing to spend her phone airtime to cruelly ring me up while Clapton was playing. And ultimately, there was the blues-rock god himself bludgeoning his tunes for the thousands Eric Clapton fans.

p/s: Oh, sometimes last year, I read Adam Duritz’ comments on Eric Clapton and I thought that was one of the best description of Clapton (although I also totally agree with Duritz that “I am really over it”).