langkau fiction

I just want to make an important announcement by uttering this chant that the wise Kalia’ali Dooung Ot Dasik’tas always says when he — or she, depending on your imagination of this character — is in despair, exhausted, confused and without Stella:

Tiuuuuuuu lah!

Okay. So, it’s out of my system now. Thanks to Kalia’ali Dooung Ot Dasiktas, C.M.sEd (Pyongyang, North Korea), B.B.Ts. (Ougadugu, Burkina Faso), M.DsZTi (Kapit, Sarawak), Fj.IkkZ (Donggongon, Sabah).

What’s with the Swine Flu thing? I remember in the 1980s, my greatest fear was the possible all-out nuclear warfare between those who are on Reagan’s U.S.and A side and Gorbachev’s USSR side. My fear was further pronounced when even the Simpsons — at that time, this cartoon was a ‘bumper’ in The Tracy Ullman Show — had a short episode on them doing the nuclear drill.

Damn. Must be a bad sign when politics could enter the world of cartoons in the 1980s.

Nowadays, wars are like entertainment instead of fear. It’s as if suddenly the breakout of war gives people something to talk about in the coffee shop. Not only something to talk about, mind you, but also the thrill of taking sides. While one would say “Okay, I’m with the Yanks in this war, man! Annihilate Talibans!”, the other fellow would retort “Damn you! May the Junta kill you for saying that!” Then, someone goes blur. I knew it. Boy George was right all the while!

What I’m trying to say is that war doesn’t seem to strike that fear into one’s spine nowadays. Well, I’m sure it’s totally a different thing for those who are directly affected by the war. But sitting in the comfort of our homes here, war seems to be a distant activity, almost akin to those war games that children like to play on the computer these days.

Since humans have been immuned to the common fear that war brings with it, someone had to introduce diseases with new names like Swine Flu, hailing from Mehiko. It’s a big thing like how SARS was a big thing, Nipah virus was a big thing, Coxsackie was a big thing, Ebola was a fucking huge thing that people even made movie out of it! And this fear is kinda real because unlike war no one really takes sides. I mean no one goes like “Hey, man! You’re dead. I’m with the picomaviridae family, man. You watch out.”

I went to buy pork this evening after work. Told the pork guy to give me 1.57kg of pork and he measured it carefully on the scale. He asked me if I had heard about the Swine Flu speading around. I told him, yes but don’t really know much about it apart from its relation with pork. “Lu titak takut makan ini babi ka?“, asking me if I was afraid to eat his pork due to this new virus. I responded to his concern by telling him that if the price of pork doesn’t go down in the next few days because of this phenomena, I’d be very worried indeed. By right, the price should go down since there’s a virus flying across international borders. “Lu punya babi ada selsema ka, tokey?” I asked him. He smiled, cut a small extra from another pork strip and passed me my 1.57kg of pork.

Y’see, he never asked me if I was afraid that Osama bin Laden might be creeping under my bed tonight. He didn’t ask me if George W. Bush was crazy when he went into Iraq to search for the fabled weapons of mass destruction (and caught Saddam in the process). Damn, being a tokay babi himself, he didn’t even ask me if Kennedy won the war in the Bay of Pigs!

Hence, the moral of this useless story is when it comes to instilling fear, war is out. Virus is in. Of the pig kind.

These few days have been crazy. One deadline after the other. It makes you wonder why it’s called ‘deadline’ in the first place. Lining up to die kah?

It’s the mating season again. My dogs are going crazy. Well, not the puppies. I guess their instincts are still to young to understand the use of their genitals apart from excreting stuffs from their body. Then, they start licking each other’s…okay, let’s not go there.

Anyways, Kabang is going crazy. It’s the moon thing. To show that it’s time to mate. For the past three days, this father of five three have been following his ex-sibling (now spouse), Semiyat, all over the house attempting to hump her. It’s either he’s forgotten how it’s done or his dick has been short ever since their offspring was born last year.

But this fellow has lost it, man. I think he’s quite frustrated about it. And I can’t just stand the whining, growling and y’know, that attitude that seems to say “I’m gonna sitck it to you but HOW? Stop moving will you? Okay, okay, let’s try this one more time…” I mean, what other styles to dogs have to mate, right?

On the other hand, Semiyat couldn’t take this incompetency on Kabang’s part and she’d growl if the other fellow is persistent for being a failure. Y’know that thing people say about trying? If you fail once, try again. If you fail twice, try again. If you fail the third time, just quit. There’s no point being stupid about it. Well, apparently, for the past three days Kabang hasn’t been that smart either. Or maybe he’s done it while I was asleep? I don’t know.

I don’t mind if they do it at night or somewhere in the corner quietly. But they don’t do that. What’s worse is that they’d end up fighting about the whole thing, not unlike domestic violence among us humans. Semiyat always wins the fight but her spouse is still damn horny. He would put on that stupid face, with the tongue hanging out and keep sniffing, licking and do stuffs that dogs do.

While all this canine pornography is going on, the three pups would run around the parents barking as if in support of the whole action! The other day, their mother got so pissed off with the whole scenario and bit the pup’s face. The brown one was the closest so he got it. The gash was deep.

When I was a kid, I used to have two dogs that constantly fought. One day, the smaller of the two got bitten in the ear almost severing it. I took a needle and thread, and stitched the ear. His ear healed without any infection.

I finally finished the second article, which is due tomorrow! It’s not even a full article. My friend’s going to write the bigger chunk of it. Mine was just laying the carpet for him to steamroll on.

That took almost the whole day.

I didn’t eat the whole of today. Just write. Crap. By 6pm, my stomach was already grumbling. “Didn’t you have enough langkau last night?” I asked the stomach. No answer.

I opened the fridge. There was no food in there except for one panggang cat fish. It’s two days’ old. hhm…then, there are some fermented fish in the container as well. I took two fishes out of the container. You can actually eat it raw because it’s kasam. I swear Bidayuh makes the best kasam. I’ve tried all kinds of kasam but it doesn’t beat the Bidayuh. Their kasam ikien is my favorite. Then they also kasam frogs, pythons, barking deer, and of course, the mother of all kasam, the babi. You can take it raw with chili and lime.

But for tonight’s dinner, I decided to fry it. Cooked some rice. Okay, rice and kasam for dinner. Rice. Padi is rice. Beras is rice. Nasi is also rice. Anyways, I decided to be creative with the rice and kasam ikien and added Norwegian Idun mustard with it. The best mustard in the world! Okay, so I was too lazy to eat out.

And I was too lazy to go out to buy food to cook.

I’m bored. Please entertain me.

I just finished writing an article. It took me the whole afternoon and most of tonight to finish a two-page essay! And my grammar has gone tulan too. Writing blog entries must have tulanized my grammar. Damn it.

I have another article to finish before end of this week. Is that tomorrow kah? This one is heavier as it requires me to scratch my head till all the kutu are relocated to its new home.

Yes, it means I do not know what to write.

It’s only after that I can do the jobthing of reading enlightening albeit plagiarized manuscripts by future literary con-artists. A felon in the making.

As a side dish, I wish I have the gift to draw or paint. That would be much better. Much better.

Damn, I need a bir.

Shit, I forgot. Damn broke too!

Buel lah…

These past two weeks have mind numbingly been stressful for me. This week alone gives me a massive headache.

What in the name of quail’s egg is happening in the Somalian waters with the pirates, news of kidnapping and shit?! I can imagine bunch of guys in their not-so-huge boats taunting the big boys of the sea, kidnapping the crew and making million-dollar demands. And sometimes, they get away with it.

What I don’t understand is how can these pirates hijack such huge vessels and kidnap its crews? Just look at Irene below. Now don’t tell me she’s not a huge ship. I mean, even a monkey wouldn’t be able to climb that monster!

Yes, she was hijacked! Probably the crew got molested too, I don’t know. But isn’t it strange that big powerful bullies countries like Emrika or Brit’n (traditional maritime warlord konon) can’t just riddle the pirates with frightening war rhetoric like they used to? Maybe sprinkle a bit of bullets and missiles here and there, no?

And as if that was not enough to torment my brain this week, today I was told that the UN nuke inspectors had just been expelled by the North Korean government because of the sanction that the UN security council had imposed upon one of Emrika’s favorite axis of evils. Nice birthday present to Kim, I bet.

Please don’t tell me the tea workers in Zhanjiang, southern China had just killed the factory owner because he failed to pay the workers’ salary for the past 21 years. This is a bit too much lah…