Weirdville

I’ve had a bad day yesterday, followed by a sequence of events that seemed to have awakened a part of me that was never meant to be summoned.

As I reeled through the waves of rejection and dejection that compounded in me, I received a phone call that lasted for 1 hour 11 minutes and 40 seconds exactly – a long talk, the longest I had in a decade probably – that entertained me, injected me with philosophical ponderings and highly intellectual, mature discussions about certain characteristics of people. At the end of the talk, I emerged from the dark blanket of something that I can only describe as a necessary evil that people do cloak themselves with – a cocktail of ruefulness, dissatisfaction, with a faint drop of helplessness – and I felt none the better.

But as the starless night went on, a few actions from the people I care about seemed to stroke that ugly part of me hidden in my core – a grotesque being that overshadowed my self momentarily and it was all I could do to restrain it by keeping myself to my thoughts. It would either explode out to the open, or implode, but in the moments of lapse of restrain on my part – perhaps due to the fact I’ve ingested two cans of Carlsberg – I let this other self out snappily.

Before I knew it, the deed was done, but still I did not waver nor regret. That uncalculated outburst was the result of suppressing all the violently disturbing features of my self, with the aforementioned potent cocktail bringing all that out of hiding, and in retrospect it was awful. A faint twang of regret surfaced the next morning, but that was all there was to it: I regretted what I did, but because it felt as if it was something not my real self had done, the regret was all too minimal – it’s as if I was feeling sorry for something that a complete stranger had done, on his behalf.

But of course, if the action I implied was a murder or something far more sinister – it wouldn’t be a very convincing testimony of my innocence, would it? But I shall make no attempt to further realign sympathetic views to my cause, because I truly believe in every word I’m committing down here.

It was strange for all these to happen, especially after the hour-long caller told me that I was a weird person he wanted to research on – a living human, social experiment, if you will. I was far from being insulted, because there are many finer points of life that only he and I met eye-to-eye with, or the little things that ordinary, lay people would never give a passing thought to, concerning themselves with menial aspects of the world.

It also felt then, as if I have a new housemate in this Weirdville – and that I’m living two separate lives parallel to one another: an ordinary, college-going guy going about mundane routines who share the same pie in the social collective of thoughts, and a guy with non-conforming thoughts that no one, except the rare few, could enthuse with.

It was made known to me that quite a few people thought that I’m a drug addict. And if the choices of life had not turn me to this clean, non-drug using path, I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned out differently – because having dabbled once in this social taboo, I found myself drawn to it and the high that cannot be reproduced by alcohol.

And today, especially after immersing myself into Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle world to the end, I felt as if, for better or for worse, the vile part of me was cleansed away, bringing with it the few good parts I had. It was like a radiotherapy treatment: in order to exorcise cancerous cells, the good cells in the vicinity were obliterated as well.

Those foul feelings that have once occupied the recesses of my heart were now gone, leaving nary a bitter aftertaste. It felt as if they had never been there, but I recognise that they have once existed – like distant memories of the past that you vaguely remember but cannot be grappled concretely.

Whilst walking back to my house earlier in the transitioning period of twilight with a red plastic of chicken rice in my right hand, an enlightening thought descended upon me like a light being switched on. That the possible reason that my train of thoughts were nearly always distracted and lose the focus of concentration as I talk or relate a recent incident, was probably because I could not multi-task, a realisation brought forward to me indirectly from yesterday’s hour-long phone call. I realised that words could come to me quite naturally if they merely reside in my head, allowing my brain to concentrate at that task on hand, but any attempt to speak them out loud would derail my thoughts – which was why any surprise question shot towards me would require me to think deeply before I could produce any satisfactory reply.

It was nearly always a frustrating experience to not be able to convey my thoughts to the dot, but can be reproduced perfectly in writing.

I’ve never really understood my self, but I’m learning more as the years trudged on – this self that’s in that shunned back alley of the world called Weirdville.