Ring of Fire – The Lead-up

 

It started one drunken evening that got out of control quickly.  One minute I’m mixing up a strange brew called “Straight To Hell” at this party.  The next, there are incredibly ill advised joyrides in BMWs, cut-up cigars, and leg splits.  This was a dinner party that lost direction and veered off the deep end.

I can’t pinpoint precisely when, why, or how it came up, but the party decided that we needed to reconvene in a few weeks to take the Phaal Challenge.  Phaal, undisputedly the hottest curry in the known universe.  A dish conjured up by a sadist’s sadist for the sole purpose of inflicting excruciating palate torture.  I don’t really know what goes into a phaal curry, I just know of its legendary crippling powers.

Now, I don’t believe you can find phaal at just any corner curry house.  Most curry houses wouldn’t dare cook this.  We’d have to go to the Brick Lane curry house in the city, named after the famed street in London for all things India.  The Brick Lane curry house is THE place to get phaal in New York because they’re one of the few places outfitted to cook this curry.  Which – no joke – involves a full-face respirator and thick biohazard gloves.  The curry is cooked in a pot and stirred by what looks like a biochemical instruments.  It’s like Breaking Bad, except more lethal.  I’m pretty sure there’s witchcraft involved in making phaal.

In any case, about a dozen of us made this exceedingly poor decision about three weeks ago.  Of the dozen, only two or three of us were going to brave the phaal.  I wasn’t about to back down from this.  (I’m told that this whole phaal idea was my idea from the beginning but since I have no recollection of ever suggesting this, I’m not willing to own it – either way, I was in no matter what.) The rest of gang would cheer us on, laugh at our insanity, or have their fingers ready at their phones to call 911.

I welcomed the three-week lead-up.  This would give me time to “train,” whatever the fuck that meant.  The best thing was having a good and proper excuse to order all the spicy shit when I ate out.  “Don’t mind me, I’m in training.”  Some people train for marathons, some people train for century rides, I was training for a bowl of curry.

It gave me a great excuse to eat unhealthy grub any chance I could.  And while I was at it, dump every imaginable hot sauce on everything.  I probably had hot wings a couple of times a week.  I loaded up my nachos with the hottest hot sauces I had.  Super spicy burritos.  All of it.

Then my friend – and fellow competitor – suggested that I try something called Dave’s Insanity Hot Sauce.  Made a beeline to the store and scored a bottle.  Turns out this sauce is so over the top, so willing to live up to its name that you’re only allowed one drop.  And that’s one drop into whatever you’re cooking – a big pot of chili, a vat of pasta sauce.  Just one drop.

Going balls to the wall, of course I ignored that advice.  The missus made chili one night, and I put a drop of Dave’s into my bowl of chili.  Not the whole pot, as suggested, but into my own serving.  Holy fuck.  I was completely unprepared for this level of heat.  There was no aroma or flavor like you get with other hot sauces.  This was bottled-up Hades by the drop.

I now had a new threshold of heat I had never previously experienced.

A few days after that, the missus whipped up a large pot of spaghetti arrabiata.  She kindly left me a note, warning me that it was spicy.  I thought bullshit, I’m in training – so I made myself a bowl of this pasta and dropped in a slightly more generous drop of Dave’s into the lot.

Pain.  Nothing but searing blinding pain.  It was like eating glowing coals plucked out of your Weber.  I started sweating buckets and my vision started to tunnel.  I ran to my bathroom and brushed my teeth.  I must’ve drunk about a pint and a half of milk – somehow I seemed to remember some advice about milk being a good flame douser.  Which also turned out to be complete bullshit.  None of it worked until I cracked open a can of PBR and shotgunned the entire thing.  I had to lie down for about 20 minutes after that.  All that over pasta.

I was starting to lose hope.  If I couldn’t handle some bottled up sauce you can buy off the shelf, how the hell was I going to stand up to a secret recipe that single-minded designed to inflict maximum pain?

This was all going pear-shaped.

 

NEXT:  Ring of Fire – The Event

 

 

The stupidest country on the planet: the 24-hours-later fallout edition

I’m fucking famous.  No, not really.  I just seem to have inadvertently drawn a bit more attention to myself than expected.

Holy shitballs, Malaysia.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how I feel about my country of birth.  As with most things on this blog (and by that I mean everyfuckingthing), I guess it was a little less than complimentary.

Most people don’t even know where the fuck Malaysia is on the map, nevermind give a shit about it.  So, with most of the shit I post, I didn’t expect anyone to read it.  What I also didn’t expect was that the stupid write-up would get passed around in Malaysia like a goddamn herpes outbreak.  When I peeked at the blog stats, I didn’t just get tens or hundreds of clicks – I got thousands.  In the first 24 hours, WordPress tells me that this stupid story had been clicked on over 10,000 times.  And about three-quarters of it had come from Malaysia.

It’s so stupid that anyone actually gives a shit about what I have to say about anything.

Seriously, who gives a rat’s ass.  I have no influence over anything or anyone.  My own kids don’t listen to me.  And people are getting caught up in what I wrote?  Fuck you.  People should give a shit about large collectives who do and/or say stupid shit.  Lookin’ at you, North Carolina.  And Arizona.  Because that’s when you realize that it’s not just one insignificant person – that’s a large festering group of like-minded imbeciles.  And that’s fucking terrifying.  But I digress.

In any case, I didn’t expect the sort of response I got for that piece.  WordPress does this thing where I have to approve a comment before it’s posted.  It doesn’t just do it automatically.  Which drives me a bit bananas, because that means it permits people to approve only positive comments to their blogs and leave off the negative ones.  Fuck that, I make sure every comment gets approved and posted.  Which also means that I wasted far too much time making sure all these comments I got were posted.  You get in, and you get in, and you get in… everyone gets in for free!

So I got slightly buried with comments.  Some more eloquent than others, natch.  Some more coherent than others, duh.  And some more outraged than others.  So I thought I’d milk another post out of this subject and try and respond to some of them here.  Some of these sentiments are repetitive, so I’ll just respond to one given example of the comment.  Cool?  Cool.

 

That’s actually a rather good point about the treason bit.  I still hold a Malaysian passport, because I’ve been too lazy to get it switched.  That said, consider how you’re actually condoning the idea that irrespective of my own location, a blog post warrants as an act of treason.  A stupid blog post.  Words on the interweb.  Is treason.  You’re a fucking idiot.

 

I fucking love comments along the lines of, “Hey, fuck you, you fucking fuck!”  The threat to me being “fucking dead” if I was in Malaysia is a classic.  The little dollop of bigotry at the end with the “faggot” seals the deal nicely.  A+

 

That’s right, “most”.

 

I wish I knew more about what East Malaysia’s like.  I never visited when I lived in Malaysia.  It boasts this wonderful, brilliant flora and fauna that not enough people marvel over (everyone’s always busy going to Kenya, South Africa, or South America that’s had better marketing).  But the neglect and exploitation of the indigenous people are not lost on me.  Because it’s largely the same all over the world.  The original keepers of the land are shit, and why would anyone expect things in Sabah and Sarawak, and to some measure, the other Orang Asli tribes (by the way, is that still cool to say, “Orang Asli” – I have no gauge of ethnic sensitivities in Malaysia anymore – hah, just kidding, no one in Malaysia gives a flying shit about ethnic sensitivities; my own father until a few years ago was still calling black people “colored”!) on the peninsula.  I watched this episode of Bourdain’s show once in which he went to Borneo – I swear I saw more of what Borneo was like on that show than when I lived in Malaysia.  Having never visited East Malaysia is a massive regret for me.

 

I didn’t take any fucking easy way out.  I fought hard to legally stay, live, work, and pay taxes here in the U.S.  I’m not letting others do anything.  I’m not asking anyone to take anyone down.  I don’t give a shit anymore.

 

THAT’S RACIST!!!!!

 

“Defecate his own brain” might be my new favorite phrase.  I’m totally stealing it.  And then I’m going to trademark it.  And if anyone else tries to use it, I’ll sue your balls off.

 

“Admit it”?  To whom?  You know what else you typically admit?  Guilt, culpability, usually something bad that one might hide.  No one ever has to “admit” anything to that’s good.  That’s how you’re treating Malaysian citizenship – some dark statement that you have to “admit”.  You’ve just summed up your own ingrained belief of the value of your citizenship.  Oh, and at no point have I ever told anyone, “Fuck no, I’m not from Malaysia, what are you, nuts?!”  That’s just stupid.

 

OK, this is a good one.  Because it’s making me address one thing I previously didn’t.  It appears that me moving away and not staying put to “fight for our right” makes me a coward.  Scratch that – a “real coward” (you know, as opposed to an unreal coward).  I guess that’s one way of putting it.  Which I suppose also makes anyone in the history of time who just upped, left town to seek a better future elsewhere  a goddamn coward – you know, like the Pilgrims, the European colonists, my own ancestors who travelled from mainland China, you know, those guys.

What an idiot.

Here’s the thing, you fight for what you want.  I don’t fucking want any of it.  You can keep it.  I’m not gonna stick around to fight.  Whatever “fight” means.  What’s that mean anyway?  Marching around in some protest?  I fucking detest protestors and people who strike.  You want it?  Then you fucking fight for it.  Don’t drag me into it.  Me, I got better shit to do.  Like maybe plan a holiday to Borneo or something.  That sounds like much more fun than this “fighting” you keep advocating for.

 

First of all, what’s with the slash before each apostrophe?  It’s driving me nuts.  Second, it’s one short, stupid post in some unknown blog that you never even heard of until today.  Stop making it out to be something that’s so detrimental to the well-being of the country.  Unless you really do believe that Malaysians in general are soooooo weak-minded that some shithead nobody in New York who writes some blogpost about how he loathes Malaysia is going to suddenly warp and twist their feeble minds that it’ll make them “jump off a cliff”?

Holy shit, maybe you’ve got a point there.

 

Not “just as stupid as Malaysia”.  Here in America, we have a whole different brand of stupid.  It comes in many colors, it comes in many flavors, it comes in different sizes, it comes in all hours of day and night.  This shit should be patented, that’s how special it is.  It’s a type of stupid that’s been finely crafted and honed and nurtured.  And now you know why we have Florida.  Or California.

 

This by far my favorite argument: “Malaysia sucks balls?!  Well, the USA sucks even more balls!!”  Such a kindergarten retort.  Yeah, no shit America’s fucked, too.  But apparently NO ONE knew this until you two geniuses brought it up.  The world owes you a universal debt of gratitude for your unearthing of the dark and well-hidden truth.  Conspiracy theorists, you can all go back to your moms’ basements now.  Go on!

 

I agree, it’s not at all easy to legally live and work here in the U.S.  Try getting in after the 11th of September, 2001 when you’re trying to gain legal status to live here in the U.S. while bearing a passport from a Muslim country.  That shit ain’t fun, I assure you.

 

Obviously!  I mean, it’s so clear!  Because the only time I brought up race was in the context of Bumiputera privileges.  Shit, only a filthy racist would suggest that everyone gets treated equally and that no one gets discounts, preferred status, or some other privilege because of their skin color.  Because that practice would be TOTALLY NOT RACIST!!

 

You’re goddamn right I’m just another immigrant.  But check this out – this is gonna blow your fucking mind: the whole goddamn country was a built as a land of immigrants (sorry, Native Americans, we’re all dicks even though I had nothing to do with spreading all that syphilis).  Everyone has from got a story of coming from somewhere else.  I mean, even in New York no one’s from New York – everyone’s from somewhere else.  And “white boy-wannabe”?  Fuck you, I work very hard on my savage tan each summer, bitch.  Now, an “Asian redneck”?  Shit, I’d pay good money to see that.  I swear that’s a movie waiting to be made.  It’d be Larry The Cable Guy doing all of Mickey Rooney’s lines from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.

 

And that’s all I have time for.  Thanks for playing, everyone!  Enjoy the weekend!

 

 

 

The stupidest country on the planet

Growing up in the city of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, as a kid I was never shy about my fondness for all things West.  Somehow, in my childhood I had developed some strong xenocentric tendencies.  I’m not saying it’s right, it’s just how I was influenced as a kid.  I ate up everything that came from the West – television, food, music, you name it.  I seemed to be focused on America and all things American.  America seemed to the birthplace of awesomeness, full of bright and shiny objects that drew me in like a Star Destroyer’s tractor beam.  (Actually, that analogy holds more water than I care to admit.)

And the more I learned about and experienced Western culture, the more I grew ethnophobic – I became quickly dissatisfied with life in Kuala Lumpur.  I had miserable teenage years.  Not just average miserable teenage years like a lot of kids had – I had this weight on my shoulders about the country I lived in, the people around me, my surroundings, my whole outlook.  In hindsight, I was probably just another ungrateful little shit who didn’t appreciate what I had, but rather moped about how green the grass was across the Pacific.  I was an insufferable shit as a kid (I haven’t changed much).

But I was unwavering in one ambition that I had when I was a kid –  one day to get the hell out of Dodge.

I am privileged to have parents who planned well enough to be able to send me to college abroad (I’m nowhere near as prepared, my kids are so screwed).  Nothing super fancy or prestigious, just a modest college experience.  Malaysian colleges were never an option, but I’ll get into why in a minute.  Long story short, I left for college in New Jersey, then found a good job in New York, and I never moved back to Malaysia.

I now call New York home.  When asked where I’m from, I typically reply, “I’m from New York.”  Which fucking kills me, because it’s not the whole truth.  But it saves me from having to explain this whole Malaysia backstory.  It saves me from having to bite my tongue about the disdain that I’ve grown for my country of birth.  A moment of me being slightly disingenuous saves me from having to deal with my own self-loathing and what complete and utter disappointment at my former home country.

So, why am I so fucking down on Malaysia, the land of my birth, my childhood country, the country in which 90% of my immediate and extended family still live?

It starts from the top.  Malaysia is like an upside down tree.  The roots are at the top, planted in a toxic pot that gets no illumination from the sun.  These gangrenous roots are the government.  A government that is held together by only the finest grade of corruption and greed.  A government that is driven by the ethnic majority.

Ahh, the ethnic majority.  You see, Malaysia is comprised of three large ethnic groups – the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians.  The Malays, who are native to the land, opened up the doors to the country to the Chinese and the Indians during the Spice Trade because Malaysia sits precisely at the perfect maritime gateway between India (who wanted Chinese tea), and China (who wanted Indian spices).  That’s the super dumbed-down version of that story.  What do I look like, Wikipedia?   If you want more detail, Google that shit.

Fast forward 500 years later, and somehow you’ve got a ruling class with a constitution that openly favors the ethnic majority, exercises extreme prejudice, and an inculcated environment in which the ignorant are rewarded and the hardworking masses are told to shut the fuck up and keep working.

No fucking way, right?  There’s no way that such a retarded country can actually exist!  I mean, it’s so fucking outlandish that it’s absolutely farcical at this point.  Like some insane Monty Python sketch.  Yeah, well check these out:

• Bumiputera discounts.  “Bumiputera” is what the Malays call themselves.  Princes of the earth.  Can’t you just feel the ooze of racial entitlement?  Basically, if you’re Malay, you’re entitled to massive discounts on all sorts of big dollar shit.  You get a lower interest rate on mortgages, you get discounts, you get preferred acceptance into organizations, contracts, colleges, etc.  If you’re Chinese, Indian, or any other ethnic group, you’re fucked.  You get the privilege of paying top dollar, and you wait in the back of the fucking line.  Lucky you!

• Pizza Hut.  Shit like this Pizza Hut commercial make even the most retarded used car salesman commercial in America look like a Clio winner.  Marriage proposals in a Pizza Hut.  Made over what is arguably the most disgusting looking food in the world it can’t even be called pizza at this point.  But neither the premise nor the pizza are even close to being the most grating things about this commercial.  It’s the fact that everyone’s wearing sweaters.  SWEATERS!!!  IN MALAYSIA!!!  Where it’s consistently 100-degrees year-round, with so much humidity, you could walk outside and do the backstroke.  This is the retarded standard of Malaysian advertising, of Malaysian creativity, of Malaysian cultural reflection – everything is poorly aped and incredibly shitty.  This Pizza Hut commercial is a perfect 30-second microcosmic film that sums up the country.

• Mat Rempit cops.  Where the fuck do I begin with this?  Let’s start with what the fuck a Mat Rempit is.  According to Wikipedia, they are “an individual who participates in illegal street racing”, usually involving underbone motorcycles (colloquially known as Kapcai) or scooters.”  In other words, they’re shitty biker gangs who ride shitty bikes, trying very hard to pretend that they’re fucking hard.  It’s a fucking pathetic subculture.  And now we have some genius politician who thinks that he’s “thinking out of the box” by wanting to employ these Mat Rempit shitheads to be something of a volunteer police force.

• Gay and lesbian symptoms.  I.  Shit.  You.  Not.  Just keep in mind that these are guidelines that have been developed, ratified, and are being rolled out by the Ministry of Education.  This shit comes from the top!  Make sure you read the article in the link a couple of times over.  I’ve read it about 6 times now (woah, that might be a gay number!), and I still can’t decide which part fucks me off more.  Is the use of the term “symptoms”?  Is it the fact that someone actually came up with a list of these symptoms?  Is it the suggestion for “corrective measurements [sic]”?  Or is it the picture of the fucking asshole in the article that makes me want reach through my screen and beat the living shit out of his fucking stupid asshole face?  Could be any of those.  Most likely it’s all of it.  If Malaysia wasn’t such a tiny little pissant insignificant little turd of a nation, this rampant act of bigotry might incite some fairly significant outrage.  But as it is, no one gives a shit about the insufferable boil that is Malaysia so no one outside of the country draws attention when shit like this goes down.  And because no one makes a massive fuss about it, the powers that be live under this delusion that what they’re doing is perfectly OK and everyone else is OK with it.  What a bunch of assholes.

So what makes Malaysia stupider than other horrible countries around the world?  How’s it different from destitute countries full of despair like Sudan or Liberia?  In those countries, you live every day knowing full well that everything’s fucked and no one lies to you about it.  In Malaysia, there is an ever-present bullshit haze of hunky-doriness that somehow allows everyone carry along each day as if everything’s cool.  But underneath of it, EVERYTHING’s fucked, you’re fucked, the future’s fucked, and the impenetrable system that perpetuates an endless cycle of greed and corruption has been perfected.  That, for me, is the most hurtful thing about living in Malaysia – the grand lie and the forced acceptance of that lie.

I write this freely because I now live in New York.  If I lived in Malaysia, these words would likely tantamount to treason.  And I’d probably be locked up and beaten for it.  The government has been known to lock up and persecute citizens for a lot less.

But I needed to write all this down not because I’m angry or trying to be insurgent.  I’m past that now.  I’m writing this because I need to somehow exorcise Malaysia from my being.  Because enough is enough.

Fuck you, Malaysia.

 

P.S.   I’m grateful for my friends and family who are still in Malaysia, who despite my repeated urging, have chosen to remain there, either by choice or by circumstance.  I respect their decision, and I can only pray the best for them.  Besides, they’re the ones who keep me informed of all this bullshit.  And for that, you guys fucking rock.  You know who you are.