"Existential confusion is a powerful force"

"No thanks, that won't be necessary" I replied, in response to being asked if I would like to inspect and test the camera out before purchasing it.


In truth I didn't even know how to operate the bloody thing.
Shutter speed?
Aperture?
Fuck it I'll go for the highest one.

I walked out of Hartono Electronik like some rich guy who doesn't test out his consumer electronics on a no-returns purchase because he knows he can just buy a new one.

---

It wasn't long before constant disappointment in the quality of my phone camera images eventually culminated into 'I need a DSLR to document this shit I'm seeing'. (To be honest it was more my inadequate composition skills).

As soon as I had made up my mind I was straight outta Bali and towards the nearest city to drop a stack of cash for a tool which I didn't actually know how to operate.

My mission now, was to capture the sights of these new lands. These lands were full of interesting sights and environments, most of which are only interesting or novel to me because would be deemed illegal in New Zealand. It brought about a sense of satisfaction, in part I think due to being an active participant rather than simply being an observer. There's always a need to be doing creating or doing something. To simply observe or consume just doesn't seem to bring any sense of satisfaction but I've been thinking about whether the need to 'do something' is just an elaborate distraction.

Existential confusion is a powerful force and it will make people do things in order to make life meaningful in the absence of things like 'going to work'.

Was I successful in patching the slow leak of existential anxiety?
Sometimes I swear I can still hear the faint hissing sound but I can't tell if it's real or a hallucination.

For now I'll keep pumping the tyre up. If it sticks, it sticks; only time will tell.

---

Now I said in the last post that I would be producing a real banger of a story but now I'm sad to say that won't be the case. Unfortunately due to night shift scheduling and the high possibility of going through some intense interrogation by pimps and gang members or getting mugged and having all my gear stolen has meant I will not be venturing the streets of Chow Kit at 01:00am unless of course I am accompanied by Ross Kemp and a camera crew, or the support of the Vice production team. (And of course a camera that shoot 12800 ISO images without looking like a sandpit).

So I'm just going to slowly release some of the already existing content in small bit sized pieces.

-----

Like 'Trans America Airlines' without the Airlines or America

"Come Inside!" Xe beckoned as I walked down the dimly lit Chow Kit road.

Most of the shops had locked up for the night but I wasn't able to spot the vocal individual standing underneath the shadow of the overhang, behind the roadside power box.
It was as if the straightforward intentions of a man had been placed into a woman's body that was only 90% complete.

My struggle to find the correct exposure settings on the camera was only matched by my struggle to find the right thing to say in this awkward situation.

"Not today sorry"
(What that was supposed to mean?)

I wasn't feeling so enthusiastic about following a transgender woman with a archetypal homosexual male voice up a narrow, poorly lit concrete stairway. Who knows what goes up on in that nondescript run-down building.

---


Some alleyways are cleaner than others.
A lot of the time, they are occupied by rats, people digging through dumpsters, people sleeping on cardboard, and heroin addicts scampering around with their needles.

If there is one thing I learned tonight, it's the ever present watch of the Colonel. Open 24 hours, the  Colonel's ever-present gaze keeps this alley way clean.
KFC, safer communities together.

This was an alleyway I could go through and would go through. For some reason I decided to eat the cold, exposed chicken that had probably been sitting out in the 'outdoor ambient temperature' shelf for 8 hours. I now had less than an hour until the impact of my culinary choices would manifest itself in the form of mild stomach pain and/or liquid shit.

Night Shift

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
It's 04:00am and I'm sitting at the reception desk.
I'm on the night shift. 

Piano nocturnes play in the background.
Chinese guy is sleeping in the laundry on pieces of cardboard.

Just a regular night at the hostel I suppose.

I've been staying in KL for almost three weeks now and I've been slowly transforming my lifestyle into that of a true traveller. By that I mean spending half my time doing jack shit and reading about Buddhism. 

I didn't even think Jack Kerourac's 'Dharm Bums' was that good but somehow it seems to have influenced my thinking without me realising it. Here I am in the early hours of the morning basically writing stream of consciousness pieces which just seems to spill out of my mind like poo exiting my body.  It costs nothing and basically everybody can do it; some more than others.

I think that once you spend a certain period of time 'on the road' (no pun intended), your perspective on life changes somewhat. At some point you make the switch from 'a person who is travelling' to 'traveller'. The difference being that the former is taking a period of time out from their typical routine back home to travel somewhere for a defined period of time, whereas the latter is where it becomes a lifestyle with no defined closure.  It's quite easy to distinguish one from the other.  The former doesn't spend 6 weeks in Kuala Lumpur or wake up at 3pm and eat breakfast cereal before spending the rest of the day playing the guitar and watching 'Who is America'.


At least I'm not writing poetry.


I'm going to try and pull out a banger in the next few days. It's about time I produced something decent for a change.

For now here's a little game I made up.
It's called: 'Spot the woman' - A physical depiction of gender ratios on Tinder

It's like where's Wally except you're trying to find the woman. (She's hiding in one of the images)

The Work Bubble

06:50
My alarm clock goes off.
It's remarkable that I managed to even fall asleep this morning.

Usually I wake up at around 10-11am, but today is different. Today I have important business to attend to and I need to be there at 08:00. (No it's not a court hearing but it involves sitting in front of a computer for 6 hours.)

I roll over and look out the window onto the street below.
Men in long sleeve button on shirts and backpacks walk unnaturally fast along the footpath as if their livelihood depended on it. (Which is probably true)
It's only natural that in a city filled with office towers that you find office workers; but what really hits me is that during my time in South East Asia, I have never actually witnessed the modern ritual of the morning rush hour as I have been operating on a very different schedule.

I want to talk about this because I back home in Christchurch, I lived a very different lifestyle. I used to spend the majority of the day inside an office building, largely isolated from everything else that occurred in the city. I used to partake in the commuter ritual twice a day and it was just a normal part of my life. I saw Christchurch from the perspective of an office worker.

There were times where I would find myself at home or in town during a weekday (or at least not at work) for whatever reason and I would feel like some kind of unemployed junkie slob. This belief was probably instilled from a young age back when I was in primary school where the kids who bunked school were labelled as the 'bad apples' who had no future. For whatever reason, that belief persisted into adulthood and even something as innocent as taking time off on annual leave and going into town during the daytime had me feeling like a wreck.

It's August 2018 and I now find myself in Kuala Lumpur. On one particular day I woke up at 11:00am, watched Youtube videos, played guitar, and ate breakfast cereal for dinner before going back to bed at 2am- all without even leaving the hostel.
It's at the extreme end for me but throughout the past few weeks, my day-to-day lifestyle has largely been about waking up sometime after 08:30, walking/driving around, taking photos, eating food and then going to bed at various hours of the night/morning. I am displaying the true qualities of an unemployed man. - A man who's spent the same money on whisky as he has on food over the past two days.

That said however, I have a foreign passport and this somehow grants me the unique status of being unemployed but without the stigma. (It also eliminates the stigma attached to drinking corn flavoured milk-based drinks outside a playground)

The only time I've seen corn in SE Asia is in a can or in a shrink wrapped plastic bag.

Throughout my travels in Indonesia, Singapore and now Malaysia, I have seen things from the perspective of a backpacker. There are many different ways of perceiving a particular place, which all depend on how your life is structured and how you fit within that society. Our lifestyles and daily patterns create the lens with which we perceive our environment. To truly judge a place fairly, one must take the time to experience it from different angles.  When you say a particular place is boring, ask yourself "Is it really"?
Perhaps it is you who is boring.


As a traveller, I have access to the widest lens of them all and it is only a matter of choosing to use it.

Now I see why they say it changes your perspective.

I paid way too much for this perspective