Who Gives A Rat’s Ass

“What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way”

-Johnny Cash, “Hurt”.

I remember my months in Hanoi. I remember my months in Saigon. I remember Phuket. I remember Krabi. I remember my week in Sydney. I remember Arhus. I remember those weeks in Singapore. I remember those getaways to Nilai and Melaka. I remember my nights in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu. I remember those nights walking by myself along Gurney Drive in Penang.

I remember those nights I spent driving without a destination in mind. I remember Banting. I remember Dengkil. I remember getting lost between KKB and Frasers Hill. I remember those nights I headed up to Genting. And of course I remember those drives to Bentong through the dangerous jungle roads. The drives back from Teluk Intan through the coastal road.

Now what in the hell am I talking about right here?

I have no sodding idea. Maybe it’s times like these that I feel like I want to just run, run, run till I can outrun my sorrows and problems.

There’s this shit in engineering (I’m sure it came from Mathematics) called a cuspid curve. That’s like a reflex point.. an inflection point. A point at which something hits a minima before bouncing off again, from the imaginary plane to the real or from the negative plane to the positive (and vice versa).

I guess I’m at that point in my life right now.

What’s the worst thing to invest with? Money? Time? Feelings? Intellect? I’d say that the worst things to invest with are our feelings. When we’ve invested feelings into an enterprise or a venture, we won’t really know what we’d get in return. It’s a high-risk venture with an unknown gain. Some people strike gold and hit it big. Others invest big and get jack shit in return.

I don’t mind investing money, time and intellect into one thing or another, capital-guaranteed or not. But feelings, that’s one currency that we’re wont to invest with but our returns vary greatly from one individual to the next. However, like any other investment, when we don’t keep our eggs in one basket we can gain and lose across the board, and sometimes one gain offsets a loss and we get a net gain, and feel good about it. But if it goes the other way and we end up with a net loss, that’s when we find solace in a Church, in a car, or at the bottom of a bottle, or all three (and not necessarily in that order).

I suppose most of the cusps in the trajectories of our lives are caused by our emotional investments. Nothing alters the paradigms and mentalities contained within our souls and psyches as much as changes or impacts to our emotions.

We’re dealt a blow, and we change. Some of us resist and get screwed up. Some of us bend over backwards and we get screwed up. To rise up from the ashes with added wisdom and a lesson for life is more of an exception than a rule.

Sometimes we’re afraid to have our hearts broken and we end up breaking another’s. Sometimes we’re afraid of breaking another’s heart and at the end of the day the only heart we broke is our own. The size of the crack, or the magnitude of the damage to our hearts, is determined by the amount of emotions we have invested in the very source of the breakage.

Perhaps I’m gradually drifting towards becoming a wild horse again. Perhaps I’m turning to the bottle again. Perhaps I’m finding comfort in solitude again. Perhaps I find more comfort being in my element and letting my hair down without a care in the world rather than being reserved, careful and conservative. I have no idea.

I’m at the cusp of my life, I’m feeling the same old familiar sting, and how I choose to deal with it will plot my direction for the next couple of decades at least.

To whoever it may concern, I’m sorry.. and you can’t return to me, I must return to you, that’s how it’s positioned at this point.