Break a leg

The sound of bone crunching is very visceral. I have never heard it. The scream that you let out when a bone breaks is very animal-like. The pain that you feel is beyond imaginable. I have never broken a single bone in my body. My ribs came close to, once, but they didn’t actually break. I sound like the serial killer in Jeffrey Deaver’s The Bone Collector. I want to have a tooth knocked out by a blow from a knuckle-duster. I want to hear cartilage snap as someone punches my nose so hard that it breaks. Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction…

I do not know how to make fire by rubbing sticks together, and how helpful that skill would be if I am about to sleep cold, tired, and hungry in a cave. Yet, it’s what my ancestors did purely by chance thousands of years ago. They probably had an IQ of a newt, and yet, they could do it – so why can’t I?

I am fucking terrified of dogs, which they can sense because they always start barking and acting aggressive towards me. Maybe I will push my luck too far one day by trying to run – and failing to make that extra step – rather than trying to stand-up and face them. Cats, on the other hand, them I like. If I ever get one, I will name it Furball. Cats are nice because you can fuck off on a trip and they’ll still be there, alive, when you come back unlike needy domesticated dogs that need constant care. I will try feeding chocolate cookie crumbles at least one time to Furball; I have no clue whether s/he will like it.

I have never experienced what real starvation or hunger is – and I’m not talking about ritual fasting or a hunger strike here. To be lost in a desert where you have too much sunlight or to be locked up in a tiny cell where there’s too little – of both sunlight and hope. I want to know how it was possible to survive on a meal of watery porridge with a handful of rice grains twice a day. I have tasted pig intestines, jellyfish, chicken feet, pigeon, shark, stingray, crocodile, frog, water beetles…and yet I’ve never tasted snake blood, or foie gras, or caviar. How fucking hard can it be to make this possible?

I want to help out someone in a helpless situation and make life better for them. This could due to poverty or injury or mortal peril or whatever – and I will do it without regard for myself or expecting anything at all, even gratitude, in return.

I want to slit the throat of a chicken or a goat that I later eat, like Mark Zuckerberg does for all his meals. Many people will be confused with what I’m saying here; I only have “lmgtfy” to tell them. I want people to mistakenly think this is because I look up to him as some sort of idol. I will make the kill as quick and painless as it can be, but I also want to stick around and watch the animal in its death throes.

I just finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland. I think it is the cause for me writing this, right now. I want to have an equally engrossing story to tell. I arrived back ‘home’ yesterday – and I am already itching to book my next trip.

I want to bungee jump off Macau Tower – the world’s highest bungee jump – carrying my own digital camera in my hand, and then worry about a $150 piece of shit that tumbled and fell from my clasp from that high up. Before the adrenalin fully kicks in and I have a laughter fit. Then I want to experience the same rush again by skydiving. And then yet again by BASE jumping.

I want to break open a door by kicking it or barging at it with my shoulders scrunched.

I want to sketch out rough-looking drawings of what I’m thinking with charcoal sticks, much like they characters in horror movies do.

I want to live – even if for a few days – among a jungle tribe, not knowing their language and cursing the oppressive humidity in the forest, the bugs, and that vile soup that they drink ceremonially on Thursdays.

I met an American guy in Saigon – no, this is not a ‘Nam story – who climbed Mount Everest solo, carrying his own tent and equipment. You can be an armchair cynic and claim that climbing Mount Everest isn’t as difficult as it once used to be (they even have 3G connectivity at the summit these days, you know, just in case you wanted to check-in to Foursquare), and you’d be a twat for saying that. On the best of days and conditions, Everest would require cojones that would need a separate rucksack to carry them in. I want to do that, some day.

I want to see piranha fishes in real life. Sharks, well, everyone’s seen sharks on the Discovery Channel or Jaws. Piranhas…now that is more exotic.

I want to volunteer for a charity in any impoverished country in the world. I hope my effort, however tiny in the larger picture, will at least make a handful of lives better than what they were before.

I want to speak in French when having sex. (I don’t know where this one comes from. Probably from The Beach again, in a roundabout way. Ooh, I made a parenthetical comment!)

I have ‘killed’ fresh coconuts with an M16 assault rifle, pounded concrete blocks with a round from an M60 fully-automatic machine gun, had my hands burnt while shooting at targets with an AK-47. I want to know how much of a difference using a red-dot sight or an ACOG-sight instead of iron sights makes in accuracy when firing a rifle. I want to try it out with a new gun, like the Israeli TAR-21. I want to preferably do this in a training range where I can hear the thwack of bullets knocking down fake iron human cutout targets. I want to do this while listening to a gameplay recording of Duty Calls, a Call of Duty parody made by the developers of Bulletstorm.

I want to see with my own eyes someone who is dear to me nursed back to health in a hospital, as I spend days smelling the chlorinated floors, the disinfectants, and a heady mixture of despair, prayers and hope around me. I want to experience relief and unbridled happiness. And then I want to drop asleep out of exhaustion.

A professor holds the record for the Singaporean who has travelled to the most number of countries in the world. He told this story of a time when trying to cross the Serbian (?) border he got stopped by soldiers trying to make a quick buck who held him at gunpoint even though he had valid travel papers. I want to be in a situation like that – a muzzle pressing against the top of my mouth, teeth tasting the iron barrel, pants pissed in, life flashing in front of my eyes… I would love to walk away from that alive and live to tell the tale, but even otherwise I would prefer that to dropping dead of a heart attack in an office working in a 9-to-5 job.

I want to learn to play the piano. I want to write a Chinese character – just once, just one – with a brush, flawlessly.

I want to publish – against my better judgement – this text online. Unlike my other published text, I will care fuckall about explaining unfamiliar terms with links. Some readers will ‘merely’ protest the ‘graphic’ and ‘vulgar’ nature of this…those prudes. Some readers will be distressed and will question my sanity; I will reassure them by taking the Mexican sobriety test. Some day in the future, maybe, someone – maybe somebody really important, at some important stage in my life – will find this text and will form preconceived notions about me; that person will be extremely prejudiced against me or morbidly fascinated by me. I know it will be one of those two reactions because you have been reading this so far. That day I will learn from experience how it feels to squirm uncomfortably in that situation and how to / how not to try to get out of it.