More Malaysian encounters...

So they trundled me off to the airport again, sat me on a plane and told me to be ready for another adventure...

This time to Kuala Lumpur, where I was to spend a week working in the Ulu Langat core warehouse, just on the outskirts of KL itself. Another dodgy taxi ride each day to and from work, up over the mountains. That was actually pretty cool; I was expecting--and hoping--to see monkeys scampering amongst the trees and swinging on vines, with the city as an interesting backdrop, but no, that didn't happen. I did see an awful lot of rain though. Sheer, unrelenting rain.

Put your head in the kitchen sink and turn the tap on full. That's what it was like. Make sure the water is warm, too. How these mad taxi drivers manage to see where they're going, I've got no idea. All the motorcyclists congregate under bridges or wherever they can find shelter during these downpours and hope for the rain to stop (good luck to them). Meanwhile, my taxi zipped by, the driver chattering away and me, confused and trying not to look out the window, forcing myself not to clench the seat or fret over the fact that the seat belt didn't work....

And humidity... urgh. I'm hoping I can set up a project to do research in Antarctica next time. I've had enough of the tropics.

I came home a few inches shorter, which is a problem because I really can't afford to spare any inches. But it was so, so humid that every time I stepped outside I just started melting. Me dribbled off me in torrents. I just didn't have enough undies to cope.

And the hotel? Oh boy, what a luxury resort that was..... Next time (if there has to be a next time) I think I'll take my tent and pitch it in the jungle. I'd certainly prefer that over a 3-star hotel that is just pretending and is really only a half star - perhaps a black hole is more accurate, judging by the number of room service meals that went missing.

(to tell the truth, I enjoyed the jungles of PNG much more than the human wilds of KL)

One good thing on this adventure was the discovery of a second hand bookshop directly across the road from my hotel. Joy! And the best thing? There was a huge sci-fi/horror/fantasy section!!!! Happy-happy-joy-joy. Books for 5 ringits, roughly $1.70 Australian.

Yes, I did fill up my suitcase at the expense of clothes. Who needs clothes anyway? Tarzan seemed to get by pretty well without them. Okay, sure, I'm a bit more rounded than he is, and a little whiter, but that's just more reason why I should strip down and go live in a tent in the tropical jungles.

I could take my suitcase full of books...

Why writing horror isn't fun...

My Malaysian taxi driver is starting to freak me out.

I've spent 4 days in his company now, with Mr. K--g picking me up in the morning from the hotel and dropping me off at the S---l offices, then doing the opposite at the end of the day. Which is all good. He's promt, reliable and the fare never changes.

Excellent.

But then yesterday, on the ride home, I was staring out the window at this wacky world in which I've found myself when, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. K--g's hand moving towards the centre console. I think it was the way it was moving that caught my attention. So I kept watching, pretending I wasn't. Slowly, he picked up a pen, hid it in his hand and then just as slowly moved is hand back to the steering wheel.

Hmm, said I.

Mr. K--g then swaped the pen to his other hand, doing it like he was trying to hide doing it. Then he droped his arm to his side and hid the pen under his outside leg.

All of which I found quite intriguing...

The ride went on. Only, every now and then, I could see him gripping the pen like he might a knife. Lifting his hand slowly, like he was getting ready. Every time I looked across, he hid the pen under his leg again.

Okay, not so cool now; by this stage, my paranoia had woken up and was bitching about being away from home, taken to a place where I had no idea how anything worked, what people were saying or what I was eating...

I wanted my wifey.

I've seen Hostel, I know what happens to foreigners; I'm going to end up in a huge warehoue in the slums somewhere with Stinking Stan paying to have his way with me...

See? It's just not fun being a horror writer. Why couldn't I write romantic stories?? Maybe then Mr. K--g and I would develop an illicit love affair, only for me to break his heart when I returned to Australia...

Damn this muse of mine.....

Lost in Translation

Well, I'm in Miri, in a hotel room listening the the near-monsoonal rain...

More fieldwork, more travel, more time away from my family (and house!), which I'm not too fond about, but hey, at least I'm getting paid to see another country.

This place is wild; the taxi drivers become your best friend--especially when they find out you will be needing a taxi to and from work every day for 10 days!--but I'm pretty sure they were all formula one drivers in their previous lives. Hell, we've topped 140km/h so many times that it's no longer exhilerating. And those road markings? Those lines indicating the lanes? Nah, that's just grafitti; you don't have to pay attention to those... And how much space do you really need when you're overtaking? So long as you don't hit another car, a few centimeters will do it, right? A miss is a miss; it's like winning by 20 points or winning by 1. Either way, you still win.

And it's muggy, so humid that I'm rapidly running out of undies.

Was sitting in the hotel bar just after dinner (now there was a feed!! Aint gonna need to eat for a good 3 or 4 days now), reading one of the local papers, and I came across a couple of things that caught my attention....

The Malaysian government was 'deeply troubled by the growth of "irresponsible" alternative media.' For examples, blogs :) The govt will be taking legal action against bloggers who flagrantly belittle Islam or the Yang de-Pertuan Agong. They want to see blogs used as a means of obtaining accurate information, a reference point for honest opinions. Crap, that's me out.

There are no laws to restrict the number of passengers in private vehicles here in Malaysia. Apparently, it's not easy to limit the number of passengers, although one new proposal is for those sitting in the back to have to wear seatbelts......... Go figure.

For a mere RM17 (about $7 or $8 Aussie dollars), you can buy a 'bona fide' medical chit (a doctor's certificate), complete with a stamp from a government hospital. The undated stamps carry all different doctors' names. The chits comes from an unknown syndicate that has been running for about 6 months, but you have to be in the know to get one.

Machines (eg, the washing machine) were causing women to become obese, especially once they passed 40 (the women, that is, not the machines)...

And on the topic of women, apparently more of them are becoming involved in dadah trafficking. Nope, dadah nothing like doodoo; it's actually a heck of a lot more serious. Had to look it up after reading that article.

In Rantau Panjang, the State Anti-Smuggling Unit foiled an attempt to smuggle 90 sacks of cockle spat into Thailand. The monetary value of these sacks was RM72,000 (about $24,000 Aussie dollars). What the heck's 'cockle spat?' I know what a cockle is, and it's pretty tasty, but a cockle spat sure doesn't sound appealing...

About this stage through the paper, I was feeling kinda ignorant, so I went and got me another beer. That always helps to understand things a little better, I've found. Hopefully, the Tiger beer would go well with the Long Island Ice Tea I'd had at dinner.

So thus freshly whetted, I continued...

Next article: Immigration in a spot over two 'princesses.' Seems two young ladies, claiming to be princesses from the ancient Sunda empire, were detained at the 'buffer zone' between Malaysia and Brunei. They were carrying passports issued by the Sunda Democratic Empire, but unfortunately for them, Sunda isn't recognised by Malaysia. Immigration has no idea of the young ladies' status, and were even confused over how to go about deporting them, as they were found in this buffer zone. The poor lasses; last heard, they were still being detained, 14 days later...

The last article I read was by journalist Rehman Rashid, who said he was given some transformative advice when he started out in the business 25 years ago, advice that could be summed up 'in a single earthly colloquialism: Lu siapa?'

Rashid goes on to say; "Get out of the office, out of the house, out of the comfort zone and out to where real people lived real lives in the real world. Get them talking and listen to them, taking notes."

Seems like pretty good advice.

The Call of the Hammer...

Well, it's been a wild time of late - brought a house and am off to Malaysia on Monday for fieldwork...

Woosh!

Did you see that? No? That was me, wizzing past - at least that's how it's felt of late.

Buying a house is an exciting experience. It's also stressful, mad, chaotic, and involved! Especially when the settlement is only 6 weeks! And even more especially when your - well, no, I'd best not start complaining here about who didn't do what they were paid to do... Let's just say, my phone bill was in the hundreds, my work output dropped dramatically, and scotch never tasted so good....

Our brand-spanking new house from the paddock...

But it all worked out in the end (only just!), and now we have a house. A you beaut, brand new, modern as heck house, 4 bedrooms and a double garage. Got just under 4 acres, too, of flat green land. The horses are loving it ('cept they're getting a bit, er, large...). My wife is loving it (she had the biggest smile upon her beautiful face). I'm loving it too.

I'm even loving the hour and a half+ ride to work and home again each day (no, seriously, I am, hear me out), cos I sit on the train with my headphones on, listening to Marilyn Manson, Dimmu Borgir, Rob Zombie, Rammstein, Slip Knot, Cradle of Filth, etc, and write.

And it's been bloody brilliant. I've done so much work on my novel this past week, it's such a great feeling. The effort is so focused; I can't go anywhere, can't really do much else- I feel like my writing has been solid, and I feel like I'm really getting somewhere.

And now, not 2 weeks after we moved, I have to head off to Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur and then Miri) for 2 weeks fieldwork. Collecting rock samples from core sheds this time, so no hiking through jungles for me (which is good, and bad, but mostly good). Instead, the company I'm working for are putting me up at a 5-star spa and resort....

Sigh... It's going to be such hard work :)

However shall I cope?

The Gruesome and the Ghost

Well, just watched Hostel - and I've got Saw II recorded ready to go, too...

I thought, to hell with it, I'll sit down and bear the gruesome and see what the hype is, or was, all about.

I'm not sure I worked it out. Hostel was okay but certainly not one of the most gruesome flicks I've ever seen, nor one of the best storylines, either. But it did make me think about things...

Hostel, Saw (and its sequels), Wolf Creek, The Hills Have Eyes - all of these flicks use 'loud' horror to express their story, and these movies are raking in the money at the cinemas. People love this shit.

Back when I was a teenager (God, so long ago now), I used to love this shit too; loved watching the most violent, disgusting flicks I could find. The more blood spilled the better. But now, I can barely watch when they show the blade slipping into the calf and slicing... Perhaps it's because I'm older and I value life more.

There are two quite dramatically different schools of horror; loud and quiet (there might very well be more, but these are my thoughts so if I say two, then two shall it be). Loud evokes feelings of disgust, while quiet causes shivers and feelings of fear, or fright, without actually showing anything (or everything).

I'm more a man of the quiet school. To me, the things that you don't see, or perhaps only glimpse from the corner of your eye, are the things that scare me best. Okay, sure, your loving next-door neighbour with the fetish for leather aprons, clamps, rusty blunt scalpels and hooks, and who knows where you leave your spare back door key, is pretty damn frightening, but that's different. It's a different kind of horror.

And I'm not sure I can explain why, clearly.

One is a fear of what might be done to you; the violation of your body, your sacred temple. It's the thought of that loon peeling off a steak of flesh while you thrash and scream, helpless to do otherwise. It's the terror of such pain, of such deformity. And in our most fucked up world, well, this type of thing is horrifying because it happens! Wolf Creek was based - perhaps loosely - on real events. The simple fact of the matter is that people torture people for no reason. And we, the sick voyers that we are, wanna watch. We get off on it.

But where is the fun in that? That shit happens in our world, and I choose to watch horror to escape from reality. Watching horror-snuff flicks just reminds me of what humans really are capable of. It does nothing to make me feel better about things. Sure, I might go, well struth mate, I'm sure as heck glad I'm not that poor unfortunate bastard, but at the end of the day, when I turn off the DVD, I'm more depressed than when I started watching because now I know so much more about humans. It's frightening what we can do...

Quiet horror, on the other hand, doesn't show you these extremes. It lets your mind play games with you. You're never quite sure what could happen. There could be torture, they may be things in the dark that are after you, or there might be nothing more than just your imagination and upbringing causing you strife. It's psychological. And it's spooky because it's more removed from reality than that torturous prick next door. Spooky in a different way, and certainly more enjoyable - for me, at least.

That's they key to the village; I like quiet horror because I find it more enjoyable than loud horror. You have to take that leap of faith and believe in the story, then the scares come. Once the flick finishes, you go on back to your real life and go, phew, what a rush. But you feel safe in your world 'cos you know there aren't any monsters, there are no ghosts.

You don't have to worry about the creaking floorboard in the middle of the night...