This time

I blink and 3 months have gone by. I miss many things but mostly, I miss me.

On leave yesterday, I wandered off to Mandai Zoo. And it struck me at the gates – that not unlike the animals, I was taking shelter from human beings! Hunters, persecutors and the like. If your days are more or less made up of people chasing you around in a mad rush to get things done, relaxing amongst gibbons and otters is a welcome break.

***

It’s easy to feel sorry for animals supposedly in captivity. But really, on which side does the enclosure lie? If you look hard enough at the face of a lioness you might catch her lips curling upwards into a knowing smirk. There’s an inside joke going on, and it’s on you.

***

Anthem on the bus ride home:

Oh, cos this time is yours and mine
Oh hear the city sounds, see the lonely crowds
This scene is you and me
Oh in the lazy sun, we’re the only ones

When will I see open blue Friday skies once more?

Toto is not from Africa...

I have decided to swear off swearing and... Milo peng.

You should only cuss when the situation's dour enough to colour. And you must must must do it with conviction. Heavy words cannot be so lightly thrown.

Milo peng. Bless the man who decided to introduce ice chunks into Milo (he was probably Indian). Sadly, Milo, Teh and other near-viscous, highly sweetened concoctions were meant to be consumed hot for a reason - they're just too rich to be gulped down like that. Ice makes it easy to down cup after cup. I have been drinking too much over the past year. Like a friend said, with a Milo Dinosaur, I might as well be shooting sugar into my veins, with a little Milo powder dabbed onto my tongue for taste.

"Creative" people are this, they are that.

“You are either creative… or you are not.”

That's shit. Why would anyone see creativeness in such absolute terms?

Everyone can be creative. When you decided to have American Waffles with kaya because strawberry and whipped cream just didn't cut it, you were being creative.

Creativity is exercised in every field. If 70% of the Earth’s surface is made up of water, the rest is made up of ideas, with the occasional wonder.

There are the remarkable advancements in medicine, science and technology. How did satellite television come about? Or for that matter, television? How amazing are painkillers? How blindingly simple and brilliant is the concept of an overhead bridge? How does quattro help Audi automobiles stick to the road like glue and cut through the wind like a hot knife through butter? There can be no Vorsprung durch Technik without creative thought.

You do not have to look far to find ingenuity. Sit down at the kopitiam and marvel at the shorthand they use for drinks: Teh C, Teh siu dai, Teh O, Teh O Kosong, pa kiu etc. Then when your Teh peng arrives, marvel at the straw (!) and the fact that ice cubes were not native to a glass of teh, until someone’s stroke of genius. Hell, someone else took that further with frozen teh cubes, so your drink never gets diluted!

Squalid little advertising people, designers and sometimes writers like to think they own the terms “creative” and “creative industry”. That’s shit. Why do these terms exist anyway? Is there some kind of checklist to determine if someone is creative or not? There must be, because it would explain why they all try so hard to look the part.

I don’t have to list the hallmarks of “creative people”; you would know. You’d recognise them a mile away, and therein lies the fallacy of all this “creative people” nonsense: there exists a mould, and they’re all content to fit in, which runs counter to everything original thinking stands for.

Horlicks

I saunter into the kopitiam and become the first person in 20 years to order a Horlicks. A regular, unhip hot Horlicks.

The youngish coffeeshop assistant from China has not heard of Horlicks, naturally. The old dude at the counter who makes the drinks (what do you call him?) invokes the inventory list and notes that the last record of Horlicks stock sits on a yellowed page dated January 1986. That particular tin was already 6 months past its expiry date when it was last opened in 1987. If you can’t fathom how long ago that is, it is the same year an English movie called Short Circuit (starring Steve Guttenberg, the actor who looks like Lee Hsien Loong) was released.

He procures the tin from a special place where no expendables are housed. It has long transcended its status as an expendable item and is now a relic, a memento, and a reminder of a time past. He pries it open half-hoping to see fragments of memory but all he gets is crusty, unrecognizable Horlicks.

Horlicks chunks are heaped into the glass by way of a spoon-spade hybrid. Boiling water gives it life. It returns to form. It's magic. He sheds a nostalgic tear and it ends up somewhere in the mix too.

For 90 cents, I get a serving of history. Too easy. I decide to swing by the ice cream shop in Shaw Towers for Horlicks ice cream. Yes Horlicks ice cream.

Overkill, you say. But what's really important to note here is how people have not let the Horlicks legacy wither. Expired Horlicks is not forgotten but made into ice cream. And with the cryogenic treatment, its lifespan is extended indefinitely.