shakelooseteeth

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-12-01T23:08:00

2006-01-30T11:13:40Z

i smoke only at night, or when it's dark. because only then will it feel right. i smoke when i am alone, i smoke when i am lonely.
i like watching people smoke. i like to be watched when i smoke. there is alot you can tell about someone just by observing how he walks, how he sits, how he fiddles with his hair, how he looks away when he smiles, how his fingers trace the contours, across the expanse of his knee cap as he tries to make polite conversation with a stranger. Everything about a person is laid bare in how he lights his cigarette. You cannot tell anythng about a person by how he kisses the girl that he loves. you cannot tell anything at all

I always feel like i'm being watched and i like to put up a good show. in that aspect i am an actor. but i cannot act. i have auditioned for a play once and i did horribly. the character was too concise and too real for me to identify with. there was nothing in those lines that i could hold on to.
it was like trying to inhale someone else's cigarette smoke. if i was a person you could place within your fingers, to trace
my outline would be akeen to watching me breath under water
with an inflated balloon. A lung-full of smoke and a lung full of smoke
and a lung-full of smoke and a lung full of smoke.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-30T19:08:00

2006-01-30T11:10:17Z

A pair of my mother's old shoes rest in the centre of my living room, a pair of violet heels that she used to wear on stage when she sang profesionally in Japan. I placed them there when I came home drunk a few months ago, i think. I remember waking up to find them sitting in the middle of the living room, 2 odd little things that seem to have crawled out of my childhood and onto my living room floor. They sit there and they challenge me with their inexplicable presence. I don't know why I never removed them from where they stood. Perhaps it is out of pride, perhaps I am afraid that removing them would kickstart a chain of events that would ruin the routine that bleeds each of my days into the next, displacing me from where i'm comfortable, content, happy, at bliss.
At times, usually on Sundays, I would feel like a seaman bailing water with a sieve. A dissonant E rings from my untunned guitar. I gaze absently at her heels like i have done so, so many times before.

The name my parents gave me was Wang Yi. I gave myself an english name when i was in secondary school. I didn't change my name deliberately, the name just rolled out of my mouth on the first day of school.
"hello everybody, my name is Daniel Peh" as if i've always been a Daniel Peh, as if since the day I was born, Mr and Mrs Peh decided that their second son has the face of a Daniel Peh, as if I was always destined to be a Daniel Peh. I don't know where I pulled that name out of, actually, it more or less jumped out of my throat on its own accord. So it was from that moment that i became Daniel Peh, and a very good liar.
My earliest memory involves a yellow butterfly. I must have been in kindergarden or perhaps nursery school when I caught one for the first time. My seond earliest memory invlolves ants, a line of ants, and how I licked them off the balcony window in twos and threes. If you ask me, ants taste kind of like dust, and kind of like spit. My third earliest memory involves a girl. A pretty girl, a Eurasian girl with a china doll haircut and black hair framing a set of strikingly blue eyes that gave you the impression that she was nothing short of magical. We were four I think and she kissed me on the cheek during a church service ( a requirement of the school at that time ). I told myself that she was going to be my wife one day. I cannot remember her name, which is only natural because I cannot remember the names of any of friends from the nursery or the kindergarden. When i think back on them on days like this, they resemble ghosts more than children. A vague impression of a pink pinafore , of me dressed as a lion in a school play and dust from the yellow butterfly that i caught in my lunchbox, wings soaked in sardine sauce. With its belly upturned, i could see the fur of its segmented body sway gently in the breeze of a sunny Wednesday morning, me in my pink checked uniform, squinting at the butterfly dust that covered my hand, yellow like jaundice and sunflowers.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-29T00:46:00

2005-04-02T16:49:40Z

the angrier she got the harder she pushed the car. the needle on the speedometer climbed steadily and I could feel my head being pushed into my seat's head rest. I don't recall ever going that fast in a car before and I was, as a matter of fact really fucking scared. Scared that I'd die right there, scared that the car would flip and both of us would tumble into a heap of metal, loose flesh and splintered bones, scared that she'd plow us into a lamp post or a tree or a jaywalker or another car filled with drunken NUS boys. So I just held onto my knee and tried to ride it out. I don't recall ever seeing her so angry before. I remember my Dad yelling at me when I about 6 for taking a piss in the living room. I remember the look on his face the way his words would run into my eardrums, his words indicipherable due to the volume and the velocity at which they were spewed at me. I was quite scared then. But compared to that , I am more scared now. At least with my father, the anger was something that I could fanthom. He was angry and hence he yelled. The equation isn't pretty but but it is actually quite simple. it was something I could understand. This situation however, is much different. Here we are in her mother's bright red Pergeot convertible careening down ECP obcenely early in the morning. The top was up, so i couldn't hear what must have been the sound of the morning air whistling past the sides of the car. What i could hear however, was the sound of her heavy breathing. her face looked normal enough, no redness to speak of even her earlobes remained their usual porcelain colour. her breathing on the other hand was what scared me the most. It would rise and it would get louder and i could hear that she was only breathing through her nose. the rhythm was erratic and so was the volume and the velocity at which it was inhaled and exhaled. If i covered my ears and ignored the scenery outside being pulled into long patches of light, it would look like we were having a normal everyday drive along the express way. which, ofcourse wasn't the case at all. I think i actually did try to cover my ears. don't recall her batting an eyelid though. actually, i don't recall her blinking at all either. Her breathing was almost demonic, in out in out in out, in stark contrast to the rest of her body, like those MRT guide lines that look harmless, all the while containing something underneath that that could kill you in an instant. her lips were relaxed, not pressed into a thin bloodless line, her knuckles betrayed no sign of tension and her eyes were neither glazed over nor did they seem to be there, only her nostrils flared alittle with each intake of breath. The entire experience wasn't a good one to say the least. upon closer inspection she had an unsettling air of indifference about her eyes that reminded me of the statistical death charts published in newspapers after a natural calamity. I couldn't tell if she was deliberately trying to scare me or if she really wasn't aware of how fast we were going. All the while the music player was playing songs off a radio station. A female deejay was talking to a late night caller about something or another I can't recall. What I do remember was how the Deejay's acquired western accent clashed almost obscenely with the caller's accent, the pairing was too incongrous and unreal, almost like farce, or a badly intonated cross talk between two chickens. one being more prententious than the other. it made the ordeal this much more unbearable.

as suddenly as she began to speed up, she began to slow down (just when my neck was starting to really hurt from the force needed to try to force it off the headrest. ) When the car finally came to a stand still we were on a road shoulder on a flyover, overlooking the only river on this island. She quietly opened the door and walked toward the railing. arms on the railing forhead a third over the water she let her head rest on her forearms and leaned against the railing. her long black hair covered her face, not that i could see it with her back to me. My left hand was on the seat belt and my right hand was on my knee unlike her i betrayed all the signs of being tense. my armpits were sweaty and my shirt clung to my back. my underwear was quite soaked and my knees lost quite a bit of feeling. I stared at her back through her side of the car, the outline of the unclosed car door frame framed her within it's metal border. I couldn't tell if she was crying. Her hair was being blown to the left by the wind and i just continued watching her. The deejay put one of britney spears' older singles on and i wondered what to do with this beautiful, angry, sad, scary lady friend of mine. I never knowhow to handle this sort of matters and I usually hold my tongue not due to thoughtfullness or tact but out of sheer cluelessness.

a few taxis passed behind us while a shooting star or two passed above us. I remained in my seat rubbing my left eyelid with my right palm listening to hit me baby one more time behind the noise of the car engine and the occasional gust of wind.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-28T04:58:00

2005-02-13T20:32:43Z

i remember, this one time when i was a little younger than i am now. it was a normal evening. the first time i smoked half a packet of ciggarettes at a go but other than that it was quite a normal obscenely late evening.

ciggarettes are like jossticks, which in turn, are like dead grandparents burning in a crematorium. one moment they are, and the next, they are not. it isn't the same as crushing a can of coke or smashing a vase onto the floor. to burn something is to relinquish it to the realm of not. the moment they burn they start disappearing, it's like you go up to the one in charge in the world of non existance and you go, hey, here's my ciggarette, here's my grandfather. people don't die and pieces of paper don't burn out, they disappear, entirely, wholesomely, completely.

a friend and i shared that pack of ciggarettes. which is why i only had half. we sat on a railing with our feet dangling above a storm drain. once in a while a car would pass us and once in a while we would feel like calling it a day. but we continued swinging our feet and smoking our ciggarettes and talking about the absurdity of sentient being despite all that. heartfelt, but pointless existantial musings, the only indication of time being the speed in which our ciggarettes burned out. time didn't stand still. it shuffled its way forward in it's hobbling gait. the wind blew like it always does and the orange glow of the street lights showed me how awkward i looked with a ciggarette between my fingers.

when you break something into pieces, a vase, a guitar, or a heart for example, the object remains, albeit in a form which is broken and disassembled but at the end of the day you can still tell somebody, hey here's my broken guitar, hey, here's my broken heart. to have something dissapear is to leave a gapping hole in where it should have been and like any newtonian vacuum it draws everything in and it consumes it.
I have seen people who start to fade away while they are still alive, like black holes they draw everything in. gravity is despair and the only fact that keeps us from drowning is the fact that we indeed are islands. emotionally we contain ourselves with only apparent indication of connection. it prevents us form being dragged and pulled under by somebody else who is drowning. i sit infront of the television watching the news, shake my head and go tsk tsk tsk.

it feels good to have someone sitting next to me. to witness the smoke coming out of my nostrils, to affirm me that it's blue and yes it is indeed very beautiful how it climbs up in a fragile plume before being obliterated by the wind. yes it is very beautiful and yes i am a very special person to think so highly of a fucking plume of smoke. it feels good to have someone to perform to, an audience to have me know that, it's okay this is not who i really am, i am merely an actor, playing a role and playing it fucking well. he is the one who gives me the loudest applause and i would almost call him my best friend. without him, the calculated way in which i cross my legs ( ankle on other knee, slightly bored, but not uninterested, relaxed, disarming with a shade of retractiveness ) or the way in which i articulate my words with my hands ( in a way that appears charming but not in an off putting way ) will be lost to the one or two people who pass by in their 100 km/h taxi cabs.

he told me it was late and patted me on my shoulder. before he closed the door of his taxi he told me that i am a beautiful person and that he always enjoyed these long conversations with me. the taxi went off and air rushed in to fill the space where it was. there was a single star in the sky and the moon had long set. the clouds went on by, conceited, uncaring and beautiful.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-27T23:55:00

2004-11-24T16:04:18Z

I had a dream this morning. In the dream I was fishing with a few friends. Our nylon fishing lines were nylon guitar strings and when each one of us cast our lines into the sea, our reels produced a distinctive musical note. Each one of us produced a note each time we cast. Bhuddi made an E note, Thike made a B, Johan made an Eflat, this girl without a face made an A, this other girl with extremely large breasts made another B and mine sang a solid Fsharp.

We would cast and recast our lines in our own time such that when one or few notes are singing, one or few would be dying or beginning. It sounded like the tides coming and going, it even sounded like rain.

Once in a while we would all coincidentally cast at the same time, we would form a chord and we would laugh.

We caught a few fish, I recall, though I cannot remember what species they were. We cooked the fish in a pit without descaling or gutting them, we then proceeded to dance. In gentle concentric circles around the pit. like paper blown about in the wind, like how I felt yesterday ,that image stuck in my head. I realised I was dreaming and woke myself up.

How do you describe a home that houses nothing. The only thing you can contend with are the spaces between objects. Vacancy is a very terrible thing when living alone and if I had a clock, it would most probably be all that I can hear in this place. I am separated and disassembled and this is my home, filled with quiet and light, so bright in here that it's almost surreal. The sun blasts everything into white space making it that much harder to breath. Everything looks so beautiful yet why am I ice cold ? The door opens and I hear the sickeningly familiar sound of my mother's slippers shuffling across the corridoor. It's odd, it's been only seven days since she left and already I start forgetting what she looked like. They only thing I remember about her are the sound of her slippers, her tatooed eyebrows and her beautiful beautiful voice.

And I woke up for real. It is night. four minutes till tomorrow. Before crying myself back to sleep I was remembering my mother, lifting up her shirt and pulling down the waist of her pants just low enough to see the three surgical scars from the C section. I was a little boy and that was the first time I grasped the fact that I came from inside this woman.

I didn't know this, but a black butterfly fluttered past the window sill just before midnight. By then I was already asleep and dreaming once more.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-26T00:52:00

2004-11-23T12:51:20Z

In a world of 3 dimentions I feel like I only have two. It is midnight and I feel like a piece of paper being blown about in the wind, in gentle concentric circles.

I cannot imagine living any closer to the ground than this. The breeze is more comfortable up here. 52 floors. Not too high where the noise from the garden can be heard. Not too low where the Mynnas can shit all over your balconey. 52. Just nice.

The word apparition has a nice ring to it. much better than ghost, or spectre or spirit.
I feel quite sad. Like a comfortable but empty chair, facing another comfortable but empty chair, in a room full of comfortable, but empty chairs. My mouth tastes like ciggarettes and dead hair ..ciggarettes and dead hair. That's such a strange expression.

shakelooseteeth @ 2015-11-25T06:10:00

2004-11-23T12:44:40Z

Today is Wednesday. I feel like I'm waiting for something to happen. Or perhaps someone. Maybe I am waiting for someone to come on by to tell me where to go. My mother just died. She was a good and dutiful mother and she died at the solemn age of 66. The trees outside my window are not moving. nothing seems to be moving. My guitars lean on each other like old women sitting at a coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon like today, whispering to each other, rusted broken and out of tune. There is a bitterness in the air and I'm not certain if it's my fault. The sun will set soon. It bathes everything in here with a certain richness that can only amplify the quiet.

I have 6 guitars. I begin tunning one of them, intending to only tune that one
A light November breeze blows through the open door, carrying the smell of carbon monoxide and a comfortable engine noise.