Life Scripts

Seven days already into the new year. For seven days, or just a bit less, I haven't written anything down, except for odd bits and pieces at work, but that's another life: the life of a developer, or to be precise, an analyst-programmer. I don't know why that had to be two words stringed together by a dash or a slash, like there could no single word for it. I once said I was a developer and I was asked, "So you're in real estate?"

So I said almost apologetically, "Okay, I'm a programmer." I'd be tempted to say at times that I'm an analyst, but was afraid to be thought of as a shrink. No, there's no one suitable word for it. I like how they referred to that in German: Softwareentwickler. It sounded more important, a tad harshly guttural, but important nonetheless.

To work in IT nowadays, you are not just in IT; you have to be called, designated, defined, by what you actually do. Network Manager. Business Intelligence Analyst. DBA. PL/SQL Developer. Data Warehouse Analyst-Programmer. What a mouthful!

I wanted to live a simple life without fanfare but unwitting complications always attended to it. Nothing seemed to be according to script. Maybe we're really all fudging our scripts as we meander or streak through the badly-lit avenues, the vexing mazes, the cryptic puzzles and sudokus of life. As we make decisions, as we steer to a certain course, et voila, our script is written. Can we change the script perhaps? Yes, we can write our own scripts, puny, obtuse, grand, noble. Just don't ask me how, as each of us will have to find our own pathetic or sublime ways to accomplish that. It all depends.

Maybe you want to write your script as a crime fiction. You are the protagonist of course... in agony of course... with conflicts fleeting and racing left, right and centre, turning your head into confused spinning wheel. Which one to deal with first? Who is the killer here? Do I have the clues to trounce this major conflict and annihilate, terminate, exterminate this thing, event, person, whatever.

Maybe you want to write your script as a Mills and Boon romance. I can't help you there much but you know the score. It's about the girl in a quest for Mister Right otherwise known as Prince Charming or Darling Dickhead, the one to look after her and love her forever. Or it's about the boy in a similar quest for the girl of his dreams (too hopelessly romantic) or his thrills (too brutally honest). I refuse to dwell on male psychology here on account of various stages of deviousness, incoherence, crudity in the male psyche, but in the end after years of maturing, the male wants a quiet relationship. But then again that may be just my obtuse fantasy.

Maybe you want to write your new script as an Indiana Jones adventure, with the thrills on kills, spills over hills, Jills with skills, and deals with dills, and scheming minds to meet and outmaneouvre. Going to exotic places, tasting extreme experiences, keeping you feeling the adrenalin rushing through your entire body, constantly facing moments of mad excitement, living on the XXX edge, life without the boring bits. Coolness. Never on the same spot twice. Each day fraught with danger but always with the assurance of predestined, guaranteed victory.

8:20 PM. Wenty Station. Deserted. No sign of life could be seen from Platform 4. Except for a young girl in white singlet, black shorts, chunking her ball on the closed garage door of the Thai Spot Restaurant near the corner of Station Street. Waiting for the train to Blacktown in this deserted strip of wasteland, except for the sorry signs of civilisation with the train platforms, the graffitied wall of MoneyTax - Tax Agents - with the cartoony illustration of two girls. One with brown hair, green shirt, arms akimbo, sour face, looking askew to her side like Paris Hilton but without the inane grin. The other with fluoro blonde hair, blue shirt, toothy smile, both friendly arms waving.

8:26 PM. A dilatory family phone call from Adelaide: What time is Jan's flight on the 21st?

8:28 PM. A train zipped through the platform without stopping. On the left side of the wall, in giant graffiti letters which always take a while to decipher: Female Force. There were names on top: Louise, Bubs, Alex, Spice, Afera, Alicia. The graffiti art wasn't bad. I've seen worse, but I've also seen better, more obscurely spastic.

I almost forgot what I wanted to say in this forsaken place, devoid of life except for weekdays. I could hear the violent, incessant chirping of mynahs nesting high-rise in the 40-foot tree at the side of the house behind MoneyTax. Their noise broke the curse-like monotony of the place, as did the occasional cars gliding by the station. The twilight rain clouds were hanging ominously on the sky, too close to my face, threatening to spray mischief.

I could feel a deep, visceral loneliness. Weary. Depressed even. Perhaps not the ilk that drives one to Sebstmord but to madness. I have one consoling thought: the mad people of the world, the ones cached away as pariahs in mental asylums and loony farms are possibly the happiest in the world. They don't have anything in the world to worry about. They are pre-occupied in their own created bliss-blessed Elysian Fields.

8:42 PM. Right on time the train has come, punctual as Adelaide Metro. I left the forsaken place and its depression black hole, sucking my chakras with the desparation that leads man to even more punctual madness. The kind that makes old, lonely men to want eagerly to depart this life and prematurely join the ancestors. I understand in my own pathetic way the loneliness of the elderlies, especially those living alone, deserted, neglected, forgotten by friends and relatives. I'd rather be like the 72-year-old Christmas Tree man I spoke to, hula-hooping near the traffic lights of Melbourne, dreaming of building a church in North Korea.



7 January 2006