Chapter 27

Why long for people unattainable, I have wondered.

Should I believe that the sea has a fish for everyone and that beauty indeed lies in eyes or ears or smell or touch of the beholder?

When I was on Olanzapine, which gave me a voracious appetite, I gained more than 20 kilograms in just the first three months. My belly protruded so much so that those in my circles pressured me to exercise more than what I did back then.

Strangely enough, a scrawny close gay friend aged 26 told me he now found me physically and homosexually attractive and would have asked me to have gay sex with him if not for the fact that I was his friend before I was a potential homosexual lover.

"I am a rare case, is my guess," he confided in me. "I like buff gay men with large tummies, especially older men past the age of 50."

I pointed out to him that he was God's blessing for all those who are well past their prime - by creating someone like him who is homosexually attracted to a minority of elderly, obese, and therefore supposedly 'ugly' gay men. I told him to perceive himself as much blessed as anyone could be because he was a unique gay man created for a niche gay market which is older, fat gay men.

Chapter 26

Are strangers just a beauty that we come across and then lose to the crowd, never to see again? What a melancholic thought. A poignant feeling.

Why do we long to be with them? Do humans been sociable account for this wanting to hang out with them, or taking a notch higher, long to be in romantic love with them and even have sex with them? Why not go further with notions of marrying them and considering having children with them?

But what if, after we are settled with them, we develop a crush on other people, and want them all to our self? Is this how the idea of a harem in heaven was born to the Islamic ideology?

A "lonely hearts" column I read in a British newspaper said the mindset of people like me may be that "mind sluts" like me could be striving to bring closure to unattainable crushes we had in childhood. I somewhat agree with that: if God allowed, I would like Him to let me have my own harem in heaven.

But there's a glitch in the system: not all of them would fancy me. If they did, we could have been together in our Earthly life itself. So the only thing I could ask God is to create men who physically resemble the men I liked on Earth and make them fall in love with me.

However, herein lies another problem: would I feel comfortable lusting after a man who is not lusting after me through his own choice? Or is there a choice at all? Do people get attracted to one another due to a coercion by Nature for them to feel that way? If so, does it matter if there is the hand of God making us fall in love with the people we do? And would I feel happy being in love and lust with virgin lads in heaven who only resemble the Earthly men I liked only in their outer shelf?

I guess then I should not be shocked that in the movie "Eyes Wide Shut" Nicole Kidman's character, who is married to Tom Cruise's character, confided to him that there was a time she became so enamored with another man that she actually thought she was capable of abandoning her husband by throwing all caution to the wind and going after that new man - whatever risks that came with her decision.

Is our slutty mind capable of abandoning our children we have through our marriage just for the sake of pursuing a crush? Is crush a form of love? Is romance too a form of love? What is love exactly? And what about the supposedly non-sexual affection?

Chapter 25

How many selves does a person have? I guess that's a redundant question as far as Siddhartha Gautama is concerned in terms of how his Buddhist philosophy defines the word 'self'.

Buddhism teaches us there is no 'self' in the traditional way the word is meant. Putting aside all intellectual gymnastics with the word 'self', I have wondered how to explain the existence of two states in my mind that I would like to call 'selves' without seeking its meaning in terms of the generally accepted linguistics and semiotics.

Why I have a concern here is because I have a mind that I can control sometimes but not all the time. When someone treats me unkindly, the bitter aftertaste remains for a few hours unless I look at my mind through the technique of stepping outside of myself and looking at myself as if it was another self, another human being, a living object that is separate from myself. My mind then calms down.

But if I look at the world while involved and consumed by my feelings and emotions, all sorts of stress and depression linger, the effects taking over my mind, and me becoming a self who is feeling dejected and depressed because I let the emotions overwhelm me and become me.

I guess I should be glad that I am able to get my mind to switch between these two states which makes me able to survive without having a scary feeling that I might not be able to function as an individual human being without psychiatric medication.

Just a thought: deliberately or not I use the present tense when referring to people and other organisms such as I have here referred to in the case of Siddhartha the Buddha. From a traditional point of view he may not be walking on Earth now but I believe he is now one with the universe.

My belief that this universe is a conscious (in its unique sort of way and not in the way we sentient beings perceive) singular system with interconnected parts makes me feel that there is only one single larger 'self' - the universe itself - and on this occasion I don't refer to the 'self' as a state of mind. While language has enabled miracles among humans, due to these hiccups, I still find language something that is difficult to employ because of all the sorts of meanings words can represent depending on their use in a particular context.

As a pantheist like Siddhartha, I feel a certain comfort that when I die a bodily death, I as the universe will go on forever. But my experience may be different. I may engage in loving myself but not looking forward to sex because ultimately I feel weird with the concept of having sex with myself if there indeed exist ways to do that after I become one with the universe. Yet still this idea of me being the universe gives a certain kind of happy thought and spiritual pleasure.

Chapter 24

I love photography. Both color and black and white. Color is a distraction according to a close friend and I guess he is right because my mind goes haywire when I try to make sense of pictures with too much color in them. Black and white helps me to focus on the subject. But I agree that vivid colors also provide a rich eyeful of objects that are framed within the composition.

I had a Canon Powershot which I used to carry with me wherever I go even if I sometimes don’t take pictures or shoot videos whenever I just want to observe the things with my naked eye and enjoy the moment. This is why I don’t regret not capturing on film one of the most visually appealing sunsets I have ever seen on Earth.

I had a free account on Yahoo!’s Flickr which allowed for posting up to 1,000 photographs for free. I still have half of my account unused. 

As much as I liked the vagaries of Nature, I also loved the ugly urban landscapes because they had a certain inexplicable beauty to them. There can be no beauty if there is no ugliness to contrast with it. A tired old cliché I agree that Nature exists in opposites. The yin and yang and all that. I would photograph bulldozers crushing concrete to construct new buildings or homes in their place. I would shoot men gutting fish on their dhows. I would snap pictures of women swinging on makeshift swings made from timber and coir. The idyllic island life. The ‘jazeera’ as Arabs like to call that lifestyle and culture.

I found these scenes pleasant to my eye but I wasn’t expecting other people to like my photos whether they were in color or black and white.

“You have a good eye for composition. Also, love your take on light and shadow, not to mention the richness of color that you put emphasis on,” a photojournalist friend once told me. Although I am humble at least most of the time, I felt proud of myself when he said that to me because he had won awards for his photography works. I was just a struggling amateur although in reality I had no dreams of going professional at any time in my life. I was happy being a content creator – the written word was my life and the whole point of my existence. It’s not that I have any inborn talent; it’s just that I love words and I love writing. Weaving words, that’s what a graphics designer friend called his works of English poetry. Even on the busiest of days, I made sure that I read at least 25 pages of any book that I was reading so that I can ensure that I finish a book within at least two weeks so that I can go on to read another book, whether fiction or non-fiction.

I also used my camera to shoot short videos for TikTok and YouTube. I used Instagram only for photographs that I didn’t mind people viewing in low resolution but I didn’t consider it worth the effort to upload videos to my Instagram. TikTok did the job. Twelve countries had banned the service but the aspiring superpower China was here to stay, whether the West liked it or not. So TikTok was here to stay. And then there was Flickr where I can post my high-resolution photos. The day I run out of my free space on that platform, I will start posting on my blog on Blogger and if ever there comes a time when Google decides to limit free space on Blogger I will buy space from a cheap web hosting service.

The most “views” I got for my YouTube channel is a 10-minute video of police catching a kid on the street – a billy goat. That was some years ago. Now a video I posted where I happened to catch two of my dogs being apprehensive of a monitor lizard are nearing one million views.

I should be happy about it but then the moment was ruined for me when an anonymous commentator scolded me for not training my dogs to respect other living things. It was in a village in Sri Lanka and the dog training was undertaken not by me but by my host family.

I didn’t bother replying to that comment because I felt that no matter how much I tried to defend myself there was no point because some people do believe that dogs ruin other animals’ lives. 

Canon products are richer in color than Sony although the latter has a bigger advantage in terms of resolution. Still, at the end of the day, I prefer color over resolution. 

The camera was stolen by someone when I had an epileptic fit while strolling in an island off the mainland. I don’t know why those who came to help me and took me to the nearest hospital didn’t bother to hand over to hospital officials my camera although my cell phone and passport were turned over to the hospital reception counter.

I now have a RedMi 10. It’s a cheap choice but the camera is tops as long as I capture daytime images. Nighttime photography is at best a blur of colors. Perhaps I could exhibit my nighttime captures as part of an art exhibition in impressionism art. Haha. 

Anyways, my first exposure to photography was through a teenaged boy from an island off the mainland who was around five years older than me. He came over with his father who was friends with my grandfather. He came for a medical checkup at one of the most popular hospitals in the mainland. 

Fortunately, he turned out to be alright health-wise. We would get on swings in my grandfather’s garden and he would sing me the most recent Bollywood songs he learnt from Hindi films from India. 

I was amazed that he could memorize and commit to his mind whole songs from the most recent movies. The song I most remember him for was "Bach Ke Rehna Re Baba" from a movie called "Pukar" and I would keep asking him to continue singing it to me and he would as if he didn’t tire from it. After all God Himself didn’t tire of commanding the Sun to rise every morning or the Moon, now my second home, to orbit the Earth.

I felt a deep affection for him and was starting to feel dejected as the day he was going to return to his island drew near.

One morning, he came into the living room while I was watching the tube. He gave me a rectangular object that was silver colored. I asked him what it was and he told me it was a camera which I can use for shooting photographs. He opened its back and showed me that it had a new film reel he had inserted in.

I was speechless. It must have cost a fortune for his father to buy him that at the prices of those times.

I stared at his face and he gazed at me for some time. He didn’t smile and simply said that he needed to go packing his luggage.

I watched him and his father until they turned around the corner of our street and was lost to sight. 

My grandfather died soon afterwards and that time when that friend gifted me the camera was the last contact I had with him. Maybe because I was too young it hadn’t occurred to me to ask my grandfather to let me know how I can contact that friend in the future. Or perhaps there was no need for that because somewhere deep inside me I was hoping that everytime that friend came to do a medical checkup he would always stay at my place. But I guess that was not to be. 

Chapter 23

The trouble with dreams is that most of those are not remembered once we wake up. I am glad my counselor at the rehab facility, Unni, made me continue writing journal entries. Once I started writing down, even those little bits I happened to remember, for some mysterious reason, I started remembering more and more - of the dreams I was having.

I read somewhere that we sleep to dream although there’s the other opinion that sleeping is a rest for the mind. The more I wrote, the more I remembered, and a strange thing started happening: even the strangest of dreams made me joyous as I ran through them in my mind during my waking hours.

Sometimes on consecutive nights I would dream of falling from high places but inexplicably I never reached the hard ground; I will always swing up as if I was bungee jumping. So those high-flying dreams were exhilarating, too.

One night I dreamt one of those elusive lucid dreams. I remember flying up from my bed and hover over several feet from the ground. I saw myself floating over streets, the traffic sluggish below me. I have to say that flying was one of the most exciting dreams I had. This particular dream ended with me coming back to my apartment, floating through the window, and gently lying down on my mattress. I didn’t have a bed because it took unnecessary space and there was no need for it when I had a comfortable mattress which I can put against the wall and use the space as my studio because I was living in a studio apartment during that time in one of the islands off the mainland.

It was where Agar first exposed his penis to me. I don’t know why. I was sipping my beer and he was too but he took a break and went to the loo. When he came over to me, I saw that he had not zipped his fly and was letting his well-hung cock swing from side to side.

I was sitting and he was standing and he came close to me without bothering to sit in his chair. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do but I supposed that he was proudly displaying the fact that he had an uncut cock and knew that where I came from the people of my culture were circumcised. In fact, another friend from his culture once asked me why my community was circumcising males even before we were the age of majority. We had no say in it because my religion demanded that children be circumcised as soon as they were fit for it though this fit-ness was arbitrary: some male children were circumcised even as infants: the parents took them to a hospital to have a convenient circumcision done. At least there was no female genital mutilation. 

I had undergone the cutting off of my foreskin sometime before I became a teenager. I was herded and caught like a chicken by the adult members of my family and I was laid on a table and all these men were standing surrounding me as one of my relatives removed my shorts and exposed my phallus to a complete stranger.

I suppose an anesthetic was given because I didn’t feel any pain when the knife – or whatever sharp object was applied – removed my foreskin. 

But the psychologically troubling factor was that the medic had his sunglasses on. I could see everything he did to my dick reflected from his shades. 

Afterwards there were three days of celebration where I was admitted to a bed and kept there for three days while the only time I was allowed outside of the confines of the bed was to go to pee or poo. 

I don’t know why pissing caused an excruciating pain because my piss slit was still intact. But I remember that the pain made me scared, making me don’t want to urinate anymore. Yet I did. And mercifully those three days were over.

However, there was one thing that lingered on my mind: that for several years I didn’t forgive my family for giving me those three days of unbearable pain. It took long years before I finally empathized with my relatives and accepted the fact that they were brought up along the beliefs of their prevailing time and for them circumcision was thus a religious duty although actually it is not if you bothered to study my faith in-depth.

Agar came from an ethnicity famed for their lengthy member. He was the first I actually got to see and I saw that he was uncut and when he stood near me, I thought he was proudly displaying his well-endowed manhood to me.

I saw that his foreskin was covering only half his glans. His meatus was half open and I wondered why. 

He stayed near me like that for about a minute and I wondered what I was supposed to do next. I didn’t want to perform fellatio on him because I didn’t have any lust for him. I only had a platonic love for him. So what I did next was to check why his foreskin didn’t cover his cockhead all the way down.

I reached over and started pulling his foreskin back and just as I was about to expose his whole glans, he giggled, withdrew his penis from my hand, and pushed it back into his Levi’s and zipped up.

He then sat down and continued to sip the remainder of his beer. 

Coming back to my dreams, dreams are interpreted in so many ways in so many cultures that by the time I was 40 years old, I had altogether stopped caring what dreams were and what they mean or represent.