Reality-check

I've got the second Franz Ferdinand album (recently pilfered) playing on the computer. I've got Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections tucked away in the front pocket of my work bag. I drive a Corolla Altis. I get my hair cut at Supercuts. I have two dogs I love and whom hopefully love me back. Every morning, I get up at 7.30am and go to work. It's a job I don't hate but also don't love. Every Tuesday I run. Every Saturday I swim. Every Sunday I play a little tennis.

Have you ever felt a pressing need to make a checklist of everything about yourself, just to make sure you're still there? Think of the cliched pinch on the cheek to check if you were dreaming. Except this is more like digging your nails into your eyes to check if you were awake. Okay I'm being dramatic.

There's this Faye Wong song:
(Blogger wouldn't display my carefully selected Chinese font. argh.)
xing3 bu4 lai2 xing3 lai2 hou4 hai2 shi4 fa1 dai1

Somewhere sometime I think I de-railed. Don't imagine it to be like a massive affairs like one of those Amtrak disasters where the train's fallen over on its side and passengers are desperately climbing out through the windows. The picture I had in mind was more like a constantly turning wheel that's run outside of its groove. It's still running but every day, every second, it just runs a little bit further away from the original groove. Zoom out. The wheel's just one of many, so this little mishap has been allowed to run unnoticed. And it probably will continue surreptitiously so for days, weeks and possibly years to come. For now, the whole engine doesn't just depend on this one wheel anyways. Who cares. But somewhere inside, you can't help but have this nagging suspicion that someday, that wheel is just going to run an inch too far out and everything might just come tumbling down.

Did you see Fight Club? Did you read any Chuck Palahniuk? He thinks its consumerism. Mass culture. Tv. Advertising. Production lines. Newspapers. Perfect replication. Duplication. He think its all of these that makes us numbly awake. I think of Murakami.