Saturday, October 26, 2024
5:08 a.m. Room at the House
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(1,999 words)
It’s funny that even I, Mr. Logical, can succumb to things like omens. It’s just after five o’clock in the morning, and I woke up early because I need to leave myself enough time to get ready and go to the dock to get on my boat to Sumatra. There is a lot going on, and I’m more than a little bit stressed out. So I was displeased when I saw one of the world’s largest cockroaches marching across my floor. For people in Canada, I must stress that I am not talking about one of those little Canadian cockroaches. In much of the rest of the world, including Southeast Asia, cockroaches come in a much larger variety. And they crawl slowly and methodically, but they also have a burst of speed. Killing them is no easy task. And they are annoying to have in your room. They have no sense of boundaries, and they will even end up in your bed with you, crawling on your body and face. And they’re relentless. Once they make themselves at home in your domain, they won’t leave until forced to.
I couldn’t help but take the appearance of this monster as a bad omen. I stood up and contemplated my room to think about what object is best suited to crushing it. At first I couldn’t think of anything, and I pictured this cockroach escaping and climbing into my gear and sitting in there waiting to suddenly emerge in Sumatra. But then I remembered I had my flip flops outside my door. I grabbed a flip flop, carefully stalked my prey, moving objects away so that it couldn’t hide. And then when I was ready, I smacked. And I took it as a good omen that I was successful. I smushed the cockroach. Of course, it was disgusting. I hit with enough force to make sure that it would be dead. No half measures. And that meant I smeared cockroach goo all over the floor. And then I had to clean that up.
I ended up wondering if this was a good omen or a bad omen. The cockroach’s appearance was a bad omen for the day ahead. But I did manage to dispatch it. Isn’t that a good omen?
And speaking of omens, there was another explosion last night. Around 9:30, what felt like a bomb went off. And just like the last time, it sounded and felt like it was right outside my room. It was a serious explosion. I spoke to KY about the first explosion, and he dismissed it as a sonic boom. This was many days after the first explosion, and my memory of it had faded, so I figured he was right. It must have been a sonic boom. And there was the story in the news about sonic booms in Ipoh. It was a funny thing to tell KY about the explosion and have him largely dismiss it. It’s part of the pattern where something quite dramatic happens to you in your life, but then when you tell the story to other people, the events somehow get reduced and lessened. This pattern has been around my whole life, and it has led to a reluctance to tell people things. If you are really excited or happy or fascinated about something, it’s usually a bad idea to try to share that with other people. They won’t react in the way you expect and hope. And it will feel ruined.
These explosions, for example, were dramatic. It wasn’t the sound of a car backfiring. It wasn’t a gunshot. It wasn’t a sonic boom. It wasn’t a door slamming. It was like a bomb went off right outside my door. It was shocking. The whole house shook. I felt the percussion deep in my chest. And both times this happened, I opened the door to my room fully expecting to find a smoking crater out there or half the house gone. But if you tell this story to someone, they will come up with all these potential causes: they will say it was probably a gunshot, a backfiring car, a door slam. They will minimize it and try to explain it away. Since they weren’t there, they can’t truly understand what you are talking about, and you will feel like you lost the experience. It will have been belittled. You were wanting to share this experience, but since the other person wasn’t present, they just won’t get it. So I often conclude that it’s better not to tell anyone. And that has also led to why I like to write so much. It’s my way of sharing experiences without the sense of the experience being lessened.
After the second explosion, I actually did see something. I went outside, and I saw fire and smoke coming from the backyard of the house across the street. This house has always struck me as ominous. I remember commenting to KY and other people that you could imagine a serial killer living there. It sits up higher than anything around it, so you can’t really get a good look. It is old and ramshackle with lots of new sections of buildings tacked randomly onto other sections. The land is surrounded by high and serious barbed wire. It houses guard dogs, and I never see any people. And the smoke and fire indicated that for some reason the people that lived there blew something up in the backyard. And it probably wasn’t an accident, because it happened twice. And the weird thing is that it wasn’t reported. No emergency vehicles showed up. It’s a complete mystery.
I mentioned this to KY, and then I instantly regretted it. Again, sharing the story seemed to serve no purpose. I wrote to him to tell him that the explosion definitely wasn’t a sonic boom. It was very clear with this second explosion that it was very much something like a bomb. And I ended my message saying that it was another Port Dickson mystery. And KY wrote back to say that since I was leaving Port Dickson anyway, I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. I guess he was trying to say something comforting, but he missed the point entirely. I wasn’t worried about the explosions. I just found them fascinating. They were a mystery that I’d like to solve. And I wanted to share the fun story. It struck me as something fun to talk about and speculate about. But it was clear that when you tell other people your fun story, they just won’t get it. So you might as well keep it to yourself so it isn’t ruined.
Yesterday afternoon and evening was a tough time, for some reason. I wasn’t feeling good about my decision to take my bicycle to Sumatra. The whole thing felt very clearly like a big mistake. It made sense when I made the original decision to do this. And even if it wasn’t the greatest idea, I could justify it to myself by pointing out that my Malaysian visa is expiring and I have to go somewhere. I don’t have a choice. And the ferry to Sumatra is right here in Port Dickson, so why not hop on it? And since it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to put a bicycle onto the ferry, why not bring it along? And once I made that decision, I figured why not turn it into a bike trip? I don’t have to make it a big expedition. I can just go there for a couple weeks if I want to and then try to return.
However, I then discovered that getting the bike ready for the trip was more complicated and time-consuming than expected. And everything seemed more complicated and difficult. Getting the tourist visa was a huge, frustrating (ongoing) hassle. Packing up my non-cycling gear was a major project. And on and on. It was supposed to be a casual and easy thing, and it turned into one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. And the amount of effort that has gone into getting ready feels far out of balance with the trip itself. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. And that feeling came to a head yesterday. I was just over the whole thing. I wasn’t in the mood for the hassle of packing up and getting ready. I just couldn’t face it. If I had a choice, to be honest, I’d have cancelled the whole trip. I couldn’t even see the point of going. I didn’t see that there would be any enjoyment in cycling around Sumatra. Sitting here right now at 5:30 in the morning, I still don’t. Of course, I have no choice but to go. The tickets are all bought. The arrangements are all made. But I’m not feeling any excitement or anticipation or enjoyment. Getting on the ferry and going through all the hassle of going to Tanjung Balai just feels like a lot of work right now and nothing more. Just a lot of work and stress for no particular reason. I wish I could just stay here. I need another week at least to ease into this.
I had only one major errand to take care of yesterday, and that was to get some money, and I decided to change it to Indonesian rupiah here in advance. I thought I could do this easily at Maybank. But to my surprise, they don’t change money. I went there, but they said they don’t do that. And the one place I could find in Port Dickson had a couple very poor reviews on Google Maps. It was called Winning Spirit, or something like that. A recent review stated, “The worst, will purposely give you less, if you didn’t calculate carefully, you will lost.” So, I wasn’t thrilled about going there. I’m always unenthusiastic about changing money. It always feels like I’m losing money and there was a better way of doing it. I suppose that happens because the amount you get will always be less than the exchange you find online. I wanted to buy 7,000,000 rupiah, and when you enter that into your currency exchange app, you will be told that 7 million rupiah costs 1,935 ringgit. But at Winning Spirit, I had to pay something like 1,995 ringgit. So it feels like I lost 60 ringgit.
Another problem is that my landlords have been gone. They suddenly disappeared, and I haven’t been able to tell anyone the exact day that I’m leaving. I’ve been trying to tell the people that remain in the house. There is a mother-in-law, an Indonesian housekeeper, and some other family members that seem to come and go, and I’ve tried to tell them, but no one seems to understand what I’m talking about. I just kept waiting for the landlords to show up. In the last two months, it seemed like they spent 90% of their time here packing and unpacking the car and making noise and leaving tons of junk outside my door in the hallway. I wished they would stay away. But now that I needed them here, they vanished. KY found out that they went to Taiwan for a holiday. And it wasn’t clear when they would be back. So I’m in the situation of leaving this place with no one knowing that I’m leaving. And I can’t get my 50-ringgit deposit back. But that’s always what happens with deposits. I never seem to get hotel deposits or any other deposits back. People are very eager to demand and accept deposits. But they have an annoying tendency to be unavailable when it’s time to return the deposits.
Anyway, I should stop babbling this morning. I still have a lot of last-minute things to do to get ready for this trip. I don’t want to end up rushing.