Different Realities... side by side.

Had a talk with a young fellow from the teams today. I always had him pegged for a bit of a joker... he's always full of wisecracks. He likes to pepper our meetings with irrelevent comments. I think once his team got a wee bit fed up and told him to shaddup. He does seem to have run with the rough crowd some years back, got into fights and I suppose some gangs, but I had always assumed his fighting was mostly confined to schoolboy confrontations and petty teenage gangwars... generally silly and mostly harmless...

Thanks to my tendency to slap labels on people I meet. I never really took notice of his comments and jokes - he always joked a lot about there being fights downstairs from where he stayed every night. I never really paid much attention to what he actually said because I thought he was just blowing stuff up, like most "smart alec" types do.

I found out the truth today when I had a slightly more serious chat with him.

He apparently lives in a rough neighbourhood somewhere in Singapore which has some pretty violent gangs in the neighbourhood. Also, he knows people who are into the local illegal fighting scene.... that's right, there is an illegal fighting circult in this dull bubble of a country. Apparently, some guys get into a ring and fight and people bet on them :P Now, I am still feel a bit doubtful about this claim, but he has said that photographic evidence is possible. I wonder if he will bring some of it to our next meeting?

Knowing what I know now, all his comments and jokes seem to take on a slightly sinister shade - a sort of hidden window to his world. He used to make joking comments about how he decided to quit and "turn professional"... I never really understood what he meant before... I kinda guess THAT refers to his current career choice. He said that he'd been in fights and gangs, but it was still better to "turn professional"... certainly I pointed out that gangs don't pay as well.... he laughed.

Talking to him I feel a little sorry for the predicament he is in and certainly, his irritating jokes and smiling demeanour seem like a tragic and somewhat heroic attempt to grin in the face of bad Fate. I just hope that he is not the sole breadwinner in his family or something like that because his old man is currently a jailbird for lopping off someone's arm in a machete fight :P

Listening to his colourful accounts, I sometimes feel that I am probably still semi-sequested in the protective bubble of normalcy that has been created by our system. I suppose something like an illegal circult of fights IS possible in Singapore, but as a Singaporean, I feel the disbelief rising in me. I did question him as to why I have never read about it in the papers, he said that the reporters sometimes suppress these stories because of either lack of interest in them or the need to create a sense that everything is normal...

Sounds like a bit of conspiracy mixed in with a fragment of Twilight Zone...

But when I think about it, THAT ACCOUNT is his view of his reality and if nothing else, metaphysics has taught me that any kind of reality can exist side by side in the same context. For instance, my reality is filled with conniving entities, astounding coincidences and weird magic... If I were to tell it to him, he would think I am crazy as well. I mean just the other day I was telling a friend that someone we know who "came back" (after being clinically dead for longer than the number of minutes they say you can be dead for before your brain starts to turn to mush) is really not the original inhabitant of that body...

So I really can't say his view of reality is fake.... all I can ask for is pictures ....

I think I'm just jolted out of my comfort zone by the thought that the Singapore I know is not quite what it all seems. I thought that THAT Singapore, with the gangs and the dingy one-room flats crammed with families vanished long ago with the world of my childhood. I do still remember the one-room flat we had, dinners of plain rice, soya sauce and tiny fish fried till most of the moisture dried up... (my grandma can't cook)... our odd neighbours... long dark corridors and dirty kids playing on hard concrete.

I suppose anything that has ever existed in time and space never really dies. It just gets swept to one side and keeps on going through other people even if you have left it long ago.

Reality... that does really take on a different meaning now. I have in this lifetime, met people who spend their entire lives travelling from one place to the next. With no idea where they are going to spend the night or what source of income awaits them and yet they march forward along the road without a single care, confident in that they will be able to survive comfortably no matter where they go.

As a Singaporean, I have to wonder... how can such people exist. The notion of a life that has nothing to do with work and saving enough for a nest egg in one's old age is ... unthinkable I suppose for someone of my upbringing. :P I some small way, I envy their carefree existance... and I guess though metaphysics I am able to gain an intellectual understanding of how the universe serendipidously arranges things for them... but trying to actually put that type of synchronicity into action for myself is really a tough call...

I guess it must take instinct to create that kind of reality... or faith..... heh..... well I guess it all boils down to THAT ... in the end.