I

LUNCH TIME WITH MY BEAUTY

This is proof that I have a fecund social life with a partner that has wonderful curves, breathtaking intelligence and a extraordinary personality. And she's so light I can carry her anywhere, hug her anytime I want to, stroke her edges anyplace I wish.

II

CLOUD IN MY TROUSERS

I nearly combusted in class today. The atoms of my extremities and my head threatened to defy quantum laws, overcome the immense gravitational energies holding my body together and escape into thin air. The faintly-ludicrous idea of willing myself to disappear or to burst into flames instantly snapped itself into existence the moment I was called up to the front of the class. But I'm jumping ahead of myself, am I. In the beginning there was a Russian poet by the name of Vladimir Mayakovsky. He bore an intense, smothering gaze into the imaginary beyond as he wrote beautiful poem after beautiful poem. He put those poems away and found time to pen a couple of political plays too before promptly taking his own life and in the process entering posterity as a semi-tragic, politically-active Soviet comrade who was probably a victim of Stalin's murderous paranoia. 77 years later a young, semi-tragic, politically-aware and entirely evil student had to study one of his beautiful poems for his literature class. That student incidentally is yours truly and the poem is unfortunately also entirely inexplicable. I have no freaking idea what he is writing about. Neither do my four other discussion group members. We make silent hay and stare at each other for fifteen minutes while the odd verse begs to be understood: "Come and be lessoned, prim officiates of the angelic league, lisping in drawing-room cambric." "If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender - not a man, but a cloud in trousers!" I want to write crap like this, hopefully I'll die young and of my own hand and then I'll be remembered for posterity as a semi-tragic, politically-active Singaporean who was entirely a victim of society's murderous paranoia. And generations of literature students after that will be forced to pore through my beautiful but entirely clueless verse and tear their hair out at my maddening illogicality. But the primary concern at that moment in the tutorial class is to interpret the poem for the benefit of everyone else, and our collective intellectual output on Mayakovsky's brilliantly inebriate mind is close to naught. Fifteen minutes are up. The prof calls out to us to present our answers. He looks on expectantly. I suddenly realize that I am the only guy in the group, and I immediately feel irrationally feminist forces pressing me down with all the weight of a grand piano. My group mates look hopefully at me. At least, I sense that they are looking hopefully at me, and I feel like shouting that very moment. It is a long moment, an interminable moment, the elastic asymptotes of time are tying my muscles in painful knots and freezing my usually active mind into a deeply-chilled colloidal morass. The silence is awkward as it punctuates the rarified chilly air of the room for a good half minute, before I utter a silent curse and whip out a smoke grenade from under my table. I pull the pin and toss it at my prof. It rolls under his chair and comes to an alarming rest behind him. There is no flash-bang and no cloud of smoke. Much to my dismay, I retrieve another grenade from my pants pocket, pull the pin and fling it at the prof's head. My second attempt rebounds off his head and lands with a soft thud on the carpeted floor without a single pyrotechnic outburst. "Fuck" flashes through my mind and I feel as if I have slipped from the pavement onto oncoming traffic.

"The poet is feeling... a lot of dissatisfaction with the world around him," I falter as I stumble from one sorry fake claim to another. "This is because he says in this line: 'If you wish / I shall rage on raw meat...' "

The prof looks extremely amused. "What goes through your mind when you see 'a cloud in trousers'?"

"I don't know," I admit.

"Look, forget about the rest of the poem," he smiles, and I know he knows I know that he is magnanimously giving me a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-And-Dignifed card. "What goes through your mind when you hear this phrase: 'A cloud in trousers'?"

I shake my head quizzically.

"Eisen, come up here."

"Excuse me?"

"Come up to the front of the room and draw 'a cloud in trousers' on the white board. Come on up!"

I try to keep a straight face while I slowly get out of my seat and to the front of the class, all this while overcoming quicksand and lead weights attached to my ankles.

Suppressed laughter emanate from the back of the class as I pick up the white board marker and slowly draw a cartoon cloud. The laughter picks up in intensity as I follow up with a set of trouser legs sticking out of the cloud and my sense of utter stupidity and idiocy comes complete.

"Fuck," I utter.

"What did you say?" my prof asks.

I turn around and give my best diplomatic smile while swallowing a crazy urge to let out long sardonic laughter. "Nothing."

The prof later explains that the poem is by all means Surrealist. To put it simply, you throw a bunch of impressive-sounding words or art forms on a white canvas, mess them around real good and voila! You have your perfectly well-formed poem, or art piece. Damn I wish I lived during the 1920s. Dali would have been my cafe buddy, Mayakovsky my tennis partner. And totalitarianism my serious hobby.

Sigh, the unhappy unbecoming unexciting times we live in.

I look up and see my artwork on the white board at the front of the class. A cloud, with trouser legs sticking out of it. Surrealistic indeed. If I had wrote "fuck" in the cloud would it become Dadaist? I do not know, because my prof interjected:

"Mayakovsky was really fashionable for his time, in the 1920s... He wore these really cool-looking caps on his clean-shaven head. And he bore this smothering, intense gaze." He turns to look at me. "Just like you. You kind of look like him, you know."

I choke. Excuse me?

My inability to swallow cleanly must have showed, for he smiled: "Yeah, you do kind of resemble him. Just shave your head. And he likes wearing black." (I was wearing all black that day.) "Ah, good. You're three-quarters of the way there. Just the head."

No way. Pay me fifty grand and I might reconsider bidding au revoir to my luscious locks.

Mayakovsky - intensive gaze, high propensity to spew out intelligent-sounding crap, ardent passion for Marxist literature, ultimately committed suicide. How cool is that. He will be my new subject of study.

His incomplete suicide note:

The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.

III

EVENING COMES