"I’ve always wanted//To eat glass with you again//But I never knew how//How to talk without//Walls dropping on the eve//The nest they made couldn’t break you//Along the fallen//Scowled a fence of beaks//But the temple is scathing//Through your veins they were scaling//Through an ice pick of abscess reckoning...And when Miranda sang//Everyone turned away//Used to the noose they obey" -The Mars Volta

The airport code for Singapore is SIN. This couldn't be more appropriate. What a place to be alive.





Las Vegas times a thousand. Las Vegas if it drank blood when it thirsted.

It costs a hundred thousand dollars to buy the right to own a car - then you can't have a car older than a certain year. They charge sliding tolls as you drive through certain places to control the flow of traffic during the day. The public transportation is immaculate and you can set your watch to it - for the ninety percent who can't afford this system. There are only a hundred cars for every thousand people and yet there are one and a half cell phones for each person. Compare to all of the US where we have close to five hundred cars per thousand people and only .9 cell phones per person. There's no welfare, but there is an amazing workfare program. Homelessness is not an issue.




(Guardian of the Buddha)

The streets are clean, the food is fantastic and the women are incredibly beautiful. There isn't much crime. All this thanks to incredibly harsh punishments and immigration restrictions I can't describe with any word besides eugenic. Phrenological eugenics. Yes. Truly. They import smart and attractive people and export dolts. Yes. Truly.





("Don't you love it when the 'losers' came up and all you get is a limp handshake and a half smile?")

It's not a rumor. It's very real. You want to stay out of trouble here.

When your punishment is a caning, they take you in a room and perform a thorough psychological evaluation. They sanitize the area. They tell you what they're going to do - then they do it. A series of blistering smacks across your ass. They tend to the wound they've made, evaluate your psyche again then they release you. If they make you pass out with the first blow, they put you in a holding cell until you're awake before finishing the job.

Major fines for minor transgressions, capital punishment for major ones. Scary in the abstract and HOW COULD I NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THIS REALLY HAPPENS TO PEOPLE?

A friend of a friend of a friend (every horrible story starts this way, it's not nearly as detached as it sounds) offered drugs to someone in a bar in Singapore. The person happened to be a cop.

The next day was the trial and they hurled the book. The day after was the appeal and it fell on deaf ears. Within the week was the execution. He was hanged for his crime.

Guys, he was 23. He was my age. This happened. This fucking happened a month ago and I'm sobbing for him now as I write this. I never knew him and I never will.

My friend said, "did you hear what happened to Dan?"




(Her shirt reads, "BAH, HUM, BUG.")

There are reports of a truck in China. It cruises around and picks up dissidents. By the time the next offender is picked up, the previous has been killed. Without checking the stats (there really aren't any to be trusted) I'm told 120,000 Chinese citizens are executed each year. Clinical efficiency.

Singapore is owned and operated, for the vast majority, by a corporation. It's a capitalist thought experiment. It's actually China's thought experiment. What works, they employ there. What flops, they leave to rest here on the southern tip of Malaysia.

This brought us to a conversation about American military policy, wherein I brought people up to date on the American Army death squads. The civilian murderers. The fucking finger-collectors. People don't really talk about these things here.





Before you get so fired-up and shocked. We execute innocents too. We absolutely do. We kill people who don't deserve to die. We call it something different and we get surprised when they don't say thank-you. Our tax dollars are complicity. You are a murderer. I am a murderer.





Singapore is America eighty years ago. Vibrant. Dedicated. Hopped-up. Governed by the stocks, the tar and feather, the dawn execution.

A wild place to walk behind someone who can open doors. A place you want to have your wits about you. We skipped the fifty dollar cover at the Marina Bay Sands hotel, bar & casino (the place with the famous swimming pool) because a guy knows a guy who has a couple billion dollars. So, no worries I guess. More than Hollywood or anywhere in the states, this is how things work here. Status, status, status. Makes my stomach roll and my blood boil or is that still the Bali Belly? Water-borne treachery. Subali's revenge.

I haven't seen even a fragment of the city yet, but I fucking hate to love it here too.

I was trying to jio this char bor, but she said "Auntie don't play play, one."

Location:Singapore, Singapore, Singapore