Unknowingly, I have recently acquired for myself a strange hobby. I have started feeling each individual venue within Singapore boring. However the island as a whole seem still a some what interesting and scenic place. Hence while it is excruciating to take in each individual spot within Singapore by itself, taking in the whole of Singapore at once still seems pleasant. As such, it is quite often I hop on to random public buses behind my house and sit in the front seats of these buses from one end of the island to the other. I would read a book during such occasions. Occasionally I would lift my eyes off these books to enjoy the passing scenery or when the passengers around me get to rowdy.
This afternoon during my reading session on board bus 196, I had the most surreal feeling. I felt as though I past through 4 different worlds during the ride.
The first world found within the book which I happened to be reading at the moment by Catherine Lim called "Miss Seetoh in the world". This world was intermittenly disrupted by the two other worlds which past through my physical side one after the other.
The protagonist in the first world was a woman named Miss Seetoh a fictional female character living at the threshold hold between the Singapore governed by the traditional values handed down from our fore father's country and the new values constantly being imported by our media and the government. Catherine was being satirically critical of the current reigning Singapore government in this piece of work. This was expressed in Miss Seetoh's words, thoughts and actions.
The family from the second world soon came and occupied the seat beside mine. Their rowdiness successfully disrupted my experience of the first world. I hence put aside the world of Miss Seetoh and plunged fully into this world of the family and studied them as I would any character in a narrative story.
First and foremost, I felt really annoyed by the voice of this boy who must be on the brink of puberty. As with all boys on the brink of puberty, myself not an exception, his voice was broken in a manner that made him sound like a total transvestite. I recalled myself then, due to my impatience at my lack of ability to fully control my voice faculties, loathing to speak during this period of my life when the voice box was unstable and my voice broke often.
There was something I found really intriguing during this episode between the kid and the father. The father was trying to cajoule the kid into accepting his way of thinking while the boy was simply not interested in the least but was nevertheless read like an open book by his dad. Strangely, during my younger days, I got myself in and out all sorts of trouble behind my parents' back never once letting them in this life I have on the outside except on a few occasions when things got somewhat out of hand, aka me returning bloody or with a grade marked in red. Why was the boy allowed neither freedom of thought nor freedom of action. :P
The boy and his family soon left to be replaced by a western couple. Contrary to popular believe these guys are rich, I am starting to form the opinion lately, it is precisely due to their inability to make a proper living back at home that they are here in Asia seeking to etch out a living in foreign lands. They too soon left the bus.
In thier place now came these two women in their late twenties perhaps. Definitely single from the lack of adornments on their fingers. They fit nicely into the class called the metropolitans. One of them was recounting her time in New Jersy and her close shave with death. She was there at the airport on the exact same day one of the planes involved in the September 11 incident departed for its deadly cruise. Their conversation was intermittenly spiced with some elements of Singlish. She further recounted that some of her holiday trips were failures from the start despite having everything planned out nicely. The feel to them were wrong. She further revealed that her trips lasted on the average 5 days. I never had such problems with my personal trips since most of them last for months with nothing planned out. :P
Then an idea popped into my head just when I was about to get out of the bus. If the information age does correspond with the zodiac age of aquarius and the true coming to age of aquarius starts on 2012, then the current monoliths of Facebook and Google, the so called icons of the information age are less icons than forebears. If such is the case, then I should be expecting to see more information age monoliths coming into the scene past 2012. The premise of such monoliths will be determined by the fundamental changes in our social fabric. Intuition thus drew my inner eye to seek out an alternate world less powered by oil and nuclear energy than something else. One of the key links between our current world and this alternate world my inner eye sees is a technology hitherto that makes possible the transfer of energy through medium that is no solid.