Everything smells Fishy here in this Country.

After the morning walks  my cousins wqouls usually stop at our local fish market to get something for the day. This is not by all means a big market and so not so much variety of fish is found here and by the looks of it the fish that were did not seem fresh, Since a child I was always thrilled by the trip to the fish market which my grandmother would insist of dragging with every time she went.

 I enjoy the sound and smell and the raw fishy nature of the whole market, the slime and the blood splattered all over the place and men with the butchering knives chopping away at fish heads and tails. The closest i came to doing something odf this nnature was when I was working at the Meat packing plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin where for nine to eleven hours a day i would covered from head to toe in blood from the beef I was boning. But that was in a different lifetime, now just a fleeting memory although i did it for 3 and half years.

Cuttle fish are great to eat but they got to be fresh and these do not look too fresh. Most of the fish I saw was not fresh sad to say and fishermen are going through a tough time in this country due to many factors the most critical of which is the lack of fish available in the nearby seas around the island. They also face the competition with large fishing trawlers that often encroaches into their fishing areas and often wiping out the fish population by the illegal methods used such as the drag net. Fishermen like their counterpart the farmers live a very hard life and are often unappreciated for what they do. I have hung out among fishermen where i used to visit at the fisherman's jetty or 'Pondoks' off the Jelutong highway and from them I learn all there is to know about how hard their life is or what uncertainties lies ahead for them as the developers keep building into the sea more and more unaffordable homes.

This is all we are while we are living our lives in this world today! It does not matter how big or how small, we are just food for the consumers We are the bottom of the food chain.

We  live and die for no rhyme or reason other than to fulfill our alloted time and space  often with no awareness whatsoever that our lives are merely to keep others alive.

Who decides how big or small how cheap or expensive how much is enough and how little is really needed?  We are like cattle headed for the slaughterhouse at the end of the day.

In death there is no dignity as in living there is no meaning when we are so buried in our own ignorance and know not who or what we truly are in the scheme of things.

When chopped up into pieces we are nothing mopre than cubes of flesh unidentifiable from one piece to the next, where have our individuality gone to?

No matter from which angle we look the horror is still the same .

IN the end there is only shapes and colors left to remind us of what we once were.