What the Hell!!

My latest Studios space at MGTF after being relocated due to a renovation work in progress. My next relocation will be to the rear of the Museum building where all my works will be outside of the building itself to avoid being audited by the USM auditors. I guesse it is alright to have dead unused spaces than having spaces being utilized to the maximum according to their books. For one who has been squatting here for the past five years I cannot complain especially when the hospitality has been kind.

Whenever I mention that i work out of a studio space at the MGTF  everyone would enviously goes ooh!! Wow!, like, you lucky dog! However little do they know how much pride and prejudice one has to play with and the patience it takes to survive the onslaught of  envy and jealousy from petty tyrants. I told myself that i would survive doing the impossible in everything i do and this is part of my survival as an artist living on the street. I have had five shows from out of this spaces at the MGTF three of them major solo exhibitions and another in the making. I have never had a permanent studio of my own and I guese I never will.

I have been going through a phase of stagnation, lack of the desire to move on to greater heights in my pursuits of happiness or self gratification much less to share my thoughts and feelings through writing this blog like i used to. I find it is becoming a futile endeavor which is time wasted and amounting to very little benefit to myself much less for others.Blogging has met with a blog and mind has declined in its tenacity for the seek of truth, as a friend recently puts it my mind is failing to detoxify.My physical state is also beginning to experience signs of the onset of decay which I am sure the doctors would find no difficulty in diagnosing as one common decease like diabetes, high blood pressure of maybe even cancer of one form or another. I am 63 so what more need to be said..
My daughter called me two days ago in the wee early hours of the morning crying on the phone which scared  the life out of me thinking the worse had happened to her. I finally found out the she had dreamed that I had passed away. Oh...well , that is not too bad worse things she could have dreamed and further more this is the second time I have died in her dream. I would not mind exiting just about now anyway as i am beginning to find life a little too much pain and very little pleasure for my taste. Too much disappointment and too little achievement to look forward to, too much horrors and too little compassion where humanity is concern. In short, life is no more fun like it used to be, like its every dog for himself and the hell with the quality, it is the quantity that matters, the hell with love and compassion its the 'money that talks and bullshit still walks' virtue that prevails today.
Death would be a welcome alternative for me and i say this with no regrets except that my  daughter still needs for me to be there when she needs me. My sons, they have practically written me off from their calendar and rightfully so as i have not been much of a father to them in the past when they really needed me. I cannot hold it against them and nor do i intend to. I have done the best I could given the circumstances and made life as interesting and exciting for myself and for them to reflect upon in their own time, I had traveled the road less taken, veered off the beaten path and ventured into the uncharted courses where not too many would dare venture. I have threaded where angels would not and touched many lives in so doing for better of for worse and came out to write about them in the effort to share my experiences with them.
My son in Dubai called at three in the morning last week and asked me if I am ready to go to Dubai as his friends are all excited about having some artworks done. I can hear that there was big party going on in the background with some calling out "Hi Dad!" I told ok if he send me some money to pay for the way to the KLIA from Penang and catch up with my car payment and my rent and some to cover my daughter's needs in school. His famous last words has always been "ok, see what I can do." then the long silence which in the past I pay some mind over but I think its enough for now. My son has become what he has become and only there is nothing i can do or say to change him. Like my daughter once said to me, "Dad, money does things to people."
It is indeed sad, very sad indeed, and like most others my initial reaction would be; had I known.... No, how could I know! I was a selfish, stubborn and often enough self centered arrogant son of a bitch with a rotten chip on my shoulder when i was their age and I did many wrongs that i cannot even begin to imagine. How can i judge my children with the same faults. I lived my Karmic consequences as they are living theirs and we are all of us headed in the same direction of self discovery as we mature each of us making the right and wrong moves as we see fit.As a father all I can hope for is that they will prevail and live life to the fullest just like me or much better without too much attachments.
As for where I am at right now, I do not have the same kind of energy like I used to take on the world much less to deal with what lies after I am dead and gone. I dread to even think of heaven or hell and the prospect of meeting my Maker as i am as sure as hell not in any way ready for Him by a long shot! Many of my friends and Muslim relatives have been urging me to take my trip to Mecca and make peace with the Lord of the Universe while I still am strong enough to do it.I can only laugh at the irony as my son the pilot lives within walking distance of the Holy Land, but that off course is  a whole different story. It is another one of the side roads i had taken along the way which has resulted in him not being a Muslim and the prospect of sponsoring his father to Mecca would be a miracle.But like everything else in my life there is always a catch 22, and so I always believe that if Allah wants me I will be there one day,one way or another and if not well, Such Is.
I have always maintained that just before i breath my final breath I would like to catch a glimpse of why was I alive in the first place;What brought me here? Who am I? It is not that I was not blessed with many a good times throughout my life and for these I am mostly grateful but to weigh these against the darker times I would rather that I had never been born. It is said you reap what you sow, indeed you do, but when the soil you sow your seeds in is toxic it does not really matter what you sow only shit grows out of it.I have spent most of my adult  life caring for the soil, weeding and tilling it, detoxifying it with organic compost so that my seedlings stands a chance of survival in this age of decadence and corruption. I have been churning and mixing my thoughts and philosophies, spirituality and religious experiences into a mixture that I hope to enlighten my children's mind as to what their father was all about. I try not to tell them who or what they should be but show them who or what they can or should not become. To avoid the pitfalls and the groove that had inhibited my existence or to taken on the bull by its horns when and where needed be. Through my faults and errors, through my mistakes and weaknesses I have tried to turn my life into a compost pile fit for the growing of healthy minds.