Saturday, April 30, 2022
The weather's warming up, and that means the winter tires need to be changed. Aye, what a hassle. I think I took for granted how you didn't need to do that in Malaysia, and only went to the mechanic when there was something wrong, lol. We changed it a while back at Car Auto House, which has been a good business to support.
Anyhoo, I finally watched black metal legends Mayhem! I know Necrobutcher is the only remaining guy left, but it was still a treat to finally watch the infamous band. Apart from the vocalist the rest didn't apply any corpsepaint at all. No makeup, but they were great! Very powerful atmosphere and a great show! Midnight supported them, and I was pleasantly surprised with their performance. Watain was screwed over by the US immigration authorities so they couldn't join the tour. Funny thing was, the crowd had a lot of British accents that day, and almost everyone was wearing a leather jacket. Lol. My first metal show in 2 years thanks to the pandemic.
Speaking of pandemic, I finally saw (half) the poker gang of aunties and uncles, that my Aunt Elkie played with. Auntie Marita's dad passed away, so Chloe, Onion and I attended the funeral wake. We saw Uncle Lawrence, Auntie Marita, Nicole and Lisa, along with a few other of their relatives we knew, chit-chatting with them since it had been two years since we saw any of them. It was a good catch up, seeing how well they were and Nicole's on her way with kid number three! Uncle George, Auntie Ledia and Auntie Elkie were there earlier but left by the time we got there. We paid our last respects, sat in for one of the hymns and caught up until the funeral home was closing.
Also played a lot of board games in April. Three rounds with various people. Earlier in the month, Onion and I played with Zoltan and Chloe at For The Win, a place we hadn't been to before, but was pretty nice. Had a Japanese cafe sort of aesthetic, and all round pretty cozy, if a bit tight and small. We played some simpler games, like Junkyard and Calico, among others, all evening until the closing time at 1am, when we were the last to leave, lol.
Several weeks later we met up with Victoria and Chris, who we haven't seen in two years, thanks to the pandemic. Oh boy. To think it's been that long since we hung out. But it was great to see them again. All chill and good even with the long absence, and we had a great time! We were pretty even with most games, most of us having won at least 1 game, and the scores were generally pretty even, showing a good balance. We played stuff like Cartographer, Tiny Towns, and Quantum, among others. We caught up with our lives and how COVID affected our work and all. Victoria's moved from her Rosedale place to right next to the SkyDome (I refuse to call it the Rogers Centre). Wow! Moving up in the middle of the pandemic. It was at Snakes and Lattes Midtown at Eglinton, so we got to see Billy, one of the staff there. He was talking about the new games they brought in during their time under construction, and one of them was The Isle of Cats. I mentioned that we adopted a cat during the pandemic and since it was relevant to the theme, I showed a picture of Toshi sitting inside a board game box. Billy went "awww" and said to give him a second, and he came back with the top box cover from The Isle of Cats, which looked like this:
Yeah, no kidding. That was exhausting. At 11am, we went for the board game session. Onion's been joining the Wednesday 401 Games evening gaming sessions, but since it's too early for me to get there by the time I finish work, I've always missed it. The waifu wanted me to join a session with some people, so we booked a slot on Meetup, organized by Naser, one of the guys who attends the 401 session regularly. We were joined by other people I hadn't met before, Zen, Colin and Grace. As Onion and I were the first to arrive, we played a short game of Archaeology with Naser, with lots of jokes being thrown around. Around that time the rest came and we eventually split up into two groups, with Grace joining us for Kepler-3042, and the other two playing Forbidden Stars. Our game was pretty intense! Lots of strategy and limited options at times, but we had a lot of fun, and the waifu ended up winning. Three of us were pretty chill and making jokes in-game, but Grace seemed to have the poorest attitude. Several times she did something she wasn't allowed to do but then would complain that she wasn't aware or wasn't informed (she was), but would kick up a fuss to allow her way. She soiled the fun a little, but eh. We played another game of Sovereign Skies with Colin taking Naser's place and after finishing, we had to head off.
The waifu and I quickly got an Elsa-themed present for Janella and drove over to the place. I've not been to one of these kid playground/arcade zones in a long time. As a kid, I absolutely LOVED Discovery Zone when it was still in Toronto, and I've still got fond memories of my time there, making friends with strangers. Kids Fun City was a lot smaller than I expected, with much smaller scale slides and playground puzzles and all. Either way, I'm 30 years too old anyway, haha! We mostly played at the arcades, with the unlimited game card we were all given, as it was a private function. So nice to swipe as many times as you want to enjoy. The Batman arcade game was a surprisingly fun game, and we played classics like Mario Kart and shooting basketball hoops. We sang Janella her birthday song and ate tons of catered food. It was like 99% Filipinos there, lmao, since they were all friends and relatives of Charmagne, and a few of my colleagues were there too. Celestine's grown crazy tall in just a few years. But she seems more gentler now, lmao.
Lastly, we joined Zoltan and Chloe for drinks. It was impromptu, as they called while we were in the middle of playing board games, but we thought what the heck. Haven't seen them in a while and it'd be good to catch up. After the party was winding down for Janella, we went off to drive to Eglinton, where we spent over half an hour painstakingly trying to get parking to no avail. We tried the visitor's parking at Chloe's place and hey, we managed to get the very last visitor parking! Lucky us. We shared a sangria and chitchatted before deciding to continue drinking at Chloe's place instead, munching on salami and various chips that tasted from great to awful (tahini kale chips... like, what?). Had a great time just laughing and talking over random stuff until Zoltan said he was tired at 1am. We were pretty exhausted too, having woken up at 9am earlier. We had been up 16 hours doing everything earlier and we were pooped as well. Drove home and crashed into probably the most satisfying sleep we've had in a while. Holy shit, so good!
Also, to end... again. Yes, you know it. More death. Seriously. I know I'm getting older, and these tragedies keep happening, but when you just see someone you know has passed away, there's always that moment of, damn. This time it's Emmanuel and Zach, both died of cancer. Emmanuel was a staff in The One Academy, helping to organize a lot of the festivals and music-related events that the college organized. Later when I became a staff, he was my colleague, and still a really cool and chill guy. Musically talented and a nice guy. As for Zach, I only really interacted with him once, during Asia Conference 2010. The second one, days before the shitshow that would lead to my pastors getting arrested. Anyway, Zach was my roommate with a bunch of other guys from the church when most of CHCKL went to Singapore for the event. Since most of the roommate group tended to stick together, I hung out with him quite a bit over the 5 days, eating, chilling and small talk whenever we were waiting for things to start. We never really reconnected after that, but he was a nice guy during the few days I got to know him along with the rest.
Oh, I realize I never posted about Asia Conference because I was planning to write about the experiences of them back then but I just procrastinated because it was a lot to cover, and I just never got around to doing it. I suppose it's long past, having been over a decade since. But I guess I'll just mention a few issues that really dragged the mud of Asia Conference 2010. First was the fact that the church strictly forbade video recording, and had security stop all the regular congregants from recording footage on their phones, often rudely. But guest pastors and visitors from around the world were allowed to record very openly and brazenly, with nothing done to them. Bloody obvious and hypocritical double standard. Secondly, another thing with the elitism of the overseas pastors was the washroom. Due to the insane crowds, about half of the male washrooms were reserved for females only as they took longer. Fine, I understand the practical points of that. Due to half the washrooms remaining for the males, we had to wait longer for our turn. Sucks, but eh, that's life. However, guest pastors and their posse would be allowed to cut in line and do their business ahead of everyone else. Honestly pissed me off because of their blatant show of power, especially when they'd show their lanyard tags (quite literally) in the face of the security to let themselves cut the queue. Yeah, I get it. Double standards between pastors and the average congregant. What's new. Doesn't change the fact I was still pissed off. And lastly was how the cellgroup kept splitting apart to do their own stuff, leaving a lot of people scattered. For the first Asia Conference in 2008, I tremendously enjoyed it as it was a great bonding time for the cellgroup and we hung out everywhere together. I think it really was a great experience and was hoping for a repeat. Instead, Ai Lee and Kai Yih would go off and do their own thing without telling the rest of us, and barely bothered to communicate with the rest of the cellgroup, which led to others doing the same, so basically it was very much a situation where we might have the occasional meal together and meet up back at the hostel, but no interaction apart from that. It led to me joining my old cellgroup in Singapore instead, because they'd bother to stick together. It was a frustration I made very clear when there was a post-mortem back in KL. Also, I got into a very unpleasant tiff with Andrew Tham, one of the cellgroup leaders of CHCKL. The exhaustion, lack of sleep and everything led to us being very short-tempered over such a small and stupid thing. It was something along the lines of us not being able to hear each other due to the volume of the surrounding people, back at the hostel. I slowed down my speech a lot, so he could understand me and he took it as me insulting his intelligence by talking down to him as if he was stupid. He got extremely offended, said some very nasty words and walked off. Our friendship has not recovered to this day. But it's not like I've bothered to repair anything either. This was 12 years ago anyway, so I don't even remember if the people I mentioned remember what they did. This was around the time that I ended up getting severely pissed off with the cellgroup and stopped attending regularly anyway. I guess it was just the culmination of everything.
Chronicled
5:18 PM
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
I've been mulling over making this post for a few years. Sometimes, I started typing, sometimes I didn't. I felt like I should post about it, considering the major event it was, but out of procrastination and just not wanting to pen it down, I guess... I just avoided it. But I probably should. I suppose for documentation, even though it's been a while. Might be a lot of rambling. I hope the time in between would have allowed me to better organize my thoughts. We'll see.
Back in the wee hours of March 7, 2015, my friend Hann passed away due to a car accident. He's not the first friend that's died, nor has he been the last. But it's probably the most dramatic I've seen and been involved in. So, around then Hann had been hanging out with the guys at Symposium much more often, and we'd been getting closer and tighter. Previously we knew him as the guitarist of Blood Legion, and it was mostly a very distant acquaintance relationship, mostly talking whenever our gigs coincided or we went down to support them and other bands. He was always chill and a very smart atheist, but it was mostly metal and other small talk whenever we bumped into him. Justin eventually called him down a few times to chill with Symposium and he dropped by more and more. As part of typical Symposium tradition, we'd always get drunk, chill and talk about everything. And Hann melded perfectly with the rest of us! We talked about God, morality, philosophy and a bunch of other intellectual topics all the time, along with a bunch of stupid shit. Good times! It was also around this time that Justin and some of the rest got into Satu Darah, getting more fanatical about their 1% motorcycle club. Hann also had an interest in motorcycles and casually rode with them a few times to test out his bike. Out of that shared interest of motorcycles, heavy metal and the intellectual conversations we had, we got tight and he more or less was a part of Symposium, hanging out with us for birthdays, the usual gatherings and other occasions. Eventually we went to sing karaoke in March, for Maxi's birthday, at Loudspeaker in Subang. I've sang karaoke with Symposium countless times, and while I'm nowhere near a good singer, it's always fun to hang out with the rest while they sing, and we all eat and drink and just enjoy the music and voices, as well as singing stupid shit whenever it's forced to be your turn. We sang from 12am-3am, which isn't really out of the norm for Symposium's karaoke sessions. Loudspeaker didn't serve cheap alcohol though, so we skipped the booze and thought we should drink after our karaoke session instead. And we did! We sang like idiots, from the small number of metal songs available as well as the other classics like Backstreet Boys and some Chinese songs. After we paid our bill, we walked out and talked crap for about half an hour outside the mall, the rest smoking while we were just chilling and discussing random stuff. Justin wanted to get drinking, but a lot of them were tired, so it was only James (Wu, aka, Pika) and I joining for the late night drinking. After some time we finally said our good byes with Hann saying "I'll see you soon," to Andrew, and we did our last fist bump and that... uh, I dunno, what do you call it? The thing where you do that bro handshake like arm wrestling? Quick googling says it's the epic handshake, so yeah, that. And the shoulder bump at the end. Then Justin, James and I went to either Lai Kong or Ming Tien to chill and drink. We bought our cheap booze (Gold Rush whiskey), coke and downed only half a glass before we got a call from Andrew saying that he was notified that Hann had been in a car accident and to check up on him at Universiti Hospital Malaya (UHM). Now at this point, we thought Hann was fine. That he got into a car accident and he was resting at the hospital. We just didn't jump to any conclusions. To save time and effort, the three of us jumped into James' car and drove to UHM, joking about how we were going to tease Hann, and other stuff. We parked, walked in and asked for Hann. They didn't know who we were talking about, so we were like, uh, what's his full name again? "Ng Juan Hann, car accident, just came in." We had to repeat that to each of the staff who we were passed to over and over and every time we asked about him, every single staff kept asking us if we were family. We kept saying no, that the police had contacted our friend to tell us to check on him. That's all. Eventually we were passed onto a young Malay nurse who finally gave us the info. We again, went through mentioning his name and her asking us if we were family. We were pretty frustrated at this point repeating the same things, hearing the same things. She said that the police found him in the wreckage and the was quickly brought here by the ambulance and they tried to resuscitate him, but, and I quote her exact words, "Your friend didn't make it."
To say that we were stunned is an understatement. You ever had that feeling, that weird sensation when your heart freezes? Like it stopped? The God-awful sinking feeling that happens in an instant? That's pretty much how I felt when I heard that. James immediately put his head in his hands, turned away and started sobbing. Justin crouched, almost kneeling, and stared at the floor. I just stayed there, static, but internally I felt all those things. I clarified and asked again, "He didn't make it?" And with as much gentleness as she could, she said, "Yes. I'm sorry. Your friend didn't make it." After a few moments while we were processing that, we asked where he was. She asked if we were sure we wanted to see him. We said yes. She brought us to another room and we saw a very bloody floor.
Eventually the sun rose and I needed to return home to return the car to my mom. She had an early morning appointment and I needed to pass it back. I notified the rest of them and we hugged and some cried while I said goodbye. James drove me back to my car in Sunway and I drove home. I was supposed to have a double-blind beer tasting experiment later that afternoon with APOSL, the science group I'm a part of, but I had to cancel that due to everything that happened. I'd been awake for just over 24 hours and I was exhausted. I got home and my mom just woke up. I told her I didn't need the car in the afternoon and she joked, asking if it was because I stayed up all night drinking. I then immediately broke down and started crying horribly. I guess that must've shocked her, lol. Through my bubbling I explained that my friend had died in a car accident and we were the last and first to see him on each side (ignoring the assholes who caused him to die, and the first responders of course). She said alright, and told me to go to sleep. I'd not shed a single tear since we found out but I suppose the time to process it and just saying it out loud after everything made me lose it and I wailed. I went to bed and crashed. It was about 8am by this time. I didn't sleep well, and not because of the events of the entire night, but because I got calls non stop for the next 6 hours. Almost every hour, I would receive a panicked call from someone asking about what happened, that they heard Hann was dead, or what had happened to him. I was tempted to just turn off my phone but I didn't want people to be left in the dark either. So I responded to every call and text asking about it. Then I'd sleep, get disturbed, and do it all over again. I woke up around 5pm, groggy and exhausted as hell and was notified of the funeral wake happening at Nirvana, near my home. I went to Nirvana and saw Symposium there, along with other friends of Hann, and his family members. I saw another Justin (Wong), a very good friend of Hann, and Fei Xiang, Fei Yan's brother, who was also good friends with him, along with a few from the local metal community. I found out later that when Justin got home, he woke his brother Jeremy up to tell him what had happened. Jeremy, having just woke up and thinking it was a joke said something like "It's too early for this shit," and covered himself with a pillow. Justin pulled it away saying he was serious and it wasn't a joke. When Jeremy saw Redzuan and Justin both crying, he knew it was real. Yeah. I don't recall how the rest told their own folks, but I remember this one clearly. Anyway, at Nirvana it was generally pretty sombre as we sat around the table and ate peanuts and other snacks, chatting with the rest. A few friends approached me, as they heard that I was among the first to know what happened, and I filled them in on what I experienced. We also spoke with Hann's family and they invited Symposium for a meal with them at a later date. Although Hann remained an atheist, his family's Buddhist, so they gave him a traditional Buddhist funeral with all the monks, chanting, joss sticks and all. When we walked up to view the body, we noticed that they had shaved his (paltry, admittedly) beard, something Justin commented that Hann would've been unhappy about. He was in a simple suit, and like with all the bodies in caskets I've seen before, I noticed just how small they look when they're in the casket. Like I said before, Hann was a big guy, but he looked tiny in the casket. We said our final words before we went off and the monks began their own protocols and rites. Nikke and I were the last to leave before the rites and chants, and she was quietly tearing up. We both offered some money, put them in the white packets provided and we went off.
We gathered at Ming Tien, where we proceeded to chill quietly and have a drink in Hann's name. Maxi brought a small bottle of Blue Label for us to drink. Each of us, one by one, shared something before we took a shot of the Blue Label neat. I don't recall much of what the rest said, but they were generally good memories. I do remember Justin's remembrance though, he brought up the story of Hann happily showing off his motorcycle to Justin and when they were trying out riding, Hann dropped the bike to the side and he just knelt down and said "My bike!", which was hilarious in hindsight. I shared about despite having intellectual discussion with Symposium, it was nice that Hann knew a lot of actual philosophy and the technical terms, and we could talk about that, which was a nice thing to have. A few of them joked that Hann was riding his bike in Valhalla and laughing at us for crying about him.
We had lunch with his parents a few days later, they treated us and thanked us for being such good friends of Hann, calling us the metal guys. We had a simple conversation about random stuff, but of course, it did lead to their son again. We found out they didn't want to press additional charges against the reckless drivers who caused the accident, as it wouldn't bring their son back, and they hoped that the punishment from the state and their guilt would be enough to teach them a lesson, considering they both lived and a son died due to them.
Since that day, every time Symposium has had a drinking session, we'd toast in memory of Hann before we drank. "To Hann," we'd say, before downing a shot. And so we do. We discussed the existence of God, heaven, hell and what lies beyond... I suppose now he knows the truth of what we both sought, of which I continue to only have faith in.
Chronicled
4:18 PM