散场没有拥抱，只有淡淡的微笑。

3年走来，非常坎坷、跌跌撞撞，感谢每个曾陪我度过的你们。

It’s what we do from now that counts.

—

Non esiste una strada verso la felicità. La felicità è la strada – There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the road

Thank y’all for tonight

The thing you gather from reading Plato’s allegory of the cave, then Deleuze’s critique of Plato is: without the cave, the sun loses its antithetical purpose.

The simulacrum negates and affirms reality. The original is reinforced by the falseness of the phantasm.

In other words?

Plato’s prisoners are trapped in the cave as much as they are freed by the sun, freed from the cave as much as they are trapped by the sun.

我的路程走得并没有想象中顺利，也曾经想要放弃过，

但最终我都没有放手，只是选择埋头苦干。

我只想唱歌，只想走自己想走的路，做自己想做的事情。

在坚持音乐的过程中，我得到了重返生活的自信，

我相信人活着有思想信念，就不用惧怕风雨。

~ 萧敬腾

My friend was giving me a lift home, and right in front of us, a motorcycle collided with a car and it all happened in less than 2 seconds: the pillion driver flew up the roof of the car, the main bike driver was jettisoned several feet away — a tangy mess of asphalt, blood and glass. The pillion driver was conscious but his face was bleeding and he coughed out blood. The main driver was unconscious. Several onlookers and drivers were trying to resuscitate the driver but I could see the white of one of his eyes.

There was precious little that we could do and it was this sickening feeling, this heaviness that I haven’t felt for so long — like tying an iron ball to your heart and casting it off to the depths of I-don’t-know-where. We broke out a hazard sign and by this time traffic was bottlenecking, which wasn’t helping since it happened at an intersection with cars coming from 5 directions. It’s like watching a live-action movie except you know it’s not fake and the actors are not going to walk away unscathed. Someone just punched me in my soul and pried me from my usual jaded hull. I felt ill.

I always knew life was fragile, and I had a few brushes with death, but I forget sometimes. It’s sobering. It’s terrifying.

Always tell the people you love that you love them.

It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

opening lines of Crash (2004)

To quote my secondary school lit text, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Oodles of screw ups a-galore. It rained cats and politicians just as I left the house to buy wood. The overhead projector died after fixing a new lightbulb yesterday . The wood-cutting machine in the workshop is spoilt. And the pièce de résistance: I stuck my base on the reverse side, so I have to paint my entire image mirrored.

Whoopee-do!

Complaints aside, I am thankful for having two friends tide over my royal screw ups just when I was about to wilt of exasperation. Not gonna cry over spilt glue too much; the funny thing about aging is that you learn to let go more. There is one upside for the day: I managed to revise my standee prototype, and with some luck/divine blessing, should make it foldable too.

It’s funny how when things go according to plan, it feels only normal and we take it for granted, and when things don’t, it’s like someone rip a hole through our space-time continuum and Murphy’s Law compound exponentially like a cartoon rain cloud that follows you wherever you go.

I think this is God is trying to teach me something. The best laid plans of mice and men may go awry, but it’s not the end of the world.

—

The funny thing about water is that it is in the air we breathe. In fact, if you pay close attention, water is all around us. It slips through only to become available in another form again.

That I hope, applies to love too.