Teenage Wasteland

I went back to a place that I had known well when I was doing national service. I sometimes think about those grey colourless days. I had thought that they were merely 2-3 years of my life. But they were more than that, unfortunately. They were the great gateway that separated your future from your past. That separated the civilian from the military. That separated adulthood from adolescence. They were a glimpse into your future. The paradox was that for an organisation that was this structured, it was also the place where all the branching takes place, where you move away from a place where everybody's largely following the same trajectory, and to another place where you were basically on your own to figure things out for yourself. 

I went down a long road, and it was eerie to be taking a bus there in the dead of the night. When I was living on that airbase, I was an NCO trainee, and we were training alongside the batch of officers. One of the officer cadets was riding his motorbike down that road, and quite possibly he was running late. Quite possibly he wanted to avoid being punished. He met with an accident, and died. Young. 

The SAF may have been tardy about a lot of things, but they acted quickly. He was given a military funeral, and many of us were in the guard of honour. To my everlasting shame, I was one of the few course trainees left out of the contingent because I could never get my bearing right. But it was a very very sobering experience. The guest of honour for that funeral was a general who later on in life found brief fame as a returning officer for one of Singapore's most consequential general elections. 

What I will remember about that airbase was this: when I was training to be a missile operator, I was probably screwing things up here and there. I could never get things done quickly enough to escape punishment. I screwed up to the extent that I got into a nasty accident and almost lost one of the fingers that I'm now using to type this out. I was supposed to be out for 6 months while the fracture healed, but I managed to ingratiate myself as an office boy for much longer: maybe I was out for 12-15 months in all. And most of those time, I was basically there. 

It was such a strange experience being an office boy. It was so different from being a student in an elite secondary school, where you're always being told to push yourself and “achieve your potential”, even when at the same time they put you in a highly regimented life style and limited your life choices. You'd just sit around all day and run errands all the time, and sometimes you had to find all sorts of ways to make yourself scarce. 

So when I went to that miltary, and when I was jogging up and down some parts of it, I was struck by the incredible amount of freedom that I had. I could go anytime I wanted, and I could leave anytime I wanted. Whereas my 19, 20 year old self would just be stuck there in purgatory, without a book to read, without an internet connection. It was an incredible form of boredom. And yet, to my mind, it was vastly preferable to the rigours of being a trainee soldier, subject to the tough physical labour that it had for me. 

I think a lot about the music that I listened to around that period. It was a period of my life, probably it's something that spans more than half of my life, when I worshipped music. And somehow what I do remember is how much I listened to indie rock music at that point in time. I don't know how or why, but I hadn't been to college yet. What I discovered is that as my twenties wore on, my music taste would become blacker and blacker, until I was listening exclusively to philly, jazz and funk and the angsty indie would eventually be sidelined. But at that point in time, a lot of it was Big Star, Yo La Tengo and Joy Division. Sometimes I wonder if a lot of this was just a frustration at being treated unkindly by a few white people. 

But then again, at least some of it was that I would at some point or another entertain the prospect of joining an indie band, of possibly joining a tribe of people whose aesthetic reference points were indie rock, and somehow that didn't sit well with me. Maybe for indie rock, there was too much going on around it that didn't have to do with the music, that people were judging it for a lot of reasons that didn't have to do with the music. Or maybe I had to apologise for enjoying that music. Or maybe it was something that wasn't usually shared with people who weren't caucasian, and I'd always be the odd one out if I were to enjoy it. Whatever it is, whenever I listened to the deep cuts, it would just scream out at me that I was listening to music that didn't necessarily reflect who I was. 

Anyway I remember that even from way back I was just obsessed with music and books, and those were my twin obsessions. Never mind that I never managed to understand what I was reading. I tried to read “Portrait of a Lady” around that time and nothing seemed to sink in. “Dangerous Liaisons” similarly was .... 

Maybe around that time I was having my mind opened to a few other things: I started to go to eating places, I started to understand why people liked canteen breaks, and I started drinking Singapore style coffee. I started looking at the new HDB estates and wondering if there was really anything all that much to live for. I think, in a way, my world was not very wide. I probably had a pretty narrow point of view. In a way, bookish people are like that: there's only so much where you can relate to the man in the street. Ideally, I would have looked into the future and realised that I would end up in Snowy Hill, which was a college that a lot of people would have given an arm and a leg to get into, and I would have spent a lot of time trying to prepare myself to grasp all the opportunities that might come my way, instead of... but I never adopted that mentality. 

As I jogged away from the base, I ended up jogging near a lot of industrial estate. One of these places was this great big underground facility, and it was a huge construction site, lit up as though it were like day. It wasn't pleasant to be around and it made me uncomfortable. But it was also one of the least glamorous places in Singapore: it had been built up since before the 1980s and I think nobody seriously wanted to prettify it. One thing I liked about commuter trains in the US is that in some of the prettier towns, they would make it look grander. Or at least it would look somewhat quaint. 

One of the main narratives during that period of life stayed with me. The present is some kind of purgatory, and there is some light on the horizon, some kind of glorious future. Everything would turn out right in the end, all you had to do was to wait for that future to arrive. You'd get stronger and wiser and you'd be able to cope. And maybe that was the shape of what happiness was about. The problem with that line of thinking was that it made life very passive. I didn't know exactly what it was that I wanted, only that I would just vaguely do something, and it would bring me closer to where I wanted to go. 

And yet for many years, that attitude served me well in life. Perhaps it would bring me closer to a beautiful girlfriend. Or it would motivate me to get more studying done when I needed to do it. Or it would make me believe that a good performance review was the key to a few more good things in life. I would say that attitude served me well until I was almost 40. And then what happens after that? After that I would realise that some of the things I thought I looked forward to, I wasn't really going to look forward to them anymore. I guess I would write another blog post about this existential crisis at some other point in time, but that was basically what it was. 

So I could look back upon what I could call “teenage wasteland”. Those 2 vital, wasted years of my youth, and I could think about how I was habituated to live out my life in an overly passive fashion, instead of actively trying to seek something out and go for it. Instead of trying to take charge of my destiny. And I do recall how upset I was that I had to waste these two years. And yet there were things I could have done in order to make life less of a dead end thing, except that I didn't seek or receive the guidance to do those things. I remember going straight to Tower Records after work, or maybe some bookstore or something, and staying there, flipping over CDs until it was almost closing time. I remember that those were dark days, when I felt that I didn't have many friends, that I was going to lose touch with a lot of other people I thought of as my peers.