The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  A blog called Cogitations begins thus: “I cannot think of anything interesting to write today.” So he instead writes a lengthy essay on the subject of being unable to think of anything interesting to write about. This essay topic is surprisingly common, and I encounter it several times.

  Dear Diary, after two hours of examining these websites, my advice to people who read blogs is this. If you really want to obliterate your brain, it is faster and more cost-effective to saw off the top of your cranium and extract the gray matter with a small window-box trowel. I call Des and tell him that blogs suck. Des replies by sending me a link to an article from a newspaper about a blog writer who has won a major publishing deal. He writes: “And what about that movie, Jules et Jim?” he continues. “That was a big Hollywood movie based on the true story of a blog writer who writes a blog about the meals she cooks. You could be the next Jules.”

  Ah-Fat, reading over my shoulder, butts in. “He means Julia and Jill,” he says. “Or do I mean Jack and Jill? Or Julius something?”

  I phone up Eddie the bookseller to ask him to adjudicate. Are blogs a good route to writing success? He responds with a strange howl like a cat being disemboweled, which I realize is his equivalent of a sardonic laugh. Then he says: “Do the math.” (This is one of his catchphrases. You say: “Good morning” to him and he replies, “Do the math.”)

  I hear a rattling noise which means he is shaking his head. “Out of 1,000 manuscripts that arrive in a publisher’s office, one gets turned into a book,” he says. “That’s a one over 999 chance of getting published. How many blogs are there? One hundred and eighteen million. How many have been turned into books? Half a dozen? So that’s a one in TWENTY MILLION chance of getting published. So do—”

  “The math. I get it already.”

  I spend the evening feeling rather low about using the internet to achieve anything. My reverie is interrupted by the phone. It’s Fanny. She announces that she has booked me for two gigs at the end of this month—both with Asian audiences. Interesting. Time to do some experimentation with what I learned last month. I fire up the computer and delete my old lists of jokes. Must generate some new material. Out go the glib lines. In comes a string of simple lines about Asian family life. We Asians may be unexpressive, but we still laugh a lot. We just often choose to do it silently without moving our lips or our shoulders or our tummies or any of the one trillion cells in our bodies.

  Friday, April 4

  Still wavering about the internet thing, I phone Harold Woot to ask him his opinion from a financial point of view. “Waste of time. More than 100,000 new blogs are registered every day, and that’s just in Asia,” he says. “Not to mention social media sites, which create blog-substitutes.”

  This is a terrifying thought. At this rate of growth, there will soon be no room for anything else on the internet except the non-LOL musings of Singapore Blogger, a man who astonishingly feels the need to tell the world that he ate lunch at 7-Eleven, surely the mark of the ultimate loser.

  Oddly, this thought flips my mood. I decide to give it a chance. It is time for the Intelligentsia to fight back. I will set up an interesting website. I will acquire a reader, possibly several. If Mr. Singapore Blogger is my competition, how can I lose?

  Dear Diary, I decide that YOU are going to be my salvation. Yes, you, the tattered little book which records my rambling thoughts. I write a short but brilliant essay based on my jottings about my Beijing trip in January and post it on the internet at www.mrjam.org.

  Then I go to the airport to fly to Indonesia to give a talk.

  Saturday, April 5

  Landing at Jakarta airport, I use a free terminal to log on to the internet to see how cyberspace has reacted to my words. No comments have appeared under my posting. Perhaps it went over the head of the internet community. I write another one, a little more accessible, also based on notes in this diary.

  Sunday, April 6

  Dear Diary, good news. Mother is confused in mind, but perfectly healthy in body and spirit, Mrs. Jam reports.

  Monday, April 7

  There’s no internet at my hotel, nor at the venue at which I’m speaking. Frustrating. I’m helping the conference organizer with her work, but at the back of my mind, I keep wondering how cyberspace is reacting to the world’s newest blogger—newest, that is, except for the 200,000 other people who started blogs between Friday and now.

  Tuesday, April 8

  Your unesteemed narrator flies back to Hong Kong to greet his mother. We install her in the bedroom our daughters have been sharing. Mother may be suffering from dementia, but there’s one thing that she remains perfectly clear about. She hasn’t forgotten my promise about the house. “It’s not a problem, is it?” she asks.

  “Of course not,” I tell her. “I’m working on it.”

  My older girl moves to a make-shift bedroom we have carved out of a utility space, while the younger one shares a room with myself and Mrs. Jam.

  In Asia, people always squeeze up to make room. I am reminded of an old Sri Lankan saying that my mother taught me, as we squeezed into buses which were clearly already full: “Everybody must go, no?”

  Then I go to find a place with Wi-Fi so I can see how cyberspace has reacted to my latest post. Hmm. Still no response. I write a third essay and post it. I press “publish” with one hand while holding the other with crossed fingers behind my back.

  Wednesday, April 9

  YES. Feedback! It worked. And not just feedback, but a RAVE REVIEW has appeared written underneath my latest internet posting. Cyberspace has registered my presence.

  “These are some of the best photographs of vegetables I have ever seen!” a commenter enthuses. The odd thing is that it has appeared under a piece of writing which had no illustrations and no references to vegetables. I type up a rather vaguely-worded note, thanking him for his views. He may be a little illogical, but at least his heart is in the right place.

  Thursday, April 10

  Encouraged, I get to the noodle shop early to continue my work as the world’s only online postmodern vidushak. I post pictures of a past holiday. Late in the afternoon, I notice that another comment has been received. The commenter shares his feelings. “This is the best review of colonic irrigation equipment I have ever read!!”

  I use Skype to get a small fuzzy picture of Des and tell him the news: “I have acquired a commenter. But he is either an exponent of a highly idiosyncratic brand of dry humor, or he is totally insane.”

  Des shrugs. “He could be British.”

  The tall, rather well-dressed woman at the noodle shop has a different opinion. “Your reader is a spambot,” she says. “It’s a machine which adds random comments to websites.” She introduces herself to me. Her name is Sheila Coen and she works with computers.

  Friday, April 11

  A routine of some sort has been established. I start each day at a table sitting in front of a screen at the Quite Good. I write a column using notes from my diary. It goes into cyberspace. No one responds or pays me. It looks like Harold Woot was right about this, too. Blogging is a mug’s game.

  Suddenly, with a click and a pop, my new laptop stops working. I calmly wait for a few minutes—okay, it was a quarter of a nano-second, because I was panicking—and try again. Again, the machine clicks into life, whines for a moment, and then whimpers and dies, all within about eight seconds, reminiscent of the life-cycle of a typical Asian boy-band.

  Oh no! What to do? This laptop contains vast amounts of random jottings, essays and other unique written works which could easily have been sold to discerning publishers for a derisory sum, as usual. Why, if I cannot get the thing back to life, I will lose years of saleable work and will have to slash back my spending for the year by several dollars. Now I don’t want you to think that I totally lost it. The subsequent five minutes I spent rolling around on the floor screaming was about a completely unrelated matter, which I will identify as soon as I have thought of something plausible.
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br />   After a calming bowl of wonton meen, I recover my composure and phone Des. The death of my new laptop will not affect the presence of my blog in cyberspace, he says. It’s all preserved in what he calls “the cloud”.

  Okay. Whatever. I tell him I will get back to work. My enthusiasm to continue surprises me, and reveals that I must be actually getting into all this. Okay, so what if my reader is a spambot? “Everyone has the right to be entertained by sparkling writing, even spambots,” I tell him.

  “That’s the spirit,” Des replies. “The internet is a wonderful thing. You can even use it to fix your broken laptop. Just borrow someone else’s computer and search for instructions on how to get it going again.” Des sometimes really does have good ideas.

  Using Ah-Fat’s computer, I do an internet search for two particular terms, “troubleshooting” and my laptop’s name, which is “Tammy-Amber Juggs,” no, I’m joking, it’s “Thinkpad”.

  Up pops a site called Nerdwealth.com. It says: “If you own a Thinkpad and it ever fails to boot, never fear.” It recommends giving the thing a good thump in a specific spot. “1. Lift laptop up with right hand, keeping screen open. 2. Find fan. (Back left corner. You can see the copper fins inside the vents.) 3. Strike laptop case near vents several times with heel of left hand. 4. Power laptop back up. It should work.”

  I take my machine out of my bag. I turn it over. I locate the correct spot. I thump it. I hit it again. I wallop it a third time. (This feels good.) I turn it the right way up again. I press the “on” button. It clicks. It buzzes. It whirrs. It comes back to life, a black plastic Lazarus miraculously raised from the dead!

  Scrolling down the screen at NerdWealth.com, I notice that lots of people have had the same experience. Here are two comments from a long list. IMMZ wrote: “HOLY CRAP! It works! That’s amazing!!! Thanks so much.” Gromba wrote: “OMG! It worked. I love the internet.” I add my own comments in suitable “internet community” language: “It totally worked!! OMG OMG OMG!!”

  That night I mention the expiry and resurrection of my laptop to my mentor/ bartender. Benny nods. “You discovered the power of what is called ‘the hive mind’. Some scientists reckon that the internet community now has more intelligent problem-solving capability than all the world’s supercomputers put together.”

  Your unesteemed narrator cannot help but be stunned at this, considering the ghastly grammar, juvenile spelling and over-use of exclamation marks on almost every comments board. Or to put it another way, OMG!!!!

  Monday, April 14

  Dear Diary, I have now been posting regular items on the internet for a week. Instead of writing actual essays specifically for the blog, I simply write this diary on the laptop, and then select chunks which I cut and paste right onto the web site.

  This morning I phone Des to ask whether I have made any sort of impression on the cyberspace community. After all the writing I’m doing, I’ll need to see some financial return. “Just enough to buy a house in London,” I explain. He laughs. His reaction worries me. I think about telling him that I’m not joking but have second thoughts and keep my mouth shut. He explains that bloggers get paid by advertisers according to how many “eyeballs” see their work. “It may take you more than a week to get enough eyeballs,” he explains. He pops in to see me at lunch and spends 10 minutes poking around cyberspace on my laptop, looking at statistics. I wait anxiously. And then we have the following conversation.

  ME: So! How many readers do I have?

  DES: Let me see. You had six page views in the past 24 hours.

  ME: Wow, six readers!

  DES: Well, two are spambots and the other four all have the same IP address—er, I think it’s your own computer. It’s just you checking up on your own site.

  ME: So how many actual HUMAN readers do I have?

  DES: One. You are your only reader.

  ME: Oh. That doesn’t sound so good.

  DES: Well, on the plus side, it means that you are not likely to get a lot of abusive comments.

  ME: Should I give up?

  DES: Of course not. It simply means you’re not quite ready to sell advertising to major multinationals yet. Give it time.

  ME: Another week?

  DES: Uh, yeah. That could do it.

  Noticing that I have acquired the habit of carrying a laptop with me, Ah-Fat urges me to sign up for Facebook so I can swap messages with him.

  I say: “But I can already swap messages with you. You sit 1.5 meters from me.”

  He says: “Ah, but you can use Facebook to tell me what books, movies and music you like.”

  “But you already know what books, movies and music I like.”

  In response, he rolls his eyes, a good way to avoid answering tough questions. (Eve should have used it in Eden.) I tell him that social networks are a fad for brainless, idle, decadent people who want to waste their lives swapping trivia. “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he whines. Old joke.

  Tuesday, April 15

  Ah-Fat reminds me about his suggestion twice in 24 hours. I soon realize there is no fighting it. Many of my friends these days would rather be tortured to death by vicious underground terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the US Republican Party than be one minute late signing up for the latest craze. So I sign up to be his Facebook friend, and click a link which duplicates these diary posts on that site. I like this. You do one lot of writing and it appears in multiple locations.

  Wednesday, April 16

  My youngest child asks a tough question this morning. “Daddy, have you ever slept with a truck driver?” Good parents ALWAYS answer difficult queries truthfully without hesitation. I reply: “Of course, darling. Many times.”

  She continues: “Who else have you slept with? Anyone really weird?”

  I think for a moment before replying. “Well, about a month ago, I slept with two Buddhist nuns, and before that, a cricket team.” We are talking, of course, about the people we end up snoring with on journeys in Asia. The biggest single difference between east and west is that people on this side of the planet sleep in public. We have to, because we work all the time. We plunge into deep comatose states as soon as we step onto a bus, train or tram, two or three times a day. We snore on the shoulders of people sleeping next to us. At lunchtimes, our heads are on our desks, and we are dead to the world. Sometimes on moving vehicles we slide right off the seat onto the floor or even out the door. Nobody minds. I was on a bus once (the 171 Kowloon cross-harbor tunnel bus at rush hour) which so crowded that I had a long, deep sleep standing up. To the western mind, this is weird, dangerous or immoral. In Europe or North America, people go through a time-consuming process involving courtship, dating, and often marriage before they can experience the thrill of having another person snore in their ear or drool on their shoulder. But on any normal work day in Asia, the average commuter ends up sleeping with more people than most westerners do in a lifetime or Madonna does in an hour. One day last December, a tall, glamorous model went to sleep on my shoulder. For several minutes I enjoyed her expensive perfume and felt like a small, penniless Asian Hugh Hefner. But then, I too fell asleep. Three stops later, I woke up as she leapt to her feet and disappeared without a backward glance. That’s modern love for you.

  I once mentioned the whole sleeping-on-public-transport phenomenon to a tourist from Italy and his face broke into a smile. “I always wondered why you see people in Asia going shopping in their pajamas,” he said. “Now I know.”

  Thursday, April 17

  A friend of Ah-Fat’s joins our little Facebook group, and then a friend of his friend, and then a friend of his friend’s friend. Now there are five of us! Each of us posts at least one thing almost every day, sometimes more. However will I keep up?

  * * *

  Later, I find a report in the newspaper about a predicted 26 percent rise in apartment rents. “Landlords in this city are vultures, greedy to suck the blood of their tenants,” Ah-Fat says, mixing his metaphors.

  “I tho
ught you were a landlord?” I respond.

  “I am,” he says, proudly. “That’s how I know.”

  * * *

  The web is all very well, but the money thing worries me. I think I have spotted a flaw in Des’s plan for me to get rich and famous by writing a blog. The scheme calls for me to do lots and lots and lots of writing. But there’s no income of any sort. And, I am beginning to suspect, no real prospect of any. So how is this better than working for the newspapers?

  As I contemplate this, the word comes through the grapevine that Eddie and Des have fallen out, not that they were ever great friends to start with. Eddie thinks the printed media remains far ahead of the new media in form and function and says so in his normal blunt fashion, while Des is the ultimate evangelist for what he calls the Digital Revolution. Each sneers contemptuously whenever they mention the other’s side of the media. I resolve to stay with friendly with both of them. But at the moment, I must admit that the evidence seems to support Eddie’s line. Publishers of books, magazines and newspapers at least occasionally pay me, while the internet is filled with unedited ramblings that no one would pay anyone to read.

  Friday, April 18

  I log on to my computer this morning to find a message from a small child named Hui from a school where I had given a talk last month, asking to be added to my friend list on Facebook. Who could refuse? He was SO sweet. I click yes.

  Saturday, April 19

  BIG mistake. Hui must have promptly told the rest of his class. Today 29 of his friends joined the list.

  * * *

  All TV stations and radio stations are broadcasting a Black Rainstorm warning at the moment, ordering us to stay indoors, so there’s nothing to do but stay home all day and surf the web. The rain hits the windows not as a steady rush of white noise, but as a series of sudden splats, as gusts of wind whip their way around the high-rise canyons of Hong Kong skyscrapers. It’s as if the angels are throwing water-bombs.