And thennnnnnnnnnnn........

I had a weekend and a half.

First there was Gamarjobat. You could tell from the poster that this was going to be an awesome show. Aunty and myself wanted to see it from the moment we laid eyes on their big heads, but fate conspired against us, and then my schedule conspired against me. However, in a rare moment of opportunity, Saturday rolled around and after many phone calls and trips to the box office, Agency and myself managed to get tickets to their penultimate show. Inspector Saab had called earlier on and got me on the guest list at the Johnnie Walker party happening at the fancy new Mercedes showroom in town. It was F1 weekend, KL was the Grand Prix City, I had a freshly shaved dome... Everything was in place for a good night out. I even got to the theatre early and had a couple of beers while waiting for Agency to show up.

Gamarjobat didn't disappoint in the least. In fact, they were inspirational in their brilliance. They are a "shut-up comedy from Japan", which means that they do mime. Not paint your face, I'm a tortured soul stuck in a box mime, but sharp, extremely funny, extremely technical mime with exquisite timing. The secret is being a mime God is in the control of your body. If you are going to interact with something that isn't there, you have to act with your emotions and face like normal actors do, as well as your body. If I was going to mime the act of picking up an object from a table, my action has to take into account the weight, texture, resistance of said object. If my arm moves downward, picks up the object, and then moves upward again with no difference besides my fingers arranged in an object-clutching fashion, it would look fake and worse, stupid. However, if I take into account the additional weight of the object as my arm is moving upward i.e by tilting your wrist, the angle of your fingers, slightly altering the speed of the upward moving arm, then the action is made for more believable. When the action is far more believable, you can get into the spirit of the action in a much more comfortable fashion. With Gamarjobat, the quality of their mime is so excellent, you forget that they aren't using props. You assume the props are there. Just because you don't see them, it doesn't mean that they aren't. This is an amazing skill to have. It allows the audience to go straight to the meat of your performance. If you are trying to pantomime that your very small bag is heavy, you would have to pull and push at that small bag to no avail to communicate to me that it is heavy. If you can do this effectively, then I will move on to the next step of the performer-audience interaction, which is allowing your joke to develop within me and then we can go on the journey that the performer has set. If you pull and push at the small bag and it looks like you are playing keep-away with your 3-legged cat, then I will not believe you and will make fun of you with my professional mime friends. We will talk about how much of a loser you really are, and whenever you pretend like you are trapped in a box, we are all secretly wishing we could cover your head with a plastic bag instead.

So anyway, they were so good that you go straight to enjoying their show, and wah, their show was so enjoyable. For the first 20 minutes all they did was show off how damn good and funny they were. They had magic tricks, they had toilet humor, they had the escalator/elevator going up and going down thingy that I can watch for 12 hours straight and not tired, and they had tons of audience participation. They picked on me and I stood up and ably went through the motions well enough to deserve a second-picking on and a lollipop. I gave the lollipop to Agency and in her greediness, ate it on the spot, without even offering to share it. Bleardy shit. Now if I was me on stage, I'd pick on me too. Big brown fat guy with a shiny bald head, sitting in the front row, smiling happily with his arms folded in front of him, looking like a cross between Bob Hoskins and the Laughing Buddha? Dude... I might as well fax them two weeks in advance with my ticket number, politely requesting to be picked. This had led to my acceptance of audience interaction. The first time they picked on me was to react to this magical power they had where the first time they zap you, you freeze, and the second time they zap you, you unfreeze. A few audience members had some problems understanding the issue at hand, but I got it, they liked my reaction enough to pick on me again... but I don't remember what the hell for.

That memory was the first casualty of the evening.

You see, I had a shoot the next day, with a 7AM call time at location. Not just a regular shoot, but a shoot where my boss and mentor, The Brain Himself, was on the job as the baby wrangler. I did some careful calculation. Gamarjobat finishes at 10.30PM... Quick Drink with Agency till 11PM... Meet up with Inspector Saab @ Johnnie Walker's at 11.30PM... leave Uncle Johnnie's at 1AM... Shower and in bed by 2AM... Wake up at 6.30AM... On Set by 7AM. Perfect. Rocking. I've worked on far less sleep before. Besides, it was a reshoot and our talents were baby geniuses and the whole thing would be exxxxcellent.

I didn't, however, take into account the 15 or so whisky sodas I would end up drinking in an hour and a half. It was crazy. It was irresponsibility at its highest... a bull in a china shop, or an Indian boy in a freeflow of Johnnie Walker. Everytime I was almost done with one, some pretty young thing would sidle up next to me with my next beverage in their hand. Nothing else about that party was remarkable, except that there were a bunch of my good friends there, the place was really stylish, and the booze was flowing like chi. The rest of the crowd were wankers who had come for the glamour of it all but cleared out once they realized that the only ones who were left were the serious drinkers who only gave a shit about actually having fun and celebrating once they had gone out, and not to pose for the photographers (that being said, I ended up posing for at least 6 pictures that night). Pincushion just called to tell me he nearly got into a fight at that same party... some guy accused him of touching his wife, which never happened. The husband was so frustrated that he threw... wait for it... a whole pile of TISSUE at Pincushion. Whisky just makes everyone so manly.

The funny thing about drinking so much so fast is that it doesn't hit you until slightly later. I headed for my car at 1AM, right on time, and as I left, everything was ok... about 5 minutes into my ride home I suddenly realised that I was completely and utterly smashed and was seeing four of everything. Fuck. I felt so incredibly irresponsible. I hadn't done the drive with four of everything nonsense in so long. The only way you are going to survive it is if you close one eye and drive. This cancels out the 4 cars in front of you and leaves you only with the 1 real car, but the problem when you have one eye closed is that you can't judge distance... so when you get behind another car, drive with both eyes open and stay equidistant away from all 4 of the cars in front of you.

So driving drunk and seeing 4 is pretty fucked, but the worst part is that I completely forgot that I had shoot the next day, gave Cobra Commander a call and went over to see him in PJ for some late night breakfast. There we were at Pan Bakery, happily chomping away at pancakes and fried eggs when he turns to me and asks;

CC: Oi rendhi dog... what are you doing tomorrow?
Me: Nothing much... I got shoot in the morning, but then after that I'm free.
CC: You got shoot tomorrow morning? What the hell you doing here?
Me: Oh fuck... *tires screeching*

So I hope into my car and start heading back home, when I realise that I have met my match... I was too drunk to drive about 12 drinks ago, but now I'm way too drunk to even pretend to drive with one eye closed. I call my Guardian Angel in Providence and she proceeds to give me a massive yelling at, which I deserved, and tells me to pull over and get my brother to come pick me up. I thank her for her kind angry words, hang up, pull over somewhere near the Science Centre, call my brother, and then pass out. I wake up 30 minutes later to discover that I never pressed "Send" on my phone and the entire conversation I had with Don Jethwani was in my head and that it was now 2AM. I look around and realise I'm 2 minutes from home, so I suck it up and drive real slow all the way back home. I make my way from my driveway to my room in one smooth motion, jeans flying off, shoes kicked like habits, and as I'm climbing up my ladder to get to bed, my Internal Monologue says;

IM: Ok Koobz... it's only 2.15AM. Take your phone off of silent, set your alarm clock, and you can still make it.
Me: Ok set *zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

The next thing I know it is already 8AM the next day, my maid is screaming at my door that my friend is outside... my friend? who the fuck? Call time was 7AM! ARGHHHHHHHh.... I put on a pair of shorts, brush my teeth, comb my hair (haha), and dash outside to find Azuzu and a runner van, happily smoking a cigarette at my gate. Azuzu is laughing his ass off because he had completely suspected my tardiness on that day and had come to my rescue like the hero he often is. I left everything behind at home... no smokes, no lighter, no wallet, no business card holder, no pen, no call sheet... All I had was my handphone. Great.

The shoot was an exercise in how not to shoot. We as a production team had miscalculated the level of preparedness that we needed to do what was supposedly "an easy job". It wasn't. It was a nightmare. The problems were mostly small and boring if you aren't in the industry, but it was particularly entertaining when the owner of the house we were shooting at suddenly materialized and went ape-shit that half of Hollywood was in his garden. See, we had permission from the tenant, whose lease was expiring in a week.. but she flew the coop the day before all the way back to Ole Blighty (England) and she was nowhere to be found. Her only representative was the thamby gardener, who was the one who opened the gates for us and all. The owner was about to shit himself. He was swearing and screaming at us to get out, and was particularly upset about a 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 metre hole we had dug in his beautiful lawn. We had permission, just not from him. So there he was in his fuming rage demanding that we leave his property and The Brain Himself was doing his whole Exec. Producer smooth talkeration on him. Now, it is one thing to have the authority to ask a film crew to do anything, but when you don't have the authority, then there is not much in the non-violent world besides a court case and the police that will get a film crew to move. If we have even the slightest permission to be there, we will be there.

A film crew is a small army. Moving it is no easy matter. Equipment needs to be packed up, cables need to be rolled, a destination needs to be decided, non-drivers need to be accounted for and so on and so forth. You've got the art dept truck, lighting truck, camera truck, facilities truck, grip truck, and the generator truck... one of those trucks don't show up to location and you don't have a shoot. The vans that bring the talents and the wardrobe people, or the ad agencies, or the clients, or the director and the DOP... one of those vans don't show up to location and you don't have a shoot.

So long story short, we didn't move. We had paid SOMEONE to use that place, and SOMEONE had said yes, and unless you can give us a damn good reason to move... The angry owner proceeded to fume his way out of there and was back 10 minutes later because in his infinite inability to drive his car, had broken his side mirror while trying to squeeze past a 3 ton truck. He blamed it on us, and we will take half the blame for sure... but he had already driven in without a problem, how come the car couldn't get past when he was driving out? We told him to send us a bill and we'd cover it. We just got the bill this morning... RM2100! Whudafuck? My favorite incident that morning though was bright red middle aged white guy who stormed into the compound of our location, and for some reason, looked straight at me... his eyes were bulging, he was a brilliant shade of lobster, chest heaving... "I WANT SOMEONE TO MOVE THEIR CAR! IT IS PARKED RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE! I'VE ALREADY ASKED TWICE BUT NO ONE WANTS TO HELP ME. MOVE THE CAR NOW!" and then he turns around and thunders off. The entertaining part of all this was that we got to see some pent-up rage release itself, but the not-so-entertaining part of all this was the total unprofessionalism that was reeking off that shoot, just like the whisky was reeking off my breath. I was still drunk till about 11.30AM before my hangover kicked in. Having a hangover on 4 hours sleep while running after 2 children in the equatorial sun is just about as bad as it can get. My brain was trying to force its way out of my left eye socket.

Then it got worse. We got rained on nice and proper and I'm not the kind of AD that lets my crew get wet trying to protect their equipment. I was out there with them, getting soaked to the bone, my insane headache going inside out as the raindrops exploded against my skull. It was some chubby-ass rain, and it was a sad-ass scene as I sat down and smoked a cigarette and contemplated the last 24 hours, and then the last 1 month of my life. It was good, but actually terrible. I was out of shape, addicted to all the wrong things and people, and just basically in control of absolutely nothing. It is a very depressing mood to be in, compounded by the hangover and a feeling that I have only been privy to since I started working in production. The feeling of being sunburnt and completely wet and the same time. Your boxers and socks are wet, but the back of your neck is sizzling. It is the worst.

So later on that evening when we were absolutely done with the shoot, I lit up a Marlboro Light and got into the runner van to send me home. It tasted like death, and everything I don't want to be or don't want to do in my life flashed thru my head. I opened the window and threw it out. I'm very aware of myself when I do irresponsible things in my life. I even hand out punishments to myself in order to get myself back in line, but the punishments are usually terrible... like as if I handed them out myself. They'd be along the lines of "No Playstation for you for at least 2 weeks... except if you want to play Winning Eleven, and then you are allowed 2 games a night, but only when playing your Master League"... see what I mean? Nonsense. Driving drunk. Wallowing in sadness. Going to work late and unprepared; These things are not on. So my punishment this time around is not so much a punishment, but a reward. I'm making my first fully fledged attempt at quitting smoking cigarettes and turning my lifestyle around a smidgen. So far its been 2 days 18 hours 4 mins and 39 seconds.

I'm not quitting for some girl, or to hide from my parents. I'm quitting for my health. So I can go to the gym and run more effectively. So I can save some money and my prostate from cancer. I'm also redesigning my diet. I'm not ON a diet, I'm just eating healthy... and going to the gym. My workout is a combination between my own regiment as well as "The Men's Health Hard-Body Plan: The Ultimate 12-Week Program to Burning Fat and Building Muscle". It sounds ridiculous but its a good book, or at least I think so. I also think it's going to take me more than 12 weeks, but fuck it.

I got all the time in the world. I just realized I'm 24.