The Republic of Awesome

Everyone has dark secrets. Mine are perhaps darker than most.

I’ve kept a huge one for far too long now. Two fuckin’ years to be exact.

Fuck it. I can’t take it anymore. Can you imagine having the most incredible story of your life and not being able to tell anyone? The inner tension is so bad I’m sure it could kill you.

I’m telling it here. A part of it anyway. I’m still afraid there would be consequences.

If you know me personally, perhaps I’ve told you part of this, in a joking manner.

I wasn’t joking. I was cracking up. I just couldn’t keep it in anymore. If you knew the truth, you’d have thought me the scum of the universe.

But it’s too late. Better you read it here than somewhere else. At least you’ll hear my side of the story first.

How do I start?

In the middle I guess. I don’t want to elaborate on how it began. That would compromise too many good friends now unrelated with what I did.

So here it is in a nutshell:

Those stories I ‘made up’ about selling guns to Zambia, then the D.R. of Congo?

They were true.

Well, I didn’t sell them directly. I mostly handled the back-end duties. Some basic creative accounting, email correspondence and coordination with our field agents, and cycling the illegal profits back into the legal money system.

Nonetheless I was involved and a willing accomplice.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to launder money in Singapore. Banks here, unlike the USA, do not have regulation on how much you can deposit before they start checking your books. Even if they checked, you could have the money out of the country long before they can do anything.

But enough with the boring accounting shit. Here’s the interesting part – how we actually acquired our stocks of arms.

Suppliers were mostly from North Korea. It is corrupted as fuck there! The ranking officers were selling their surplus North Korean Type 68’s at US$100 a piece. We issued them receipts for US$70 (which were given to the government) and they pocketed the difference.

The rifles were bundled into trucks and driven across the Chinese border. A small bribe allows smooth passage of the merchandise. At a small town called Dalijiazhen 300km from the border, the cargo would be unloaded at an aquatic farm along the shoreline. The goods are then loaded on a boat.

After a quick run through the bay, the boat reaches Changhai Island, which has an operational international airport. Disguised as plumbing parts, the crates of weapons are loaded onto a cargo plane. This cargo plane heads straight for Zambia where our goods are either sold to the local government, or shipped across the border to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where ongoing localized conflicts ensure a steady demand.

The North Korean Type-68. Fairly decent Russian AKM copy.

We shipped about 10,000 pieces twice a year. They were sold at roughly $300. I say roughly because we were usually paid in diamonds. Minus the cost of dissolving these conflict diamonds into the market, we generally had around $3,000,000 revenue per shipment.

That was our main operation. On the side, we shipped Chinese handguns to criminal organizations around South East Asia. In fact, I kept a Norinco Model 77B from one of our shipments. It sits on my table as I write this.

We didn’t supply the 7.62mm rounds though.

Life was good. I didn’t get a very large cut, but it was plenty to live well.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.

Our top masterminds were recently arrested, crippling our organization. Investigators are penetrating our whole network. It’s just a matter of time before I get implicated as well.

I’m not sure what to do, but writing this out made me feel… better? I don’t know – it’s probably not going to help seeing as everything is FUBAR anyway.

Edit: I just got a call from my Singaporean partner. There were police outside his building. I’m going to dispose of the Norinco. Blogs are not considered as evidence in court, right?

So this morning I went for the NOC interview round two.

Also known as Super Hantam Interview Time (S.H.I.T).

Because, as the name implies, you will kena hantam nicely. The interviewers will find your weakest point and grill you about it until you crack and crawl out of the interview room like a puddle of expired vodka jell-o.

Unless you’re as awesome as me and you just outright refuse to.

You outright refuse to because you have suited up, and when suited up, you are so awesome nothing can possibly faze you. Not even the end of the freakin’ world because you’d just haul your ass on the meteor hurtling towards Earth and surf it like a cowabunga board.

Being suited up grants player +5 Invincibility.

No you turn around and talk about Steve Jobs. Even though you don’t own a single goddamn piece of Apple equipment. But that doesn’t matter because you’ve read Job’s biography like a dozen times.

Read it because you realise that there’s a lot of Steve Jobs in you. The early Steve Jobs that is, and the parts that made him a bit of a jerk. That tenacity, that unbridled need to have things your way, that fickleness and perfectionistic torture you put your employees through.

Maybe, just maybe, it means you have it in you somewhere to become an entrepreneur.

And maybe you will. Only to get your ass fired from the very company you founded because you are such a supermassive asshole.

I relate to the 30-years-ago version of this dude.

Maybe, But we will have to see.

If I managed to make the cut, I’m sending a Thank You note to Mr. Jobs.

It’s the least I can do for showing me that yes, the stubborn, tenacious, visionary of a man can ultimately make a dent in the universe.

One night out.

100% opened, hooked and connected.

Guess who’s back in the game?

For more elucidation; or maybe not - follow me on motherfucking twitter.

Yes I finally succumbed to peer pressure and got the motherfucking lamest blogging shit since Facebook statuses (which are awesome for bitching about people like … *ahem* you know who you are)

TWEETER

With the exams out of the way (said motherbitchin’ exams had as much ass rapin’ as a prison shower room), I’ve had all the goddamn time in the world!

Which I squandered on sleeping. … … NOT!

I spent my suddenly free time fixing up the two broken bicycles I found. The good news is they now work perfectly well, and I cycled with Joe this morning to Sheng Siong to get bike locks.

Sheng Siong – The solution to life, the universe and everything else.

The bad news is that the bicycles are about as useful as using an enema to cure cancer if you want to get around the university. This is as the arsehole who designed the place didn’t bother to level the hills.

Trust me, it’s a literal pain in the ass to ride up slopes. But the feeling of going down one at a speed that will likely kill you is priceless.

Speed is always good. Keanu Reeves’ acting on the other hand…

On another note, last night I did some superiorly awesome shit. This is shit so awesome I will not post any more details of it.

This is because certain Powers-That-Be (PTB) have a tendency to stalk their ‘employees’ online. I had a friend who got called up by the PTB because he was organizing a trip on a social networking site (you know which one). This was:

1. A trip with no fucking relation whatsoever with the PTB, save that a few of their ‘employees’ were tagging along.
2. A trip that does not involve a) hookers or b) drugs or c) anything illegal to the best of my knowledge.
3. A trip for all purposes and intents, was a innocent sojourn with good friends to a far off place to do nothing else but relax and have a good time.

Thus I will say no more. The awesome shit I did while under the purview of my previous PTB though, I have posted some already and will post more.

I’ll just leave you with a singular picture:

Say it with me: I WILL NOT OBEY!

I just worked for the last 4 hours or so. Without a break.

Before you start applauding at my amazing feat (amazing because even working for 5 minutes seems a pretty good achievement these days), please note that I was not working on school work.

At all.

I think it would take the threat of Ultraman kicking my ass in his glorious rubber suit to make me do proper work. Or the threat of torture and deadlines work too.

Mmm torture.

But no it wasn’t school work.

I was repairing two disused bicycles left in the hall bicycle shed.

This involved liberating the bicycles from a rusted lock system (mostly by breaking the rusted locks) then some minor repair shit like replacing the seat or resetting the chain on the sprockets.

As I have repaired them, they’re MINE. That is as long as the previous owners don’t come back to claim their rusty pieces of crap.

Great fun – I’m more alive when I’m repairing or building or creating things that I totally don’t have to. This is also known as procrastinating.

That is all.

Oh except that I still have fun during classes doing total rubbish:

Click to full view.