I get my mental libido, amongst from other divine sources, through language and how it structures my inner reality - assuming I know what inner reality means and what it looks like. Which I don’t. And that is the beauty of imagining what each word, ie concept or noun, looks like in my ‘mind’s eye’. As a child, I have this hypersensitivity towards words. I get OD-ed (in gangsta slang it means overdosed) by words.

I get high on them, sometimes I would go higher than the Empire State Building or doubly higher than the Petronas Twin Towers. I’d repeat a new word I learn over and over again until I feel nauseated and at times feel like blackening out.

As in the character in Jean Paul Sartre’s story, Nausea. I’d sit on the bus (usually at the back, unlike Rosa Parks of the Civil Rights movement,) look out of the window, and get high first on the rugged and gangsta lullabying motion of the monstrous vehicle such as the T Hakim Bus service in my village or the Johor-Singapore Express from the Sinfully Smelly City of Johor Baru to the Rochor Centre in Singabore (oops, Singapore City I mean). I’d get high on words.

I’d notice the signboards, read them words, read billboards, read the captions, read name of streets and figure out what they mean. Then like, the mythical Malay Frankenstein who ate human vomit to get high and become as mighty as Smoking Joe Frazier, I’d get high on words my little eleven-year-old pea brain worth two cents for that two-pound universe would get clogged and fogged with words that I felt like having a word vomit - like Badang.

I’d close my eyes and take a deep breath and I’d be happy again. I would feel that I had photographed the words and archive them somewhere in my micro-mini-midget brain. Then, I’d search for the best ais kacang and cendol in town to cool myself off and to have a brain freeze high. Words would be alive in me and I’d become some of them.

Sitting here now in my library amongst these few thousands of books perhaps of a billions words, I’d close my eyes at times to go back the times I first encounter words, and in this case, names of people and things associated with my life in a drug-infested Malay kampong in the Sinful and Smelly City of Jay Bee. In the hippies-high-on-pills ‘pil khayal’ seventies. Of Tasek Utara radicals-against-golf-course protest times of the Deep Purple and Rolling Stones seventies.

Yes, Johor Baru of the seventies was the stinkiest and smelliest and sweatiest city in Malaysia. The bus station smelled like a concoction of petrol and piss. Of dust and dung and people walking around like mutating American Yankees in dungarees. Thanks to her river of life - the Segget River. Smells like the rottenest of all eggs on planet earth.

A cross between a rotten Johor-Malay telor pindang and Chinese thousand-year-old egg, Kelantan budu, Malacca cincalok, North Korean DMZ-Gangnam-styled kimchi and ten-year old Swiss cheese - all in one that gave the Johor Baru city, like its politics, that stinky, eggy, rotteny, cheesy, pungently feel. Cross-culturally stinky.

Like AliBaba-1MDB-Bujang-Jones-Lapok-Trump-Syrian-murderers kind of rotten stinky. Stink-to-the-heavens kind of stinky. Like how it is described in Sasterawan Negara Shahnon Ahmad’s great Malay late 1980s post-mo novel titled ‘Shit’, written during the Dr Mahathir Mohamad Era - about that period of stinkiness.

But hey, did I have a choice to be born in and live, say in Kuala Lumpur, the second stinkiest city then, or even Kuantan the third, which smelled like dead fish at times? Smells like Bauxite Red Planet kind of stinkiness. Kelantan illegal logging kind of stinky.

Gua Musang-bullying-of-the-Orang-Asli-kind of stinky. Islamic State-hypocrisy kind of stinky. Cartoonist-Zunar-arrested monthly-kind of stinky. No I did not have that choice of a birthplace. I wanted my city to smell like Singapore’s Marina Bay - when I was growing up as a teen, it smelled that way. Smells like teen spirit. But I supposed a city ought to smell as nice as her politics. And the stinkier the city, the stinkier the politics.