If education is the key to knowledge, and if knowledge is power, and if that power is the power to shatter the chains of ignorance and prejudice – then I’m concerned. Never mind the quality of local education yet. The escalating brain drain coupled with these numbers suggests a future where everything will remain just about the same. Books and freedom of expression – and ideas – are powerful things. The unbelievably (hilariously) long list of things censored and/or banned in Malaysia speaks volumes about the lengths to which the government will go to keep the people in the dark. Consider something as silly as Zoolander to something as serious as The Origin of Species. Banned, the lot of them. Right along with a host of books discussing Islam (Western writers know nothing!) and books with titles like: How To Talk To Your Child About Sex. The nation is being pushed back into ignorance while being simultaneously chided, scolded, and nagged to get an education. Talk about mixed messages.

What’s the point of an education, then? YouTubers are hauled to jail for making a parody of the national anthem. Bloggers are arrested for their opinions. Cartoonists are accused of sedition. Opposition newspapers are shut down for “inciting public unrest.” Press freedom has declined to a point where more African countries rank higher than Malaysia on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. There is a veil being drawn across the country in the name of national security. Yet in the name of national security, there cannot be a veil. Racial and religious tensions flare up every now and then because many still live under a rock. We cannot mommy a population about what films are suitable or not and expect them to mature at the same time. We must read widely because literature can open eyes, and because nobody will get far on MPH bestsellers alone. We must be allowed to speak because that is a byproduct of an educated society. In fact, all these things are a byproduct of an educated society. It’s how nations grow up.

I hold to the quaint idea that knowledge leads to truth and that the truth will set you free. Free from things like ignorance, fear, and prejudice. That is the point of an education. Granted, going to college doesn’t necessarily equal getting an education. Neither does one have to go to college in order to be educated. However, the tertiary enrollment numbers in Malaysia mean either most do not have the opportunity, or most do not care to even try. Oh dear, either way, oh dear.

There’s so much I still want to do. Yet I can’t.

I will die tomorrow.

I’ve gotten religion. It was a decision I made after much thought. I called a priest this morning and asked him to baptize me. I talked to him about making me a priest too. He said to give it some time, it was a big decision. The biggest, I said, and hurry up about it. I’ve become a new man.

The priest asked me what I would do if I were to be freed. I said I’d be a useful member of society. I’d get a job. I’d pay my taxes. God forgive me for evading the law for so long. I’d obey the traffic signs. Help old ladies cross the street. Tithe. Donate blood. Go to the villages in the remotest jungles and bring stacks of Bibles. Read the newspapers. Vote.

No longer will I knock down anyone in my way. I’ll be polite. I’m not going to plot to take advantage of the old and the young and the weak, only those who deserve it. I won’t live recklessly. Life is precious. I realize that now. My life is precious and I’ve wasted it.

I know now ignorance of the law is no excuse. My advice to everyone reading this: don’t be ignorant. I know mixing around with bad people is bad, so bad. Please. Don’t make my mistakes. Mistakes have consequences. I was brash and stupid back then. Reckless. You must understand. I know I didn’t until justice caught up with me.

Justice is good.

I cannot tell the government to abolish the death penalty. That means nothing coming from a dead man. I feel no anger or hate. There is no one to blame, but I forgive you. Forgiveness comes easy toward the end. If my words do nothing to persuade you that sentencing another human being to death is wrong, please read on. Sentencing another human being to death is wrong. God said not to murder.

I have so much potential. I’ve only been born. I’ve only just started thinking about life and death. I think about good and evil. Love and hate. I see life differently. Even the colors have changed. How does it make sense to snuff out a life like that? So if it’s not too much trouble, please overlook decades of debate and the rule of law.

I may have lived like the law didn’t apply to me my whole life. I just ask for an exception. This one last time.

Save your pity. Don’t judge me. Don’t. Laugh. Cry.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame rang true. It was a mess of inanity scattered with blistering lines like “nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” It hit me where Waiting for Godot hit me a long time ago. The sheer meaninglessness of life. The futility of human will. The emptiness of God. Beckett explores such themes in both works. Absurdist theater isn’t the most accessible stuff around. Waiting for Godot, when it first opened, was largely derided. Audiences walked out. Seasoned critics scoffed. People didn’t get it. But prison inmates did. In 1954, Beckett received a letter from Luttringhausen prison in Germany that reported the play’s triumph. “Your Godot was our Godot,” the anonymous letter writer said. The inmates knew what Waiting for Godot was about because they, unlike the theater critics, could actually see the walls keeping them imprisoned. Beckett’s worldview was bleak and black. One character in Endgame, after an attempt at prayer, cries: “That bastard! He doesn’t exist!” In a world without purpose, where hell is other people, where everything is nothing – the laughter masks a fury so searing that I begin to wonder what kept Beckett going if he really did believe what he wrote. The man might as well have committed suicide. He didn’t, and died an unremarkable death at 83. I suspect he didn’t buy everything he sold. It could have been part of a personal quest for truth. It could have been Beckett’s way of testing, discarding, and refining deep internal conflict. I think of him as generally misunderstood. I picture him a quiet man. A happy man.

Three days of nonstop live music. Free. The streets of Austin are awash with weirdos and hipsters and geeks and demigods. Oh mighty and awesome SXSW, we bow before thee. Asobi Seksu. The Dodos. The Dears. Yuck. Surfer Blood. The Strokes. Bright Eyes. I missed Noah and the Whale, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, DeVotchKa, The Twilight Sad, Great Northern, The Naked and Famous, and Matt and Kim – and a whole bunch more – for the simple reason that there’s only so much awesomeness an individual can handle at one time. Highlights: Owen Pallett’s cover of Joanna Newsom’s Peach, Plum, Pear; seeing Okkervil River – twice. Lowlights: Conor Oberst ranting about the US “bombing children in Libya,” and just about “any country with a -stan“; The Dodos not playing Park Song. But no need to lose sight of what really happened. The past three days have been enough to restore my faith in humanity.

A tire that goes on a killing spree? Sounds awesome. I was disappointed. And there was so much promise. At 85 minutes this film starts middling way before the middle, its smugness unable to carry it past its smug no reason philosophy. Cool poster though.

Spring break in Austin has been great so far. There was: floating down the San Marcos river, seeing a copy of the Gutenberg Bible at the Harry Ransom Center, tasting that burrito at Chuy’s, smelling music down at 6th Street. The Twilight Sad or Okkervil River? Has to be one or the other. Gah!

I laughed because I knew I believed the people responsible for blowing up buses, hijacking planes, and killing civilians deserve to die.

I laughed because I knew I thought that the best response to terrorism was a policy of an eye for an eye. We need an alert public, sharper intelligence agencies, and stronger retaliatory measures.

Let’s all pray the food crisis away! Let’s wish for an alternative source of energy! Maybe, if we cross our fingers hard enough, we’ll manage to quell the unrest in the Middle East! I laughed because I knew I believed prayer was not an answer to anything.

Yet Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I laughed because I knew I want so much to do that – and I cannot.

I take film seriously. There is no such thing as “just for fun,” or anything like “harmless entertainment.” The most mindless, cynical-let’s-make-money kind of films, have a worldview. They espouse one view of life over another and they are not neutral. These ideas will inevitably whisper their way inside our heads whether we like it or not. The question is whether we choose to let them by like callous immigration officials, or whether we choose to engage them. We cannot pick and choose what we get from film. It’s complex, interconnected, multi-layered. We get the whole deal or nothing at all. Pretending that you can pick and choose what to take from a film is a lie. Pretending that there are films that are “better” morally, spiritually, or ethically, is also a lie. There are good films and bad films. That is all. We judge the film truly if we judge it aesthetically. Using some kind of moral compass to draw a line in the swirling sand between films “appropriate” or “inappropriate” is foolishness. Either everything is okay or nothing is. The only reason to avoid wasting time with a film is if it’s a bad film: if the writing is sloppy, if the acting are atrocious, if the story is half-baked. But when you sidestep Schindler’s List because of the sex scene? When you throw out Fargo because of that part in the hotel? When you raise an eyebrow at Little Miss Sunshine because of the language? You’re missing the forest for the trees. Schindler’s List tells of the dichotomy of the human spirit. Fargo is a brilliant fable about the folly of man and the wisdom of fate. Little Miss Sunshine says we’re all losers anyway – which is profoundly inspiring. It baffles me how some can reject these and choose films of such questionable quality. Subjective nonsense, you might say. Not as much as you might think. Our taste in film gives much away. It’s interesting to me how we can identify and sympathize and side with the different and the outcast in film, and not do the same in reality. We see ourselves as different and identify with Gru, the X-Men, James Dean, Nemo, Frodo, Harry and behave exactly as Dudley, Magneto, and Saruman would. Life is not clear-cut. It’s deep, complex, baffling, ironic. Film should reflect that. The best heroes are conflicted, torn between doing what’s right and doing what they want. The best characters are ambiguous, they change their minds and have the potential to become better or worse. The best stories have bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. The best stories question our dearest beliefs, challenge us to see another point of view, and raise more questions than answers. The greatest sin a film can make is to lie, to give us cookie-cutter characters and mad-lib story lines, and present a world where good and bad are clear from the get-go, where everything ends well. Films can change lives. A steady diet of bromances and rom-coms and shoot ‘em ups tells me who you are and who you’re going to be. It tells me how wide your horizon is. It tells me how open you are to new ideas, different people, and strange experiences. There is a place for comfort food, but you can’t expect to grow if all you had was breast milk. There’s a bold new world of cinema out there. Why stick to the cliched, the maudlin, the trite? Why be safe in fiction when anything is possible? We should labour tirelessly to mature our knowledge in film, develop our taste, grow our opinions. None of it has anything to do with the real world, and so all of it is serious stuff. We’re defined by what we think and how we think, what we imagine and what we dare not to imagine. Films shape our ideas. We can get a better grip on that by talking about it. Question, debate, and never be afraid to see yourself in a despicable character. Never avoid films because they offend your religious sensitivities. Avoid them because they offend your self-respect. Take film as seriously as you take life.

I take film seriously.

I finished Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark. The man is profound. I’ve never seen anyone use such words to such effect. A brilliant writer. Yet somehow avoids the traps so many brilliant writers fall into by shedding all traces of pretension. During the break I devoured like an animal David Sedaris, Jonathan Franzen, Orson Scott Card, Alan Moore, Charles Burns, Lionel Shriver, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Winn Collier, and Roald Dhal. It was the understated, the muted, the simple, that really impressed me. I loved the quiet beauty of Danny, the Champion of the World. The naivete of Tatsumi’s work belied something so deep and painful and true. Ender’s Game worked because of awesome restraint on Card’s part.

Yes, I may have buried myself in Seattle’s bookstores and libraries. I may have surfaced from the depths of my books to go up and about occasionally if only to fulfill some sort of rule that on while on holiday one must “do something.” But when I spent a day wandering in a daze in and out of Seattle’s wonderfully worn secondhand bookstores, I remembered everything college let fly from my mind. I seized the moment the way a hungry thief grabs a loaf of bread. I read. And for a while it was like the good old days. But there’s no going back. The grind beckons.

The Coen brothers can do no wrong.

The man sitting next to me on my flight from Seattle to Abilene didn’t ask why once, he asked it twice. Why would anyone want to change the world? His cold, small chuckle gave away a lifetime of hard-won wisdom. I liked him right away. As the conversation continued it became clear that I was sitting next to the most interesting person in the world. He was a fascinating, balding 46 year-old man dressed in camo pants and a brown leather jacket. He was, for lack of a better word, stringy. Apt considering his fondness for hunting and a deer’s tenderloins cooked just right. Guns he loved, and guns he upheld as the backbone of America. Guns are the great equalizer, he said, nothing protects the innocent like a gun. He showed me a picture of his house by the water in Blaine. Built it himself, too. While I’m here, my wife’s alone at home and I thank God almighty that there’s a gun next to her bed. I scored points when he learned I’d fired an M16 once.

There’s nothing like a hard-boiled conservative – perhaps even libertarian, he admitted – to bring out your true colors. I always thought I was a shade conservative, but I’ve discovered it’s more accurate to say I’m a shade liberal. There was in his seat pocket a copy of George Bush’s Decision Points. He railed at the government and insisted that he should be left alone. I want my county to tell my state to leave me alone, and I want my state to tell the federal government to leave me alone, and all the way back down. He psshawed the UN and said Bush did the right thing. It was useless trying to persuade him that a hundred years ago, isolationist policies were feasible, but not today. It was even more futile trying to persuade him that the UN was the only thing preventing the international community from descending into chaos (when it comes down to it, I’m swayed by ridiculous ideals). In return, he professed a belief in mankind’s warped nature, and oddly consistent with his passion for guns and ammo, maintained that there were a lot of people out there who should be dead. Including Saddam. He had a brother who served two tours in Iraq. Bringing democracy and freedom to the people, no nobler cause, no sir. And he believed it. Wholeheartedly.

I beat George Bush in a race once, he said. My heart stopped for a second. I beat him by more than two minutes. Apparently they used to belong to the same running club, back before Bush became governor. He leaned back in satisfaction. Two minutes. Ah, the good old days, I could almost hear him thinking. Ah, Texas. Texas, full of gun-toting red-blooded honest-to-god Americans. He grew up in Lubbock, not far from Abilene. He laughed that the sheriffs in both towns still knew his name because he screwed their daughters too much. Went to college too, instead of joining the army. Stupid, he muttered, selfish. There were too many pretty girls. When he tried after 9/11, it was too late. Too old, they told him. Now he sends Christmas packages to the troops as a kind of compensation, if not for them, then for himself. I do my part, he said, although this time he didn’t sound so sure. In college, he did something I admire in just about anyone: he stayed away from the fraternities. You aren’t in a frat? he asked. Good. Be your own man. I treasured the compliment. He didn’t do too badly in college either. Finished with a 3.6, all too short of the perfect 4.0. It wasn’t fair, he shook his head, and I was screwing her too. To cap it off, he came out of college with a wife. I didn’t ask how they met.

He didn’t get in trouble with furious fathers alone, he came close to being blown away by tornadoes at least three times. Doors ripped from their hinges, trees blown out of the dirt, buses swept down the street – I listened in mounting envy that my childhood should be so drab. He was even bitten by a rattlesnake in the barn (you’re a city boy, huh? he had that tone country-folk reserve for city boys). What did he study in college? Law. Real-estate law. Most lawyers are liberals, believing in the community and so on, and they embarrass me. But, well, I embarrass them too, and here he gave a shrug that was at once defeated and defiant. Ever been to New York? You’d like it there. Lots of liberals. For someone who believes in independence and freedom, and opposes conformity and regulation so strongly, it’s funny that he should have chosen law. He searched the top of the aircraft for the right words for a moment, and said at last, I help my clients stay away from that conformity and regulation. At this point he struck me as a genius. What a brilliant college student, to juggle an affair and a near-perfect GPA. He disdained authority, but was smart enough to see that you kept your enemies closer. And law? A masterstroke. Throughout this sandstorm of information and banter I was never entirely sure how much I could believe. But perhaps the most memorable thing he said that evening was: oh, did you see that? She’s got big boobies. Without missing a beat we went back to talking about what made America so great.