It was like sitting down and having tea with the Devil.
“Rituals are symbols, friend,” said Gomez, my High Priest of Obscurity. I mused about the symbolism of Monty Python’s Holy Grail for a bit, and recalled cows tossed over castle walls. Ah, I have it now: jettison the meat, a fundamental vegan doctrine; being vegan, an Edenic reference, no doubt, prefiguring humanity as innocence before the Fall - therefore cows over castle walls equals references to the innocence of a child suckling at his mother’s breasts. I said as much to Gomez.
“You see it now,” he said, “and you will also note the subversion of the Arthurian myth in that movie, dissembling notions of the quest for the ideal; the ideal is tomfoolery”. He said this with much vigour and I eyed his cup of teh-tarik warily. I considered my options, throwing furtive glances at Gomez’s unkempt hair and ganja-induced conjunctivitis. I made up my mind.
“Boss, teh-tarik lagi satu,” I said to a passing stereotype of cheap labour, himself a symbol of a globalized, socially-acceptable form of indentured servitude.
“There is, really, no truth,” Gomez continued, pushing a piece of paper between us, “only patterns”. He must have caught my brief frown; what was this, now, latter-day epistemology? Gomez began drawing smallish-patterns on said paper with a much-chewed pencil. The kopitiam’s indentured slave slides a glass of teh tarik across the table, providing on cue his best Third World insurance-salesman smile.
“And is that a truism?” I asked Gomez, immediately regretting my question; he twitched and frowned ever so briefly, and I panicked. With Gomez, there was no telling if irritation would lead to lengthy explanations or a short shrift with a dull spoon. He waved away my comment and I breathed easy.
“Everything is connected, friend. Witness the petrol price increase; by itself, traumatic. Then place all the pieces on the table, friend. The smelly water. The failed MRR2. Women squatting in the nude. Don’t you see it?” he said.
“No, not really. Oh, wait: the government’s fucked?” I said, chuckling. He didn’t think it was funny, but I laughed anyway.
“It’s a conspiracy!” he hissed, “A vast and complex conspiracy!”