On Malnourished Spectres

Unfortunately, “no” my follicle-challenged former neighbour, this is not an update on the incarcerated enigmatic producer from the 60’s.

A funny thing happened on the way to work (and stop me if you’ve heard this one before), over the past few weeks. There are all sorts of cakes, fancy drinks with burnt sticks in them on the sidewalks. This is very noticeable in the City of Finery. Well, city of fines, anyway.

Adhering to my law of not letting the truth get in the way of a great story, I won’t profess to fully understanding it. And rather than do my research I will string together my understanding from a few disjointed conversations in coffee shops and pubs.

So it turns out that this is Singapore’s version of Halloween. Without the Jack-O-Lanterns or corn candy. Somewhere around about seven months into some calendar that has a whole lot to do with the moon, someone nutbag opens up the doorway to the underworld and lets a whole lot of famished ethereal folk into the land of the warm bodies. The devout and spiritual warm bodies are on their game – they leave offerings to mollify these wraiths that have the munchies.

All pretty harmless stuff.

Except for the burning bit. You see there also seems to be a belief that burning some paper cash will appease the angry apparitions, and bring prosperity to the merchant … at least until the feller with the short memory opens up the gates of hell again, around seven moon months into next year.

Those tortured souls that read my earlier treatise on just how much wind there is on The Island (there is none) will be connecting the dots about now. You see when the majority of the population starts burning incense, lighting up real money, torching fake money and - in some cases – setting alight to whatever you can stuff into a 10 gallon drum, on a Island with no wind … well you get the picture. Speaking of stuffing whatever you can into a 10G drum, a big Cheerio to my favorite Irish ship painter (your 10G drum story beats my 10G drum story by a wide margin).

So I’m going to bring myself some good luck and put the left over pizza and what’s left of the Coopers Stout out on the side walk for the hungry hillbilly ghost. And I’ll burn a few bob (from The Maid’s purse, of course) on a stick.

Or you can bring good fortune upon yourself like my boy did last weekend (in a moment when he wasn’t channeling Stink Fly or Kevin Leven), and you can just reach up to the display that is perched above the ‘do not touch’ sign, and take the money from the mouth of the jade tiger.