Well, I didn't think it was going to be easy but my God Sharon is right - you spend so much time swatting away flies that at the end of the week even when you close one eye it still drains you, knowing that the hill has chosen to park its fat arse right there in front of exactly wherever it is that you want to go. And you haven't even taken the first of a thousand steps!

You know, and this is just between you and me, I would rather have spent the energy just getting on with things. The time for talk is over for me now. I haven't been writing since, what, 2 months ago? I'm dumb, yes, but thick as my skull is, the message does eventually filter through: talking gets me nowhere.

I'd been spending a lot of time - five to six hours a day, usually in the office, since I never used to have an internet connection at home - in online forums since 2001. In that time I've written and posted probably an average of one article every other day. And what do I have to show for all that effort?

Falling on deaf ears

For every 3,000 people that you reach out to, you get maybe one or two who would suspend their prejudices and engage you in conversation to hear what you have to say. At the same time, you come across maybe one or two who have something interesting to say in return. Usually, though, it's just the typical pre-made sugared water. It doesn't even have bubbles in it to tickle the tummy linings. How banal.

Most of the time you get exactly the same thing: people pile on you and kick your butt en masse. How many newsgroups have I been kicked out of, anyway. It was amusing for a while, but it got old very quickly. Ikea doesn't sell chairs big enough to contain pulsatingly sore butts, let me tell you that. Hey, I'm only human, so what the heck.

These days, it's no longer funny, but rather than dig in and duke it out, experience teaches you to just roll your eyes, walk away and try to pay no heed.

That's the curious thing that I have discovered. You say something and the people who agree with you are likely those who already hold the same view in the first place. Only very rarely do you get people from the other side, or who have been sitting on the fence, to see things from your perspective.

And the people who are on the other side? They don't really hear what you're saying. As long as you're not saying something that syncs with what they hold inside, it doesn't really matter; you're an enemy who needs to be silenced.

It's how I came to believe that all argument is pointless and about as satisfying as wanking off to the latest Internet hottie. It took me four years (of wanking, yes... so it's not just my arse that's sore), but these days I really can't be bothered about whether the house is falling to pieces or not. I'd rather keep my head down and work on the company - not Neohikayat - I'd started to feed myself. Capitalism feels so goooood and liberating. Certainly much better than socialism.

The peculiar thing is that these people who disagree with you have a radioactive mutant-like tendency to rant and wail and decry you as the devil incarnate (which I probably am, so I'm not discounting those charges), and yet you find yourself at a loss to respond because, well, how do you argue with garbled words and non-logic?

Like many Mingguan Malaysia articles, these rabids have a tendency to lose the plot very early on. They would start with one thing in the headline, carry that through for the first two paragraphs (if we're lucky), and by the end of it they would have taken us on a meandering journey through the horse dung mountains of Greater Tibet, and you would have been well and truly lost.

And then they expect - nay, demand! - that you respond! What the hey, f- face, how exactly do you expect me to do that?

Fancy is as fancy does

No wonder a lot of Malay writing these days are full of fancy words and convoluted phrasings: they're like frilly doilies that mask the fact that there is, in fact, nothing underneath. Or, at most, something that only takes two paragraphs to say. Try and read the IKIM column every Sunday and see.

And too literal to boot! Grr. Let's not go there, but man, these soiled diaper cases really need to go and take lessons on the different levels of reading.

For once - just once - I would loved to be torn down by a critic who is eloquent and, above all, coherent.

For God's sake, is that too much to ask? The answer, unfortunately, has always been, yup.

There are things that I think I need to do and that's all I'm interested in. Don't agree with me? Go start your own thing. Nobody's putting a gun to your head and telling you to buy anything.

But that's the problem, isn't it. Most people want to be a victim. They want to feel like they're some helpless slaphead who can't help but be dragged along by whatever it is that someone else happens to do. They want to be dictated by circumstances; rising above it is too much effort.

Boy, I'm pissed

That way they think can get away easy when God, in the afterlife, asks, "Well, you knew the world was getting shot to pieces, why didn't you do anything about it?" They think they get to go, "Ohhhhh hnk hnk, it wasn't my fault, see, there were all these bad people who were promoting all these undesirable values and and and..."

"I see," God would probably say. "So, why didn't you go and start your own publishing house, then?"

"Welllll, hnk hnk hnk, you see, God, I don't have any money and I had a full-time job and I have the car to pay for and I have 5 kids because that's what You wanted us to do, right, and and and..."

Burn in hell, freak. Lovely to see you down here, by the way; it is a little toasty, isn't it.

Retort is all these people are good at because they're too lazy to Do. They would rather spend time in the kedai kopi looking out for the next idiot whose pants they would pull down for public entertainment.

Here's the thing. Let me draw a great big circle. See that? That's the entire Malay community in Malaysia. Now let me draw a smaller circle - that's UMNO members - and another one - that's PAS and the Islamists. Now see that tiny bit up there that looks like a speck? That's my turf.

For all this talk about "memecahbelahkan masyarakat Melayu" (splitting the Malay community), I honestly can't see how it would destroy the fabric of this great community by having differences of opinion within it. I would have thought that would make it even stronger.

Evidently, I am mistaken. Which is why the idea of having many circles within that one big circle is intolerable for some people. They would rather see a monolithic circle (the better to steamroll other races with?).

It's funny when people write to tell me to acknowledge the viewpoints and sensitivities of others who disagree with me. One, I don't have to agree with whatever other people have to say. And two, for the mainstream to turn around and tell the minority, "Acknowledge me" seems like - I dunno - weird. I mean, why are you giving this power over to me?

Deviant Malays: how many of us are there, anyway? And - more importantly - how deviant are we, really? (Or another way to look at it: are we the ones who are deviant?)

Enough to scare the sweet shit out of the rest of us, that's for sure. Even though you could probably fit all of the bad Malays into a satellite town and burn the whole lot of us out of your collective memories. Oops. I just put ideas into Rabid Boy's head, now.

RUHAYAT X's publishing house Neohikayat Press will launch Aweks KL in early July. Aweks KL is written by and about women. Already it's garnering a lot of heat and flak. Wilayah Kutu - the first anthology published by Neohikayat - is the book to have in your hands now.