Letter to Julia 20120416

In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful.

Aaaaargh... Sundays are always busy days for me. I've been slammed since I woke up this morning, I need to wake up later, but that doesn't work either. Oh I'm so lazy, Julia. I just wanna snuggle up with you. The lot next to my house belonged to my grandfather, and it's twice as big as my yard. It was overgrown with trees, scrub and thick thorny brambles, with snakes and huge monitor lizards, but I managed to clear out most of them. The monitor lizards still come around occasionally, but I just found an old catapult on the ground. How convenient, but I would rather have an AK-47: those lizards can run pretty damn fast. I'm still working on chopping down useless trees, and burning trash, and digging up stumps, and whacking weeds, plus everything regrows at lightning speed out here in the tropics, so it needs to be maintained. But my Mom is in such a hurry to cultivate that land for some reason, so she also has me plant and maintain some crops. Of course I don't eat any of that stuff except maybe the okra and the peppers, but they are all still babies at this point. I transplanted a few banana trees for my Mom. Did you know that banana trees are kind of like giant celery bunches? Well, that's what it seems like to me. The babies grow right at the roots, so I chop off a portion of the root where the baby plant grows, just as you would chop off a segment of a potato where the eye grows. More daunting is the task of emptying out all the trash in the ruins of my grandfather's house. It's a big house, with about 7 or 8 bedrooms. It's most likely crawling full of jinns.

Everything of that house has to be demolished anyway, for some of the rooms are just ramshackle spaces made of reused wooden planks built by my grandfather for some odd reason, probably due to excessive jinn activity. God knows. Chee Cheah seems to think it's clean, because she hangs out there nearly all the time. Besides, I much prefer this little house I'm in now. But nowadays, there is something much more different going on here than when I was a small child. You may think that it's not your fault that you lag behind, as I may think that the front line is no place for someone as beautiful as you. Rather, it is preordained that you lag behind, due to the circumstances and the type of people I have to deal with in regards to this mission of mine to please Allah with music. The consequences are that decisions will be made for you, and the restrictions thereof. But do know that I love you and am faithful to you, InsyaAllah.