Thursday, December 29, 2016

2016 Roundup, Paraquat and Gramoxone

Not many would understand the joke in the title. Those three are names of pesticides, insecticides and/or herbicides popular with Malaysian farmers.

If you grew up in the rural areas, like I did, you might have encountered these things and I assure you you won't forget their smell. Nothing smells like poison more than those three.

But the most toxic has no smell. It's an illegal Type-1 insecticide  called Lannate Malaysian farmers get from Thailand, smuggled through customs and any form of control.

You get Lannate if you have a wild boar problem, like we do in our village. Wild boars are the most intelligent of all animals. They can detect poison and/or traps. Probably due to their superior sense of smell.

But they can't smell Lannate.

So you mix Lannate up with some chicken entrails and you leave them out on the ground. The next day, a wild boar would have all four feet up in the air.

You don't sell any animal killed with Lannate. The toxicity is so potent, if ducks were to spoon for worms at the site where the boar died, the ducks would die. If flies land on the ducks, the flies would die. I saw this, when I was a kid.

You sell the dead boar to people, and you'd be killing them.

Now what does this have to do with a yearly roundup? Well, absolutely nothing. It's not a metaphor or subtext or whatever.

I don't even feel like doing a roundup now because I feel toxic. I was betrayed yet again recently, and it will take time to heal. Meanwhile, I still have loads of work to do and my back still hurts, meaning I can no longer sit down for long periods without taking any rest.

If anything, 2016 saw me embark on a path to reconcile my newfound peace and happiness with my old work drive.

I once did what to me was an amazing amount of work within short periods of time. It nearly killed me, literally, and I was testing if I could go into that mode again these past few months.

I have so many things to do. So much, that I am beginning to feel like I don't want to do them.

I think I'll feel better tomorrow. And I hope going back to my old working habits would not be too similar to drinking poison.