I miss my couch.

It was a red, dilapidated seventh-hand giveaway, possibly salvaged from a sunken ship in the 1950′s. Definitely not something one would pay SGD 100 for, and definitely not worth the SGD 60 I paid to haul it to my place. Buyer’s remorse aside, I loved that couch. With a cheapass sofa cover draped over, the couch became my home within a home: I slept on it, chowed down a hundred-and-one takeaway meals on it, jacked off to countless hours of porn on it…

No more.

I now live in a 6ft-by-3 space of bedding on the top of a bunker, in a cheap (by Singaporean standards, at any rate) backpacker’s hostel. It’s a novel experience for sure. I don’t have to wake up and wade through three feet of dirt and muck on the way to my bathroom, which was worse: I shed more hair than a menagerie of untended kittens, and imagine all that perpetually wet. I don’t have to tiptoe over shards of broken beer-bottle glass, or half-putrefied chicken bones tied in polythene and left there for weeks. This hostel is sparkling clean. Disturbingly so.

I don’t complain. The front door is the Tooth Relic Temple. The kitchen is the Food Street. Chinatown teems with life, and bustles with the relentless energy of commercial activity, 24×7. Many an evening, I find myself at my usual cafe, forking in local fare and quaffing down cold beer while I watch people from all over the world (skimpily-clad females, especially) stroll around in their touristy manner. It’s fascinating. It’s relaxing. And most of all, it’s easy on the pocket.

It boggles the mind, how many kidneys, souls and blowjobs one has to give to pay the rent for (much less own!) an apartment in Singapore. Given my famously ineffectual financial management, and my tendency to take care of business at the eleventh hour, Pillows and Toast was the one of the few places I could afford. Without having to rob a bank, of course. Although I can’t say I won’t, a week later.

Friends, Countrymen, and that creepy dude who tried groping me in the MRT, I accept all forms of payment. Those into BDSM, you’ll have to wait a week. My butt’s still sore from the last time.

Damn I miss my couch.