Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.

Instruction Manual Humour

IMHO (I have learned that that's geekspeek for 'According to the only opinion that truly matters, i.e. - MINE'), a genre of literature that hasn't yet been given it's due is User Instruction Manuals for cheap electronic goods made in places like Taiwan or Malaysia or Timbuktoo.

When you think about it there's many reasons to reccomend them:

* They're generally always good for a laugh.
* They're informative enough to be almost useful.
* Sometimes they're even weirdly profound. (Most sound like they were written by Yoda.)
* Best of all...they're free!(well, you've already shelled out cash worth three times your entire paycheck for the widescreen t.v./dishwasher/ ice-cream maker/completely-useless-and-doomed-to-spend-the-rest-of-it's-life-as-a-receptacle-for-dirty-laundry-but-you-just-had-to-have-it-at-the-store-thingamajig that they came with!!)

So here's a little sampler. Enjoy.

INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be the finest, it is our advising
that: NEVER to hold these buttons two times!! Except the battery.
Next taking the (something) earth section may cause a large
occurrence! However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a
very maintainence action, as a kindly (something) virepoint from
Drawing B.

Tower of Babble

This is a Protest. This is a Rant.
A railing, flailing, hissing, pissing, flipping-you-off-with-all-10-digits-while-spitting-in-your-eye RANT.
What we're protesting here is the sheer, incomprehensible ABSURDITY that is corporate jargon.

Who thinks this shit up for chrissake!!

Tell me, corporate world? Do you have a guy -a thin bony nervous guy, someone who's always feared his ears were too big for his face and his voice too damp for his paper mouth; sitting in a drafty little cubbyhole in a spike-jonze-being-john-malkovich inspired half-cap stunted ceilinged attic somewhere, squished between mountainous stacks of yellow legal pads, pencils sharpened to deathly gleaming points, channeling the angst and humiliation of so many brown bag lunches stolen and stomped on by schoolyard bullies into vague, incoherent, self-inflating phrases designed to set the average human being's teeth on edge?

I mean, come on! When did it become normal to talk like this - verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives or god alone knows what and of course, the arbitrary stringing together of random alphabets that makes it sound like the entire corporate world suddenly, unanimously decided to speak Czech.

Now if you buy that whole 'the geeks shall inherit the earth', then I suppose you've got to believe that this is the devil's pay-off and in that respect, somewhat overdue. Allow me to illustrate by means of this shining example of the savage little ironies and bipolar belly-flops of fortune's favour.

See, I imagine that on a battlefield of another kind i.e. the schoolyard, spouting phrases like, 'interface systems architecture' or 'synergize intuitive paradigms' would have guaranteed you an ass whuppin' of major proportions. Now say stuff like that in a board room full of hypercaffienated, hypoglycemic, middle aged, middle management types in too tight neckties and there's a pretty good chance they're going to see you as some kind of business Demi-God.
And get this...pay you a buttload of money to churn out more crap like that!

So, since you're the only one who actually understands what you're saying...for once in your life, YOU'RE COOL. You are THE MAN.
Sure enough, before long, you're hooked. You're actually believing that bullshit you're spouting.

Welcome to the Danger Zone.

Because where does it end?

Or imagine this - IT DOESN'T!!!

It crosses over into civilian life. Soon it'll be an epidemic - girlfriends all over will want to have 'THE INTERFACE'

The Sunday morning drone of ESPN will be shattered by wives intoning "Honey, you need to reprioritise your KRA's and deploy real-time deliverables"

And meet the future of sexual harassment: street corner studs hooting,"Baby, I'd like to mesh synergistic architectures with you"

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.

Monsoon Memory

This is one of those days: reality is a blur and the portal to that magic rain life can briefly be traversed.

Everything is pregnant with moistness; swollen with rain.
Outside is a tropical rainforest.
Dripping. Oozing. Bursting.
Emerald sparkles on winter gray sky.
Inside is a papery forest hut, dry and cool and clean.
My feet in dry socks. But the wet is already in my bones.
Birds twittering and squawking and fluttering, and
the fat wet wind whistling past.
Snatches of songs I long forgot tuning in to my frequency on the moist crackling air.
Songs about perfect days and a distant past life I probably never lived. Or maybe I did.

Who knows the lives I've lived in that alternate universe of my monsoon memory.
Maybe, in another life, I was a leaf riding the swell of the Amazon.
Maybe I was a stone skipped on the surface of a pond in Kerela, or a paper boat rushing out of the Suez canal, eager to meet the sea.

They say the magnetism of the Moon makes people crazy, the way it pulls and pushes the tides and harnesses the ebb and flow of blood in the vein.
If you ask me, the Moon has nothing on the Rain.

If I Had A Boat...

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean.

And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat.

But if I had a BIG FAT LEAR JET,
I wouldn't need a Pony or a Boat.


OK - no, this post was not meant to be a paean to materialism. I just like this picture for the composition and the nostalgia value. The ditty came along cause my mind is frequently out to lunch.

Situation Normal - ALL FUCKED UP!!!

So here we go again...the city's exploding...again. All I can think of to say is, FUCKERS, You're killing the wrong people!!! If you are going to systematically target groups of people for random extermination in the name of terrorism, can you at least be fair about it and allow the common people to send up viable candidates...people we'd actually like to see killed.

I mean that's win-win. You get cannon fodder and an upgrade in your international terrorist profile, we get rid of people that make our time on earth particularly unpleasant.

Par example, I'd like to nominate, as my first candidates, the people that promised but never quite managed to bring to book the people responsible for the first serial bombings in '93.

Next, I'd like to nominate the politicians that went around hugging the widows and holding the babies of victims and vowing never to forget the carnage...at least not until 7 p.m. that evening when it was time for drinks at the club.

Finally, I'd like to nominate the idiot who, come tomorrow, will shake his head with practised bemusement, marvelling at the Takes-a-Lickin-Keeps-on-Tickin 'spirit' of Bombay and will then, with ill-concealed smugness, actually applaud the dysfunction and apathy...wait hold on, I think I'd like him to go first.

BTW, this just occured to me...they'll be calling this one 7/11, won't they? Perfect! The Americans have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'emergency'. The Indians have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'convenience store'...go figure!

Hard Talk : The Universe and Me. Part I.

The universe has some explaining to do.

Seriously...I would like some answers.
The way I figure it: as rational, sentient beings, creation has deprived human beings of the pleasures of an insensible, uncomplicated, rationale-free existence. So I'm here with my 'Right to Information' form filled out in triplicate and duly notarised because Goddamn it, I have questions and I WANT answers!!

What I'd like is for the universe to explain if not account for certain realities. There are big questions of course, such as the need for the holocaust,
the purpose of global warming, the mechanics of Donald Trump's Hairdo, etc., but there are smaller, more personal queries also.
So come on in universe. Take your shoes off. Smoke a cigarette. Make a sandwich. Get comfortable....this may take a while.

Now in no particular order, here goes:

*Explain how it is that I, as a common individual not related by blood or bond to anybody vaguely powerful or popular or influential or even remotely good-looking, can hope to get a fair shot anywhwere in this cosmos...where can I, an unaffiliated nobody, get my redressal? Where can I get justice? Where can I get my lunch money back?

*Explain to me why the government thinks that somehow by cosmetically altering the name of a city, they will have given all the inherent problems of that city a facelift too...like "Ooh ze crap et ze crud on ze streets of Mumbai, she ees charmant, n'est pas? Bombay?? Mias non...she ees ugly"

*Explain to me how it is that my watch, my microwave, my airconditioner, my dvd player... basically every piece of electronic equipment ever owned by me manages to break down precisely a day and a half after the stipulated warranty expires. I sense an electromagnetic conspiracy...

*Explain the need for cellulite again....like seriously, who thought that was a good idea.

*Explain why Creed?(the rock band, not the ideological construct.) Pearl Jam and Live weren't enough for you?? Ok given, Live were a little karma-obsessed and Ed Kowalczyk wasn't nearly as cute as Eddie Vedder. Still,we forgave...kinda. But Creed?? Scott Stapp?? Seriously!!

*Explain to me how Religion, this universally accepted conduit meant to teleport humanity straight into the bosom of divinity, has been and continues to be the reason for 90% of the goriest, most savage, most pointless bloodletting to have occured through the ages.

*Explain this Japanese hair straightening epidemic that has struck not just vain, upper middle class housefraus and frauleins(oh woe, if that were all) but oddly, an alarming majority of testosterone-heavy muscle monkeys. All of a sudden, there's a rash of people, male and female, running around wearing what can only be described as a bad throwback to the glam rock frightwigs of the 80's. What next? Crimping?

*Explain how it is that my sexlife consists entirely of being screwed over - by my phone company, my bank, my landlord, tax collectors, creditcard companies, my clients, expensive chain restaurants, evil cabbies, freebies with fine print, murphy's law,basically anyone that figures they have an appetite for fresh sucker today...HOW, Universe HOW?

*Explain the teeth of the English...how is it that this pea-sized nation, which colonised nearly half the globe, couldn't get itself a half-decent dental plan? Unless of course, dental-envy was their primary motivation for conquest: the subjugation of aboriginal peoples possessing healthy, aesthetically pleasant teeth. Hmmm...now that you think about it: India - originally a nation of good strong shiny white teeth, Africa - good strong shiny white teeth, The Americas - good strong shiny white teeth.

Ok, now in the name of bandwidth and brevity, we shall adjourn. But by no means am I through with you, Universe. So unless you're sending another monster asteroid my way, this is 'To be continued...'

I came. I saw. I procrastinated.

I figure I'm just the laziest motherfucker on this planet.

That's what brings me here at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning gwaping at a computer screen while subjecting my neighbours to my most recent John Mayer compilation. (Ironically featuring 'Midnight' a track dedicated to insomnia and urban alienation. Good theme.)Now the thought swirling around in my brain, mystifying the fuck out of me is: Where do all my good intentions go?

Today was supposed to be about creative exploration. Today I was supposed to turn a slowly moulting mountain of gateway paper representing 8 years worth of doodles and ideas and rough drafts into at least one actual artwork.

Instead I took a nap that lasted 6 hours.

The narcolepsy is just a reaction. The real problem is writer's block, or my version of it, anyway. This is an abject, paralysing fear of commencing, of committing, of eventually fucking up SO badly in SO many ways that they'd need a whole new decimal system to quantify it.
It's like stepping off a cliff...once you 're airborne, you don't know how far you're going to drop and what shape you'll be in when you land. The average person tends to put it off for as long as he or she can.

The good news (I'm guessing)is that I'm not alone! We are a generation of procrastinators and lazy motherfuckers!!(how else do you explain the grammar in text messages and the tomaguchi phenomenon?) To avoid doing any real work we have all perfected a whole host of ingenious evasive strategy.

I know people who, everytime they need to begin a new project, will defer the inevitable by attempting to re-organize their entire CD collection - alphabetically, or chronologically, or based on favourites, or based on which bands had members who had maternal aunts named Gertie.

Spending an hour plucking your eyebrows(with toe-nail clippers),scraping the grunge off the grouting in the kitchen tiles with a toothpick, trying to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes (even though you don't smoke), volunteering to make absurd market runs (you've just discovered that there are no spark plugs in the house - horror of horrors), meditating upon the whorls and lines on the soles of your feet to see if you can find any hidden alphabets spelling 'Paul is dead', these are all acceptable evasion tactics.

Now the question is, has Humanity always been such a bunch of putter-offers, of procrastinators, of slackers or is it just our generation?
Like, I wonder if Plato had to play 249 games of solitaire before he sat himself down to write the Republic.
Or if Einstein would spend an hour combing his facial hiar into animal shapes to add to his bag of party tricks before he went to work on the theory of relativity.
Can you imagine Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount: "Water. Wine. Water. Wine...no, water. hic!! hee hee no, th-hass wine."
It's a wonder anything got done!

Notice by the way, how in true diabolical fashion, I have managed to defer my start up problems by making them yours...What? do you see any finished artwork lying around the place?

soy un perdidor

Currently, Beck Hansen is God...ok so i took my time discovering the dysfunction, but hey, discover it i did!! The prince of post modern punk, the lord of lo-fi,the king of hill-billy hip-hop swing; call him what you will, the dude can get it on!! And in case you think the boy's just about gibberish lyric pelted thru a prefab drum machine beat laid under a twisted harmonica, i have two words for you...'Sea Change'

Reader's Digest is evil..

TGIF!!!(I'm always tempted to say gesundhiet whenever someone says that, don't know why.)
Anyway...iiit's Friiiiday!!! And Halleluia, I have managed after many a moon to finish up the work week on a friday. Yay! long weekend!! I know I'll regret it cause I'll have to find twice as many things to do to fill it up and give it some semblance of debauchery! Will probably just end up comatose on the couch trying to exorcise this kink that's gathering like a voodoo cloud in my spine, just beneath my shoulder blades.

Other than that, Reader's Digest is trying to tempt me with offers of free cars and the chance to win a gazillion bucks in their sweepstakes thingie...it's just bait, they have no intention of making me flush!

They just want to trick me into buying their crap books.They make it seem like by refusing their 'Very Special Offer' of buying a 'Very Crap Book', you'll be taken out of the running for their 'Very Special Lottery'.
But be not fooled, weary pilgrim, for they do have a 'No, I don't want your crap book, but I still want all that cash and the free car' envelope...only you have to pay the postage on that one yourself.

Now I don't particularly need a book titled '50 Secrets To Make Your Garden Bloom'(and stink like a stampede of horses just went in your gardenias.)But a book called 'How To Grow High Grade Pot In Your Kitty litter Box'-that, I could use.

Also, would someone please tell them I'm not really interested in learing how to rewire my entire house using dental floss and a dry cell or who the real inventor of the shoe horn was, so could they please stop using what remains of the earth's natural forest cover to make annoying little sticker thingies that you have to stick in the appropriate and equally annoying little spots on their annoying little sweepstakes entry booklets, while rejecting the annoying crap book offer they insist on dangling in front of your nose every time!!
Now don't get me wrong..send me the offer to join the sweepstakes, cause I'd kill for that free Hyundai but don't strip an entire forest of sycamores or whatever to do it!!

I is for Idiot

Words fail me.
No really, they fail me. My brain fails me. I am devoid of coherent thought. As I sit here, I turn progressively into an idiot...with not even enough savant to back that up.

I think I probably peaked at the age of 9. At 10, I must have been a fucking genius brimming over; All pop-corn pop pop popping with thoughts and plans and ideas and notions. Bigger and better and more aerodynamic and packed to the sundecks with the protein enriched goodness of freshly squeezed possibility.

But i guess it's been downhill ever since. The vaunted balloon of my virtuosity hit a low pressure zone just short of the finish line and snagged itself on the jagged edge of mediocrity.

And now my intelligence works in fits and spurts, like a broken juicer or something...the blade keeps turning but the trough's jammed.
All I know is the shine's definitely off the old noggin. I'm not as razor sharp and puking possibility as i once was.

Who knows, at this rate I should be drooling into a sippy cup in about 7.5 years, give or take a few.

Dubious Epiphany # 136

Sometimes the only way Out...
is Through

Raaaaiiin Oonn Mmyyyy PAAaaaRaaaaade!!

AAAhhhh RAAAAIIINNNN.....rain....goooooood!So I'm actually thinking of lashing together a couple of planks of driftwod and teaching myself to row to work...it may be an improvement on ricks and cabs. And think of the money I'll save!

Weirdly enough for most people, wading to work would qualify as a definitive bitch...but I'm actually enjoying it.

But then it figures, doesn't it? I dress down for work; anything that gets wet or ruined...well it already is. Plus it's cooler when it rains so sites without the electricals in place aren't sweltering dutch ovens. Working without decent lighting is a bit of a challenge though and the damp means it takes longer for paint to dry...(I sometimes still get a kick out of telling people I get paid to watch paint dry...literally! (oh well..some people get to stare at computer screens)

Anyway, all in all...I love this whole coming of the flood spectacle. Rainy days always feel like a kind of universally accepted time out. Strangers or friends, people are nicer...we catch each other's eye; we pretend to grumble about the weather; we shake our heads feigning bemusement at the heavens pouring down on us...and sometimes we even cut each other some slack. in essence, we make contact. It's nice.

And then there's the amazing way that the rain brings out the contours of things into such intense relief...be it the colours of the fresh washed leaves, or the regrettable depth of the potholes on the roads or just the shapes and smells of memories lost in time.
I realize I remember things past more vividly if rain formed part of the backdrop or soundtrack of the scene...like somehow your monsoon memory is like a parallel life running alonside your real life, but you can only access it when it rains. Ok weird...sue me.

And to think of all those countries out West where they liken rainy days with gloom and sadness...and here in our sun strafed country we sing songs to the rain about how it brings us back to life...there's a lesson in perspectives for ya!

So anyway I'm praying for more rain....I'm feeling invincible and I think I can blame it on the rain.

Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.

it's not the storms that rage that will whittle you away...
it's this endless everyday.

wonder what it's all about....nausea i think.

Gettin' wiggy wit it...

Ok, things that will forever confound me by their very existence #3847 - Bad toupees.

Got to thinking about this when I saw a man in a store the other day - regular old guy but he had, nestled atop his head, the mankiest rug to ever have existed in the HISTORY of hair!!
The wig itself was your garden variety cheap,noxious, vile,bad bad bad hairpiece. However, what made it's dead-rodent creepiness so in-your-face offensive was the fact that it looked like some one had tried tossing it, frisbee-like, onto this poor sod's shiny pink pate...without having quite managed the perfect throw.
So the wig just sat there, three clicks due east of it's ideal final destination, leaving a furrow of bald skin to cleanly demarcate the scraggly remaining natural hairline from the jagged edges of a toupee made by satan's milliners, while what could only have been a dark supernatural power at work prevented the whole mess from oozing down his ear and sliding off his head.

Now maybe this is just me, but I'd imagine that if you put yourself through the indignity of owning a hat made of fake hair or worse, dead hair that once belonged to another human being (or horse...or ape...or gerbil?) just so you could salvage the derelict vessel of your vanity, then what you really need to complete the illusion ( or delusion, depending on how you see it) is an assiduous and unshakable belief in, and acceptance of, said hairpiece.

I mean, give the rug it's due!! Lavish it. Pamper it. Treat it like a gorgeous but demanding mistress; one with magic secrets and a weakness for protein rinse. Get that flash new haircut. Go all out on the conditioning pomade. Hell! do the routine with the hot rollers if that's what it takes!!(oh, and for god's sake, get yourself some of that extra strong hair adhesive while you're at it!!)
Don't just slap it on and forget about it like it's the bastard child you wish you'd never had!!! Because the only way you'll get the world and me to suspend our disbelief for the moment and pretend that your head is actually full of your own hair is if you seem at least half-way convinced of it yourself first! Because if you're not, well then you may as well lay a dead cat on your head for all the difference it would make...it's might even be an improvement!

real deep shit

Alternate reality. Consensual reality. Personal reality. Multiple reality...
Why do we not admit to there being more than one absolute legitimate reality? When you think about it, how can there not be?
It's kind of like the Earth, isn't it? One integral, solid whole... But divided and subdivided of necessity till it's in fragments: continent/ country/ city/ district/ yours/ mine/ ours/ theirs...Splintered into separate wholes by this need to hold as our own, individually.

Wouldn't it be ok to think of it as being so much bigger than me that I could climb in and wander around in it's hazy labyrinths, trying to find the perfect fit for the jagged edges of my individuality stained logic and know that I'll find a mirror for my perspective here under the all embracing awning of ultimate truth.
who's to say. Whose to say...

when you're happy and you know it...shut up, it won't last long

Refreshing… This might be a place in this huge unconcerned cosmos where I may offload the stuttering mangled garbage in my head without being told to shut the fuck up. If so halleluiah!

Ok so I sound like some sad Goth-obsessed, manic-depressive who listens to portishead and occasionally takes a razor to my wrists...(haha yeah...that’s gonna happen...NOT!!) But hey everyone hits a downswing every once in a while...so I’m pissed. Sue me!

Anyway, so I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. I mean, is it just me or are seemingly content, successful, urban individuals getting the blues with almost menstrual precision of late? And for no apparent reason it would seem? I mean look at me. I'm down. I'm out. And I have NO clue why!
I mean, it's not like I’ve lost my livelihood or the love of my life, my best friend, all my money, my favourite pair of furry bunny slippers...right? So all's well, right? WRONG! I mean what is this feeling? This horrible heavy stomach-clenching, gut-wrenching cannot-hold-my-head-up-feeling? Where did it come from? And WHY!!!? By all rights, it shouldn't be there...shouldn't even apply to me. I mean, my life is GOOD, DAMN IT!!! Ok so I’m not bouncing off the walls with glee every second of everyday but hell, I can't complain. And yet I do...

I think I'll blame this ‘Myth of Happiness’ i have in my head. Yes...happiness! Apparently, it’s a must have! And apparently happiness, not unlike homemade detergent and cherry preserve, can be created at will in required quantities and stored in airproof Tupperware for indefinite periods of time (ok the Tupperware bit only works for the soap and cherries). But the point is - you're supposed to make your own happiness, right?

So how? How are you supposed to do this? I mean shouldn’t happiness-making at least come with a manual? I mean what are we supposed to do...look about our world and watch films like Simon Birch, and a few sappy phone company commercials and read books by people like Henry James Waller or Richard Bach (horror of all horrors) and collate the sum of their syrup'n'scotch soaked wisdom to read that the easiest way most of us make ourselves happy is by ‘having’.

Yes, yes I know; that brings us straight to the ridiculously malformed yet unquestionably popular idiotism i.e. ‘money can't buy happiness'. Well, let’s state for the record and for all eternity that over here i.e. in this corner of cyberspace that is dedicated to the voices in my head, we will have no truck with the trite, the trifling, the over-simplistic; the downright stupid.
So in keeping with this policy of responsible extrapolative cogitation, we shall abstain from acknowledging the sheer ‘A is for apple’ naiveté of that statement let alone bother to tackle it.

So, no what I mean by the ‘having’ principle is that we are supposed to have a certain number of non material things that are supposed to then add value to our lives - things like a fulfilling job, love, intellect, intimate friends, great familial relationships, a productive day, impeccable taste and a few other things you can’t really pick up at the checkout counter at the supermarket. Now, say for a fleeting moment you have managed to amass all these things, together; or at least in aesthetically pleasant combinations. Yay, halleluiah, break out the bubbly! You’re happy!

Yeah, but for how long? See, that’s where it all starts to fall apart. You can manage a few moments of sheer gut-bursting joy given the right circumstances, but then you throw the balance somewhere by squabbling with a friend, a lover, a mother; or outgrowing your job, your friend, your lover, your mother or whatever and the happiness starts to leak right out of the bag making an unsightly puddle right at your feet.

Here’s the thing...say you were programmed to accept that things like this are bound to happen and that we must expect to be ‘happy’ 4.36% of the time, ‘content’ 73.65% of the time, ecstatic 0.87% of the time and, plain miserable for the rest of the 21.12%, then we’d have a realistically devised psychometric pie chart and we’d see that things are as they should be and we’d spare ourselves the further agony of soul-wracking self-analysis and just carry on being content.

Unfortunately we’re programmed to constantly and persistently search for this elusive and extremely capricious state of being i.e. happiness. We’re programmed to be relentless and unceasing in our quest for it...never allowing ourselves to settle naturally into the furry-bunny-slipper comfort of a more placid and attainable ‘mere contentedness’. So, not unlike small hormone-induced rodents, trying to navigate a bizarre maze in some mad scientific experiment, we tend to keep butting our furry little heads against the countless imaginary yet not insubstantial walls built with the brick and mortar of our insecurities, our limitations, our fear and guilt and shame and compounded sense of failure.
Result? YOU’RE FUCKIN’ MISERABLE!!! So what is wrong with this picture? Well, we’re all trying too hard aren’t we? And for who? for what? WELL, HELL!! I DON’T KNOW, DO I? I mean if I did, this whole tirade would be a little redundant don’t ya think? Ok so what’s my point? My point, maybe, is we need to relax...and debrief ourselves...and stop watching sappy films and commercials...or at least believing in them...and we need to make up our definitions and our yardsticks for happiness and truth and beauty and the rest of the important stuff by ourselves, as we go along. The way we make our lives up. We need to go back to thinking and feeling for ourselves...cause I for one am sick of having to compare my life to an image on a flickering screen to see if I’m doing it right!
Ok over and out. I’ve run out of steam.

Apparently we must share...

Welcome to the pre-event blow-out bash of the collapse of civilization as we know it. Apparently, a prerequisite to being here is an overwhelming need to share.

No,don't worry. We don't want your wealth, or your wisdom or even that last Mars bar you've been hoarding in your pocket since 7th grade.

We want your dirty laundry.

It would seem that here in the first quarter of the 21st century, it is imperative that we (as a species) disseminate...and of course, it logically follows that by disseminate...we mean broadcast electronically.

So any guesses as to what follows next...

Yes, Logic would point to either Door#1- A Reality T.V. Show or Door#2- A Weblog (AKA Blog, Online Journal, Rant Register, Universal Online Repository of Noxious,Vile, BAD BAD BAD Writing)

No Points for guessing which one this is.

Brace yourself...here comes the Vogon Poetry.