Annihilate

My teeth hurt.
My head is a vice.
Every word I've ever choked down
imploding me from inside.

My arms hurt.
My bones are diamond.
I've been bracing for impact
since the beginning of time.

My lungs hurts.
My heart is molten.
I'm holding in a universe
of no thank you and goodbye.

We are not Alchemists.

The alchemy of the act of creation happens in between synapses.
So subtle, your hands know things your mind will never fathom.
Your thinking brain is only ever playing catch up.


From the outside, it's romantic. A myth arising.
The Creative Genius. The Tortured Artist. The Eccentric Visionary.
Such familiar phantoms.
All drama and intensity; conviction and passionate purpose, flamboyance and elegant outrageousness.

So much caricature.

Because on the inside, creativity isn't always dynamic.

It isn't always pretty. Or cool.
Sometimes it isn't even particularly interesting.
It lives in the quiet places.
And sometimes more resembles sheer doggedness than beatific ingenuity.
That telegenic flurry of inspiring activity you're imagining?
That's a movie montage.


That isn’t to say that sudden, electric flash of inspiration isn't a thing.
It's just not 'The Only Thing'.


Between the seminal flash and the realized creation there is all the work of creating.


And it is work.
It is sweat. It is muscle, blood and bone. It is creative ADHD. It is schizophrenia. It is loneliness. It is resistance. It is doubt. It is losing perspective. It is going too far out. It is not knowing the way back. It is giving up. It is getting back on. It is lumbering through. It is feeling. It is finding. It is doing. It is looking. It is looking again. It is repetitive. It is mundane. It is grunt work strung together, end to end till something larger unfolds...becomes; till something of value is formed.
It is work.


Myth-makers you do us no favours.

Of Broken Things

Beware
the pull.

The strange beauty
of broken things.

The fracture
unthinking
breeds treachery.

The sirens
don't sing
to your health. 

The Shard

It may have happened before.
And maybe it'll happen again.
But every time, like a serial somnambulist shocked to wake up and find yourself teetering on a high-wire, you wonder how the fuck you let it happen. Again.

You let someone get under your skin. Not just that - you went ahead and built them a fucking serviced apartment under there.
And you did it without checking to see if they had further travel plans.
And they moved right in. Stayed; used the facilities.
Why not? There was a heated pool and room service. No need to pick up after themselves.

And then it happened. You woke up on that fucking high wire.

I break it off.
You break it off.
He/she breaks it off.
We break it off.
It doesn't matter.
Point is - it breaks off.

And everything you thought they were/ we were/ it was - is gone.
Your pleasure palace burned to a cinder, razed to the ground.
All That Was/Might Have Been is reduced to rubble - to a hard jagged shard left inside you like a molten splinter to gouge with vicious glee at the soft unguarded heart of you.

In the thick of the aftermath, every breath is blood.
But, the thing is, you've been to this circus before.
And so, you know that fortunately, at some point, the bleeding will stop.
And not so fortunately, all you can do till then is wait.
Wait till breathing is only merely excruciating...and then only painful.
Wait for the wounds to scab over. Wait for the scar tissue to come in. Wait for it all to eventually be just one more unevenly mended rent on the fabric of your existence.

And the irony is that it won't be the pain you'll resent.
It'll be the time - the time it'll take for that scar tissue to form; the time it'll take till you're you again.
When you aren't busy being utterly devastated, you'll find yourself mostly being really annoyed by that inconvenient little nugget of reality.

Because that shard is a voracious, persistent, many pointed little bitch and it won't let go of you easy.

A few weeks in, its bite will have dulled to the degree that you'll stop being constantly braced for impact. You'll manage to go about your day to day business doing a credible enough impression of a functional human adult.
But then, when you least expect it, someone somewhere will drop a word into the conversation - a word as random as Dremel, or as mundane as July. Or you'll see something as banal as AstroTurf, or as ubiquitous as sunlight. And suddenly that little bitch will shift and stick you with renewed vehemence.

Over time, though, that scar tissue will come in right and thick. The Shard will settle in and become a numbness within that remains largely inert. At the most sometimes, in maudlin moments, it might cause you a dull twinge - if you're the sentimental kind.

In time you'll forget it's there.
You'll forget that the numbness hosts a living wound.

And then someday in the future, you'll open your eyes and come to the sick realization that once more somehow, despite all your efforts to the contrary, you've landed on the same fucking high wire you swore you'd never so much as go near, let alone attempt to traverse.

And as the newly implanted remnant is in the process of ripping you a new one, as though that itself weren't punishment enough, every old forgotten shard inside of you will come screaming to life, as sharp and vociferous as the day it was born.

Gleefully, in unison, this syndicate will turn full circles under your skin to make sure to jab you with their pointiest sides. And as the voices in your head start up on their symphony of recriminations, mocking you mercilessly for the dumb fucking impulse that led you to make the same fucking mistake all over again, The Shards will join in to offer a command performance of their greatest hits - 'I Told You So', 'You Should Have Known Better.' & 'How Did You Not See This Coming?' 

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

You left your splinter in me.

I gave you lunch and moral support.
Held your hand when the pain wracked through.
You said it was like barbed wire
scraping your insides raw.
I assumed it was the cancer.
Now I wonder it wasn’t the cocaine shakes.

 Fat lot l know about either.

You took a nap and you took your chance.
The Shins and your mouth.
Wincing the Night Away
and the late afternoon sunlight
streaming in from the sea.

And you left your splinter in me.

Right in the middle by my breast bone.
I guess I'm lucky you weren't aiming for the heart.

I made you coffee after.

Gave you leftovers to feed your body
And books for your soul.
I’d have given you anything.
Easing your emptiness,
that became my Holy Crusade.
Thank God, you'll never know.

And then, a couple of weeks or so later,
when you took me out like trash,
How come you got to keep all I gave you?

And all I got was this splinter.
This phantom shard in the center of my chest.

It’s real for all it’s invisible.
Too insipid to be called painful
too persistent to just ignore.

That's the size of the damage you got done.

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

On Ephiphany and The Blackness of Soot.

The peculiar thing about having an Epiphany is that it usually happens very, very quietly.

There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.

Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.

Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.

It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of  the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.

The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.

It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.

It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.

Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.

I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.

To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.

But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?

And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.

And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.

Shut in. Shut out. Shut up.

I'm sitting here 

hating the sound of my phone when it rings

and still 

I'm pushing against the silence 

that's thickening and crusting over in this room,

smothering the furniture and the books and the TV flickering wordlessly.

I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I dont know what I'm doing. 

Ignoring the things that need done, doing things that have no meaning.
Boredom. Lethargy. Exhaustion.

What is this? 

It would be so simple - to walk out into the world.
To engage. 

 

But right now it seems to require a monumental act of will. 

And right now I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I'm letting the lonliness achieve critical mass.

Aaaaaaacccckkkk!!

Dear Diary,
It has happened.
I have spent the week home, alone;
eating reconstituted noodles and beer, teaching myself photoshop and hand built pottery while watching sitcom reruns.
I have turned into my father.
Kill me now.

The list

Hello January. You must change your name to 'The Month New Year Resolutions Die A Silent Death.' I know it's unfair, Jan. Why should you pay for December's sins. Still, such is life.
This is why I dont make New Year Resolutions.

But it is 2012.
And if this mumbo jumbo about the Mayans and their skill at future-prediction is accurate, apparently we'll never need to make resolutions again, ever. So, I've decided to let this be the year I make a list of things I want to accomplish this year.

So My (Slightly Delayed) List of things the Universe seems to want me to do in 2012 -

1. Learn to freaking drive!!! Since I'm now at least twice the legal driving age, it might be a good idea.
2. Get craftier. Stop making virtual scrapbooks of things I intend to do and just freaking do them already! So - at least 1 complete project every month, no matter how small. This means 12 projects in 2012. All to be documented.
3. Get healthier. Yes, yes - that's a fanciful notion if ever therewas one. Still, get off my freaking ass and do something, even if it's just once a week. Start with yoga or swimming.
4. Travel. Visit Pooja. Make it happen. Stop worrying about the freaking money and whatever else may seem like good reasons to put it off. Plan it. Do it. End of story.
5. Sell an idea. Just one. Concieve produce, execute, package, market - all of it. Create a product that I love. Make it the best I can. Then send it out into the world and see how it does. If I like the process, make another. Put my best work out there.
6. Learn to work wood. Carve it. Cut it. Join it. Feel it. Make my hands stronger.
7. Find love. Even if it's only from myself.
8. Stop hiding.

That's all I can think of right now. maybe we'll add some more later. Who says u can't be resolved to action in June. There you go, January. That's pressure off you.

Things I Know Now...

Goodbye 2011. Thanks for being a good year. The last few years have been unnerving. Thanks for the respite.

In gratitude, I'm leaving aside the snark for just a little bit and attempting to collate the personal ephipanies that these past years have brought; just purely to help crystalize, in my head, the lessons that are in the process of revealing themselves.

So:

'The Things I Now Know (or at least am getting to be pretty sure about.)

1) Almost Nothing is an Absolute. (See how that 'Almost' slipped in there and saved the assertion from being ironically self-negating.)

2) Everything works out (You just have to live long enough.)

3) Most situations turn out the way they were going to. It's personal tendencies towards hope or drama or nihilism or hyper bole that give these events the cast of momentous epics, grand events, close shaves, non-events, farces or tragedies.

4) Bad things happen. And then we move on.

5) Amazing things happen. And then we move on.

6) Life isn't Fair because the Universe is Balance. This means that you, like almost everyone else, have likely recieved a fair number of get-out-of-jail-free cards when you least deserved to. So you and life are about even.

7) No one is 100% Great or 100% Asshole if you can manage to climb inside their head and have a look around.

8) There will be times when certain people will insist on showing you a mirror - to either magnify your flaws or glorify your perfection. Sometimes, they're being true friends; sometimes, they're being assholes. Your job is to figure out which is which and deal accordingly.

9) Life doesn't come with a punchline or operatic theme music to cue you in to the moments that are going to be personally significant. Consequently, it is entirely possible you may miss the high points of your own life as they occur. Be vigilant: Own the wins, grieve the losses, acknowledge the pain, allow the anger, feed the hope. Be present.

10) If you have to try harder than you want to just to be loved, they probably aren't worth it.

11) In the moment, true perception is distorted and the actual significance or insignificance of events and people to your existence is unrevealed. Remember that when drama crops up between you and the people in your life and you get the urge to respond melodramatically.

12) When the chips are down, you are the only one who can take care of you. So long as it's not harming someone else, you are allowed to do this By Any Means Necessary. So bawl, sleep, run, eat, make, read, listen to loud crunchy music, drink, do whatever it takes till you're you again. Then get yourself up and throw yourself back into the fray.

Regret

3.a.m. and I'm outside myself.

How can I miss things I've never had.
Explain it away but still the ghost remains.

Taunting weak moments
with borrowed memories
Culled from unknown sources:
the collective subconscious...or the supraconscious.
Memories of bones meshed and tangled tongue and gaze;

Unborn, yet they wear the skin of regret.

If I've lived epics of the imagination,
in planes that haven't yet been conceived
what does that make me?
Future tense or past imperfect...
Or simply present denied, deferred, refrained.

Recycled Ode to a Beachtown.

For Goa, December 25th,2000. Reissued for Galle, February 6th, 2011

Swimming out into the pinpricked night,
cleaving at the amorphous blue
with arms of curling smoke.

A spinning shuttle;
fairy-light spirals in my head.

A face in the dark - old; spry.
The dancing embers licking her fingers dry.

Beachfront in an hourglass.
Waves of euphoria pummel
the shores at the edge of time.

Orion sinking into slumber;
whisper goodnight,
and on the rim of the ocean:
crouching, hidden - Daylight.

All That You Can Leave Behind.

In yet another manifestation of the dysfunctional randomness that seems to typefy me, I'm contemplating the 'Shipwrecked on a Desert Island' scenario. Ok not quite, it's kind of a 'Shipwrecked on a Desert Island meets Burning House' scenario.

I'm trying to answer, as honestly as I possibly can, the question: If you were forced to leave behind your life as you knew it, what would you take with you? (Just so we're perfectly clear, by this we mean - in exchange for life as you do not know it, not death or the general absence of life. Also, obviously this applies to material possessions only because no, you can not take your best friend or the local barista who after 3.5 years has finally mastered the art of brewing your java fix just exactly the way you like it.)

So, here's what I've come up with so far - In The Event Of Imminent Unavoidable Long-Term Existential Relocation, Take:

*Paper - All certificates and documents - Because lets face it, someone's always going to want to see your birth certificate. (The warranty on your blender may not be of much use but take medical records and old love letters.)

*Pictures - Take your photographs with you. Always take your past with you. If it's been a good one, it'll help remind you who you are, who you've known, who you've loved and been loved by.
Hell, if nothing else, your photographs will serve as a warning that fashion is a fickle mistress and you are truly not as cool as you think you are. (Did someone say parachute pants.)

*The Gizmos - Lets face it: Ipod, therefore I am.
While early man may have forged blithely into the unknown armed with nothing more than a piece of flint and a sharp stick, humankind today can do nothing without the aid of a device that supports any less than 3 USB ports.
So - The Laptop, The Cell Phone, The Camera and of course, The Ipod.
Just the basics, though. Leave the GPS and the electric toothbrush behind unless you're that new breed of human - the kind that's never heard of stopping to ask for directions and comes with USB ports in lieu of opposable thumbs. In which case, the point is moot since you will die if unplugged from the mainframe and/or by exposure to direct sunlight and fresh air.

*Entertainment - You won't have friends to begin with. Take a book. Preferably a familiar one that is like an old friend. If you have no books you think of as old familiar friends, then take a bottle of Whiskey. This will either buy you new friends very quickly or help you forget you don't have friends, new or old. (Nintendo is acceptable but will give you carpal tunnel and decimate your attention span.)

*The Essentials: clothes, shoes, corkscrew, reading glasses, Swiss Army knife in case you need to channel Robinson Crusoe...

Problem is, it gets murky right around the 'All That You Can Leave Behind.'

I'm Easy Like Sunday Morning

A memory. 3 years past. Sunday Morning. I'm sitting looking out my window like I like to do. There's plenty to look at but not much to see. Mostly just trees, birds and other tree dwelling wildlife. Then there's the apartment building across, just far enough away to afford privacy but near enough to provide innoccuous voyeuristic distraction - Like a tv set with no more than 2-3 channels all showing simultaneously on different screens. Scenes of staid domesticity on a daily basis. Mostly just static.

I mostly watch the couple on the first floor. They're my favourite show. Both probably in their 30s, they seem successful enough without being flash, attractive enough without being glamorous, cool enough without being hip. The average DINK couple, I suppose. As it turns out this morning's episode is called 'Cleaning Day.' This should be fun.

She's in shorts and Tshirt, thin and determined. He's big and ill at ease. Reluctant to say the least. This is obvioulsy not his idea of the ideal Sunday morning. She looks grim and faintly possessed as she contemplates strategy and starts the assault on whatever grime and grease may have accumulated in her kitchen.

He's in a state of suspended animation. You can tell he's lost; like he'd like to help but he cant read the instruction manual - it's in female. Clearly out of his league, he stands hovering motionlessly just inside the kitchen door. You can tell he's going for one of two possible outcomes with this tactical maneuver.

Scenario #1. - Delusional: He's hoping his mere presence in the kitchen at the time of cleaning will satisfactorily count in her mind as an actual contribution to the work. The theory is that this would leave her happy and unshrill while giving him that warm and fuzzy feeling of being useful without actually having had to do anything unpleasant. (Highly unlikely, but hope is that thing with feathers...)

Scenario #2. - Practical: Failing ideal scenario #1. he's hoping that being a huge, lumbering hunk of stupid will infuriate her enough that she'll refuse his help and throw him out of the kitchen. In which case he can safely and guiltlessly go back to whatever it is he'd have liked to have been doing in the first place.

He understands that while this scenario precludes the advantages of 'happy & unshrill' and 'warm & fuzzy' it still manages to circumvent the 'death & destruction' that might result from the implementation of Scenario #3. (Scenario #3. - Unthinkable - In this fictitious scenario, he simply refuses to help with the kitchen and instead prepares himself for full scale nuclear attack and subsequent annihilation.)

Meanwhile, she's been venting her frustrations on the kitchen windowsill looking demented and vaguely pissy, like she's wondering where she can go to get a refund on the strong, sensitive, gallant and ridiculously house-broken hunk of man Mills & Boon promised her. So she scrubs away, ferocious, twitching like an angry epileptic and he skulks around guiltily in the background, twitching like a rabbit in heroin withdrawal. They look like secret adversaries.

But then it changes. Her shoulders relax. She capitulates. She turns around and gives him simple instruction. He follows. He looks vaguely relieved. That wasn't so difficult. She directs him again. He follows, soon looking almost eager. He starts small - lift this, reach for that. Gradually he gets more involved - adding suggestions, taking initiative, solving problems and by and by I see them come together; coalesce into a team and attack that kitchen with joint vengeance.

Before long, there's horse play and soon they're both smiling and then laughing and then having plain ol' fun. In between cleaning and having water fights and dust-rag duels they grin at each other, looking a little bemused that they're having such a good time cleaning a kitchen; pleasantly surprised that together they've just managed to turn a dull annoying chore into quality family time.

And I'm sitting there in my window watching shamelessly and thinking - This is nice. This is what makes being in relationships worth it, I guess - the fact that even unpleasant jobs can be turned on their heads and made sufferable and even enjoyable because they were shared by two people who exercised their caring for one another. How nice.

With a warm, fuzzy, wistful feeling I realize - this is a phone company commercial. (You know the ones - so treacherously manipulative that you find yourself saddled with a family & friends talk-plan that you won't use all because what you really wanted to have was the family and friends featured in the commercial.) Only this is not a commercial. This is in the flesh. Real.

And predictably, almost on cue, I'm about to tailspin into a maudlin and prolonged spasm of dejected singlegirlhood when I realize something.
If they were looking out their window at me, they'd see a single girl with no responsibility more pressing than lounging by an open window, listening to Nina Simone while drinking coffee and looking out at the world...I'm probably their gourmet Brazilian coffee commercial.

Absolut Obsolete

And then one fine day you realize everything you were taught was incorrect; everything you know is wrong…or rather obsolete. And then all you can do really is pray for armageddon or the apocalypse when all the counters will be reset to zero because you know that the only way to regain your paltry advantage and reclaim your tattered ego is to go back to the hunter-gatherer phase. Hello dinosaur.

Research - spinning jennys flying shuttles free trade policies economic imperialism reduce reuse recycle cradle to cradle closed loop distress research review deadline trash found object art stupid inconsequential eco-dud.

There is only one thing to be said -

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On a quiet night, I can hear myself age

2008.

As of April, it's been 20 years since we hauled ass back to Bombay. 20 years!
That sounds like an obnoxiously long time! And yet it feels so...recent!

I can't really wrap my head around it. Largely, I think, because of the fact that I think of something that happened 20 YEARS AGO as part of 'recent' history.
It's somewhat unnerving because it brings into sharp focus something that I've been trying to ignore for a while - namely, the whole business about growing old..er!

All your life, you pour so much time and energy into the concept of 'growing up' - either trying to accomplish it successfully of trying to avoid it entirely, only to realize that somewhere along the line it happened anyway, with little or no help from you. And sure enough, the words 'spring chicken' and 'not' have been playing in an endless loop in my head lately. And yet, I'm confused. What I want to know is - Is it over? Am I done?

How do you tell? I mean, is it one defining moment? Is there a 'PING!' like when the buzzer on the oven timer goes off and you know for sure that the cake you were baking is done...and is, therefore, ready to begin its irrevocable journey from celebratory confection to compost.

Does some cosmic or karmic timer similarly go 'PING!' at a predetermined moment and for oh-so-brief a moment you bask in the realisation that you've entirely grown up - only to immediately thereafter begin that unrelenting decline into old age?

I can't make out. I feel ancient some times. I have old people complaints now.
My feet hurt. My knees are bitching. I'm have become intimate with the phenomenon of the sleepless night. I have headaches...constantly.

And I rant! I actually pontificate. I sometimes sit outside of myself and watch as I channel my dad or grandfather just as they're going into one of their interminable gripes. I am ashamed to say that it is entirely possible for me to have, at some point or the other, begun sentences with 'back in '91...' or 'when I was your age...' And as if that weren't enough, I am also guilty of using the phrase 'going to hell in a handbasket' with regard to any number of mind-numbingly banal subjects - traffic, the government, the state of Bombay city, the state of my hair, the grammar in text messages and on and on, ad nauseam.

And I worry. I worry about money - I worry about how much I'm spending and I worry about how much money I'm not making. I worry about paying my taxes. I worry about not paying my taxes. I worry about global warming and urban sprawl. I worry about not eating enough veggies and drinking too much coffee. And I worry about whether it's better to use paper or plastic. I worry that in the end it doesnt matter either way.

I worry that my chronic inability to find someone remotely interesting enough to go out for the ritual cup of coffee with, means that I'll eventually end up alone and my pathetic solitary income coupled with the skyrocketing cost of real estate will mean that I won't be able to afford to pay the going rate on house rents, let alone buy a place for myself and eventually I'll be forced to move in with my mother and then will have to get myself a terry-towel dressing robe and 6 cats, purely on principle (even though I can't stand cats or terry-towel.)

And then I worry that I may not live long enough to become the prototypical ageing spinster because what if the headaches I've been getting are actually an aneurism that I was too lazy to go and get checked out and when it explodes I'll be found dead, face down in an empty bucket. (Why a bucket? Because my sister once passed out in one when she was 10 and it makes for an interesting visual)and of course then I worry that when I'm found I'll most probably be wearing an embarassing pair of jammies...

...and then it occurs to me - I still wear jammies. And I'd sell my soul for a pair of fluffy bunny slippers; and Pez dispensers(candy included, of course.) And I still love candy - not fancy, 85% Brazilian cocoa content, grown up gourmet chocolate (which, I'll admit, has its merits) but boiled sugar, sticky sweet, colours of the rainbow, gets stuck in your teeth candy. And I still believe that it is mandatory to eat your skittles in even numbered colour combos. And I still do the thing, when you're shampooing your hair, and you make it stick up in peaks so you look like someone out of a Dick Tracy comic or Ace Ventura (yeah, like you don't!)

And I still like music with loud crunching guitars and I think world music can be kind of pretentious and that nice as classical music may be, I can never listen to it without imagining a bit of that classic Merrie Melodies cartoon action going on in my head. And I still get a snarky juvenile thrill when people swear in books or in song lyrics and so I may have graduated to reading Vonnegut, but I doubt I'll ever get myself to read books on self-improvement or the economy or by Milan Kundera just for pleasure. Why not Milan Kundera - cause Milan Kundera sucks ass!

And, oh yeah, I still use phrases like 'sucks ass.' And so I get to thinking, how grown up could I be?

Or is it that you never stop growing up...even when you've about finished growing old? Has adulthood become optional...who knows? The format has changed so much over the last few decades, it's hard to keep track of what we're supposed to be doing.
It might just be so much easier if life came with a manual or a script...so you'd know what you were supposed to do or say or what sense you were to make of the whole situation...like what am I doing writing this out at 2.30 a.m. when I have work tomorrow.

The Universe and me....Again.

Aaaaand we're back!

Hello, Universe. Me again.

Well, you should have sent that asteroid when you had the chance. Now, quit whining so we can resume! In case you forgot the format, I'll ask the questions that need asking, and you, Universe, will explain yourself. (Or as you've done so far, fiddle with your blackberry and try to plead the fifth.)

But don't worry, we'll start with something relatively simple...ish:

*Explain Marmite. Yes, Marmite. I mean, come on! This is not food. IT'S TOE-JAM IN A BOTTLE!!! So, let me get this straight - the mere possibility of a chocolate chip cookie that would NOT pitch it's cellulite tent at my butt is absolutely OUT of the question, but edible toe-jam you're OK with??

*Two words - Reality Television. Oxymoron, anyone?
This one is wrong on sooo many levels, I don't know where to begin. But how about the fact that this is a town where Simon Cowell is the Mayor, Paris Hilton is the patron saint and Donald Trump is God! Enough said!

*Explain the need for Irony. Yes, irony - effective in books, movies and art. In real life - not so funny, you son of a bitch!

*Explain the Indian Government's aversion to Sex Ed programs in Indian high schools. Allegedly, it's inappropriate subject matter for teenagers because teaching the little bobble heads about sex will alert them to the fact of the existence of sex and this, in turn, will then encourage them to go out and have said sex.

It's Obvious the Indian Government has never met a teenager.

Ok, the libidinous hankerings of horny 14yr olds aside, what really astounds me about this marvel of bureaucratic reasoning is the assertion that its the Education itself which will be the cause of the misinformation of Pinky and Pappu.
Either the Government needs to go out and get a dictionary and look up the word 'education' or it's finally admitting the truth about the quality of the teaching methods in the average Indian high school.

*Explain Tele-marketers. Do these people not have lives? Or do they really believe that calling me at the most inopportune moment possible or clogging up my phone inbox with text messages sent at random times like 6.42 A.M. is their best sales strategy? What? They think that if they catch me when I'm comatose or in the middle of losing my mind and all my marbles, I'll be less likely to resist a mobile phone connection that lets inmates in some Kazakh prison pass on their long distance phone-sex charges to me?

*I read somewhere that 'The Universe is balance.' So I just wanted to know if you've been hitting the hooch a little hard lately...cause where's the balance, man?

*Explain the whole 'Battle of the Sexes' fiasco.
Admit it - You messed up! The boys were only supposed to do all the heavy lifting and leave all the real deep thinking to us. Simple, right?
Oh, but NOOOO, you had to let them think they ran the show as well! So now, we have a world where men can make television remote controls sophisticated enough to launch nuclear projectiles, but they can't make themselves a sandwhich. Bravo, Universe! Y'done good!

*Explain the grammer in text messages. Ok actually, more than an explanation, what I'd really like is the assuarance that, in the years to come, I will NEVER have to put down money at a bookstore only to read the words, "8 wz da bst of timz, 8 wz da wrst of timz..."
Promise me that day will never come.(Hey, it could happen! Remember ye olde days, when thou spaketh thus?)

3 a.m. World.

I have that 3 a.m. feeling again, where you're wide awake and in the darkness everything loses form and everything around you looks like a cubist painting - Shapes. Lines. Circles. Squares. Octogons. Just shapes - no depth, no dimension.

It's a strange time to be awake.
You are the only one on this alien planet. You are the only one alive.
This is not the time for conventions. You are the convention.
You can reinvent the world.
You can rewrite histories. Rearrange gravity.
Erase time, invalidate space.
Slither down the ceiling, crawl up the walls.

Feel the cold stone floor under you back while your feet hold up the sky. Fit your body into this concrete crevice and look for an alternate universe in the cracks in the wall.

Sense does not exist. There isn't much need for it.
3a.m. world is an alternate reality.
You are not you. You can be better or worse or nothing at all.
Nothing exists outside of it so the need for definitions and comparisons does not arise.

I am and that is all that I need to be.
I have nothing.
I am nothing.
I peel my skin away. I pulse. Throb.
I am nothing.
I am everything.
In 3a.m. world I am free to acknowledge everything I am and all that I am not.
Angry. Apathetic. Scared. Hopeful. Fulfilled. Fucked. Finished. Undone.

Had I hoped to be better than this.

Oh, baby!

The problem with being a serial procrastinator and congenital escapist is that your brain is hardwired to wander aimlessly, wrangling with issues and visualizing bizzarre scenarios that have ZERO productive value to you, personally...just so you can avoid doing any real work.

So in that vein, lately, owing to the fact that many people I know have had/are having babies, I've been ruminating upon this whole 'Miracle of Birth' business. Of course, being intrinsically perverse I've just gone ahead and built a whole operetta in my head featuring the exact moment that the people who've just had the babies first come to terms with the reality of the situation, hallmark-tinted glasses slipping for just that one moment.

Tinkly merry-go-round music forms the soundtrack of the scene, as they try to wrap their heads around this bundle of wrinkles: Oooh, look honey - ten fingers, ten toes, mom's eyes, dad's schlong, brain still in it's original shrink wrap packaging - perfect. blank. unbroken. Tra-lala-lala-la...

SCEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeCH!!! Craaaaashhh!
The tinkling Mozart baby music comes to a screaming halt inside their heads as the thought slams into them: Is this Mother Theresa,Jr. or Charles Manson, version.07 they're cradling here?

Freeze frame.

See that moment right there...that's pure, uncut, I-want-my-mommmmieeee(or-enough-horse-tranquilizer-to-kill-a-small-rhino,) blind, undistilled TERROR we're talking about.

That's the moment when the realization of the hopelessly wide chasm of possibilities between Option#1 and Option#2 knocks them on their asses, and then hyperventilating (and possibly dropping off into a catatonic stupor lasting 19 years or so) they attempt to come to terms with the invariable certainty that before the fat lady sings, they will have taken this bundle of pure, untapped potential and FUCKED IT UP in so complete and unique and irrevocable a fashion, as to warrant a lucky psychiatrist somewhere a very tidy beach house on the Cote D'Azure.

Welcome to parenthood, suckers. Your life as you knew it just ended.
The requiem mass has been cancelled because you'll be needing the cash...y'know - for formula, and diapers, and G.I.Joe toys, and yes, also all the beer and drugs they'll buy after raiding your unsuspecting wallet the minute they hit 15.
Have fun, good luck. You're gonna need it!

(Hey, I warned you I was a twisted fuck!)