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!)

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is dead. Aged 84. The semi colon has been replaced by a period. Full stop. So it goes.

Here's the thing - I never took Lit. in college. I never learned how to read the classics or anything that would qualify as 'Literature'.
Consequently, most of 'Literature' scares me. And what doesn't, it bores me.
What is the underlying motivation of the protagonist, what are the central themes, the symbolism - why is the moon like a siren's gaping maw and what does that have to do with the asscrack of eternity?
Fuck that shit, I don't know.
Kudos to my mongrel education, I barely learned to spell.

So, I stayed well away from the 'Important' writers. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mailer and Vonnegut etc. They seemed too clever for me, too abstruse. (To my credit, I dreamed that word up...plucked it out of the ether. Thank god it actually exists and means exactly what I need it to mean.)
Funnily enough, I was right. They were clever. Sneaky, even. Because, somehow (I don't know if it was the smell and feel of ancient books bought on sun-warmed pavements or the fact that secondhand was all I could afford to buy at the time) I got hoodwinked into reading the things I had initially dismissed as 'The Classics'.

And I was surprised when in a lot of the writing I found echoes of my own thoughts. Notions that had vaguely occurred to me, only set down with such clarity and economy and wit as to give me pause and make me wonder if, perhaps, I hadn't thought those thoughts independently, but had stolen them from the author by some form of pre-osmosis.

Vonnegut was one of those. At the first reading, it was like expecting to find a dour college professor or sanctimonious, old-fart, elderly relative and instead finding an ageing beatnik who maybe listened to Greenday and had a weakness for fart jokes. I mean, the guy said Fuck...A LOT! How scary could he be?
Surely, this couldn't be 'Literature'! It didn't seem painful enough. The writing wasn't flowery or long-winded. There weren't even any 'thees and thous and thys.' And wait: he was actually funny, and irreverent, and poignant, and absurd, and ironic and gentle. And hip! And he MADE UP WORDS!!!

The first one I read was 'Cat's cradle.'

It was unexpected. It was funny and weird and profound and it took me a while to wrap my head around it.

So now the thing is, I never know if I ought to recommend Vonnegut to just anyone. Because if you come into one of his books with a defined notion of what a novel is supposed to be, then you're going to wonder about my taste and maybe even my sanity. So, the best I can do is tell you that he's weird, but in the best possible way.

Look, this guy says things like "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." and "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." and "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool"

His characters travel back and forth in time...and no they don't save the world (though they try.) And maybe their only super power may be a slightly heightened ability to see their own specific strand in the cosmic cobweb of reality. His Heroes aren't tights and cape wearing Pin-up idols for the gay community, just worn and wearied versions of himself and his villains are time and tide and the dogma of mercenary modernism. But he manages to amass so many potent features of life and living and pack them all so diabolically into a device as simple as a few hundred ink-stained pages, bound together by string and glue.

So wait, to simplify - here's what I think his books have been about: truth and simplicity, and absurdity and seriousness and frivolity and gentleness and dystopia and hope and the past and futures and nihilism and idealism and science fiction and family and war and politics and ethics and tequila and peace and forgiveness...in short, EVERYTHING.
Go read one now.

Gratuitous yet occasion-appropriate Vonnegut quote:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." - Slaughterhouse Five.

I contain multitudes.

The chief problem in living with the schizophrenia of me is that I never know which avatar is going to be in the driver's seat at any given point.

There's obssessive compulsive mimi, paranoid delusional mimi, chocolate fueled degenerate mimi, endorphin laced earth mother mimi, ass-whuppin' tank grrrl mimi, whingeing wimp mimi, nasty crunchy PMS mimi, weeping willow PMS mimi, super efficient professional powerhouse mimi, temperamental prima donna artist mimi, mother of confusion mimi, super slick rockstar mimi, nobody loves me mimi, couldn't give a fuck mimi, hypersensitive wuss mimi, insensitive bitch mimi, oddball goof mimi, stoic buddha mimi, queen of chaos and melodrama mimi, rational pragmatist mimi, juvenile delinquint mimi, aging singleton mimi, infantile passive aggressive mimi, firebreathing dragon mimi, peace corps pacificst mimi, social butterfly mimi, complete social retard mimi, sanctimonious purist mimi, raving alcoholic mimi...

and on and on and on...and on.

And if you thought listening to these whinging wierdos was a pain in the ass, think about when it's time to buy them shoes!

The Anatomy of Revolution

Heaven and hell are not features of the after life.
The gore and the glory, it's all played out on this earthly plane.
Revolutions abound.
Ideology is to Physiology As Bullet is to Bone.
A million people kill and a million more die.
For the cause, against the cause.
At the heart of the struggle there's only that. Always that. The Cause - informing the process, validating the madness.

And then eventually one day, when rhetoric has buried rhetoric and more blood than is merely tragic or obscene has been shed, one side wins - generally the oppressed.

Utopia is born. The footsoldiers of the revolution dare to dream of life, pure and plentiful, bought and paid for in blood.
But they forget - the balance of power may shift. It's nature doesn't.
Like a see-saw there are only two possibilities, and only one equation: up or down, oppressor and oppressed.

And sure as every new day is born, only to crust over and then ignobly die, the shine on the brand new republic quickly fades.

Strife sends up heroes and martyrs. Peace buries them and places a fat guard at their tomb to collect an admittance fee.

And The Cause...under whose tattered awning the throng once huddled to ward off a common enemy; The Cause is wrapped in parchment and mothballed away along with words like nobility, honour, duty, glory.
Words like development, progress, efficiency and bottom-line take their place.
'We' becomes 'me'.

And the dispossessed remain dispossessed...only under new management.

And then the vague realization hits you - Life really is only about 'Business as usual' and a Revolution is just a Hostile take-over.


Go read 'Animal Farm' now.

New Year Blues

Another year gone and still no sign.
I waited and waited for the epiphany to come. It didn't. Second year in a row.

Last year, the wine and weed addled euphoria coaxed me into believing that the lack of an epiphany meant I was going to be ok. 2006 was going to be a good year...the year we had all been waiting for. It had to be! Things HAD to be better this year, we could all just feel it.
And see!! No pesky epiphany. No word from the void. No freaky, unsettling prediction about the state of being for the coming year. Surely, that was a good sign.

Turned out, not so much. It wasn't the year we thought it would be. Far from it. Instead of being a year for healing and having and forgiving and forging on to bigger, better things, it was about growth. The painful kind. The kind that involves fear and hurt and relinquishing and being pushed further out into the unknown without a safety net and no respite.

Betrayals, evictions, ejections, rejections and too many goodbyes. Bad choices, stupid mistakes, reality checks and human let downs.

I suppose it is a necessary thing and I should be glad for it, but that may happen later, as a feature of hindsight. Right now, I'm smarting with the petulant indignation of a child that's been slapped in the face and wonders if, perhaps, there wasn't a gentler way to teach the lessons that needed learning.

And now, another year has turned without a sign. I suppose that's just the Universe saying, "Beware! Different year, same shit. Don't break out your dancing shoes just yet."

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.