Around the time you were being less interesting

From what I remember, this is what happened at 3am last night -

"So, like, that burning bush. Moses. He burnt a bush of marijuana, right?"

"No?"

"Of course he did. And I'll tell you why. All those Jews were mass-tripping when they said the Red Sea parted. How the hell does a sea part?"

"*Reads out the Wikipedia entry on the Red Sea.*"

"The Red Sea cannot part. Unless it's like.. two oceans facing each other and having simultaneous low tides. All the Jews were stoned. They thought the Red Sea was parting and tried to cross it and then they drowned. THAT is why there are so few Jews in the world."

"I'm pretty sure HITLER had something to do with the Jewish population."

"No. Shuttup. I'm being very profound right now."

"Go on."

"So Moses burnt a bush of weed and the Jews died thinking a sea parted. Also they have big noses from inhaling all that weed. And.. and that's why they're so susceptible to such a host of genetic disorders."

"..."

"Yeah that's what I thought."

Been reading quite a bit of Neruda this morning. And writing notes about solid waste management (you know, poo handlage.). Everyone else is busy studying, but I have an English paper tomorrow, so HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Inside Joke -
Amoeba is a Hero. We must try to be. Like the Amoeba.

I look over at him, slouching as if draped over the side of a chair like a roll of fabric. With the headphones plugged in, nothing will matter, as long as the legs tap rhythmically, as long as the throat silently hums and the fingers play frenetic chords, riffs,
Whatever.

And I think to myself, that I am so very stupid.

Did I say that I loathe you, that we should leave all this behind? So much more. In flashes of white hot anger I have hurled words that, in retrospect, have sounded so childish that I both laugh and cringe at myself.

I’ve always longed for a lover who would double up as my best friend when I needed one, and a sibling for when I needed someone to look out for me. To grow up as a single child may have its perks of a large inheritance and whatnot, but it makes for a lonely childhood. Especially lonely, in fact, when you were a fat lonely kid with tall, skinny neighbours with far too many friends. While all the others were away hopping on bouncy castles that I wasn’t allowed because of my girth, I began to read.

Voraciously.

And as I read I made up worlds – fanciful portals that led to complicated lands.

And then, like God, I created my Adam.

He was so tall and so wonderful, with a crinkly smile and crooked teeth. He would have strong arms that I could melt in, a rich wonderful voice. He would ask me about my favourite things, naturally some things we would love alike, some we would have a mutual distaste for, and the things we did not agree upon we would debate hotly but reconcile in the end, for that is what lovers do.
It’s just what all young lovers do.

I reach up to your nose, and I’m as tall as you if I stand on tiptoe.
You cannot sing, not even if you tried.
I could lift you up if I wanted to. I think.
The way your jeans threaten to fall off while mine cling on like second skin-in a minute I’m reminded of my fat kid past and it scares me and saddens me to see your friends with those skinny bombshells with matching-clothes-shoes-handbags-accessories. They never have bad hair days. Days of crippling self doubt and days where calories must be counted but they aren’t for fear you have eaten too much – so much that you will explode and never be heard of. They have longer legs and thinner arms and t-shirts that flatter their every curve and hide their every flaw. Not that they have any of course.

I am rendered inadequate in every measure and I wonder why you would even like me. Me, with the hair that flies off in different cardinal directions on any given day of the week. Myopic me, I’m prone to spells of superciliousness and bouts of anger. I bite my nails and I cannot stand defeat.

And I am short. Not lissome and wispy like I should be. I once spent an entire month listening only to Flo Rida’s Right Round. I cannot dance and if I do I look like a spastic monkey, no offence to spastic monkeys.

And I am jealous, so very jealous, that every time you treat another girl the way you treat me, in spite of myself I am stabbed with a pinprick that is sharp and painful but mostly shameful.

But like a favourite song you make me forget and you make me discover.

With every word I scream I know I push you away. I know that one day you may no longer return.

But overlaying everything is fear. That no one will ever understand me the way you do. I am afraid that one day someone smarter and prettier and less blustery will take you away and make you work less and appreciate you more.

Appreciate you I do, in my mind more than I say it loud for reasons unknown. All my swagger and all my bravado, all the things that I say about how I would be better off without you – they would collapse if you leave. Even though you should be loved more.

I know how stupid I sound. What anyone would say if they saw this. That if I know all of this, then why don’t I?

Because, you see, I am so very stupid.

So stupid that I would do anything to rebuild the things I break down over and over again, in the hope that one day, I’ll learn to not demolish things that aren’t meant to be broken.

And everyday I promise you that this will be the last time I hurt you; everyday I meticulously prove myself to be a liar, again and again and again.

Like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I shall become The Girl Who Cried Love, and karma will smile silently.

As much as I am afraid that no one else will ever understand me, I am afraid that you don’t understand me.

Just as I am terrified that I don’t know you at all.

You want a mature relationship. With a friend who turned out to be more. I don’t know where you got your calm from, I missed the lessons I should have learnt about patience. I am a hypocrite so worried about losing my identity with you that I don’t see how I’m forcing you into a mould.

And for every one of these things I am sorry. You are your own person just as I am mine. You deserve someone who appreciates you for all that you do. For all that you are. Someone that probably isn’t me.

But should you ever feel like you want to settle, I’ll still be here. Stupid, stupid me.

In which the author expresses a desire to sue Hollywood.

Each questionably great romantic comedy ends similarly but differently. With the love of their life gone far far away due to a misunderstanding, the protagonist realizes the hard way that life without said romantic partner is cold and loveless. And so begins the last scene, one you mindlessly cheer on knowing of the situation’s improbability and the predictableness of the ending.
Rex Harrisson as Henry Higgins, after his impassioned and somewhat misogynistic “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?” soon realizes that the Cockney Eliza Doolittle was more than just an experiment. George Peppard, the impoverished boytoy writer and Audrey Hepburn, the whimsical socialite Holly Golightly look for a stray cat called Cat in the pouring rain in a back alley, accepting that as two drifters, they’d just be happier if they stuck together. Runs through terminals, and friendly guards who allow transgressions and breach of security at the risk of their jobs, a romantic conclusion atop the Empire State Building, several years into the future after a casual acquaintance on a road trip vehemently declares that men and women can never be friend because sex will always come in between.
I blame Hollywood for ingraining in me standards that teenage boys will never achieve due to the lack of a scriptwriter controlling their lives and actions.
I blame Hollywood for making me believe in a parallel universe where I would be consoled by a dashing man in a tuxedo, ascending on an escalator, a single rose in his hand and a look of pure love.
I blame Hollywood for wrapping my mind around three words, three words that would emotionally validate me, I refer not to ‘I Love You’ , but Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire with the line, ‘You Complete Me.’
While on one hand, the sheer volume of unwatchable romantic movies cheapens and mocks the idea of love, the film industry has also glorified the same emotion, putting it on a pedestal so high that we are led to assume that we cannot function without a wonderfully kind, loving and considerate significant other.
The purpose of this diatribe is not to advocate the idea of independent singledom. It is selfish. It is to remind myself that I’ve been socially conditioned to emotionally look for things that are fantastical and scripted. Films end with a slow fadeout embrace or a sincere ‘I Love You’ and a consequent kiss of reconciliation. That there is a Happily Ever After is a conclusion out candyfloss mind jumps to.
A relationship is dynamic, and no sprint on tarmac or speech in front of crowds ever conclusively solves anything. If anything it is, at best, a good anecdote for when you grow older. But sooner or later, you will resent something again and at some point the airport is going to list you as a repeat offender on charges of trespassing.
So what do I conclude from all of this? That a relationship is a compromise that you are willing to make, that our environment teaches us things that are not necessarily true. That flying under the radar, being off the grid, and simplicity is just as effective and heart-warming and meaningful as freezing to death in the middle of an ocean watching your lover survive. At least you can be sure that in your case, he didn’t memorize lines that someone else wrote for him, and he’s not reading it out while wearing alarmingly large amounts of makeup.

Sense and sensibility.

Are best left to the Victorians.
As for me, I prefer debauchery. 

The look on your face, was delicate.

I never want my life to be like a Damien Rice song. I'm afraid of pain and loneliness and regret, but I never want it to be so wispy and wistful that each moment of it is heartbreaking in so many different ways.
I want my rage to be fast, to be angry, to be wild and to be over with. Grudges are scary, the ones you harbour in your heart for so long, with all those layers of stealth that you wrap it in with, and then sooner or later you will release it, when I'm vulnerable, when I let down my guard. You make me never want to relax.

Now why would you do that?

Like when I forget you, and I forget you exist, I forget the things you say that I used to remember. And then you come rushing back to fill my synapses and bloodstream, suddenly my hair's a mess and my clothes matter, but mixed with the self-doubt there is the elation that you'd rather be here than anywhere else.

If you think about it, sir, maybe it was self-defence after all.

I saw him for the first time and it was just confusing, you know. He
was newborn then. I should have been happy, like those other
teary-eyed pussies outside the maternity ward too conscious to smoke
cigars to kill the tension. He was newborn then. Kicking squealing
bundle of frigging joy. The nurse who brought him in had a nice ass.
That's all I saw. Then I saw him, that bloody slimy oozing noise
machine. Rat-like face, albino-rat, mind you. Fuzzy downy hair. I
wanted, I wanted to carry him like the lions did, by the scruff of his
neck. God he was so disgusting.
Now don't go thinking I'm a psychologically depraved fuck of an excuse
of a human being, no. My other kid, he loved me. He's a real boy. They
say he took after his mother, they lied. He was mine, I saw him and I
saw me. My heart beat for him. My boy he was. My son. See? That's
normal enough, innit? Normal as normal can be.
But when Junior-Junior came along, I saw them all in the first moment
in the white light of the cheap hospital wing with yellow peeling
walls. The idiotic grin on my wife's face, god, she looked so proud to
have birthed that monster and my son. That little kid looking on so
adoringly from the sidelines. Like a donkey in a Nativity play looking
on at the runty little Jesus, I don't hate God, now officer, don't put
that down in your records, it was, it was a metaphor. I was being
literary. My son went from lead actor to understudy in that one
second and my heart bled for him.
No, no.
That's not when I snapped.
I'm not an animal.
I put my best false face, my best pretend grin. I pretended to like
that tufty little thing.
As he grew chubbier and cuter, I didn't mind him so much anymore.
He was so darned cute, putting things in his mouth when he shouldn't,
pooping in his little white pants, and giggling all the time. Like a
puppy.
Who doesn't like puppies?
My wife, god, she was an indecisive cunt though. Told me I had to love
my kids, now she tells me, "Larry", she says. "Larry, you can't
neglect Junior. He needs you too."
The fuck he needed me. He was grown-up. He was old. JJ was YOUNG. It
was simple, but Junior didn't understand.
"Larry", she said, "You gotta learn to divide your love, both your
little boys need their father."
I stayed awake that night thinking about that.
The fat bitch was right.
But I couldn't just divide my love like that. Love's precious, y'know?
Not a slice of pie, not Lola the neighbourhood whore, that slag's gone
around more than a hash-filled cupcake at Woodstock. I'm not a
love-whore. I couldn't just tear off hunks of my love and just GIVE it
to people.
Love's sacred and unique like that, yeh? It's, it's exclusive like that, innit?
THAT'S when I snapped.
So you see, officers, that's why I killed them.
Junior doesn't talk cute anymore, and JJ doesn't giggle or poop in his
pants. I don't love either of them anymore. They're not even alive for
God's sake, what am I, a dead-person-lover, like those stoners down
Main Street who orgasming over Kurt Cobain?
That's my explanation.
Happy now, officers?
Can I have my phone call now?




(So I found this in the middle of a bunch of solved problems in my math register this morning and I had no idea where it came from. It's something I've never tried writing about so you'll have to excuse the novice-ness of it all.)

And after all, we did plan for nothing.

Someday I want to go to a place with no name with nothing to do.
No shoes and no rubberband to tie my hair up in.
I will not wince when the grass pokes my bare feet.
I will not worry about the wind messing up my hair.
I will lie down on the ground and feel it holding me up.
I will have the gritty mud scratch little scratches into the palms of my hands and underneath my fingernails.
I will walk on a beach and push my muscles that little stretch where each step is an exercise.
I will dig my feet into the sand and burrow my toenails in, right in.
I will not hold you hand just the backs of them brush against each other accidentally on purpose.
I will taste the salt on my face sticky as it may be.
Walk on rocks with slippery footholds.
Hide from the Sun.
And when it rains we will not hide from the clouds.
I will laugh through blurry vision and lightning strikes that illuminate and thunder that growls.
And the winds will blow and chill us to the bone it will make the raindrops cut skin.
We will walk back to our little room heady with the smell of wet earth and slow trickles of stray raindrops on windowpanes.
Grey skies will fade to a night with ominous red clouds.


In the morning, we will wake up with terrible head-colds and sneezes and we might just regret the lack of shoes but for the warm hugs from the quilt (and you) I guess it was worth it.



(My dinner tonight was about a million cream crackers with pepper cheese and green apple jam and now I am off to steal Oreos. Yes, this is my definition of a fruitful Friday night.)

"Stella, oh Stella for Star!"

I've written about A Streetcar Named Desire before, back when I read the play, but I finally got the time to watch the Elia Kazan directed movie, and I swear to God, I think I want a man from the fifties. I know, I know, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski is in no way the perfect man, but oh, oh but he just is. Just so hot. 

The way he strolls across the room like he owns it because he does. The way he throws the radio out through the window. Animal screams and puppy dog eyes, the rage under the shower and then the desolate little boy at the foot of the staircase, and all he wants is Stella. 

I'm telling you. The man's an animal. He's disgusting, he's crude, a little... "primitive", but you watch that scene where he comes back the morning after the poker party, with the greasy wifebeater, that hat on his head, and all that horrible grime and sweat and hard work on the fore-arms, you tell me after you see that scene, I'm pretty sure you want to get beaten by him too. 

I'm not saying I condone wife-beating. I'm just saying that there is probably a part of everyone, okay fine, me, that doesn't want to be all strong and confident and independent and free-living. A part of wants to be that completely wishy-washy females that feminists weep for. I don't know, and if you ask me on any other day I'll probably laugh you off for ever bringing this up again, but sometimes you just need a manly man like Stanley Kowalski to make you grin like an idiot. :)

i'm sorry for putting you on the spot, but i'm just sharing the spotlight.

(wrote this in exactly three minutes, i should really go to bed, or do my biochem lab record, but hey, if i don't procrastinate, who else will? this is for all you people who complained that i wasn't posting. my apologies. this isn't much but it's a tad longer than the last three posts put together (learn to love line breaks!) so yeah. off to bed, cheerio!)

just because

you're not in my pictures yet

does not mean 

you're not part of my movie

the movie of my life, you know

you know you have a starring role

and we need it to fade out on the slow embrace at the end

all good movies end with that kind of stuff

the movies that don't end depressingly, that is

hey, we're not a depressing movie

not the kind you watch and then 

you want to blow up a building or drink yourself to sleep

because you're too frustrated and/or too sad with the state of the world

no 

we're that kind of movie

that'll make people give loose change to hobos on the street

that'll make people sing in the rain

that'll make people name sleds after flowers, say it before they die

that'll make people happy

happiness is what

makes the world go round.

aside from all that angular momentum, but we're not talking about that right now.

Waiting for the Sun

So, where I used to live lived this little kid who is no longer little, but when he used to be little, he used to be one of the darndest ones ever. When he watched Koi Mil Gaya, he was so inspired by that solar panel on that cow-like alien Jadoo's head that he asked his mum very seriously - "Will I be supercharged too, if I stand in the sun?" And his mum, who naturlich thought he was joking, said yes, he would most certainly be supercharged if he stood in the sun. 

For about a week later, at 6:00 am, which was when the sun rose in Calcutta, you could see a little seven year old boy in his Dragonball-Z underwear, skinny legs and protruding ribcage, standing tall squinting at the sky, ramrod straight on the windowsill, waiting for the sun.

fuck biotechnology, i'm building a time-machine

I miss Calcutta.

Calcutta winters smell like home.

Calcutta was easier because there was only one parent.

One extremely mostly co-operative parent.

Another absentee phone parent.

Because there was carpet floor and fake Tibetan soup and orange streetlight glow under my window in December.

Because Harshita and Sreeja were always only one local SMS or about five minutes away.

And I saw most of my friend five times a week unless they were bunking. I didn't have to care about what to wear in the morning.

If my parents yelled I could only hear one of them. And I never had to hear the Ominous Revving of the Car and the Slam of the Door.

Collapse the Light into the Earth

I wrote this because I didn't feel like doing Math, my room mate's English teacher showed them a documentary on 2012 last night, and my morbid fear of dying is rearing it's ugly head again and it's kind of hard to go about life fearing about the lack of it. Analogous to eating the last plate of good food and wanting to eat it fast and yet knowing there's none where THAT came from. Porcupine Tree and lack of Math is sort of making me feel better. For some reason I thought writing would make me feel better but it only made me feel worse. Man I'm a loser. I haven't done anything useful. I have a huge ego and nothing to back it up with. And to top it all, I'm going to die in about two years. 2012 is good news only for psychopaths and non-believers who are going to have a field day on 01-01-2013.
If we live to see it.
:-/

Are there going to be sirens, wailing in the dead of midnight,
Like a shrill knell for the world?
Will we burn hotter than the sun, or will we just stop existing
Crumbling into ashes when we take unwitting steps
Danger
Danger
Ohmygoodness DANGER.
Is there going to be some sort of line, women and children go last
And the captain of the world locks himself in his cabin -
2012 is the Iceberg for our planet's Titanic, and Ron Howard is a morbid, morbid man
Who couldn't come up with a happy enough ending.
And will I hang over the edge of a oaken door with icicles freezing my hair -
Watching you die and we'll think of the things we never did?
We never took a trip to an amusement park in the late summer, never watched the candy-coloured rides in the haze of the setting sun.
And we never went to Amsterdam, and we never took roofies among the tulips, stupid grins and outlandish words we wouldn't remember were never said anyway.

My life would look like the preview of a movie half-formed in the mind of a visionary
Extraordinary ideas and crazy situations that never really happened
All I am is a barrel of mush that never fermented
And I am left undone, unfinished, because I never started anyway.
I could have been the best beer in the world.
So when Day Zero finally arrives, what is going to be like -
An army of aliens, tired of being misrepresented as green, antenna'd misfits take us down
Because they're tired of hiding from the Mars Rover?
Something less mundane like a fiery inferno going Kablam and we're all little strips of bacon
Or the Sun goes on strike
Or the vastly superior idea of thermal death, when we expend so much energy that the entropy of the Universe goes up so high that we just cannot move anymore.
For an idea that's been lurking around for hundreds of years, 2012 Is surprisingly vague, you know?
All the better to spook us out with.

i'm thinking you should ignore the innuendo

This is Grouse Lodge,a residential (the only residential) recording studio in Ireland. More importantly, this is where Snow Patrol recorded "The Planets Bend Between Us".
And this is also where Muse recorded "Absolution".
Okay, so apparently it has like, this swanky pool and this shiny health spa and stuff, and there's all this technicial shazam about how good the recording facilities are. There are separate acoustic rooms and all.
I'm not a musician.
But I'd light a fire in that fireplace when it's cold and dark we'll throw a rug over our feet and drink a little too much liquor the kind that gets to us slowly.
We'll get slurrier the world will be blurrier as the night wears on and at three in the morning we'll put on our boots and our fly-away scarves step out in the faint morning light.
With palms on the rough stone we'll find our way around a town we don't know shoes scraping on cobbled pathways electric bulbs in grimy mullioned windows the wind thrashing whistling through trees so tall tall tall.
Freezing noses red like traffic stop signs I see you through the fog of your cloudy breath.
I'm not a musician.
But.
We should make music!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I need a decent winter and I need to get laid.
Well you're half correct.

"Schrei du laut du kannst"

Sometimes you get bruised real bad, and you put a band-aid on it, and it heals over time, right? You don't pick at the scab, you don't peel off the band-aid a day too early, you let it curl and fray and drop of its own accord. Until all you're left with is this scar, see, just this teeny slightly differently-coloured patchwork of skin that remains the only reminder of the cut.

Well sometimes, it feels weird to poke the scar and feel nothing there, even though it hurt like a crazy bitch when you first got hit.

"And we (shall) twist, we (shall) twist, we (shall) twist."

One of these days you and I shall have a few beers. And in the light-headed haze we shall talk of things we've said to each other before, in low voices laced with conviction, leaning too close and making intertwined neon silhouettes in a corner.
Stupidly enough we'll ask each other to dance.
We shall make complete fools of ourselves to the soundtrack of songs we've never heard before.






But don't worry, I'll still love you in the morning.

Post Title - Twist, Neeraj Shridhar, Love Aaj Kal.

"Please don't go crazy if I tell you the truth."

I listened to several songs for inspiration
And I tried staring straight into space.
I waited for a bolt of lightning to singe my hair and burn my face
And electrocute my brain into a state of poetic frenzy
But you see,
The sky does not have potential enough.
How do they do it, the ones who do it, write songs about people, just like that?
I have a muse far greater than them, and yet I'm stuck here
Rambling.
As I was saying-
I could try to rhyme the way I tried
Back when I was seven, in school, and far too zealous, I tried everything
Even ice-cream with ketchup,
So I wrote a poem for class
About my cat
Who was fat
He ate rats
Slept on a mat
In a class of thirty, twenty-two of us seemed to own twenty-two identical imaginary
Cats
Who were Fat
Ate Rats
Slept on a Mat.
So evidently, I'm not the next Plath.
I could write you a song, a song with no instruments but with incoherence
Because my ineptitude also extends to musical instruments.
But if you were a song,
You'd be an instrumental track
And what I'm getting at here might solve my poetic predicament too.
Hell.
You're just too good for words.

Post Title-"How to Be Dead", Snow Patrol, for the American Pie soundtrack.

"I should've kissed you when we were walking in the rain, but what am I now, darling?"

She took one long look, her last, all around the place. There lay the pieces of paper that rustled around on the floor, and walls generally faded except for the squares where there were pictures on the wall, brightly coloured patchwork walls. The peripherals of an entire existence wrapped away in a fixed numbers of boxes, in a truck that was revving up four stories below. If there was to be a soundtrack, there would be the sound of crashing piano chords. Or maybe Frank Sinatra?
But there was no soundtrack except for the assorted sounds of the people on the street, the cars as they whizzed on by, and the audible sigh of the failed poet who lived downstairs.
"We hates to be movin' yer along, ma'am, but we has fo' mo' deliveries to made, see, an' we, we was jus' wonderin'...". He had the strength of several wild horses, but the deliveryman's only contact with all things fine were boxes marked "Fragile". But he'd picked the short straw and it was his job to hustle this nostalgic client along, slightly nudge her along to the future.
"Yes, of course."
So she sighed one last sigh, brushed the hair out of her eyes, and walked out of the door.


Post Title - Cheers Darlin', Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan.