Teach me how to dent time.

They say that hindsight is 20/20.

Pithy aphorisms don't make it any less infuriating, do they?

It's not easy when your one true misgiving with the world is the linearity of time. For 2018, it is this hearts' earnest desire to have problems slightly more pliable than the laws of Newtonian physics.

That. Just that.

Aftermath.

After the battlefield is finally cold, and the sun has set on the massacre it witnessed, it is memory that poisons those who survive. No matter which side you pledged, dwelling on each blow will kill even the victor. Eventually... and indiscriminately. 

Lessons That Came Too Late - Part 1

"A nature that does not sue for happiness, often receives it in large measure"

Listen Without Prejudice.

Given enough time, everything decays into rage. It courses through the veins, thicker than blood. It burns brighter than most fires you and I have known. It lives. 

Burning out is a gift, a blown fuse being the final line of defense before the carnage. The limit of human capacity for enduring pain protects not itself, but the source. 

But there are those who don't burn out. Those misguided into striving for invincibility, can only come burning and blazing, or not come at all. They forget how to half-live, they know not how to half-love. Run enough pain through them, and they become live wires; obliterating everything they touch, knowing neither peace nor loss. The current, it's possible, would never stop.

Fulcrum

One doesn't play with fire, without expecting to get burnt. 

In doing so, the objective of the game is not to avoid damage. The whole point of the exercise, is to balance ones' instinct for survival against the predilection for self-destruction, and discover which one wins. The war, after all, is always internal.

More.

12.02
I miss certain things, so much more than I ever wanted them. And sweet heavens, I wanted them so so much, that the "wanting" and the "pursuit" was all that was left of me. As long as the hours are filled up with just a little more than they can contain, the days are bearable, and the nights are dispensable. It's when peace dawns that the real commotion sets in. When it's quiet, it's hard to bear being in one's own head.

12.02

An unfortunate state of affairs, it certainly is, that we've landed in this situation. Had we met elsewhere, in a different life, this would have panned out very differently I'm sure. But this world is a complicated place, and the only point of contact is also the core point of conflict. 

So what chance do we have?

11.02

A shrink in the making says that if there's one thing that's changed over the years, it's the fact that I've succumbed to "being more mainstream". I think I've merely identified a need to create a character that is more "mainstream", acquired the ability to vivify it, and the capacity to switch it on and off at will. As the years roll along, I'm not quite changing as much as I am growing several different people in one exceedingly capacious head.

09.10

If I say to you that the world as we know it is coming to an end, you wouldn't so much as raise an eyebrow. Sure, I believe you can move mountains with a flick of your little finger. Sure, you tread the earth like you own it. Sure, everything is a victory to you. And every conquest pushes you higher up on your pedestal. But would you ever change things, not because you could, but because you wanted to?

12.09
It gets crowded. So very crowded. Inside my head.

The puppetmaster is me, the puppets are also me. Each puppet a tiny part of my entire self. Each persona a tweaked and tuned modulation of the various behavioral patterns, memories and belief systems that make up a person, adjusted to just the right degree to attain a certain cause, a particular end, or a purpose, like the knobs and dials on a complex piece of musical equipment.

All these blogs I write that chronicle each one of these lives are all headed in separate directions, all over the place. I don't like where either of them are headed. Neither these people, nor their stories.The puppetmaster right in the middle is having his limbs torn out of his sockets, struggling to hold on to strings that just happen to exhibit incredulous tensile strength.

13.02

I woke up feeling 17 today. Led zeppelin playing in the head, spring in the step. It's been a while, but so easy ti is to map what was there then, to what is today. Things should have changed. I wish I could say "Oh, if only I had known the things I know today...", but the truth is, I cannot. I knew. And these 6 years, I haven't found enough new. I now need to fill up feathers and filling into my paragraphs because there is nothing more to be said about the things I already understood perfectly 6 years ago. Time froze, and so did I. Cryogenically, I hope.

11.03

To have power over people, is to either assert a clear and overwhelming intellectual superiority over them, or to seduce and subsequently exercise control. All in all, the keywords remain the same- overwhelm and seduce. But having lost the will for the former, and the moral sanction for the latter, I'm left to trifle with my modest lateral devices. Ah well, Machiavelli shall share a drink tonight.

10.02

Across all of civilization and culture, there is no single insult known to be more effective than a well-timed "point-and-laugh". Fact

11.10

Epiphany. Every thing, concept, incident, occurrence, phenomena and association is about control. Things controlling others, the number of things bearing the influence of control on a single object,  and the degree of the control. And in this system, power is all about the ratio of the degree of control one practices over objects/concepts/people external to oneself, to that which is exercised by external factors onto oneself.

11.10

Owning a fully-customisable cellphone is no joke for the obsessive-compulsive. The sheer amount of time that can be spent moving RGB sliders to get the lower side of the incoming chat bubble to the perfect shade of teal... the boggled mind boggles.

10.06

One of these days, they'll finally catch up to what I've been doing all along.

12.01

Best laid plans backfire. Using humor as a defense mechanism comes to bite you in just the wrong places. The problem? My decision to be amused by every thing that bothers me has led to strange results. The world now thinks I'm drunk all the time.

11.10

The digitized world leaves one in want of romance. There is, of course, romance in uncertainty. In doubt, unfavorable odds, inconvenience, tragedy and in nostalgia. It's hard to place what exactly is lost in the quantisation of things. I think it's the depersonalisation. We rarely think of emails fondly. It's the handwritten letters we archive for years.

09.05

Perhaps irrational masochism isn't all that irrational after all. 

11.10

I know the difference between strength and imperviousness. But in case of emergency, the latter is a serviceable substitute for the former.

12.11

Poignant it is, that all subtleties of the human condition now decay into abstruse facebook privacy settings. So very curious, this time and age.

11.11

...and in a grand ironic spectacle, I realize that even my disregard is insufficiently misplaced.

12.01

I was always told that my words were a gift. That they can do so much that most cannot. That they stir up the deepest of contentions, the strongest of passions, and the most obscure of sentiments. That they can control, contradict, charm and manipulate. Question, sully, extol, or taint. Inspire, persuade or demean. Refute, baffle, overwhelm, and glean. That till I have my words, all can be salvaged. So I've been trying to weave all my little words into alluring patterns and strings, to cast then off into the skies, hoping that somehow, somewhere, they'd land in a place that justifies their existence. Whether my cause has met the intent, I cannot say... but today, what I truly want is to draw ropes and forge chains out of all these little words. What power do they have, after all, if I cannot wrap them around a few things, and make them stay?

12.01

All I really want, is to meet one person everyday, who can tell me something I don't already know.

13.03

I don't even know what normal is, anymore.

12.04

You can either be one of the people who spend their lives talking about the others, or you can be the one they're all talking about. Not a tough choice to make.

12.11

Deceit, the world shall never decry.

Even the moon thrives on borrowed splendor.

Did I really ever see its dark side?

12.11

There is so much music to be found in this world. Everything that is, is music. All patterns, all statistics, all odds, and all objects. They flow, and so does the music. Words flow, and so do these numbers.

13.01

I can feel a storm coming.

13.01

This quill of mine,

today explodes with colour,

seeping into paper,

bleeding into wood.

13.03

Pieces of Radiohead, REM, and RHCP came together, got inspired by Afrobeat, and became Atoms for Peace. Excuse me while I go nuts.

November

Sometime during the while I graduated from having nightmares about explosions to having nightmares about cyclones, reality certainly became less of one. It hasn't nearly been half as cruel as I'd become accustomed to, and a new kind of freedom has been found, it seems. Not the "spread my wings and soar away" variety, but more of a "today, I decide to stop pretending these chains are made of anything more than yarn that I would have slashed away with a fingernail a long time ago, had they not have been a metaphor for something that was rather valuable once upon an unreal and delicately fragile time" kind.

I understand more about this thing people call "human frailty" than ever before. I still call it cowardice, of course... and you, being you, might scoff condescendingly at the fact and shake your head in misleadingly unconvincing exasperation, continuing to unleash upon this world a false sense of security that will forever remain your ultimate, all-serving escape route. But so be it. Like I've said before, this is the way of the world and the world, I will not argue with. It's too predisposed to its own frailties for that. 

Having witnessed my words lose all power the year before, this year was also about reclaiming faith in them. I said so much that needed to be said, in and to people and places, not so respectively. I said that everything in this life is compensated for, and my balance stands levelled and even. Keen and quivering ratio, yes, but balanced nevertheless. I said that these things happen and the victories are not absolute. Nothing, unless broken down to the microscopic level is binary data. And once we're there, we're both the same. Broken down, we're both the exact same sequence of 0s and 1s and QR codes. I said that proof by analogy is never a proof, and I refuse to use it to describe the degree to which our own intent governs our lives in contrast to pure entropy and probability. I said that my violent, passionate, disagreeable self will always be so, because it is the only thing I can be knowing the things I know. I said that I would always go to the greatest lengths to have my environment be a product of my actions, and not vice versa. That my life, my volition, my choices and my loves are entirely my own and so is the responsibility of bearing their consequences. I said that in this wild spinning world, we are specks in the whirlpool. Colliding, drifting, cracking, shifting, breaking, coalescing. When not a single point in these realms stays constant, what do we centre our world around except our own estimations of perspective and standard deviations? I proposed that we take the sum total of all existence, slice it in the dimensions of space and time, and capture a sliver of reality in our minds. Every premise sorted, every colour accounted for. That much of reality, you get to keep. I said a lot of things, and mean them as much today as I did then. I, being me, will continue to do so.

There is more than a glint of hope, you see. This year and a half has brought in a lot of change. Having previously escaped the traps of formal education, it was a concrete step towards making(not finding, for that is too passive) my place in the world. Places, people, cities, and a fair deal of altered states of mind. Green, amber, and the entire rainbow wedged in between. Inconvenient loves and some very convenient hate. Bright lights, and wild nights. It was also the year of fending off droves of the redundant, the fatuous and the wasteful, fighting gender biases tooth and nail, and fighting for the fact that I am responsible only for my own actions, even if the weight and blame makes good stuffing for a communal piñata. The realisation that if the world insists on making me choose between wasting a lot of my time talking about it, or have it waste a disproportionate amount of its own talking about me, I might as well choose the latter despite the associated costs. 

The understanding that if I claim that a person is to be defined by their thoughts, beliefs, premises and ethos, then death is far more threatening a proposition than I ever imagined. Death, of course, of an entirely different sort. There were mountains and beaches and everything in between a million times over again. Music that you could touch, music that killed and resuscitated, music that broke, music that fixed, music that connected a hundred people through one feeling, music that set the air on fire, and music that made my heart want to explode. A lot of things made my heart want to explode, in ways good, bad, and honestly quite messy and ugly. But there is freedom. Never have I felt so wholly responsible for, so completely in control of my own life. Taxes, bills, and paying the rent. Living on my own, and breathing in a decidedly unhealthy amount of rarified oestrogen on a daily basis. 

But you shouldn't dwell, I implore. For "you", you must understand now, is not really you. 

Lesson Learnt.

A person who does not need a reason to pledge allegiance, will never require one to commit treason.

Irony will be the death of our kind. Done in by our own ergonomic keyboards, our ergonomic chairs, and these unforgivably ergonomic lives.

Postmodern Pinfold

tread lightly
speak low

contrivance,
less edacity.

pretend, we can
delude, we shall

and absolve
a life

wasted.

Never attempt to cure an addiction through abstinence. Do it through control.
Control is the only thing potent enough to make anything lose its charm. 

Quid pro quo, will also end up making the whole world blind.

Work In Progress.

I could say that it's sudden abdication. And that it's a cruel thing to do to someone with enough abandonment issues to build a monument out of. I could do the flip and tell you that it's not renunciation, but abject fear in flagrant masquerade. Argue, I can, and you know it. But if I'm going to be honest, I might as well take the world down with me. My mind has been sick before, and so has my heart. And if we're fated to turn into each other eventually, then the promises you made are mine to deliver. Conviction is that simple, and sometimes I wish mine had enough to hold on to. 

Disconnected inferences are back.

Ever-mundane urban life lulls us into a false sense of security, where we never expect much to ever happen. So complete is the illusion in its surreptitiousness, that one fine day we're all just walking around with blind spots the size of football stadiums. And then we blame the butterfly for the hurricane.

The Decision.

Religion is a utilitarian concept.
In reality, we always forge our gods and demons out of ourselves.

Further Discourse on Happiness.

Reading through The Picture of Dorian Gray, I chanced upon a realization that had been toying with my head for years. Indeed, it is true that maleficence and the years corrupt the body. But is it also true that knowledge corrupts the mind?

Most of the happiest people I have ever known are also some of the most ignorant ones. Most of the intellectually gifted people I know are deeply troubled, in one way or the other. And it’s the existentialists that seem to be the most perturbed of the lot. Why is it that self-awareness (or any form of awareness at all) unleashes a nagging discontent upon those who may seek it? Most of us may live our lives in the pursuit of happiness, but to what end? If it is a state of mind, then do the aforementioned facts not point to the delusional nature of all human desires and their satisfaction? If yes, then the integrity of rationale and accurate perception is dearly compromised, and life is lived on a background tinted with contrition. If not, then the value of happiness itself is a grotesque overestimation. It is somewhere between these arguments that I hope to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I do, however, lean towards the latter.

I have always believed that happiness is an over-rated concept. When we have the entire spectrum of human emotions available to us, to paint our world in just one color would take a serious lack of imagination. Existence wouldn’t have much meaning, if we didn’t taste all the flavors it has to offer. Wrath, Despair, and Fear are just as crucial human experiences, if not more. After all, they are far more intense, and intensity begets exhilaration. If we were to miss out on that, then it would be a life only half-lived.

Two Sharp Edges.

Ahh... Hope!

So easy to lose,
just that hard to abdicate.

Just so we all remember...

There are only two kinds of people in this world : The ones who become what life makes out of them, and the ones who are what they made out of their lives.

The highest value that a man can hold is his own ability. Consequently, the greatest sin is the failure to recognize it. And the most profound form of depravity to exist, is his refusal to acknowledge it.

Thus begins my lecture on the necessity of an internal locus of control.

P.S. I'm so stuck in the wrong profession.

Universally Speaking.

People never change. Ever.

Circumstances only cause them to highlight, sharpen, and play out certain aspects of their being more than the others, at different points in time. If you take to observing people closely enough, they'll never surprise you.

Life, on the other hand, is far more complex than that.

Ambitions à la Nostradamus.

Tonight, I want to be the toad in a wishing well, right out of a lesser-known, obscure little fairytale. One that would have entire pretentious kingdoms, their doltish gold-haired pretentious Rapunzels and dorky-looking, velvet-clad pretentious Prince Charmings tip a coin in and bare their shallow little souls out. Then, with an overbearing air of pomposity, I would raucously clear my throat and croak out cryptic, one-line prophecies... in effect, messing with their buoyant little heads. Only then will I ever be able to justify my existence congruently in an alternate dimension.

That, or I could make a positively vapid fortune-cookie.

"You proceed from a false assumption: I have no ego to bruise."
- Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
- Oscar Wilde 

*croak*