Antecedent to rescue, abject.

Applause, for the irony deserves it.

Champagne, for the problem with this world;

If push must eventually come to shove

a lot in this life can be dealt with,

but nothing will survive too much love.

This Day's Blurb

Ersatz Victory?

Lesson Learnt.

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

So much angst I spill all over this place, it's soaked in a dark, sticky concentrate of gloom that has the consistency of tar and the temperament of quicksand. It rained last night, and the most dramatic "all is full of love" moment was had. If only it rained every time I wished for it to. Every time I needed it to.

For everything else, there's The Clash. Sheer bad-ass brilliance.

Crusted.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.", said Douglas Adams. Sounded funny at the time, but fills me with anguish today when I find that what makes up the Universe, indeed, does make everything within it. The minute I begin to celebrate something in a person, it disappears. They don't change as much as simply cease to exit/spontaneously combust. Anything I treasure, I either kill or witness its suicide.  The "or", because in a world as sinister as this, who is to say how far goes the reach of our actions, our thoughts, and words? To what degree is one's happiness, or ardour, or anger, or misery one's own? There is this graph... a mesh. There are people who make up points in the graph. And there are lines of control connecting these people. But the lines are so many, so entangled, so intertwined that NO ONE WILL EVER TRULY KNOW WHO IN THE NAME OF A NON-EXISTENT GOD TUGGED AT THE DAMN STRING THAT PULLED A HUNDRED KNOTS AND TORE A FEW THOUSAND VERTICES OUT OF THEIR PLACE FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME THIS VERY MINUTE IN THE GOOGOLPLEXES OF MINUTES THAT PRECEDE IT AND THE GOOGOLPLEXES THAT FOLLOW, TILL TIME ITSELF BECOMES THE PAINFULLY INADEQUATE CONCEPT OF HUMAN INVENTION THAT IT REALLY IS. It could, after all, have been me. 

"Strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude."

Swirls of confetti in a wind tunnel with no gravity.

Tonight, the concept of sleep seems alien, just as it was last night. Sometimes when I roll out the past, the present, and the discernible future in front of me and try to make sense of certain things that simply never will, it gets to be a bit much to handle.Thoughts are like swirls of confetti in a wind tunnel with no gravity. On nights like these, everything that did, can, and does matter comes in quick and disorienting flashes; faster than I can fit into its right place. But just when something up there is dangerously close to cracking, one particular memory works its way into the picture and shoves everything else out. 

When I was 17, I met the most intellectually gifted man I have ever known. Over a significant period of time, we exchanged words, ideas, and entire worlds. One day, in leaving, he said something that stands emblazoned in my memory, to this day. "This road you're starting out on, I've seen it, and I've been down it. Being the way you are, it's only logical that you would too. I know the why, I know the how. But please know that through the test of time, living up to your convictions and bearing the consequences will be excruciatingly tough. It would be a long, arduous, unending climb and there will be a lot of pain along the way. It's not a question of "can" any more. Are you sure you want to?", he said. I leaned forward, smiled quietly, and said the few words that keep me sane in times like these. 

"I've made my choice."

So today, what do I have to complain about? 

Six years ago, I made a choice. And that's that. 

Disquiet.

00:01 AM

On the eve of the day that is today, I happened to pass out rather uncharacteristically at 8 P.M., and woke up right now with the faint realization, that there aren't going to be any sarcastic messages or crisp phone calls at midnight that I would conveniently wince at, ignore, and then forget all about. One, after all, doesn't get that lucky every year, and it's small pleasures we live by. Sure enough, there were none.

And then I dragged myself to this wheezing old reminder of a computer seated on a creaky old reminder of a work-desk, and typed this message. Because like Hemingway advises, one should write drunk, and edit sober. But I never like to leave room for editing. What I have for you, is all of me... unedited. With the erratic margins, errant aligning, and odd handwritten pages- crossings and omissions intact.

After a long time, things have changed. For better or worse, I'm not sure. Because I need to see you, and talk to you. Because I don't know where this is going to take me, a short while from now. Because I miss doing this, and I just might miss it more. Because this just might make you feel the way I want to. Before it's too late.

Is there nothing left
of this mess we've made?

There is a light (under the covers) that never goes out.

They ask me why I read. 

I tell them it that makes me happy, but that is untrue. How do I tell them the truth? How do I explain the fact that for most of my life, I've lived in a paracosm. A world of my own creation, because reality was never quite enough for me? That my mind was a box I never stepped out of, and the leather-bound frame of a book was the frame of my only window to the world outside. That its pages were a portal that transported me to lands near and far, to times enveloping the past, the present, and the furthest discernible future, where I learned about beauty, art, society, and the world when my immediate reality was too disappointing, or too insipid, or too predictable for me to step into. That my restless self wanted to run so fast that while the terrain and the training wheels felt like an insult to my capacity, my mind was hyperactive enough to construct cobbled streets, race-tracks and open-fields down to detailing the texture of the dorsal wing of the common swift moth perched on the rusted cross-arm of the gothic street lamp. That I knew people and understood them before I could speak to them. That viewing the world through so many eyes conferred upon me the capacity to be anything I needed to be, and what I could have became only a question of what I wanted. That the world's worth of knowledge and experience is condensed so much better into volumes, pages and nifty little constructs of sentences, for those who lack the patience, capacity, or poorer sense to wade through all the garbage that clutters an unaided experience of the world. That one needn't read to believe, but one must read to weigh, and to consider. That the mind is a machine which needs intellectual stimulus for fuel, and that reading is often a person's best shot at expanding it to its full capacity(or as close as it is possible to get), and that once you're there, there's no going back. How do I explain that reading gives me not just happiness, but everything else that reality is too listless to offer me. And that if it wasn't for this dogged whim of earning a living substantial enough to make my reality half as enthralling as my imagination and paying off the debt incurred in the process, I would still prefer to look out at the world from my window. Because having done that in the past, nothing I've seen since I became a part of it has ever managed to surprise me.

.............................................................................................................................................................................................................

They ask me why I think so much. 

How do I tell them that knowing the things I know, it's the only sensible thing left to do?

tragedy now dances (to the tune of dubstep)

*thump* *thump* Three years ago, healing was easy. Sure, it was a fairly arduous trip along the darker edge of the emotional spectrum, but it was foolproof. It was methodical, logical, and calculative. It was as much numbers as it was words. *boop dhee bhoop* Denial, anger, passive-aggression, rationalization, active-aggression, "the volcano", *boop dhee bhoop* de-rationalization, the bargain, more anger, guilt, more anger, re-rationalization,*boop dhee bhoop* self-destruction, burnout, rock-bottom, a little alexithymia, disconnection, "the zoom-out", "the crawl out of the abyss", gravity, the gift of selective memory... and finally, *boop dhee bhoop* the sutures. To come out almost fully-functional, albeit stapled/glued/taped together, wasn't altogether a bad use of one's spare time. An exercise in histrionics, one might say, but certainly not futility. *zeeeee thump* The last time around, healing was pared down to something nearly perfunctory. A straight-up burnout made healing unnecessary. *boom zeeeh boom* To survive, and quickly distance oneself was enough. It was exhaustion, and running out alone into a winter night. It was a comical juxtaposition of Shirley Manson's voice, and a surge of gravely non-comical sentiment. After years of a half-assed effort, it was 15 minutes of silence and a little perspective. That was all. *bheeeeeeeee zooooorrrb* But today, the cold isn't enough, and neither is the night. Even the Manson of the darker variety isn't enough, and a life lived on borrowed time certainly isn't. Healing was never a hard thing to do. The trouble, it seems, was always in wanting to. *thump* *thump* *thump* 

*fades out* 

For all the things I could wish for, there are a million I want to wish away.

Undo, unlearn, relearn. Regain all I forsook, rebuild all that I have lost. Because the weight of all this loss bears so so heavy, that I can no longer think of myself as one whole entity. There are only bits and pieces, disconnected from each other. More out of need than desire. More for survival than verve. Atrophied, hypertrophied, strained, drained, relapsed, revived, revved, degenerating. In spasms, in motion, dazed, charred and singed. 

I think I need to put this life on hold for a little while. Until the time is right. 

There is the world, but there is also the view. People sped up, time slowing down. I have a problem. These words of mine always hang in the air, awkwardly. Misplaced in time, misplaced in space. In thought and in action. In the dizzying flux of irrelevance that slows every damn thing down to an insufficiently maddening degree. It's not how it was, not how it was supposed to be. Colloidal rooms, bleary lights, and the suspended pieces of ideas there is simply no point to pulling and holding together with glue and scotch tape. We could never believe it, but some things aren't really meant to be fixed. Torn books, folded into origami swans, tied with strings to the ceiling fan, weaving patterns and words and shadows of insignificant things around. Candles and lamps and the spinning world. Reality is wasted on people like you and things like me. It's too late to salvage much. Sooner or later, there will only be the view. The looking glass and the haze. 

"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him-- it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped."