milestone day

 

anxiety addiction elevation intoxication. homage. to luck. my luck, how weird it hits when I am dragging my feet around, snarling at the world for a little shut up and leave me alone, and suddenly, I am filled with benign hope. perhaps perhaps perhaps lifes not so bad at all, there are still many wonderful things left, beyond my current view, far beyond, but definitely in existance, hope burns bright. and my eyes are happy with the curve in my hips and the depth of my voice, and the wrinkles of age that grow steadily and all the excess fat I carry around, and the hair I don't have, and the dreams I still do.

What a stroke of luck that I can be a comfort to myself when I need it the most, are you listening, wayward body, winding soul, I sneaked one past you, Im actually doing something that's good for me. Im actually tasting freedom and feeling colors, and understanding the futility that marches around, making me protect this rotten soul, with layers and layers of healthy fluff.

When I don't care if I live or die, when the incredibly weakening hold of love can be forgotten or laid aside for just a moment, when I am no longer at the altar, funny how sacrifice and marriage happen at the same place inside so many heads. In other words, for language, Im ok. I was born without a spine, you hear? I was born to dissolve and I cannot be anything but a mollusc, albeit a rude one with spines. you see?

I have a memory that crosses over generations to bring back answers, then stops confused at noisy intersections. which way was I going again? Give me a cloister and a robe and a book of emptiness, and I will fill it with beautiful lines and whispered secrets that will make your head spin and your eyes blind. If you go in for that sorta thing. But whispers across centuries cannot be felt, realized, captured with noises, they are grown with goosebumps and smiles and utter silence, the kind only possible when a little death is mixed with life every day.

And of course, it is all fiction, it will all be fiction. I have a passing relationship with fact, recognized and discarded, conflicted and confused, I have a deeply embedded private gene that ain't gonna make a scene about my truths, ever. If I were to deal with fact, all I ever have to say to the whole wide world is sorry. And thank you.

 

97457823

 

there are moving lanterns in the darkness, suspended and floating around, not swung by wind, just shifting in time and space, like moving perspectives. they share a connection, they share the same light at a respectful distance from each other. their glow blazes and dims as I turn around them,

they are here for their own purpose, they barely light my path. they are here to keep secrets alive for the time of each darkness before dawn. they lend strength and invisibility to the darkness around, but their beauty is their right of passage. they are all silent and deceptively lifeless. some are long, some wide and patterned, some faint inside intricate glass bulbs, some flickering without enough energy.

I can easily imagine an age when they were grown with oil and wicks and fire, with shades to contain their agitated reactions to every stray wind. they had no wires, their patterns could be arranged easily, so there was no need to design them, if you didnt like them here, just move them there. they went where the darkness was not enough to see.

now, they are electric, but their form remains, with an added stillness, illusory in the way it denies the constant movement underfoot to newer worlds. days are passing inevitably with flickers inherent in nature, stray winds, tides, shape-shifting trees, and animals always on the run. and I want to move around these lights to change them, to change myself, to blend with the darkness, to dance the dance of momentary immortality, anything, to avoid being hypnotized by their stillness, light must always move

 

gutterball1

 

the fever is making me delirious, I want to run through a park and understand life in between, I want to do all my life work in a day, and rest forever, not dead no, just alive eat and sleep, vegetable style, I want to call out all the passive aggressive morons I know and stand them in a single line together and explain the value of a human being, and the meaning of freedom and love in three quick sentences before dismissing them from my life altogether, without permission to ever return. I don't ever want to hear the word "convenient" again. I want to stop all the noises that people make and fill the world with a grim silence until I am ready to listen again, I want to turn off the news and the outside world that only want more things, never have anything to give, never anything I want, I want to want things like normal people, I want to cry when im ignored, yell when Im insulted and leave when any respect for me has left, I want to turn my futility around in ten minutes, I want to change my clothes, wash my hair and cook a good meal, I want to finish my giant mountain of ignored work and exorcise the phlegm thats taking over my life, I want to grow like a banshee, and die like a banshee, screaming wispy and sorrowful instead of putting all the energy I no longer have into being happy, loving and light hearted. Which, strangely enough, the world assumes is damn easy to achieve in this cold ungrateful life filled with unhappy self-seeking figureheads who will cheerfully exchange living people for pieces of paper, and call it a great bargain, who will build complex mausoleums quicker than the time it takes to shower a little love, life and compassion, who have ten minutes in their day to think about something, anything, other than themselves. I want to be less bitter less angry less negative today which is impossible without tylenol and possibly tequila, I want to sew my mouth shut and sit in a dark corner until I am sure I will not talk and pour out all the anger I have in a flood of molten lava that will burn everything in its path, that will burn me too, but once the volcano erupts, I cannot stop it. I want to be somebody else this month, I want to spend my time easily, and without stress, in quick fixes for pain, like crying and manipulating and indulging in mind numbing spectator sports like sitcoms gossip movies and drama, just so I can avoid looking at the purpose of my life and feeling helpless about it, feeling sick and tired and exceedingly irritable, and just too goddamn weak to care. I want to stop feeling sorry for myself RIGHT NOW.

 

**This too is a stream of consciousness writing, almost unedited, like the vastly prettier Mood Capsule, this one is disguised as a world class hissy, but its actually very deep :(

somewhere between demand and supply

 

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the conviction that, if you step on the stones just right, if you take just this path, then you won't have to die - Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

Its in the remarkable nature of imperfection, the shedding of reservation, the peek behind curtains we drew with our invisible sketchpens. It can only be felt when you embrace without caution, never understood, explained or theorized. Like life. Its like trying to draw an amoeba, you can never really get it right. Or wrong.

And we have this gift, the magic of feeling beyond what can be seen. The magic of being in the presence of profound confusion, of never understanding, and yet feeling euphoria winding its way around our feet. The magic of happening, beyond what can be measured, what is right and what is left behind.

It gave birth when a drained listless voice lifted and a song, quiet and uncanny, but true, so true, wafted up in the breeze and was everything it said it was and everything it never had to be. And left behind a sudden sweetness that clung, that the ears returned to, that the soul opened and wondered with.

The touches, the little curly borders on the edge, embroidering around the corners, little hints and shades of new moments, and tenacious ends. They capture the spine and wilt our resistance.

They were all virtues, they were all vice, wicked and wonderful and non-committal. There are concrete desks of course, but they are just here for our survival they don't care for embellishment, or resonance. When voices creep up in tune, and the little sadnesses, the little habits we puny humans have, of making a carnage where a soft cry is enough, will remain, and it will be terrible, it will be glorious, it will be everything we imagined, if not in uniform, if not in ten second images.

It will be in a lifetime, in moments added and multiplied, shared and sought. It will be opened out in little portals as we turn left, then right, without any sense of the impending, with only the senses that move within our body. It will be impossible, confounding, lossy, with messy afterbirth everywhere, it will be remarkably ugly and incandescently beautiful together, it will need a complete lack of understanding, and a few billion smiles to make it, but make it, it will.

If there be just one way to understand the pain in my head, it would be time. Time has passed, and the pain has come. I don't blame time precisely, I attribute time. I don't see the betterment that comes with time, only the pain. Today. Tomorrow will be different of course, there will be more time.

This constant self-contradiction, self-censoring, semi-immersive euthanasia, I must leave myself for a while before I return, renewed and filled again with hope and childlike wonder, filled again with the magic that gave birth to my self, streaming from my fingertips to finish it.

I need time, to complete the time I had. I need peace, to stop the war inside my head. What i need, is time, and love.

 

orange night

 

there is no hope tonight, only wind, insanely happy whistling wind. they made an orange night, to match the decor of hell. a night of obscene powers and a low constant music. they made a night of extraordinary beauty and gave it to me free, only I was looking for hope, and I couldn't set my own narrow life aside to see.

Until now, when the wind slapped across my hair, and moaned, of terror and heartbreak and sehnsucht. of loneliness and a steady chill. it was going the wrong way and it was too strong to be stopped. there is nobody but me around to talk to it to say, there is no right way, there are only ways.

Until now, there is another lonely guy in a corner watching the wind move around the clouds. watching my orange night. and I am so jealous at having my private show shared, I cannot see it from his corner. the wind rages on, useless puny humans with their petty grievances and their sordid lives.

I agree, orange is turning to brown, the blood is ebbing and drying. the wind is still talking, it hasnt found answers, only matchsticks that flow obediently along its path, and snap when it turns. I wish you were here with me, to enjoy this night, to hear my wind and feel my orange sky turn black. its a high deep wind, it will reach you, it will find you and bring you. And now I have my hope, go figure!

 

the last hunt

 

when we searched
for light, for the worlds
where only power lives
screaming glee with no harbor
lit by gasoline
with flaming sparks coiled
around life within the hour
for a present of eternity
no waits no needs
it seems so effortless
when you reach a hand outside
to singing
daylight in the dark
did you find it, were you there
wherever it stood, quite alone,
the secret, the truth,
the calling of integrity
to a moment where
only pure loneliness can be
hope with a choral ballast
look keep looking, did you see
it flutters and floats
the light at the end of the tunnel
and tell me did you also check,
across the bed, over the clothes
under the kitchen sink
find anything?

 

language

 

I dunno when these words and their worlds became fantastic to me. I learnt english from its story books, from the english countryside and food and customs and clubs and games. From their loves and hatreds and the way they said they lived and the things they said they believed in. From the best color of their grass and the magnificence of their history and geography.

All of this doesn't exist outside books and stories for an outsider. They don't live in people we cannot see, they cant be heard from a voice across the atlantic asking for a credit card or from a news report of ten people killed in london.

English is my language of thought, of beauty and idealism. It is the language of my expression, it is the way my mind has trained to work.

I learnt bengali from the eyes of a child, from the love of my maashi, she stole from us, but she loved me anyway. I learnt it from the first impressions of a loud noisy city from object shapes and people all melded into one confusing mass of the senses, from my mother talking to the maid and her colleagues, from my father who did not speak it, who listened to people who spoke in bengali and talked back to them in hindi. For my childs mind, it seemed a perfectly reasonable exchange, what they knew for what he knew

Bengali is a tongue I have mostly forgotten. I wasn't a child for very long.

I learnt tamil as a child and then, as an adult. From my family, from the food I ate, the way I ate it, from the texture of clothes and rituals, by living among the people that speak it every day, the way they thought. The way their lips moved, the way their hopes burst into song, their labors on the roads, their screams, their games, their movies, their politics, the way they loved, the things they hated, their passions, their apathy. Tamil became my language of relating, of emotion, feeling and understanding

I learnt hindi from movies. They taught me the lingo, the words of suave street people, the poetry of lovemaking, the sounds of larger-than-life dramas and songs that a people use to entertain themselves. I learnt it from school. From its poetry and high brow literature, from what the language was proud of, from what it wanted to teach to newcomers.

I also learnt hindi from the first man I loved. I learnt it from the way he thought, what he held dear, from the double meanings and puns he made, from the relationships he had with his friends with the bridge of the language. He never spoke hindi to me, strangely enough, although I was reasonably competent.

Then I learned that I have other languages. The language of code. Java, Unix and SQL largely. They are perfectly valid languages in their own right. Beautiful languages too, they harbor no bullshit, no poetry, no pretenses. They are what they say they are and thats that.

I found early that I cannot read descriptions of applications, big fat diagrams with arrows colors and animated slides, excel sheets with rows and rows of information to be divined using arcane textbooks of pdf, scrolled through left right and tab by tab, magnified and described piece by piece with links, cross-referenced ad-nauseum and talked about so much.

I don't need them. Give me the code that is the heart of it, that does the work, that actually transforms the errata into channels, that siphons data into tubes, that makes a vast complex mental-mechanical machine and runs day and night without any need for interference and it appeals vastly more to me.

I can read a program faster than another humans interpretation of what it does. I have found out that very few people can see a piece of code and agree about what it does. Everyone has their own opinion, everyone focuses on one piece of logic they like, or don't like, they magnify it, belittle it, color it pink, wipe it plain, theres always an opinion associated with it.

I discovered that the only way to truly understand the function of a language, or a piece of code is to read it while it is performing that function. The ideal viewpoints of every language as expressed in their best face to the world, their art, their movies, their power point presentations, are usually beautiful, compelling, false mirages. It is not their beauty or their bias, but their reality, their ability to perform a necessary human function, that gives them power

 

haiku

 

they set three eyes on the ground
as they walked in the sky
in flew a grain of sand
~
wisdom gave birth
sometime after life finished
making love
~
we agreed dawn was cold
we donned our coats
before the sun agreed to shine
~
her small fists clutched
a bright tweety bird
smile, her eyes closed

 

the nature of rest

 

I know now that the daily uphill battle exists, and it is inevitable. I resent it every dawn, still haven't learnt to enjoy it, still havent learnt to shed all the dead weight before I start the climb.

I cannot count the years it took to dawn. To understand that I must sweat and train and bleed every day, all my life, just for the privilege of being myself. To hold the lethargy that fear and life bring, close to my heart, and keep going.

Also inevitable is knowing that I will lose this lesson every night to my human nature. A gregarious seeker of crowds and common voices. their echoes bouncing inside my head will slip me back gently to the lowest common denominator, come sleep.

while I climb, while I lug around heavy corpses and vivid blow-by-blow memories, the hardest thing to find is rest, shed load, forget. or is it forgive?

some days, i'm bent over double by the weight, my back aches. and I wish within the bounds of promises and compass bearings, that the moon was just over here, beyond this water, inside this dream. so I can finally stop, sink to my knees and never get up again

which is when I found out that if there be one thing the world demands constantly of us, it is our nights. our supine forms at rest, all baggage shed. our sleep, our darkness. the world never understands our need for it, unless it is explained with unfocused divinity, mired in established rituals, and rigidly outlined in time.

my search for the nature of rest began with a singer, his song. he knew truth, saw it, sang it, and tried to show it, in a truly transparent attempt at redemption, for himself and his muse.

he showed me that whatever I wanted to see was already behind my closed eyes. just a matter of being able to close my eyes and search. he showed me in one of those rare moments when someone reveals their immortal soul, that there is no greater destruction than denying who we truly are.

he showed me that there is just one consequence of destruction. more destruction.