another lovely place i'm nowhere near ,or, singing the broadside blues

"A mangrove is a woody plant"/
can there possibly be anything else in this world that now remains to be said?/
i'm falling in love with lower case. e.e. cummings is dead./
has been since 1962/
i can't believe the man who/
wrote 'may i feel said he'/
ceased to be/
when my mother was still in diapers./
All is lost to a world where/
"Empathy with the id is the quintessential/
Je ne Sais Quoi, so to say, of the existential."/
to be the naked and the dead/
is to have Dignity with a capital/
or lack capital with dignity./
Anyways, norman mailer died too./
tho' his wife never did press charges.







"Here i stand, I cannot do therwise, so help me God."
- Martin Luther.

I wonder how many theologians twisted themselves inside out trying to interpret this particular comment to mean one thing or the other on Predestination and Free Will? Not everything is as straightforward as throwing the devil at inkpots, or vice versa.

who do we applaud?

9 could well be a number. Nine years after a certain 17th child was born in a family of 52 children somewhere in the middle east, messrs Yamasaki and Robertson designed the WTC. The first building specifically designed to withstand the impact of a boeing 707 (then the largest extant jet plane). Silly them, wasting so much thought on making a building in the middle of lower manhattan 707 proof. especially since man was going to create the 767. there is nothing we do that we can't do better. amd will, given time.

46 could well be another. go to psalms in the bible. In the 46th psalm, count the 46th word from the first line, and then the 46th word backwards from the last word of the last sentence. the king james bible incidentally. he might have done it himself on his 46th birthday. then again, maybe god likes name dropping...

And there will come soft rains...

The devious demented denizens desecrate the desolate durbar of a dying demi-god, while my attempts at avoiding alliteration are appropriately awful.

there's less in life to talk about, as i sink into the quotidianous quicksands upto my neck. I can only turn my head around to look at life passing by; scruffy, dreadlocked, flea-bitten, clothed in rags, a couple of months overdue for a bath and stinking to high heaven. 'one day' i vow, yet again, 'one day you'll be in my bed sweet, and maybe even on my terms' but we're going to have to sanitize you first, won't we? Pour on you a gallon of respectability, lather you up with a bar of sweet smelling ignorance, shear off that fur with some middle-class censoring, and dress you in the garb of the visible, or rather the seeable. oh well, don't worry, we'll have our sweet adventure yet, just as soon as its perfectly safe. but hell yeah i'm brave, bohemian and breaking free of the middle class mindset every chance i get. Haven't you seen me eating at the shady pork and beef joint? rolling jays 'fore watching plays, and even smoking out in the open, like way out?

ain't that enough for right now? Well it ought to be, cause as a perfectly legitimate member of the self righteous midders, i decide my own set of values, and though i'm open minded, unbiased and understanding, of course the world will ride by my rules. It daren't do otherwise.

It's monsoon now... Aaah the shortlived relief of a brief piddly shower, as if god had a prostate problem. And then oooh the blissfully muggy weather for the rest of the day, when a drop falls on your book and you look up expectantly (the eternal optimist you) only to realize your own sweat saturates the page you're reading. Delhi - you justa gotta love it... it makes any place look like heaven. And to add to it you have the tantalising memories of dharamsala, where you could have been spending your summer. the blissful abode of the lama, junior and senior, where you can tell everytime there's been snowfall in the dhauladhars when you wake up. Where all the t.v. plays is fifa2004 on the x-box : a dangerously hypnotising game even though you can't actually make out the blonde squiggle getting tramped into the mud to be beckham. Where to get to the nearest cyber cafe, you walk down the precipice to your own private stream, cross over the ice cold water, or jump in and loll about for a couple of hours if the sun is around, and then climb up the opposite bank to reach norbulinka, that strangest of retreats with those crazy monk dogs with the beautifullest karma in the world. the thought of that stream right now could just about drive me mad... meet mrs. Tantalus. hello.
goodbye.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh... in a rather soppy wet manner.

they threw a war and nobody came

I have a headache the size of a minor planet... also, and this amply demonstrates my special status in god's universe, a head cold in the middle of the hottest week of the year. Be that as it may, we shall, in the proud tradition of your-friendly-neighbourhood-female-martyr, persevere.
"We need a self-help program, a do it yourself philosophy, a do it right now philosophy, an it's already too late philosophy." - malcolm X

its already too late in 1965. where does that leave us, forty years on, still without a clue, or even a line to call our own? wearing 'che' tee shirts and listening to dylan music from way back when, really the wrong side of the tracks, picking our revolution for the evening from the charred remains of a million young beliefs, hoping the vigour and sweat and actual sheer belief will maybe, just maybe, rub off , or even just lend a reflective glow that would nicely complement our thoughtful attire for the evening. yeah man, the revolution has arrived. the revolution is dead. the revolution is now a funeral party, also, ironically, called a wake. join the danse macabre, enter the mausoleum, close your eyes to the ecstatic noise and count slowly backwards from ten as the swirling glittering party you constucted around yourself decomposes and disintegrates into the temporal nothingness that is its rightful state. wake up to the bittersweet smell of weed overlaid with the smell of the dust raised by a thousand rotting carcasses who, but for you and your desperate interfering ways, would be where they're supposed to be, conservatively rotting in peace. Aah c'mon man, let us be already. yeah we realize your inherent inability to communicate with your own period or the people inhabiting it around you, and we understand your need to leech off the blood of those already dead and bled, but c'mon, cut us some slack wouldja? we've already laboured through our own intensely felt times, smelt enough 'stench of earnest sweat' to last us a couple of lifetimes, so roll over, and let us play dead! and quit quoting dead guys already. its disgustingly like those ancient roman ladies bathing in the sweat of gladiators, hoping god alone knows what would rub off on them. or somethin like that... these dead guys can get confused, apparently their heads aren't where they used to be. the author would here like to take credit for any self aware irony discovered in this post by the discerning reader, intentional or otherwise.

Of office hours and missing socks

its funny how right when one is about to rejoice at the sudden lack of work in one's life, and has just managed to switch to the right frame of mind for getting off work early, has, in fact, already picked up one's bag and is in the process of lookin for one's shoes, one is ( to go back miles to where we originally were) cruelly presented by the malicious and inscrutable gods of Office Mysteries and Missing Socks with a whole new load of work, which not only effectively prevents one from leaving early but also, since it means you start a couple of hours late, results in you ending up staying longer hours in office on a saturday than you did all week. Another aspect of this newly unfolding and still mysterious universe are the inscrutable laws of work attraction. in a few words, since i'm currently too busy to have time for more, here it is: when you have no work, you are also not likely to get any, and when you're already overbooked, the rate of accretion of more work will be directly proportional to the amount by which you are already behind. if i had time to use a metaphor, it would be something along the lines of icebergs and 9/10s below... but have to go do another voiceover now.... and then the blissful testosterone smelling hour long bus journey home... aaah saturday!!

Everybody wants KOONG FOO fighting

last night i saw a movie called 'kungfu hustle'. if only more of us took ourselves as seriously as the makers of this movie. it was slightly strange in that one felt the overtones of an almost gallic irony in what was after all a Very Oriental Movie. highly recommend it tho' to all readers - in the unlikely and hence probable event of someone drifting across this blog in this bizarre pretzel shaped universe - ok , if you can come up with something more irrational and tortured I'll give the weary metaphor a rest. till then I'll stick to the classics, though their smooth well worn surface may make sticking tough as hell. Since we're talking bout self aware, tho' steering clear of irony, blogging (so far) seems to me to be all about getting your voice past this big lump of self awareness lodged squarely in your throat. even without an audience and in a position so far undisclosed (un-dis-closed: who said double negatives were a no-no?)
Anyways, do go see the film, and then get back to me. In an age where scary movie is your archetypal spoof, it raises the levels and standards of humour in the category, in fact redefines the very genre itself in a much needed re evaluation.

what causes the earth to quake? and sundry random queries.
an easy lazy metre. no mention yet of fairies.
tear apart this blue gray jungle looking for four leaf clovers
in a holey leather armchair, for spare change do voiceovers.
the books pile up the money dwindles: cock one's snook at keynes,
a snigger drifts through a wormhole - will now work for beans.

i'm just a product

yea baby, the wazoo stops here. well what did you expect? i'm early at work and have had about as much of "early foetal development and the ear" as i can currently chew. and hopefully regurgitate. besides, miss babe in arms, even you can't be innocent enough not to have done this intentionally. you send an egomaniac like me here, what d'you think i'm egoing to do?? huh huh?
ok, mind sluggish pre the midnight mark, and its still shockingly closer to post than pre. therefore make a... oops signs of life, gotta duck. maybe life gets more explicable , then again would one want it to? ps a cat named cat