Back from Bliss

The only thing I hate about visits to Dharamsala is the fact that they always end. And way before you're prepared. Oh well, the transience of bliss and all such...

Prosaic.
The patterns life always falls into when you're at home. It's impossible to think poetry, unless its the slit-my-veins-and-watch-the-blood-pool-in-the-golden-sunlight variety (a borrowed image - thank you chaddimaster). It's not the physical space or the temporal situation - God knows both are bizzare enough to generate volumes of verse, or worse(sorry). It's just that you always get caught in the gravity field of the inane trivia of everyday things, and it sucks you in deeper and deeper. It tends to travel with you, so that when you are standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid at Giza, fighting so hard to hold on to (or create out of thin air) a wisp of awe, ignoring the swarming multilingual multitudes which are increasingly a fact of life on this, our overburdened planet, and pretending not to see the locals somehow allowed to break the 'no climbing' rule, clambering all over it with utter disregard for the fact that you are trying to have a polite conversation (of sorts) with the poor beleagured monument, your parents will pipe in with a perfectly timed query about 'who's carrying the sunbloc?', or 'has anyone seen my hat?'. Life could be so much larger than life if it just butted out once in a while.

So, bowing my head to the demigods of inevitability, here's a random picking from an endless list of pet peeves:

• those tricky little fliers that slip out all over the floor when you open the morning papers. Ugh, a mess of unwanted advertisements at my feet that I then have to get up to clear. It's not like mornings weren't tough enough anyway.
• Nails, no, growing nails. If anything discounts the theory of evolution, it's that. After years of clipping them, they still don't get the message. Whatever happened to adaptation for survival, and learning from experience. Nails are like the cockroach of the human body.
• People. Sometimes some of them some of the time, and sometimes all of them all the time. If there really was a god, we'd each have a planet all to ourselves.
• Relatives. Ok, this one's a little tricksy, and though its logical to assume the last one covers this too, I thought it deserved special mention.
• Objects getting ideas and wandering off into hibernation or on Grand tours so that they go missing for years and then suddenly turn up again, lying there so innocently, trying to assume an air of 'Who me, but I was here all along!' Really, who do they think they are fooling.
• Order, or our vain attempts at
• Sanity, or our pitiful pretensions to
• Lists, which sorta falls under both the last categories. Really, who do we think we're fooling.
• How the shirt you wanna wear is always at the bottom of the pile in a rucksack, or right at the back of a neatly arranged drawer... especially right after you've just spent hours arranging the damn thing to your satisfaction. It's either me or the universe's sense of humour, and I'd pick the latter everytime.

Ending on a less depressed note (I beg off with lack of sleep, and way more than a tolerable dose of social interaction), I still get high on treasure hunting through my parents' mountains of collected and inherited crap - thank god for those magpie tendencies). My grandmother died eleven months ago, and my father, while clearing out her stuff, rediscovered a pile of old LPs of his which he had written off as lost or whacked. Going through them today, I found an original pressing of The Sgt. Pepper's LHCB, with a perfectly intact cover, and, hidden among a pile of old abba, paul anka, reggae stuff, another of Dark Side of the Moon. Again Perfectly preserved. Glory be!