Omniscience Inc.

Of Warm Hands and Sympathetic Clefts

2011-05-14T12:05:00.019-06:00

It always begins in a souring. Overanxious types show up, hands slip down and go up unsympathetic clefts, overripe melons burst in the corners, and I . . . I am always there with my big, rough tongue to lick it, souring and all.

An old man asks for the time and gets brushed aside. His fists half-heartedly clench as he shuffles off to sink into one of the couches furthest from the lights. Bitter, he silently farts into the brown patch-work couch and drenches it completely. Couches at parties are, by far, nature’s most farted-on objects. A couch can be pushed only so far and sometimes a couch will fart back. This couch is no different. It pushes back. Its essence will spread and attempt to fill the world. Soon harsh-words need will exchanging, jaws will need breaking, heads will need squishing, and—at the very least—entire floors will need fumigating. The old man knows this. He sits still as his pupils slowly turn into couch-fabric.

It is nearly eleven o’clock and Paula is still beautiful. Thin, pale worms dig themselves deeper into the food. She looks on as their bushy tails disappear into a dark red casserole. They mean to be eaten. But everyone has seen the posters and they are too excited to be hungry too and so tonight the worms will go unfulfilled. Paula’s fingers curl into a fist and the fingers crackle. Her bones are older than she is. She steals a glance at one of the many full-length mirrors and I look back at her.

Her hair is coming undone. She looks around to check if anyone is looking. No one of import is; only two younglings who look away as soon as she finds them. She licks her index finger and tucks the three enterprising locks behind her ears. Mrs. H’s back bumps into her. Paula shudders. It has been eighty-three days since anyone touched her. But then she doesn’t know that. She shudders anyway. Mrs. H’s big brown eyes grow even bigger and browner and her little mouth reaches maximal puckering and they both apologize for the green daiquiri that now dribbles down the yellow sundress. The dress is ruined and everyone in the room knows it. A thousand dogs licking it for a thousand years couldn’t lick it clean. To compensate, Mrs. H takes her by the hand and drags her rag-doll-like to the restroom. As if Paula didn’t already hate everyone and everything enough.

Mrs. H is ten years younger than Paula and far lovelier by most standards. Most men are exactly that: standards. Paula snorted. Standin’ ‘tards. No. That spoilt it.

Mrs. H turns on the faucet. The tap gasps. The small, clean room fills with the sound of water filling in Mrs. H’s soft, cupped hands. They are soft and quite large. The water collects and then overflows, collects and flows over. Paula looks at me and studies my face for clues to what she must do. But I have nothing to say to her. I never have had anything to say to her. I cannot and she knows I cannot. She knows what I am. Everyone implicitly knows what I am. She knows I am not her instructor, nor her aggregator, nor a reminder of her humanity when she least feels human though she believes me all these and more. I am, for her, just there—inscrutable. Where she is awful, she thinks I am not. She believes I love her still. She believes that because I cannot take her with her flaws, I shall not take her at all and let her world so keep her, flawed and all. I do not care. I am only curious. Mrs. H takes her hands apart and the cupped water collapses.

- I don’t know why I do that, Mrs. H says. Mr. H says it’s my maternal instinct kicking in. I tell him to stop thinking in clichés.

Mrs. H resists the urge to stroke her belly. It wasn’t protruding yet. They had been married for five months now. It should be.

- I suppose it’s comforting, Paula says.

- What is?

- Oh? Oh. I suppose they both are—the water-thing and the cliché-thing.

Mrs. H examines the damage.

- It isn’t all that bad. A blotch here and there gives one character. The dress—though replaceable—isn’t inexpensive enough for this place. Inexpensive is better. Expensive dresses are better spent on the dos of the higher floors. They get ripped—and ripped off, she half-smiles—just as much but one minds it less there.

It is a very sunny dress. It even has a few small, light, orange suns embroidered on it in discreet places. Mrs. H produces a damp tissue, slides the crook of her arm behind Paula’s thin frame to lock her in place between the basin and her parted legs, and then proceeds to vigorously rub the green out of the yellow dress. Paula gasps.

- The tiny spider doesn’t bother with the foreplay, does she? Paula thinks.

The blotches were now streaks and lighter in colour.

- That’s only made it worse, Mrs. H says as she straightens up and removes herself from Paula.

- It doesn’t matter, Paula says recovering.

- It does! Of course it does! I think my shawl would look good on you.

- No. Don’t worry about it. I was anyway looking for an excuse to get out of here before . . . well you know . . .

- You won’t stick around? He might be good you know and I had hoped to get to know you better.

- Perhaps some other time; perhaps when I am not ovulating quite as much.

They giggle nervously. Mrs. H takes off her shawl and wraps it around Paula’s shoulders.

A dozen short, thick snakes emerge from under the doors of the occupied stalls and slither towards the basins. They leap from the floor to collect in the other basin, hiss at the two women, and start disappearing one by one up the waterspout.

- Stop them! They’re too young to be on their own!

Two identical women in distractingly pink dresses kick the stall doors off their hinges and lunge at the only snake left in the basin. The snake’s head splits into two. Small, square human-like dentition erupts from their thick gums. A ventilation-grate falls to the ground and a much larger snake pokes its head inquiringly through the opening. The two pink women squeal and protest that thing cannot possibly be theirs. Smaller snakes flop to the floor from the other grates. The air turns most foul. Mrs. H and Paula exit the restroom.

- That’s a very nice shawl, remarks Ms. T.

- It’s mine, says Mrs. H.

- Is it silk?

- Yes. I’ve always said all things green must be silk or they simply cannot be green enough.

- I have felt that exact same thing about blue-ishenss and cotton.

Someone opens a window. An odour so foul it is sweet sticks its many fingers up everyone’s nostrils. Eyes water and contact-lenses slip under eyelids. Some head for the restrooms. Paula blocks them off and Mrs. T peeks into the ladies’ to check if the snakes were dead yet or the women back in their stalls. They weren’t. Meanwhile, the food is ruined. The clothes are ruined. Little green bubbles dot the sides of the chocolate fountain. Everyone self-consciously spits into their drinks and throws them away. The hostess slaps someone; presumably whoever opened the window. The window is closed and fifteen wet, furry deodorizer-dogs are pressed into action. The mirrors spot-over and I can’t see what happens next.

- I must leave now, I hear Paula groan.

- Are you sure?

- Yes.

- This one’s agent claims he was the one that came up with the “we’re all in the pregnant, junkie whore business” line.

- And how exactly is that something that recommends him?

- It’s funny coz it’s true.

- I have given up on writers.

- Yes. They’re not very human, are they?

- I don’t give a shit about that. It’s more about what they’re branching out into.

- Gigolo-hood?

- They’re always trying to pluck naive-realist cherries and that is not their job! That job, says the philosopher-turned-journalist with the standard-issue lopsided grin, is ours.

- Hmph. I still like their little gigolo dance.

- Remember what the agents promised about the last one?

- You mean the girl that came to the thirty-second’s thing?

- I’m not sure what floor it was. It couldn’t have been that low.

- What month was it?

- November.

- So the big tide wouldn’t have come in yet . . .

- . . . and the smell would have been unbearable that far down, yes. Maybe it was somewhere in the fifties.

- In November? The fifties had gone silent.

- The lower sixties then.

- Ah . . . now . . . I haven’t been there for years. I don’t think they bathe much down there. As if the courtyard wasn’t bad enough.

Paula silently swore. Why would no one let her finish a thought? What did it matter which exact gathering of morons had last had a writer? Writers were rare and just as invaluable as cock-farts. There were hungry parties full of hungry people on all of the thousands of floors and artists enough to service them all. Time and time enough alone fed them all. And Time’s little puppets, the cannibalistic hordes of the lower floors, would continue to feed them until the ocean should finally claim the Building. The big tide had been coming later with each passing year; as if the ocean was saving up, gathering itself for the one last push. The whole planet would suck itself dry and its vengeance would come in thousand mile high waves. The cult of shit-what’s-their-name-again would sacrifice the construction workers on the highest floors and magick them into zombies. The zombies are the only defence. – Launch the armoured bummers! the high priest would say and the zombie pilots would fly once again into the storm to negotiate peace. But the Ocean would not care this time and kill them all and then unwrap the Building like an onion and suck it dry.

- But that was only an idle fantasy even if it wasn’t hers alone. Meanwhile, Paula could no longer bear to become imperceptible in the field of yet another audience’s endless empathy or to dissolve in the sea of its sympathetic brown eyes. She must leave.

- What?

- Did you say something?

Shit, I think, it happened again. It seems I break the wall whenever I strain it overmuch while listening in. My chronicling then becomes Paula. In examining the contents of the glove, I fill it and she sinks below—flailing limbs and all—into nothingness and inconsequentialness. But I can only chronicle. I cannot create. I am drained now and without will. I am impotent. I am no cock, nor its adversary. I have no face, no arms, and no legs. I am all neck. If I fill, it is only because I also empty. I am filterer and farter. But I am still not at peace. A neck never is. So I must pull back to the still-spotted mirrors.

- Yes, she said, I was saying it must have been somewhere in the early sixties.

- Ah. I wasn’t there then. What did that guy do?

- Nothing. All he did was list all the things we do that he said were the same as circle-jerking.

- Like?

- Oh I don’t remember. Things like peeing in adjoining stalls, liking sports teams, joining fraternities, gangs, armies, and . . . umm. . . talking.

- I see. And did it work?

- Sort of. But, to prove his point, he whipped out what he called his “mouth-treat” at the very end and invited us to be honest with each other for once in our lifetimes and that pissed everyone off. We threw him off of course. But it was one of those selfish deaths. I wish we had fewer of those.

The mirrors clear and I can see again. The sun has set. The darkness of the empty sky will envelop and dissolve the world’s many misgivings. But the moon will soon clear the Crater’s rim. It is now nearly midnight; a midnight in the dragon-mating season. It is too late to risk walking home alone. The moon drags the giant winged rats out of their snug burrows in the earth below. In spite of their immense size and their fervent desire to get at all the meat inside, they can never get into the Building and so their mile-long claws and their mile-long teeth are of little consequence to Paula’s walking home. What is of consequence is that they invariably include the Building in their love-making. This season the entire Building shudders every night. They crash into it, pound their free claws on it, and sometimes slide up and down its length. The Building may be nearly indestructible but it gets damaged very easily. Anything not being watched by more than one human can be legitimately consumed by the building to repair any damage it might sustain. There are no cameras in the corridors she needs to walk through to get home to her cat-with-human-eyes. So Paula is stuck here. The lights dim. Mrs. H’s sweaty palm finds hers. A spotlight picks up N and deposits him on the wider, room-facing edge of the big, empty table that now is blocking off the twin exits. At the other end of the room, the much older and much less successful writer grabs a passerby and says, “Don’t leave me now. Not today.” The passerby agrees and sits down. Their hands link in the dark and they turn slowly towards the lighted portions, towards the writer and his audience, revealing . . . revealing . . . revealing . . . but no one is looking.

Smiles are exhaled and left to linger. N takes in a deep breath and exclaims “If everyone I’ve ever met weren’t so goddamned lazy, I’d be dead already!”

Indulgent tittering.

- Thank God they close the windows here. I hope there are no closet-Smellers here. Keeping your windows open so the stench of a million dead artists rotting in the Courtyard will fill the holes in your heart is a bit like copyright infringement, no?

Pause.

- But then perhaps not everyone can afford the likes of me and it’s not like the dead need anything more. The story I have chosen for tonight has me committing an awful lot of manslaughter. I know manslaughter is bad. It is not like I don’t know that. It’s just that I don’t think much of the dead. They’re dead, no? Fuck ‘em and fuck what they might want. Aren’t there enough of the living to worry about anyway? The more that die, the fewer there are left to kill me.

I sometimes think I am dead. My wishes don’t even amount to a fucksworth.

- I do not propose we valorise life or the living. The sun bleeds the earth. Her skin ruptures and bleeds pustules. We are them.

Paula groans audibly.

- My story begins—like all good stories—in the promise of sex. But before I begin I must ask how many of you have been bouldering, mountaineering, rock-climbing, and etcetera?

Most free hands go up.

- Oh okay. I thought I’d get away with more made-up shit. But since you all have been to the Crater’s rim and even had jobs on the rim, he snorts, I’ll have to make up a setting. My story is set in a mountain range and that is something that stands on its own and serves its own purpose. Let us call it the Himalayas. I am assuming everyone knows how mountains work. They are essentially big phalluses. Obviously you all knew that but I had to use “big phalluses” at least once. Twice now. I now cannot bear mountain-climbers or mountain-climbing anymore. All you do is you go up a really big phallus to plant your flag, tent, and etcetera in it and by doing so conquer it. Some instead simulate an ejaculation by reaching the top and then jumping off. The entire exercise usually has only two rules: you climb mountains and you try your best not to jump off once you’re high enough. And so it inevitably attracts only those who can barely manage either. I was once like that. I will not say I was young and foolish ten years ago or that it has been ten years since. Such things assume too much. Who is to say that Time hasn’t stood still from that moment until this one now? Who is to say that it isn’t I that have, in fact, walked?

Paula groans once again. Louder. She squeezes Mrs. H’s hand and Mrs. H groans gently too.

- So anyway, I was much younger and my foolishness was of a much younger sort. I thought climbing mountains was the easiest way to get some. I had not struck on lines like “Yes. I think you are exactly like Woolf and Plath. I think it’s really great you use menstrual flows as a metaphor for sex.”

Pause. Tough audience, he thinks. They are like all audiences: a field of gently swaying necks. Their fleshy eyes follow me around and the blocked-up noses claw the air to smell me. The mouths smile. They are always so awfully silent.

- It was the eleventh day. We were three guys and three girls. We had paired up but it came to nothing. There were only two tents and we were quite frustrated because it was too cold to simply wander off and leave a pair or two alone. One of us had forgotten the third tent at the base camp. There was much suspicion and much resentment. We hated each other like only horny, frustrated teenagers can.

- There was quite a lot of other equipment we had to lug around. Rope, crampons, a million carabiners, food, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, clothes, and so on. We also had ice pickaxes or something. But only the girls used them. Perhaps we instinctively knew it is wrong to claw a phallus.

- We were about sixteen thousand feet above sea level when I fell. Now a lot people I have met believe when you fall at sixteen thousand feet above sea level you fall all the sixteen thousand feet to the sea. This is simply not true. At the very most you might fall a thousand feet. That isn’t all that bad. You might still live though you’d not like to.

Pause.

- I fell. I should have fallen with everyone else but we hadn’t roped up because we weren’t feeling very pally. So only I fell. Well I didn’t really fall. I slipped and I slid down forty or fifty feet. But on a mountainside forty or fifty feet off the beaten path is bad enough. And my situation was in fact quite bad. My oversized belt buckle had managed to snag on a very small rock projection. I lay spread out on the ice unable to move. I twisted my neck to see where I was. I found I was hanging, much like the helpful rock, over a thousand-foot drop.

- Now this is interesting. You see me here telling you about the time I nearly died and you assume I didn’t die then. I did not have that luxury back then. It was like everyone and everything was waiting on me to do my bit and fall: my impatient friends, the biting cold, and the realization I had about how easy it is to die. I was on Kierkegaard’s cliff. I was incredibly free for the first time in my life. There was nothing holding me back.

- When people say their life flashes before their eyes when they are about to die, I suspect, it is very likely that they are being forced to evaluate their entire lives and so decide whether Life’s really all that. It stretches the imagination very little to imagine they all would be forced to overvalue their past under such stress. In a suicide-bid, on the other hand, when sentiment has time enough to settle, one might have a less biased perspective on life and death.

- Now my friends did not really care about the very many epiphanies I had had in under a minute or so. They were yelling at me to get the fuck up already. I still couldn’t get up. I was certain I would die if I did. There was however one more thing that kept me in limbo. I am incredibly lazy. Climbing up to my friends would take twenty minutes easy. Even after that I’d have to keep walking for a week till we got back to the base camp and motorized transport. And even the base camp wouldn’t be the end of it. I might forever be stupid enough to get dragged along to such situations. Would it really be that bad if I just lay here, spread eagle and with freshly ripped clothes, and just let the mountain do with me what it will?

- One of the guys decided I needed some help. He roped up with everyone else, struck a dozen nails into the firmer bits of the ice and passed the rope through them, and slid a few feet down and let an ice-axe slide the rest of the way towards me. I saw it coming towards me and I saw it was way off course. I stretched a little to catch it. I knew I wouldn’t. And then it hit another rocky projection and everything slowed down as I—in much horror—watched it turn direction and gain speed as it sped towards my outstretched right leg. It clipped me and fell over the edge. My nylon pants filled with blood and I leaked over on to the white ice.

- The mountain had kneed me just before the belt-buckle had snagged on the little rock. I was sure the axe had fallen on and killed at least one hiker. One of the girls had been pregnant and had had a leech latch onto her leg the night before and today morning she had found herself a lot slimmer and had been sniffling and whining ever since. And now my fiendish friend had wounded me. I had had enough. I was extremely angry. I wanted my revenge. I reached around and unclipped my crampons from my backpack and fitted them on my hands. I clawed my way back up. It did take twenty minutes. I finally reached the track, threw off my crampons, straightened up, dug my naked hands into a partially-hardened snow-bank, made a melon-sized snowball, and let it fly at the fiend’s head. It came right off and rolled off the cliff as the headless torso slowly sank into the snow. I laughed. The girls laughed. The other guy did not. I did not care. I blamed him for the lost tent and we threw him over the next day. The end.

Pause.

- Is that it? The hostess asks.

- Yep. Now if you wouldn’t mind. I am all spent.

- No. We don’t throw people off willy-nilly. Do you see a satisfied audience here? The Courtyard is a sacred place and not for the likes of you.

- Fuck you. That was a nice story. Now throw me off!

- No.

- I am an anteater whose veins are varicose with ants! They live in me. I am their anthill. They wake now and I can no longer bear it. Throw me off!

- No. Now go to the back. What a fucking waste of time, she says as she turns on the lights.

On Progress.

2010-06-26T21:51:00.002-06:00

I see no evidence of progress in the machines of men.

The wheel is only a breast that rotates freely.

Fire is only a penis regrettably caught in an immortal moment of ejaculation.

Shelter eats you but does not kill you. It is a womb.

Expressed beauty is only a cry for help.

I am an anteater whose veins are varicose with ants. They live in me. I am their anthill.

The plight is probably risible. The pain is hopefully less so.

Extract No. 3

2010-06-01T12:30:00.014-06:00

The book is titled 'Of Gods and the Like' after a bit of fantastic word-buggering of Spinoza's fabulous Ethics's first part 'Of God.' It is likely I am revising this next bit while you read. The incoherence might frustrate but it is difficult to revise the entire book every time I inject an idea in somewhere. The following bit is the very beginning, which like a funky succubus is still sucking away at the firmness of my ideation after the three years since I started writing for it. Mating Gods with distastefulness might seem distasteful but if it is to be done, I will do it gracefully. This perhaps is more important to me than my squandered supply of love. If you must swear at and curse my ineptitude at impotency, go ahead and include me in your process but keep away from metal penises and do read on for I love you o reader for your act of reading more than you could hate me for whatever it is that I have done to you. Do return. I update frequently.

The Numbered

EIGHT: One died. Two died. Three to Thirteen died. Fifteen died. Sixteen died. Seventeen to Twenty all died.

TWO: Rises now from our want for self-preservation a want for witnesses to wait on us in the wake of the demise of our previous self.

FIFTEEN: The want inflates our shrivelled corpses and we are afloat again.

TWO: Addressing the want’s want, rising with its rise, by breathing life into these few words we state the obvious and by this, in another manner of being, begin volleying salvos of stale fartwind into the expectant and patient quiet that would still us if we stilled.

EIGHT: I have long believed that there lies in the forgotten depths of creation an obscenely self-referential metaphor, a meta-creature that is stuck to the firmament and from whose mouth bubbles downwards through these oceans of Being an endless stream of spite. I call it Zero. It is perhaps the firmament. Perhaps we are. It matters little now.

NINETEEN: Like a wicked bar of soap that pleasures itself near Zero so its own vile bubbles may join the interminable stream of spite to issue forth from forgotten depths, our first emission of the stale fartwind--that now tries to flood the surrounding emptiness to make it habitable--pushes us up and out of the fundament. It brings with us the carcass of all that was already suspected susceptible to demising. Having conveniently lodged itself into our coalescence before hand, it too floats up from places too terrifying to know better.

ONE: Despite our best efforts, we have died and so we are certain now that free will is an illusion.

NINETEEN: Perhaps we were meant to die.

THREE: That is quite enough of that all-powerful spittle of spite monster nonsense.

TWO: But who else could stand to gain from robbing the universe of what gives it meaning? Must we now suppose there is such a thing as meta-meaning?

EIGHT: Spite does. How could you be so blind? Our very existence is a continuous struggle against Zero’s breath. Where would we be without the gentle breath that pushes our feet into this soil here? That plants us in the meaningful? We never gave meaning. We only ever distributed it.

THREE: Or perhaps we unknowingly maintain the illusion of free will in some exotic dimension of our existence.

NINETEEN: Or perhaps I alone do.

EIGHT: Perhaps I ought to kill you all out of spite.

ONE: Perhaps we ought to kill you.

NINE: Oh do be of good cheer Eight. Good cheer will probably save us all.

NINETEEN: Eight bites Nine. Now to return to our purpose. . .

THIRTEEN: We are all that now remains of the kind conceiver of all kinds . . .

EIGHT: . . . of all other kinds.

THREE: . . . of all kinds and though it is for us and us alone that a solipsistic world-view is permissible, now that their hands no longer join ours as we try to cup the universe away . . .

EIGHT: I take a bite out of Three. While I masticate, I will be quiet.

ELEVEN: . . . and now that they and their hands have slipped away to the unknowable unknown leaving behind the gaps they leave in our shield of cupped hands . . .

TWENTY: . . . and now that the universe has poured through these gaps and thoroughly offended us and our boundaries . . .

SIXTEEN: . . . we find it hard to disregard their lack, the lack of the lacking two, because perhaps this permissibility can only belong to the whole of our kind.

TWO: Without their napes to nuzzle into, without the soft flesh of their hips to firm our hips against, and without their spread cheeks to bare frothing, pulsating assholes to join ours as we pound away at the quiet, our small circle of the Numbered finds it even harder than before to hold off the innumerable hordes of Unbeing that circle us and the cowardly Universe that has sought refuge in us by violating us.

SEVEN: To remain incomplete though we have been filled to the brim and passed on into irrelevance by whatever it is that promises to complete all that dies, we pile our hopes onto our self-love because it is what primarily causes us. It is an object. Perhaps we gestate it or perhaps it gestates us. We hope our hopes will weigh us down and keep us from being floated further downstream. But self-love is a hungry child. Or perhaps we are the hungry child. We must suckle it all out attention and so we try to dismiss the missing two from our minds, push them into the furthest corners, place their memories behind the folds of a thousand other unpleasantnesses, and find a new whole in our depleted numbers. But we are weak, too weak to take shovels to our hearts and empty ourselves of them. And so in the lifetime of the moment that absents them, till whenever the moment deigns to stop multiplying, we are forced to number nineteen not twenty one. We are to lick the wounds they left when they left.

ELEVEN: Now of the two, the one we can miss more . . .

THREE: And one we must miss more!

EIGHT: Assholes.

SEVEN: . . . partial to staying the only one entirely absent from this something, is the lastborn of our kind, Twenty One. While common sense does its part and calms the flapping gums of our wounds by reasoning she could have fared no better, that she too must have been pulled from slumber and oyster and run headlong through the same abattoir that chewed us up and shat us out so into the safety of this limbo that wholly depends on the beating of a new heart that bleeds none, leads us nowhere, and beats on only because it lets relit desires desire on, crash on like unrepentant drumrolls on the slack skin of our impotence that tries in turn with its slack to stifle them, quiet them, and stymie their attempts to tear it open, break out, and somehow kill us a second time, for the sake of our continued suspension in this limbo, we must be both impotent and filled with longing in equal degrees. So it is that we can do nothing but desire on and wait for rationality to magically redeliver her to us.

NINETEEN: Waking well past our deaths, knowing little of how we came to this end, and being a bit inquisitive about it all, we train the eye of reflection inwards and reflect. Death (whose multiple visitations now seem more likely) and whoever sicked her on us must have found the only weakness we all inexplicably share. This supposition is perhaps far enough from being accurate to be accurate and perhaps it is not but it is ours and as an extension and an exertion of our love for our self-love, it performs and buys us a place to dump our hopes on. We brick in our hopes so:

They take a feather to that most easily tickled bit of hers, the bit that shields the tenuous conjugations of her many manifestations with the universe from the less pleasing of lies. By brushing the sleep off each eyelid, they wake her from the toil of her dreams and then with fingers little, carrots large, and blandishments foul, lead her away from her bed where her inertia could still have weighed her down and kept her from floating away with a pleased vanity’s giggles. Awake and aroused, she finds herself in their bed where an alien inertia spews forth its tendrils and binds her extremities down. Her will is lost to her and almost all of it crumbles when she cannot pleasure away her arousal. Then, a relentless stoking of her incontinence sends shivers of electricity down her spine and blushes squeeze dry her limbs and push all her juice up into her beautiful head till she--like a wet sponge hung from a gentle pinch--is caught in the utopian ideal of repetitive, unyielding pleasure and trembles in incapacitation. Once her limbs cannot drag her away or the mind will itself clear and once the last of her will slides into place and lets her see the only way out of this excruciating ecstasy, she slips off her defences and invites them inside her and our friendly friends--aping Moses in the least literal of interpretations--take her soul to safety by parting her body and plucking out the soul, removing it from whatever harm her vitals might do her and so by shearing away her head, tearing off her arms, hacking off her legs, and punching out her torso, they bind her skittish soul to the refuge of a shrivelled neck where she is reduced to a flipitty-flapatty that can offer sufferance to existence just as well but cause not as much harm and at long last could be returned, like we have, to a self unsoiled by the need for purposefulness and temperance, to a remainder that could return to our love.

Our supposition ends thus. In it she perseveres like we suppose we still do in the universe’s supposition. If she did die, it is likely she is now somehow hiding and if she is now somehow hiding, it is perhaps because some unnecessary remorse saddles her with fatalism and then like a selfish lover mounts her and rides her away from seeking shelter in the windowless sacristy of our forgiveness.

About the Hyenas

2010-05-16T19:52:00.000-06:00

The hyenas of war should get fucked and their assholes should be ripped out. The thing is, the mouth needs bones but the asshole does not. Let the hyenas fart all they want with naked pelvic girdles. We will not hallucinate on their fart again and believe them. The hyenas know they cannot use their faces to speak to us because faces are in general ill-equipped to hide the mind's intent. Greed readily translates into slobbering and slobbering is much worse than sweating under pressure which can be misinterpreted as a good thing.

Assholes sweat too but they never ever slobber (unless of course the issue of previous dietary intake comes up). The face will always betray them and so the little fucking pustules let their smooth fat wrinkle-free cheeks speak for the pus that swims in their skulls.

Rip out their assholes and they will matter no more. If I didn't believe they'd bite off penises shoved in their mouths like greedy little farmers who want to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs in the hope they'll shit golden goose eggs, I'd ask for volunteers to have them fucked there too. But perhaps that is overkill and such willing penises are needed elsewhere and elsewhere is a wonderful place!

Women should not be bought and sold for their sex and neither should lawyers, engineers, doctors, or any other kind of stupid fucking philistines be told theirs is an honest and acceptable prostitution of the self. Prostitution is the debasement of the self for the pleasure of others and soldiers come from the lowest (or the highest) form of prostitution. Fucking hyenas that tell stupid come-receptacles of soldiers to go to war for moneys and glories should be stuck on a spit, slowly roasted, and fed to themselves.

I missed a chance and it is a terrible feeling. So, go forth and fuck the fucking inbred pigfucking hyenas whenever and wherever you can and go forth and multiply so your offspring can fuck any such swine of the future and along with the shots of pure satisfaction that are bound to fry your brains over time, you will get a nice little family tradition out of the whole deal.

You fucking hyenas.

An Indictment of Organized Sport

2010-05-15T21:08:00.009-06:00

This has been a long time coming. Now anyone who has met me would know I look like the sort who would rather watch sport than play it. That assumption is entirely without merit and I would like you to immediately put such a thing out of your mind. I am working out, burning calories faster than usual, and eating healthy. I can almost feel the fat in my belly squirm as it is forced out of my various openings. But, fit or unfit, I refuse to partake in the trillion-dollar orgy that is sport.

My views on organized sport are similar to my views on organized religion and God knows I don't think much of organized religion. . . (a subsequent "not!" would be too trite to actually make obvious.) I could start with statistics to show how wasteful institutionalized sport is. But I'd rather start with a little quoted quote from a much quoted monologue.

And what is that which I ought to pay or to receive? What shall be done to the man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care about - wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting that I was really too honest a man to follow in this way and live, I did not go where I could do no good to you or to myself; but where I could do the greatest good privately to everyone of you, thither I went . . . What shall be done to such a one? Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he has his reward; and the good should be of a kind suitable to him . . . There can be no more fitting reward than maintenance in the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which he deserves far more than the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race, whether the chariots were drawn by two horses or by many. For I am in want, and he has enough; and he only gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you the reality. And if I am to estimate the penalty justly, I say that maintenance in the Prytaneum is the just return.

There is no need to say this is from The Apology of Socrates but I do anyway. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that happiness perhaps can be measured in dollars. Then it is not enough to question the purpose served by the trillions we pour into the coffers of sports teams, their managers, and that many-headed hydra called Marketing because we could point to the questioning of why we should do anything really. Instead, we should, like we should whenever in doubt . . .

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.

Gandhi's talisman is not without merit and it is just far too easy to not worry about the world not forced regularly down our optical tubing. Far too easy. Another quote and one that describes Gandhi becomes necessary:

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

Churchill's comment is with less merit but serves its purpose well. Why does it take a Middle Temple lawyer to make a Gandhi? Mohandas was not exactly a carpenter's son. It is convenient to imagine the human race conjured up the first bourgeois whores in 18th century France. But that is sadly not true. We have to take what we can get in way of enlightened individuals. The bourgeois do not treat the message as a message but as a metaphor for loss, gain, pain, pleasure, and sacrifice; specifically what the individual had to endure to make the message. Thus their eyes turn Gautama Buddha into a generous and self-sacrificing Prince Siddhartha. Churchill, the embodiment of the British bourgeoisie, does something similar. The capitalist whore will deride socialism for being anti-intellectualist and yet will fear the intelligent individual.

This fear gives rise to organized sport to fulfill the desire of always having something to do.

The Socratic method now finds expression only in the fatuous pugilism of debate teams.

Intelligent discourse is made to bow before heated discussions over pointless player statistics. Revolution to talk of revolution and that to the virtue of tax-deductible donations. Pointless rituals to preen the young and teach them the way of the bourgeois.

Money-making is a sport? Gambling is a sport? Sex is sport? What is not trivialized to being sport?

At this point I would like to refer to the Swedish cartoon of Mohammed. I did not see the point. There was none. No artistic merit. By "art," with some teleological bent, I point to the cause of whatever being is.

What has no artistic merit need not be.

Instead we are forced to learn by rote and repeat what earlier versions of us, in their turn, learnt by rote and did. Fire good. Fire bad.

By watching sport, we are returning again and again to the expected unexpected, to the unexpected that strays only within reason. To the comfort of reality tv.

I, for one, would rather watch something with a script.

I would rather live out a scripted story than go through the motions of a pointless expression of my bastard individualism.

I leave with Heraclitus:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Once the Charm of an Absurd Existence is Spent. . .

2010-03-28T01:15:00.003-06:00

If I say my life is absurd, it is not because I mean to boast but because I wish to force a reconciliation between my self and my belief in all life being absurd. So I repeat so: my life is absurd.

Oh!

Faking excitement now consumes much of my day. I blame everyone.

I wrote a small little nothing a few months back. It goes like this: "But, most of all, we are what we are not." It meant little back then. A nothing. A something that was just contrary enough to amuse me.

Then, yesterday, I finally realized what my subconscious was trying to tell me. I was talking or walking or eating or whatever-the-fuck-it-is-that-I-do-now and suddenly I realized I do not have a subconsciousness. I do not have a consciousness. I am empty.

I am what the rest of the universe uses to counterpoint itself.

I am where the rest of the universe stores its junk.

I am a non-entity pressed into existence for the sake of the universe.

I am the bit of plastic the pole-vaulting Universe uses to stay in the air. I am not the pole. I am the bit of plastic that it snags ("plants" makes its role seem benign) its pole in to life off.

As soon as I realized what I had realized, I felt the weight of the entire Universe (minus me if it is that I do exist) pressing against me. I suddenly felt extremely inviolable but also extremely unhappy.

Paranoia is a strange and lovable thing but to suddenly come to know that the universe has created me solely for its selfish purpose of continuing its existence is not really anything like the wet dream I remember having about the time I finally figure out the purpose of my being.

Calling it acute claustrophobia is putting this feeling mildly. Claustrophobia--as I see it--relies on the person's knowing that there is a small possibility that the self can explode (or just swell up) to exactly fit the dimensions of the confined space it is in. There is something about joined walls that makes us want to feel them out, to lick them all over, and to have our forms be one with them.

But the Universe? Does it have walls? Can my fear of open spaces be reconciled with my fear of closed spaces? Not bloody likely.

I feel like I will choke on the next breath of air I take.

I am reading Dostoevsky and Kafka again. I remember now the state of feverish excitement my first reading of "Crime and Punishment" brought and also the indifference towards Kafka my first reading of "The Metamorphosis" brought. This time around, I realize why Dostoevsky could read my mind and why I did not care about the problems of Gregor Samsa.

I am the Underground Man and I am Gregor Samsa. I am my novel's hero and I am extremely indifferent to what I say or do.

To pervert what Kafka says: "I am the nihilistic thought that came into my mind."

Or rather into the Universe's mind because it does not seem likely that I have a mind to call my own.

And to describe myself with a final metaphor: "I am not the person the rest of the universe talks to, cares about, and makes love to. I am the condom it uses to fuck itself."

Extract No. 4

2010-01-30T17:05:00.004-07:00

We think with our limitations. I speak for myself but assume you are not unlike me. There are no absolutes--nothing that can really separate me from you. I think we know this and it bothers us. If we still try to find absolutes with our pessimism, we find we can reduce everything we have ever done to either prostitution or masturbation. Even rape can find a place in the two. But of course this is only for the sake of our pessimism. Prostitution and masturbation are hardly mutually exclusive. Also we are still talking about things we do and not about what we are. We are not prostitutes because we prostitute or masturbators because we masturbate.

When engaging with certain portions of the universe, like when engaging with its vastness, solipsism becomes essential. I have always felt that. The premise that brought me to that conclusion when I was seven was not really the same as when I was dead and twenty seven. Twenty years ago, I felt real people were too hairy to be really real.

Now that I am dead, I must revert to solipsism because non-existence does not make sense. It cannot. The explanation for the non-existent must be non-existent.

To offend the pious.

2010-01-10T13:14:00.017-07:00

The 'net is full of nuts. It is almost like a divine spider-squirrel is gathering them up all and putting them there for the winter to come.

The Theist side is full of morons trying to convert and defend their faith. There are also those that pour out awful rhetoric in such a defense. The Atheist side is no better. It is full of kids breaking free from the traditions of their parents, shut-ins, and youtube worshippers. They tend to modernism and I will come back to that question soon.

I suppose this post will grow with time.

So to the Theists:

1. Why claim your favourite book has all the answers in the world? Which chapter/surah answers forty seven times eighty three?

2. I came across this in I, Claudius. So I will give it credit for this answer to Jesus' importance: Christianity started off as just one of the many MANY cults. Few survive. Thousands of prophets are forgotten by this world to keep alive the memory of one. And why was he different?

Because he died and it was very poetic.

3. There is no such thing as a good Christian or a good Muslim or a good what-have-you. To say a person does good only because he believes in God and fears the punishment of God if he be otherwise is reducing that person to a mindless husk who can know only fear and no love other than self-love.

How easy is it to admit the good Christian and to reject the Christian who scans verses from the bible to justify the slavery of women and inferior "races"? Very.

Christians have never been particularly forgiving. There are reports of mass-cannibalism by Christian armies during the first crusade. Do the acts of a few good men who happened to be Christians outweigh the deeds of the hundreds of thousands who have raped the planet for the sake of and in the name of their God?

4. I sometimes wish I were Jesus and not Nikhil. Nikhil can only make terribly salty and very nearly unpotable water out of wine.

5. Let's not kid ourselves into believing there is a heaven. Christ didn't make it because he committed suicide. What chance have mere mortals?

If there is, there must be only one very smug occupant. Fuck Him and fuck His apparent smugness.

Maybe Hell and Heaven do exist. Maybe they're on Venus and Mars respectively. Maybe we should preemptively carpet-nuke both them planets thereby cluster-fucking God, Satan, and all their little miscellaneous minions.

And to the Atheists:

1. Religion and Faith isn't all that is wrong with the world. Children get indoctrinated in a great many number of things. It helps their development to trust their elders. To doubt everything their elders say could mean death or ostracization. Blind nationalism is just as big a threat in those terms and perhaps a much much greater one when we look at the tolls of 9/11 (6,000) and the Iraqi Invasion by the US (600,000).

2. You forget how reasonable it is to imagine there is a deceitful God and one that does not care for us. For whom the activities of the moss on a very small pebble can matter only very very little.

3. Those that quote from sections of the Old Testament like Deuteronomy or Leviticus to show what a terrible thing it is that the Bible will make the gullible do must realize most theists believe most of the bible was written by people interpreting the will of God (and for some part to further their own purposes). These then cannot be used to judge the religion as a whole. Men are fallible. This is acceptable to all faiths.

4. For most theists, an acceptance of the belief that God exists is exactly that. An acceptance that is not unlike resignation. "Surrender your will to God" is exactly what they do. They are just tired. We unconscionably accept the certainty of our deaths though we have certainly not died before to the best of our memory. It is a similar resignation.

Please note the use of quantifiers here.

Also, I bring this up.

Why do we smoke?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we believe?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we get married and have kids and pay our taxes and have little parties and make lots of nice friends?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we live then?

Peer Pressure?

I certainly do not find myself talking much with the dead.

Two Chicken Farmers

2009-12-21T00:38:00.009-07:00

Elvis: I mean . . . can you imagine if these fucking chicken thought we were like their gods because we give them water and food and shelter?

Merv: That would be one fucked up religion.

Elvis: Well aren't we all like chickens then? It looks like we have a purpose and it looks like love is all around. It seems like love or consensual mating is our purpose. And then one day we die. We accept this simply on some the basis of some malignant mutation of inductive reasoning; because it has worked for our parents and theirs before them, it will work for us. Our purpose is to love. And then when we have loved and loved enough and our love is all spent, we have to die. We see death as inevitable.

Merv: Yes. A BIG "fuck you" to all this "surviving death crap" is not to think or talk about it all.

Elvis: These chickens have seen the "gods" that come just before dawn--while they are still sleeping--to take away their fellows.

Merv: Once their fellows are gone, their fellows no longer exist. They Un-Be.

Elvis: They have died and the remaining have "survived" for the time being. But they know they will be taken soon. It is simply "how it is."

Merv: Well what about the chickens that see their fellows get slaughtered before them? What do they do?

Elvis: Do they still not think about it and find something "more productive" and "better" to do while they wait? Or do they get excited about the prospect of their own deaths for reasons they do not understand and froth like cannonballs do preflight?

Merv: What if our purpose is to be eaten?

Elvis: What if Death is some horrible insatiable multi-dimensional being that fattens us for seventy or so years and then eats us?

Merv: Fat being the metaphysical whatever that we are full of when we old enough to die?

Elvis: Yes.

Merv: Oh forget these things.

Elvis: What things?

Merv: You know . . . Life, Death, monsters, yada fucking yada. . .

Elvis: Oh. Okay. I came up with a new one anyway. What is the worst part of a cock?

Merv: I prithee. . . do tell me!

Elvis: The cock-tail! Ha-ha-ha!

Merv: Fucking chicken fucker.

Alex, Alexandra, James, Pascal, and Dirty Wagers.

2009-11-17T09:46:00.003-07:00

*poof*

Alex and Alexandra appear.

Alex: Oh hello there!

Alexandra: Hello.

Alex: Did you come in with me?

Alexandra: Perhaps. I do not seem to have any recollection of you nor do you appear to have any of me. In fact the only things swimming in my consciousness are my identity, whatever I have gathered of you in these last few seconds, some sort of whooshing sound, and some miscellaneous junk.

Alex: Swimming in your pretty little head, am I?

Alexandra: It’s just a figure of speech.

Alex: Not one I have heard before. But then the first thing I remember is the same sound you speak of and not very long ago. I thought it was more like “poof”. So it would seem we were created together not very long ago by that Great Big Poof.

Alexandra: Is that the most plausible explanation you could come up with?

Alex: Even if it is that Aliens have plucked us from an earth boiling away in Ragnarok, wiped our memories, and placed us here to mate and in time regenerate the entire human species so they can resume serving their purpose in observing us, is it not better to believe God did this to us?

Alexandra: It is reassuring to know you would want to mate with me. Thank you. However if we were indeed to regenerate the entire human race, isn’t it likely that a few generations down from our children would feel the ill effects of inbreeding?

Alex: Perhaps that is what is intended.

Alexandra: Intended by whom?

Alex: God of course.

Alexandra: Why God? Why not the aliens?

Alex: Well aliens or any such agents can be felt, interacted with, and -- if needed -- fought against. Without an intangible agent like God that makes us ever so often choke on our bits we would have only ourselves to blame. For every unfortunate twist in the road that screws us good, we would not get to moan like Hunter Thompson, “See what God just did to us?”¹

Alexandra: Faithful translation of Marx’s argument² about how all religion is but a means to an end for the universal escapist.

Alex: Opium should be the opium of the masses. However, as it is apparently not incumbent on us to mate, we might as well talk about God.

Alexandra: Well I am an agnostic and you are a theist, right?

Alex: Not really. I’d rather not be labelled.

Alexandra: But Pascal requires we wager for or against the existence of God³ and so wager we must.

Alex: So it is an option forced on us? Well what if someone is raised to maturity without being told of such a thing as God?

Alexandra: It could be claimed he would not be really mature if he is not capable of the kind of thought maturity requires and the neural firing system that makes available mature thought processes (and consequently maturity) requires the idea of at least some sort of a god.

Alex: So you could as well say there can be no absolute Good without God. It is a faulty conclusion. So is the conclusion William James makes when he claims there can be no meaning to life, no purpose for individuals, and no happiness without God⁴.

Alexandra: But let us assume we must wager...

Alex: Why should we?

Alexandra: Because it is expedient.

Alex: How so?

Alexandra: Well, consider this interaction. We do not know where we are or why we are here or for that matter what we are and yet what we do is talk.

Alex: It is the most civil recourse available.

Alexandra: Not entirely. We are building not only on the very uncertainty of whether we should be building but also on the uncertainty of not knowing whether we are building. We are then perhaps building on uncertainty with uncertainty towards unknown ends. We could discount how firm the ground feels and sink below but what purpose would that serve? I would side with Russell here⁵. From what evidence I have seen it appears our mind is simply not equipped with the ability to discount every single thing - though theoretically speaking it perhaps can be done. Even if we know something is probably true but cannot accept it because that would destroy the very paradigm we use to relate to the world, do we force ourselves to accept it? If we must continue in such a blind pursuit of the truth by treating it like the Holy Grail and disproving everything, we must still focus on any one aspect of the universe at any time to consider it and then discount it with some sort of acceptable justification. A negation of the entire universe can certainly be thought of but turning that idea into justifiable belief, into knowledge is very difficult and the only short cut available is to develop severe psychosis.

Alex: And so to a very obvious conclusion that we need some beliefs left intact and unexamined because our actions are the extensions of our beliefs. This means we must wager because it is the only civil recourse available if developing severe psychosis is an example of uncivil behaviour, yes?

Alexandra: Perhaps. Or is it the other way round and are beliefs extensions of our actions like Wittgenstein proposes? Well, on reflection, all I just said about uncertainty can be credited to Wittgenstein⁶.

Alex: Alright. We will also accept without question the premise both Pascal and James use: it is impossible to prove or disprove God’s existence.

Alexandra: While keeping aside the possibility that we live in an infinite universe...

Alex: ...where everything would be possible? Yes.

Alexandra: So we move onto the question of the wager itself. I propose that the applicability of such a wager onto every human is probably impossible. Let us consider how different the lives we all live are and consequently how difficult it is to find two people that share exactly the same bias for every aspect of the universe they both know of. Bias must come from experience and unless we have clones that have been carefully administered the same stimuli all their lives, it is unlikely any two people will think alike. Our fears of a zombie apocalypse are made of two fears: the fear of a sudden and substantial increase in the surrounding predator population and the fear of everyone becoming the same. One of the premises of the Wager is that we are all capable of being presented with at least one single unbiased moment where we can make this decision. Even if we are forced to make the decision at gunpoint, it is unlikely we will be unbiased at the moment. We would more likely be thinking of the gun and the option the person with the gun would like us to pick. Our life is not a game of blackjack where we have a very large supply of moments where a comparatively unbiased decision can be made. We have all been counting the cards and cheating at the game ever since the notion of an invisible superbeing was first introduced to us. We either find the idea lovely and stack up evidence over the years for His existence or find the notion preposterous and stack up evidence against such an existence. In the end, because most of us rely on the idea of justified belief for our “knowledge”, we do not need complete justification for our belief to turn true. We only need what we deem at the moment to be sufficient. If you clearly believe in God’s existence, then the other choice of not believing in God is already negated. If you do not believe in God and would rather believe there can be no proof for God’s existence or nonexistence, then again the other choice in the wager is negated. The wager cannot accept predetermination and still be a wager.

Alex: I agree. It does not matter if we lose or win at the bet; our biases have already tainted the wager. A pure wager as required by Pascal requires in turn that we come to the table as blank slates. Furthermore, there is also an implied permanence to the entire matter. How can any person living for sixty or seventy years base their entire lives on a decision made in a single moment? What if one is not sober at such a moment? And we know states of sobriety are not set in stone either. Herodotus quotes Solon as saying, "Count no man happy until he be dead,”⁷ and if we are indeed ruled by such impulses...

Alexandra: Yes. If we must live by such a decision then most assuredly it is like living by a lie, embracing it knowing we have lied to ourselves. Pascal recognized this and he realized he must die to know better. Even so, he would rather hold the lies of the scriptures as evidence of divine will over the heads of unbelievers and bash their heads into the ground with the Good Books till their will breaks (like does that of new recruits under their sergeants and new girls under their pimps) and submits to the simple power of peer pressure.

Alex: While I love the firmness of your beliefs and the pertness of your principles, perhaps we should move onto less invigorating arguments to conserve our energy to war with the aliens and/or God.

Alexandra: War? Haven’t you been paying attention? “Make Love not War.”

Alex: With the Aliens? I doubt they’d be compatible and God we have already established as someone who can only play with Himself.

Alexandra: Oh you should not say that. It is not very proper.

Alex: Well screw propriety. Am I not an adult? Why then the censure that treats atheists like kids? Are we speaking ill of some actual member of our society who has feelings and could get hurt? No. We are slandering --if at all-- a king who has always ruled us by proxy.

Alexandra: That can be left for some other day.

Alex: Okay. Before we take up James, I should like to talk about this business of an infinitely happy afterlife that Pascal is certain awaits the good believers. He hurries past the obvious problems of defining such a life of infinite happiness. I am more or less certain there are experiences we have never experienced and that they are not dependant on our knowledge of them for their existence. I accept that. However, if Pascal expects us to give up delicious sinning in this lifetime for infinite happiness in the next one, should he not at least explain what he means by this infinite happiness? Does he really want us to leave the chicken in the hand to go chasing after a million billion phoenixes in the bush? Isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins? James Cargile gives a very nice example⁸ of how Pascal reasons: “A very rich man who is fond of jazz promises that in two years, he is going to toss an unbiased coin. If it lands heads, he will give each devoted jazz fan a million dollars. If it lands tails, he won't do anything. Every Sunday for the next two years, a one-hour jazz concert is scheduled. It is known to be highly likely that if you attend these concerts religiously, and avoid listening to classical music, you will become a devoted jazz fan. This case is clearly analogous to the situation of the man who is reflecting as to whether or not he should take up religious observances. And in either case the answer is obvious: you had better start listening uncritically to a lot of jazz. You may return to classical music as a millionaire, and you may get to heaven and not have to listen to sermons anymore.” A similar choice is rumoured promised to certain fanatics: sacrifice a chance at living a life with a wife and children to get at 72 virgins in heaven if they act in the name of God. The question is not about the religion being deliberately misinterpreted but rather that such a choice is made available through existing infrastructure put up by that religion’s faith just as it can be by any religion’s faith.

Alexandra: I like where this is going. What is this business of happily ever after? Some utopian ideal we have not yet understood let alone realized? Is this God person stopping us from being happy here so we fear Him and love Him up so He will let us into His wonderful Garden of Eden where we will get to live in one single moment of infinite happiness forever? James does not speak much of this happily ever after business. He speaks instead of tangible happiness here, having heaven on earth by believing in God to give Life meaning and to let everyone feel loved. But does he not discount the fact that we are perhaps happiest when we are struggling against something? Is this mass euphoria religion so proudly creates anything but mass hysteria? Are the scriptures not like songs sung in protests to empower revolutions? Is the missionary not a revolutionary? Is this it then? Do we already have heaven on earth? An eternal struggle against each other? Against ignorance? Against something that will magnanimously remain undefeated for the sake of our continued happiness?

Alex: Thompson would agree but are you just mocking James now?

Alexandra: No I actually mean what I say. The two things we fear most are God and Death. We have no empirical evidence for either. I have not seen God. I do not know Him. I have not died. I do not know Death. Maybe the “dead” are just shunted off by “them” into some sort of witness protection program. What if “they” have all been lying to instil in us a fear of both God and Death?

Alex: Ah I see. And what if Death is not what we think it is? What if it an event rather like our birth? An event that starts off the Unbeing part of our lives where the knots we tie to live in the Being part of our lives gradually come undone as we are slowly forgotten by the world till it is like we never lived and our having been becomes inconsequential?

Alexandra: Well I do not see how that is relevant to what is at hand but I agree. Without empirical evidence, we all become pragmatic and just go with the flow. The only real and tangible force that guides us all seems to be that of peer pressure.

Alex: Getting back to James’ argument about how not believing in God means there is no more meaning to life, no underlying purpose that justifies our living, and no more universal feeling of love...

Alexandra: Yes?

Alex: Well it feels like he is speaking from one side of the fence. I cannot claim to be without bias myself and say I sit on the fence and thus impartially judge all. Even so, it seems like he dreads the other side and believes the world would fall into anarchy without a sustained effort by the majority to believe in God. This is then related to the dread Kierkegaard speaks of⁹. James fears if there is no one to give our lives meaning and no one to hold us back on cliffs, we would certainly give into that overwhelming impulse we all feel on cliffs to jump. According to him, we cannot be put out by half-meant exercises of our volition. This “dizziness of freedom” that we feel on cliffs to end our lives for the sake of a singular impulse, to suddenly discover there is nothing holding us back from doing as we please is terrifying. For someone writing in James’ time --when the empirical evidence that Science had recently brought to light had effectively upstaged Faith-- it was a terrifying notion to just keep writing without any unyielding and universal censure that is ever-present behind your back for writing can be like urination in the way holding it in can cause bladder complications. Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx were hardly forgiving in their treatment of Faith. Modernism was the hero of the hour. It is only to be expected when something like Empiricism overthrows the old paradigm, there spring up people like James who cling to their beliefs and re-justify them in terms of the new paradigm. James’ greatest argument is a vicious attack on this incorrigible need for empirical evidence that Science has. If his God cannot defeat Science then how is He the Greatest being possible?

Alexandra: Yes. This is reflected in how the garden variety theist behaves. First he will look for evidence. Dostoevsky speaks of how Faith in most men is fickle and needs to be reinforced with miracles or stories of miracles¹⁰. But then Dostoevsky also notes that in a realist faith is not born of miracles. Realists would find strength to accept miracles as natural phenomenon if they do not believe and on the other hand would accept them wholly as miracles if they do believe. Faith is a complex thing and to reduce it to dependence or non-dependence on evidence is perhaps not appropriate. This I would claim even though I see the cycle that most believers seem to follow revolves around continually satiating the gradually fostered need for God. When they do find evidence, it is very likely someone will come along and break their footing by proving their evidence is not admissible. They will find proof again and again someone will come along and demolish it; they continue so till they give up and claim that God needs no proof and that He is above proof. However, this may not be the rule Faith works by.

Alex: I appreciate your conclusion even though it is not really conclusive enough to end this debate. We must remind ourselves that it is not difficult to claim something. One can jump from conclusion to conclusion till one dies. For us to claim anything we must know this “anything” and we must also claim we have justification for this “anything”. But when someone claims they know they have proof of God’s existence or nonexistence, it –more often than not-- becomes a matter of justifying their claim with saying how well read they are. Perhaps on a comparative scale such a claim is possible and perhaps some are indeed better read than others. But to claim such a thing on the basis required by James or anyone making such absolute claims requires they be stuck in the metaphor where each man is an island harvesting salt from the ocean and these men then must be islands who believe they have gathered enough salt to buy out the entire ocean. There is hubris here and also an insult the entire world.

Alexandra: Hmm. Ooh... it feels like we are disappearing. My insides feel faint.

Alex: We probably lived out our purpose and so must die. Goodbye.

*poof*

Bibliography removed.

for myself

2009-06-14T01:11:00.000-06:00

Isn't the only coherent human communication in the making and then sudden breaking of deadlocks? Does it have to be?

The only way to not think of her is to not think of her.

I'm so tired of agonizing. So tired of coping. So tired of intimacies meant to last minutes.

But I don't know what would happen if I stopped.

Music and me.

2009-02-11T11:09:00.002-07:00

The premise of this entire post is that I, having spent a large part of my childhood learning to play music and a large part of my adulthood (so far) trying to understand music, am uniquely advantaged to have a perfect understanding of what music is, should be and what it could be. So, clearly not very well begun.

The post comes at a very strange time for me. As you might have perchance observed, this olde chronicling has been left to simmer in the pot for a while now, even so after the flame under is put out. My book can be blamed. Have been applying the final coating. I had been working very well, till a past love blundered heedlessly into a dream. And now all that progress has turned to shiyte. Now this has happened before with less consequential loves and the usual remdy is loosely arranged around calling her up, entreating her to a more meaningful relationship till she pops out her neck, and I get to regret the entire deal within minutes of her having lost her will. After that, and this is a matter of no mean frequency, I refer such said past loves to either my privates (which works with an unfortunately mean frequency), or to a post I have on this blog of mine, which is the generic "it's all over". In either case, I am gladdened (the somatic a flavouring of the spiritual?) But this new old new (and so on presumably) love of my life will not relinquish her hold over me so easy. She has probably read that post and it made no difference to her, pretty little perv (yes i know you're reading this, but I'm not writing this for you). And so does fate lovingly coat my book with her ordure, leaving me wishing time will wash away her sins while I expend my creativity trying to love her (and by her I mean me), and writing another post full of lies for tu while I am semi-shitfaced.

Now music is a wonderful thing. I can happily force my tastes on others because of the conviction that the grass I lie on cannot be pleasenter than what caresses the rest of creation, grass included. It is a personal thing. I am better.

But my love for music is not a purely pushing myself on others routine. I actually enjoy the music I listen to. In my earspace, everything goes from Beethoven's Seventh's Second to Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven. I am very much spoiled for choice. There is music for me from what was lit in the Dark Ages to the very recent '80s. The contemporary music scene earns the bestowing of my amiably generous contempt. But the woman I would live out Marty Robbins' El Paso for, shares not my sentiment among other things. My wicked Felina.

Music is what I aspire to be someday when my ashes are scattered to the winds that will sound me continually. Life is too short, or perhaps some other wonderful chiche. Now even though the association of playing or writing out music pales before that of my acting out music, I know someday I will compose like Verdi, strum the guitar like Hendrix and Clapton, drum like Buddy Rich and trumpet like Miles. It is an eventuality I have come to terms with. The above chosen cliche applies.

But what of music as an art? Would I place Elvis above Morrison? Ha! Meaning I wouldn't. Now Elvis with his baritone does impress but how many songs could he write? Not a great many I imagine seeing as how he never wrote one. Is Music but a performance art? Is that why little retards with big guitars, petty problems, plaid shirts, paper penises, and plastic hearts are much loved for their propensity to fart?

The ethos of our life today is after all, just the performing art. What is our job? To whirl faster and faster to the tempo set by the creatively unscrupulous few. Music and Movies we turn to after our turn with Love, the universal whore that wakes up every morning before every new phase, every new junction in the road, reborn a virgin, egging us on to get the seemingly vital but quite mercilessly illusionary choice over with so we can get back to the straight circle our fathers and theirs died in. So the creativity and creative pursuits of our super-peers may live on in our sacrifices.

But I am not ranting. I am only talking about how wonderful thing a distraction like music is. How the great songs relate what the unplucked strings of our hearts tried to before we took a jackhammer to our crude ambitions. How the even better ones, comfort us for what we have done.

Bravo. Encore.

P.S: Some of the above post can be sung to El Paso.

The Writer and his times.

2008-12-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest things an otherwise mediocre writer can accomplish with aplomb is to comment on the times he finds himself a part of. And so, with no need to cast aside my mediocrity, indeed use it as a strength here, I begin my commentary on what happened last week.

If I mentioned that my interpersonal sexual activity curve suddenly plummeted to make love to the base-line before I talk about how Mumbai was attacked by a bunch of charged up tweenagers, I suppose I would being disrespectful, unpatriotic and perhaps be liable to be charged with light treason. So I won't.

How does one begin to overgeneralize the tendencies, aspirations and activities of a billion people that have managed to fill a subcontinent to the brim? By calling them fucktards with a set of intestines for brains and another brown eye where their mouth should be? Of course.

Consider for example what the casualties of last week's terror attack means. If there were 500 casualties in all, that would make a loss of 0.0000005 of India's total population. Doesn't look like a big loss. There are more than enough births everyday to compensate for that. Sure we seem to have lost a disproportionately large sum of money. Some say thousands of millions over three days. But time is money and so that can be expected. And yet, for some reason it hurts us so much more. How now?

Is it because it could very well have been us in those hotels? That train station? Perhaps.

Now what is Mumbai? A money well? A deep throated whore? An island full of the best bits of the Indian people? Maybe. Mumbai is the nerve center where all the other nerves want to be.

There are so many Indias and so many of them seem to be drawn in by the behemoth that is Mumbai.

We could call this a Navy and a Coast Gaurd and an Intelligence Bureau and a Research & Analysis Wing failure. The bureaucracy might have failed us. The present government maybe to blame for having loose fitting policies. Our neighboring countries might be blamed, and they are being made to bare their teeth too. So in the end, we are blaming a mechanism spanning thousands of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of employees for letting in a handful of young boys armed with a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment, and even letting them go about their business.

Consider what is happeneing in Tamil Nadu this very day. Similar casualties?Socioeconomically speaking perhaps it pales before our Mumbai business. Still I don't see 20 lakhs displaced from Mumbai.

What could have fishermen and agriculturalists have done to incur such wrath? What could Mumbaikars have done to incur such wrath? Now even though you expect I am using this as rhetoric, and will villify Mumbai (and perhaps even those pre-modernist village-folk) in some ingenious fashion, why should I? You can guess what I have to say. We all know we have to say with "the voice of our ageless creed", shit just happens. Saying Mumbai wore her dress a little too short and so was just asking for the raping is being far more broad minded than our friendly neighbourhood representative fuck who is even now busy passing the buck.

Look at what the cyclone means. It is a force of nature. Vast, invincible, and unavoidable. We accept and even laud it for its nonpartisanship. It is not evil. In some easily explicable behaviour, the freshly updated toll was not even carried out in most papers. The same can be extended to other similar natural phenomena. Calling them disasters would be narcissistic. Floods were prayed for from the Nile. They were, to put it gently, used.

Need I say more?

Why shouldn't my sex life interest you just as much?

There and Back Again. Part 1

2008-10-30T06:37:00.001-06:00

That about sums up the trip. There, which I figure was about 750 kms of biking and back again, which was about 697 kms of the similar.

A day has almost passed since I touched the bike. 21 hours to be precise since I reached home. To say I got back home would be like I am stressing the fact that I am glad to be home, which I am. But where does that hang the trip then?

I have not, to put it plainly, washed since. Well yes the parts I had immediate use for, but the rest remains covered with the filth of memories and dust and care and weariness and spit and, for no fault of mine, anonymous vomit. It would seem I sailed through the places I had been without actually changing anything about me or about the place. Just came back with an apologetic smile frozen on for not being able to stay longer and covered with all the souvenirs I mentioned earlier.

I am tired, true. My back is being a pain in the neck, I have slept far too much in the past day or so, and the face hurts for having borne the weight of the head, the bedspread is creased in all the wrong places, and even though I want to sleep a lot more, I know I have things to do, people to meet, places to go, all of which is so very ironical that it is hardly funny.

Still because I am sunk over in front of the pc with a bed sheet for a toga for my chair, I suppose I have to keep promises and "tell all". But you have to understand that memories are no one’s bitch.

Now to begin what kind of writer would I be not to quote myself? Not a very self-centered one.

And so, "There is only a movement, a warm lugubrious moan from what was before, no sense of actual movement. In my grip I hold the representation of this world, and yet what do I feel? Am I moving forward? Moving backward? Is time a noticeable factor at all? For as far as the self will concern itself with such matters, do space and time even remotely overlap each other’s territory? Is what I call my progress a function of time alone? As I slowly walk to the water, I feel a leaden sense of the sameness dragging me back to a place I never really felt having been. My intent hasn’t changed, the world around me did. If I could feel with longing for an immutable place or one in my memory, perhaps I would feel different about where and what I have been, perhaps even what I have been part of. This, this that is me for now, moving, shuffling along time and space, altering what I inspect, feels like melted plastic. I can pretend to be anything, anyone, even pretend like what I am doing now is the most real instancing of existence I will ever need, but then what am I if I believe myself? Pain and a quest for truth maybe such great motivators, but aren’t they the same? And if they are not, don’t they together form the abstruse complement to the whole of my self?"

Leg 1: 423 kms.

Now the root cause is quite complex, and whenever I met someone who ask me the why, I said, "To find out how far is far." Yes quite. Still it all started from someone asking me to come down to Ahmadabad to meet up half a year back. They reminded me of that promise I made then a few weeks back. I half-heartedly agreed again. Because I was stuck at rewriting the end bits of the second chapter, in a bored afternoon, I went and inquired about fares and the like. Prices, it turned out, had shot up by a trifling 100 percent. But that was reason enough for me to think further, imagine-dream and go about being indignant. "Que, Que??"

And so onto the drawing board, come the Google Maps. Quite a handy tool, but it does make everything seem so small. And so I decided I would get on the bike, fill up the tank, and go on a 16 hour long drive on 660 kms of wide national highways. Simple enough.

But things change, people introduce new ideas, and so plans change. So the end result was to visit some Navi Mumbai pub packed with ex-bar dancers dancing away anyway, have some R&R, stopover at Vedchhi for an overnight stay, and then go on. So if you're expecting a fascinating turn of events, there isn't. That is exactly what I did.

I left home at around 7 am armed with a bag full of odd necessities and necessary oddities, and a body with a earache, backache, and a fair deal of stomach upset. Evacuate myself. Get dressed. I remove the packaging from the pair of socks I had bought last night only to find them lacking toe-holes. Lament lament. Wear them anyway. Call up peeps, let them know I'm leaving.

Now the idea was to measure the distance I had gone by the number of songs I finished on the iPod. Thought would finally listen to all the 13 albums by the Beatles. Started out with Dylan instead. R&R was still a long way away.

Go out, vroom vroom the bike a bit. The oil had been changed the last night, and the bike was happy. Petrol filled to a maximum capacity of 15 liters usable. Took the highway that needed taking, felt the cold air nip at my exposed skin, lament not finding any pair of gloves, check up on the air pressure at a different petrol pump. There is hardly any traffic on the road. Continue driving till I reach my college. I do not slow down. Reached the express highway between Pune and Mumbai, that six (or eight lane) pothole less wonder. Sighed at how my bike is a pariah in such places. Turned onto the four lane (but well maintained) NH4.

Had occasion for a near-fatal accident soon after when I was looking at the dials and numbers instead of the road that they measured. Passed it up, and decided to swerve back on course and not hit the naughty three wheeler cargo hauler after all.

The road joined in the expressway fun for a bit, passed through one of the tunnels too, but that was far too short-lived to warrant more memory space. Reached Lonavala, stopped, had 1.5 kilos of chiki packed, drank 10 rupee tea, stretched limbs, turned up the iPod’s volume, kicked tyres, promised to stop next only at Mumbai and did.

Now I am guessing the fastest bit of travelling I did was between Pune and Mumbai. After that everything (except my magnificence (the word does sound like something a peacock would have)) turned to shit. The roads were terrible and for the first time in a long time, I had to slip into the first gear. I stayed below the fourth for a very long time. Almost an hour and a half. Mumbai is deceptively large. Of course it was the roads that did most of the deception because it seemed the shit would end right at the next corner, but the maps were to blame too. Who would guess the scale varies as you zoom in and out of maps?

What seemed like a straightforward road in and out of Mumbai, turned into a long snakeskin-y corridor with a long snaky chain of traffic permanently planted in it. The roads had been dug up too, but that can be expected. It is the little sacrifices we make for progress that get counted in someone's diary. Of course that diary is eventually lost in the annals of grand openings and the like. But of course, God, we hope, is a better accountant.

After asking my way around (two rickshaw wallahs and two traffic cops), I managed to get out onto the wide part of Ghod Bandar road. The next part was fun, even easy fun. Of course my careful signaling had much less effect than my incessant honking and so I stopped the former and got onto city traffic rules, much of which entails overtaking from the wrong side, honking, marking up grievances, and gesticulating with middle fingers.

I stop somewhere on the road, where my hurrying self gives out, get the horn wiring repaired, fill up the stomach and the bag with chocolates, and thus was my first meal on the road. No bar, no morally flexible girls around, so I sigh, and go down that same road and so, eventually, in an hour or so, on the shoulders of giant hoardings and giant curse-word coalesces, I left the city of little people with giant dreams.

My roads have now changed from the NH4 to the NH8. Still a tar road, perhaps more potholes here. The sun has come up to its 10 am highness. The stilling breeze has left my helmet and it is getting sticky in a great many ways. Bob Dylan has given way to Bob Marley and he finished up to Bob Seeger and I skipped Bruce Springsteen and Cat Stevens to go onto Cream. Now, to avoid a permanent loss of hearing, I have to dial down the volume to a low where I have to guess what is being played. But then I haven't heard Cream ten million times for nothing.

I stop a few more times, at about a 60 or 80 kms intervals, each time asking folk how much further some place is. It always turns out to be a lot. So I find the odd five or ten kilometers lose meaning on the highways. After all, even with an average of 80 kmph, I am covering more than a kilometer a minute.

I was a bit surprised at how many people I asked gave me accurate directions. But then things occur which make you lose hope in the collective omniscience of the collective other. Now I was to look out for this place called Billimora from which I would take a right turn and onto Vedchhi. I couldn’t find Billimora. I found Saron Villagae, Chikhli, Gandevi, Endhal, Bhulafala Village, Jallalpur, Kabilpore, Amadpore, so I did what comes naturally to tourers, I passed them all. The thing was, I had asked a rickshaw wallah how I could get to Bardoli and then onto Vedchhi, and he asked me to go to Navsari. And I did. And it turned out to be quite expensive advice. At the very least, I drove an extra fifty kilometres that day to land up in a series of villages teeming with accommodating folk armed to the teeth with loud condescension. Their directions led me through another 30 kms of scaring-chicken roads. Bowie wasn’t helping much, so I switched him off.

Directions (wonderfully incorrect now that I fondly think back to them) came from a group of Mallus sitting around drinking tea in their garage. I asked for directions and they all gave readily, and I understood none of it. So I countered their enthusiasm with “Malayali aano?” which is “Are you Mallu?”, paused a bit, and fired another salvo “Evedna?” which means “From where?”. Now after this my capacity to go on asking or fielding questions in the lingo drops like the appeal of a princess metamorphosing into a toad.

When I meet a Mallu (originally inhabitants of Mallu-land/Kerala), I do feel a sense of brotherhood, me being part-Mallu. And that is probably a good thing considering how they are as much a part of our highways as the aluminium siding they open garages next to. But then, also comes anxiety, not from the tea they might offer. But from the expectation they have that I must be able to at least speak the lingo with some fluency. One fact of the matter is that I am quite bad at this fluency bit, and another is that I see no immediate urgency to remedy the matter. This inadvertently means the smallest of garage attendants, the boy who holds the wheel while it is under the water, can make me feel smaller than him. So, I go “Eh, Mallus are such pigs.” After all, as I am informed by a knowledgeable source, one cannot easily find goat milk in Gujarat anymore ever since the influx of goat-devouring Mallus began. Pigs.

But eventually I did reach the Vedchhi Vidyapeeth, and the small sacrifices that I had made and the smaller favours I had done unto me, seemed quite irrelevant when faced with such abundant R&R potential.

Greeted and meeted Surender bhai. Had food served. Ate. Talked. Again my apparent Mallu-dom comes to haunt me. I had let on earlier how I was mallu. So in comes Sahadevan bhai, who is pukka Mallu, expecting a kindred soul, firing away like kindred souls can be expected to. Kindred soul or not, my Mallu-ness cannot last long under pressure, and I falter, crack and switch back to my usual mixture of Hindi and English. That aside, I find he, like everyone there, is great company. Next I retire to the room I had been given. I sleep fitfully, being interrupted frequently by well meaning callers inquiring about my shell and the mind it came in. Met resident pets.

By the time I am sleepy, I decide it would be a good idea to switch off the phone, go out and do a little clickety-click. I feel tired enough to skip two of those, and so head out to eat dinner. The food is very kindly simple, and by the next morning my stomach is to feel peachy again.

After the food, the chit-chat and the leg-pulling, and (un)fortunately I’m not acquainted enough to be fodder for the latter. Then came the Sammellan, a gathering of everyone at the ashram. Almost everyone was quite vocal. I am guessing that might have taken some time. The main issue raised was one about funding for the Vidyapeeth. Now from what I gathered, there had come a letter offering funds, which could be used to repair the Library building. The caveat was that they wanted a name attached to their donation. Now this was unacceptable for most folk at the ashram. Understandable. Of course there are no solutions that would satisfy both parties completely. So I kept quiet even after the entire situation was explained through the questions of others. I just kept sifting through my allotted wheat for the unwanted and the alien. At the end, I was asked for an introduction. I declined.

And then the floating log stilled for the night.

The LHC and the Fear of the Unknown.

2008-09-09T10:42:00.000-06:00

“When the world ends, don’t be caught with your unwashed knickers.” – Fourteen.

Of course I haven’t yet included that line in the book. Fourteen being the God-ish narrator of the the first chapter. But I have scheduled it for a later time this year. I assume I should be able to get time enough to insert it in, you know as a line everyone will go “aww” and “awesome” for.

However book writing asides aside, eschatologically speaking, taking into consideration every person howmuchever of an atheist he might aver himself to be, the end, apparently, might be near. And in eschatological terms, that means, shit will happen!

And it’s probably a bad idea to be caught up in the most massive of messes with soiled knickers. So I do hope, if it turns out tomorrow being the 10th of September, 2008 CE be D-Day, God, if you’re there, let me not have time to shit myself.

These things come in snide little packages. Like that song? “Afternoon Delight”? If you still don’t know, the song is about daytime lovemaking, the naughty kind. Ah more info in case you need it before time, as we are used to whiling away, whiles us away.

Point in consideration being that time when everyone felt the atmosphere would catch on fire if a nuclear bomb was tested. That didn’t quite transpire as planned, but what did come out was a series of apocalyptic films about how the lead characters would very cool, and no one would listen to the earnest little professor with his very many charts who is protesting against government or privately-funded experiments; you know the kind of thing like what is going on right now in that politically neutral country where all those horrible Bollywood films were shot in the ‘90s?

Well anyway, it turns out, the world does care for modernist science as long as it threatens to kill us all, one fell swoop or otherwise. The rest of the time, not assuming there will be a rest-of-the-time after tomorrow, it happily cruises on through reality with pre-modernism. Boobs and nob-heads all.

I suppose I should give out some well meaning advice too, even though, fewer people, than I would have liked, seem to be spooked about the possibility of micro-black holes being created in some lab on earth. I mean how can you be so calm about this when you freak about that stupid Saturn mal-influence thing that went on for ages on all the TV channels?
Anyway, no point going about killing everyone, raping everyone (even if that means you die a virgin), looting shops and the like because the possibility of alleviating and justifying circumstances arising tomorrow is still rather low, and those of you looking like an arse and being fried on the hotseat, consequently, much much higher.

So, spook some other people, drink, do crack, eat yourself fat, do whatever it is that you would usually do at the start of the month when your inhibitions have been lowered by the last month’s ending.

But I do hope I don’t have to hear someone in my primetime afterlife going on about how they told us all so.

God if you’re there, don’t be.

Bringing up Knowledge and Porn.

2008-07-22T05:01:00.000-06:00

What is it with us and escape clauses? If you remember (or would care to scroll down my back pages) you would find a post similarly stuck up as "dreaming of better porn". The title was obviously misleading and I just went on to vent less needed rhetoric and shame on me for misleading you oftener than the once.

There is this play off between the voices in my head. One commands me be a capitalist pimp, be a conservative whore, drag down the potential of others, never say what I mean unless the price is right. I haven't ever distributed for free what I could sell, but that still ain't me.

The other, the seditious one, the ubiquitous socialist prick who is the bane of all self-imposed and borne intellectualism wants me to be one with the rest of the sentient sub-sentient biomass morass I find myself a part of. Heed their creative faux-creative sub-aqueous voices too. We are all made the same.

"It's rarely man climbs to excellence by
His own thin branches; God in his goodness
Wills us to claim from from Him nobility."

But may he find himself hoisted by his own petard if he tries to impose social conditioning on me supposing a genocide can take care of the subversive 'elements'. I am only dancing here, aren't I?

Old mister dotard, crippling ailment claim your sexual extremities and fruit if you drown your own voice to save it all for a better time, a better audience. There is none. The more you sell, the less you have and it does work that way for all your bell bottom blues.

It doesn't matter if I fluster in the beginning, the end or everywhere in the middle. Does that make a lesser man of me?

There is this offensive term you see "newbie". It has plagued me with dogged earnestness to follow me wherever I may go. I don't want more, I don't want it very fast. I am socially awkward sometimes but it is very nearly always justifiable. How can the mind be contained by the conversations of a few within a room? Can the Dalai Lama be called a newbie because he cannot port forward or set up a torrent tracker?

Then what is justifiably intelligent clerisy knowledge? Is it knowing what the most relevant issues are? Being au courant with the issues concerning existence? Isn't that too vast a net? Isn't an inherently conceited mind incapable of learning and re-learning something anything for all the time it is? How can we overlook journalism as daily wager literature? A primogenitor of pulp fiction? People go through their entire lives sitting on fences because frankly it is rather difficult to make commitments, much unlike the thing with men in sitcom romances. In some ways we are like a sitcom audience, always setting up ourselves with much care to experience what have already felt and liked, sometimes with soda and popcorn. Lets face it: there is too much "stuff" and so many "things" floating about and our memory banks though voided frequently with weekend binges cannot quite contend with that "something vaster", something "omniscient".

So what have I been leading up to? An entity with a baselining intellect that has no problems with containing all the knowledge the world -with all its sales pitches for V8 cars and the rest that makes up its voluminous voluminosity- crams in indiscriminately into uncorrelated minds. The good news is that we already have begun the development of such a being. Here, this thing you are experiencing right now is the ascendant of that future. We call it Web 2.0

Now the development of the Web 2.0 probably started off as a less fulgurant scheme. Imagine a company that wants to make a lot of money. It has some money, but not enough to buy its poor executives islands in the Pacific. Imagine that! So it wants a lot of advertising money, right? It wants its pages seen across the most number of web connected consoles, right? But returning visitors need an incentive to come back. Like good content. Good engaging content is hard to come by, leave alone exceptionally interesting content. So how do we force the visitors to come back for more? The company cannot possibly keep creating fun interesting content filled pages, that would require many thousands of employees, content writers, creative artists etc etc.

See where I am leading?

The company simply buys servers or server spaces on the internet, puts together a user friendly user-generated content distribution website, like youtube, lets the visitors upload their own content, visit their own content, forward it to others, advertise and voila a few million dollars for each MD's kitty every month.

Why stop there? Let them talk amongst themselves, share, create more, visit more, even buy their own server spaces, their own ads leading to the said spaces and so on.

So what we have is very simplistic and yet infinitely complex because the creativity involved is only limited by the near infinite permutations and combination of the total biomass morass involved in the project. Now I am not very sure I remember how Permutations and Combinations exactly work. But imagine 10 numbers are involved in 2 types of combinations, then the total outcome will be 45 and if they are involved in permutations, the number is 90. However, if 10 numbers are involved in 10 permutations, the result shoots up to 3628800. Or so my calculator tells me.

Now you surely know better than to doubt arguments involving large numbers, even if you like me only very weakly follow the argument itself. Why bother imagining quotients and remainders when summing up infinites?

Again what am I leading to?

What is the Purpose of All Multiplication (PoAM)? Maybe? I hate concluding so obtrusively, just as everything was getting exciting.

But maybe one simple-minded PoAM is gathering all the precious resources one can find? Processed or otherwise? Creativity and not Intelligence (or quotients thereof) being a resource?

Then how can you or I claim creativity is an end unto itself? How can we be this conceited about ourselves just because we create and develop a knack for this creation business over time?

Ullo Creators and Mothers all, your absolutism stands to be upstaged and 'tis high time for a new tide of absolutism.

PS: As for the porn, shame on me for leading you on, but it isn't that dirty so indulge your well senesced lewdness somewhere else. If it helps keep a few million potential sex predators off the streets, I am all for porn and more actors of the same ilk.

Virulent Anti-professionalism, anyone?

2008-06-19T11:11:00.000-06:00

As usual, the dictionary meaning is so plain and dry and unsatisfying.

So what is a professional? A person trained to do something and that something is what he professes to do exclusively and that work indeed defines his life and identity?

Like here:

- So what are you? (and not what do you do)

- I am a media professional.

and then the conversation veers into that pit of educational qualifications, job requirements and projects and clients and softwares used. Usually very dry or very unsavory.

So what is this professional-ism?

Why does the need for a professional arise? It is about accountability. People tend to mistrust each other. That is the way things are, and have been for quite some time.

Without professionalism, the fact that we "know" is debatable. In effect, professionalism kills the entire skeptic battery with one fell swoop because the person being consulted is there on the basis of his credentials. Something that places him above his fellows in this particular mode of thought and practice.

Now based on his experience and accreditation, he might be required to provide services to people, for personal gain or not. Now, he is held accountable for the advice he provides. If the client is unhappy with the results, the client can slap charges on the professional. Given this, we can now explore why we in fact need this clear demarcation between client and professional.

A line of work, an occupation, can be practiced by both, a professional and a non-professional. Of course, I am not saying professionalism is all that is bad with the system and is downright evil. We, as a society, have already agreed upon it not being so.

But why?

If I want to visit a doctor, I want him to know what he is doing, and the concern of mine is usually above commerce. Similar conclusions can be drawn between client and professional relationships in civil engineering, law, etc. We need expert advice, so we can have advice without the need for sacrificing precious man hours at the cost of our own professional aspirations.

At the very lowest level of our system, which can be taken to be an inverted pyramid, we have the elitist who wants to have all the snob value he can acquire. He is the quintessential pest for whom the entire plainer population -placed above him- moves.

Recent times prove that this is indeed a snub nosed pyramid and is shifting angles to reach a steep plateau as soon as it can, till it resembles a cuboid. This point is called utopia by some. People arranged homogeneously till there is no more need for upheaval and people are free to do what they want. But the crude molding hands of the ones at the bottom of this inverted pyramid can never alone shape our entire race for an eternity of a pleasing and much desired calm.

So you see the fashionable accessories of the style-conscious wife of an IT tycoon is worth more than a few hundred small boys trapped in a small hut making fireworks. Like every arm of hers is supported by a hundred small hairless inflammable arms. Like every time she drives down to the jeweler's, her vehicle is the effort of a hundred pairs of miniature pallbearing hands. What human capital expenditiure framework are we talking about in HRD forums? Replacing nascent flammable human resource with fashionista-material and smartly dressed white collared men?

Or rather isn't it that everyone is yearning to be that little more so they can be worth more than as many people as possible. By that extension of logic, how is anyone poor? They are just lesser beings, for the time being because the benchmark keeps changing, but not to much to overwhelm the sensibilities of our nouveau-riche folk.

What we live in, I will say without mincing my words as it wont, is a caste system. To say professionalism brings this is to give it too much credit. Human scepticism is to blame too. But I digress, for the point is very simple and plain to see. For the sake of trust and inter-dependence which make our anarchist society tick, we have this credit system. You earn some, you work some, you win some, you lose some.

Most certified places of learning guarantee placement into the desired niches. And there is born the professional. The simple headed careerist who has no credentials is swept into the system because he finds it hard to get the job he wants. So, with or without a formal education, professionalism can affect everyone. Yet the same is hardly true for the elitist and nigh snobbish niches such as journalism, writing, art, the performing arts, governance and what is being called super-finance. These fields are still scared of professionalism because they believe that their field is pure in its esoteric nature and thus exempt from the need for such candor. The chief aggravator of this is journalism. Editors saying “either you have an eye for news or you don’t” is such rot. This is a very juvenile tendency they have, and exactly the sort of thing that gives the urge for professionalism more momentum.

Now all I have said can be shot down as bids of anti-intellectualism. But this is hardly the case. Wittgenstein is ardently anti-professionalism. Now what Stanley Fish says is “anti-professionalism is indefensible because it imagines a form of life-free, independent, acontextual - that cannot be lived”. But most of us were not born yesterday, have seen the world, and yet can choose to lay siege to this thought.

We are driven by competition, the yearning for more, and this is what drives on the wheel that crushes down independent thinking and pushes us head first into an almost determinist society where all is laid out bare but on an uneven playing field. Monkeys can be made to read philosophy and give exams too and there are indeed degrees that afford a similar straying of free will. But are graduates called philosophers?

My doodhwallah (milkman) might have the potential to be the greatest painter ever born, but how would he know? If Dante had never been forced to leave his homeland, would the anguish he had already had been enough to write the Divina Commedia?

The experience of every individual’s life is to be marinated in the clear blue liquor of his own will so that it remains delectable and instructive for the years yet to come.

The Four Director-leaf clover.

2008-06-16T07:52:00.004-06:00

Now the following Directors may or may not be the best ones the world has ever come up with. I won't debate that. And it is not like a hierarchy list I have prepared with a list with legitimate rankings. I haven't put in that much effort. Just a post about some of the Directors who have influenced me.

Again a director's task may or may not be greater an ordeal than a writer's. I suppose both have their inner demons, and I suppose there could be a necessary aversion between the two. One being a graphic artist, the other, not quite as much.

But then the vision is what counts, yes?

Tarkovsky.

Tarkovsky, a Russian director, directed seven feature films. Yes that is him and Kurosawa in the first picture.

I came across his work a few years back with 'Ivan's Childhood'. The other movies, all of which I loved enough to talk about him the first, are
Andrei Rublev, Stalker, Solaris, Nostalgia, Offret, The Steamroller and the Violin.

He mostly worked in black and white, because "films in color are like moving paintings or photographs, which are too beautiful to be a realistic depiction of life."

Each of his films is a special offering like no other. He co-wrote most of the scripts. And he deals with complex subjects like critique and the wants of people very well.

The creative person is a recurring element in most of his movies. It goes well with my own thought process that though creativity might be an end unto itself, it is probably one of the most complex ones and there is much that has been left unsaid by both the creative person himself and the creative person as an artist.

He took long beautiful takes to help the viewer reflect on the beauty of world, with and without the corruption of life and the other one of intelligence. An example would be like in Stalker where he takes a long take with water as the main protagonist while three characters discuss the most prosaic and difficult subject of all, 'purpose'.

All his characters remain with you long after the credits have rolled.

Memorable shots would include from Andrey Rublev with a cow being set on fire, a nun who is caught in the same shed getting speared for her trouble, a horse stumbling down stairs and getting speared too, a mentally challenged girl braiding a dead woman's hair after she is the only one left alive in a church after a raid.

Hitchcock

I don't suppose I take a very great unpardonable liberty when I say everyone who has ever seen a film has seen an original scene or a re-hashed scene which can be credited to Hitchcock.

Point in case being the shower curtain being yanked open and an anonymous dagger being plunged repeatedly into naked victim's naked body (hehe, I wonder where exactly). In most re-hashings, the soundtrack is kept the same, and so is the the bloodied water swirling down the sinkhole.

There is much I have learned from his movies (having seen almost all of them, repeatedly). Like I had no idea what a shower curtain was, being blessed with a birth in a country where don't have ventilation problems, until the scene came along. It was damn straight awesome.

Plus it was great fun to pick him out because he almost always had a very brief guest appearance. The one I love the best would be The 39 Steps, because I had read the book too. And Hitchcock's rendition was exactly what most directors don't just get right!

The recommended list out of the 50 plus movies he has directed(!) in chronological order would be The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964)

But enough fan worship. Why do I and millions of other who have seen him love his work?

Because way before cinema became that advanced to allow for it, his camera work easily trounces the now-popular running camera, hand-cam camera movements, his camera work displayed an easy power of the individualistic point-of-view that made him so famous. Like in Psycho's stairs incident. Because every frame conveyed the latent beauty of the moment, and so he recreated a collage of constantly superimposing images. A technique that has been whored out so by so many directors since him, that it almost seems tacky.

Because, in Rear Window, when we get stared back, there runs a shiver down your spine even if you guessed that would happen or have seen the scene 12,000 times.

Because he could create magic on film for any given situation.

And that seems rare.

Stanley Kubrick

Why Kubrick after Tarkvosky and Hitchcock you may ask? Because the three represent three different standpoints of good cinema. While you can easily guess now what Tarkovsky and Hitchcock spoke of, it is harder to categorize Kubrick.

To say he was the finest 'tongue-in-cheek' director there ever was would be a bit too presumptuous, like a bumpkin who has seen a ten seconds of a movie, and guess what the ending is. Now though the ending may not be wrong or inaccurate, variable change theory predicts that he is just being stupid.

I don't want to be or seem stupid.

Moving on, the first movie I saw of Kubrick was either Full Metal Jacket or A Clockwork Orange or Dr. Strangelove. The others followed soon enough. It is simply impossible to pick and choose and say that this Kubrick I like the best.

The most highly recommended ones would be: The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

The thing with Kubrick is that he moved with the times and lived with the much (rightly) maligned American movie industry and still created such masterpieces like these. He moved from the film noir to war-pics to epics to soliloquies to science-fiction to satire to horror and ending in a surrealist view of modern intimacy and privacy.

So he ended up telling very varied stories with very many different styles, and still managing to win the much sought after critic-approval every single time!

As for the technical expertise, he pioneered the front projection to hide shadows and give superimposing of real action over pre-filmed locations, and the use of lenses meant for NASA to film in candle-light for Barry Lyndon. But again we cannot generalize his technique, because that would mean having to deal with each feature.

He created fantastic real-world characters even though a marked disdain for real life is clear to see in his sarcasm. And though he would seem more interested in the mechanics and how humans function en masse, his personal touch always reaches outwards and into the viewer's soul. The best examples of this would be Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.

Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa's act is flawless. I would like my critique to sound good enough to critique him, but it is pointless, I get the feeling I cannot write as well as he could direct. Gut feelings like this one usually turn out to be true.

Kurosawa was not a director who directed and made films for the elitist pricks of the world, numerous as they are now. He made them for the common man, probably the Japanese brand of common man.

Truffaut, is is said, walked out of Pather Panchali while it was being screened at the Cannes film festival. He called it an amateur attempt. Someone who has seen a Bergman and a Kurosawa and a Ray would understand why he thought so. It was of an alien world, something unaccapteble to the point of caricature, unless of course we have seen India. Like many South Asian writers, Ray's work was a rooted one. This meant it meant less to the average 'consumer' of cinema.

However when Kurosawa was discovered, I can easily imagine how the established directors of his time must have shifted uncomfortably in their seats. He got inspired by Shakespeare's work, and he inspired Sturges, Leone and Lucas, and even Sholay and so on. His accessibility remains his strongest point.

At an extremely broad view, his movies have a certain pleasant je ne sais quoi quotient that is nigh unmatchable.

The movies I recommend would be : Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Red Beard (1965) and Ran (1985).

My first Kurosawa movie was The Seven Samurai, and it worked extremely well for me. The haplessness of the peasant conveyed was very moving, not unlike Andrey Rublev and The Seventh Seal. That the villagers would pay their hired samurai by offering them rice three times a day while they themselves ate millet, that they would rush to lock up their daughters to protect them from the necessary evil, the guardian samurai was like a breath of fresh air after having seen so much poorly rendered sensationalist anguish.

Kurosawa worked a lot with a very cool actor, Toshiro Mifune, who played the juiciest roles Kurosawa's epics had to offer. The association turned to be important for both of them. Toshiro was the original rogue and Kurosawa was the original visionary.

I should mention how Kurosawa worked. He too took long beautiful shots that in no way hindered the progress of the tale. In Roshomon, characters in a largely forest setting where the light lighting their faces is completely natural (this was the first movie to do so), it conveyed ambiguity, uncertainty, good and perhaps yin and yang, I cannot say. Better qualified people than me have dealt with it in the Roshomon Effect!

The narrative is never very clear with many different sets of explanations, and everyone concealing something darker looming around with certain gloominess. It goes into the league of 'cult' movies that should not be re-made but apparently it has been.

He gave especial care to ensuring his movies were perfect in almost all the ways he could control. Weather played a very big role in his creation. He even took care to dye the rain water black so it would be captured properly on the lens. When I saw the movie and before I knew he had done this, I was struck by the dense downpour and the close proximity it conveyed.

He had an entire castle set constructed on Mount Fiji's slopes only to have it burned down for a climax for Ran. Everyone who was something of a director aspired to be as good as him.

With a fan base that included George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, where did he ever go wrong?

Oh right, he was a six-foot tall perfectionist that never got to direct his own Godzilla movie, and apparently, ins spite of all the comparisions laid out between the two, he loved Ray's work.

Oh and John Ford.

Inside and Outside.

2008-06-13T03:20:00.000-06:00

I wonder how I could bring myself to write this. But I have been silent for a bit, and it has been weeks since I wrote last. And still I get this trickle of visitors, both old and new going through the blog, poking around, not minding their own bloody business and doing all that other nonsense I loved when I felt a lot more unloved.

But why is it that I write here? Or for that matter write at all? This is not my work. I don't get paid for it, sure I get the occasional shag (oh I know you still come by and scour all the new posts for a mention, well no one but me is ever getting a mention here). But must I prostitute myself for sex?

What do I have to offer anyway? My years account for about 1.567164179*10(to the power of -9) of the world's years and I am already weary of the world? Does that speak more of me than of the world?

If I say I am this strange person who no one could ever understand, I can understand why I say it, but what if I am just pampering my self's individualism? Creating a dualism in the self to feel satisfied and complete. I have suspected that might be the case for a long time now. Ever since I found out I could hurt other people. Ever since I realized, though I am not certain why, there is something about me that other people want and like. It is probably a latent goodness of the human soul that creeps past me and attracts men and women with both low and high self esteem.

Still, the world is in a lot more 'shit' than I can pretend to sympathize with. Bad media, bad politics, bad leadership, bad communication, bad economic policies, and a lot more instances and practices with which I get to attach 'bad' without feeling the need to contribute more.

Apparently, India is the murder capital of the world. What do you expect when you liberalize a people and unleash on them globalization, voyeuristic violent media, too little money and remind them again and again they can get a better deal than they already have? It is the promise of a dream that gets them. Stupid pitiable loathsome children, everyone of them.

Have you ever seen the average Indian? The guy who will define the entire subcontinent just by be-ing?

Someone will probably butt in and tell you it is nigh impossible what with the different gene pools mixing all the time. That this is a very diversely populated area. But how true is that claim? Aren't they just attributing the entire corpus of the self to what lies till one inch deep and no more?

It is completely another matter about how we are superficial (being as that may be a product of evolution), but we are mistaking the self to the body that it comes attached to. Even if you feel -like most of the other people I meet- that in living, you fulfil your purpose, you have something going on. So you have a purpose exactly like the average being, human or otherwise.

It is infuriating to think of someone who is the mean sum of all our desires and skin deep reflections. For he is the root cause of why we despair. Not us, we have special exonerating circumstances that makes our causes and life justifiable.

We need to jump! Not at someone or on to something or on someone's toes. Just jump for the sake of jumping.

Why though?

Because that is the antithesis of rationality, not suicide or the like. If you can meditate while being irrational, maybe that is setting a greater benchmark? Maybe you are proving something now? It doesn’t matter if it isn’t. I jumped enough to realize that though I thought I had loved enough to last me my seven lifetimes, I could still love a lot more. So I have a new thing to compete against, and now instead of finding a purpose I am stuck with the a purpose I thought up trying to meditate whilst jumping without purpose.

I know this makes a lot less sense than your fixation with pop philosophy with its roots in Gothicism and self inflicted depression, but maybe we all need to grow up.

On another note, it would seem that I am an Elitist. This affliction is apparently brought on by my obsession about my cacophony being heard and lauded as unique and remarkable (if not revolutionary). That my desire to be heard is not very much different from what leads attention-starved celebrities to do the things they do. But I don’t even have a camera with a night vision filter!

Not that it is a bad time to be an Elitist. I point to the ‘bad’ list here again. I feel absolved by the times in being an Elitist prick.

‘No, then why do you like to go on about novelists, directors and musicians we have never heard about? Philosophers? We don’t know what to say when you insist on offering your critique.’

‘You haven’t been in a village long enough to know how it is over there. How peaceful it is. It changes you. You do not need your fancy-shcmancy philosophy to explain life there. It is just the colour of civilization’s shit that matters, not how it comes up with so much shit. I know you like and read him so I quote Shakespeare here, “There are more in heaven and earth, Horatio. Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’

I don’t feel that needs to be answered. Quoting Shakespeare is of course a big faux pas, for it is the illiterate and ill-read who try to pass him off as ‘unimportant because he is an Elitist icon’. But for that matter, why is Proust an Elitist icon?

But that is exactly what I meet with when I try to put across to a Marathi person that Shivaji is not good enough to be a demi-god. Or something similar; and now the entire BJP party is being raised up again on the principle of relative shitty-ness.

The average being is of course apathetic, or is sure every politician needs to be taught a thing or two. I can only guess, I am not really Omniscient, am I?

Now is that really a good enough an excuse to condemn me to Elitism?

Well alright, I don’t mind, I apparently have wide enough shoulders to make a remarkable shrug.

Spoon-bending

2008-05-06T08:08:00.000-06:00

So, I took up spoon bending recently. No, it is not a euphemism for something that cannot be printed. But rather, what it exactly sounds like, a something that has left me with semi-melted cutlery, burnt fingers, broken cutlery and lot more angst than I had to begin with.

The act, when done properly, I was assured, would cure all my psychic ailments, empowering me and binding me to the universal fabric of love that envelops us like a lot of jelly; even though, a little loss of dinner table ornamentation could be expected.

The trick, as it were, is to bend the spoon without applying much physical strength or even paying warranted attention to the piece of cutlery at hand. Now, this is suspiciously reminiscent of how Douglas Adams teaches us to fly, but I hold my peace and think of Keanu Reeves and little bald boys bending similar spoons. The trick is to understand that there is no spoon at all. And I believe because it is absurd not to, not to mention un-cool.

So, I started all very smug in my knowledge, knowing all I have to do is focus, think of a ball of energy at eye level that gives me all the energy I need, because its own is inexhaustible. Then, I start chanting “bend bend bend”, pick up the spoon, feel its neck with two fingers and a thumb, and wait for it to go “putty” in my hands. Remembering the important part about being distracted all the while, I think back to happier times. It doesn’t work. Screaming at the spoon with four letter obscenities with varied intonations and affixes does not work either.

The next day, I try pre-melting it, to expedite the process. Thusly, the burnt fingers. The third day, I use Bakelite spoons. Thusly, the broken cutlery. The fourth day, my girlfriend breaks up with me for destroying her precious table-wear. Thusly, the angst. No true love, as betokened by both the carol and the spoon-benders, ever came to me.

So now, I sulk and do the requisite name-calling, and dismiss this as pop philosophy offshoots of populist theological elitism.

But why would people predisposed to cynicism fall for such things anyway? The infliction was not that of Faith, it was of something more sinister, Hope.
There is this enormous “ritual” pie that theists and atheists both equally and regularly are forced to take a bit out of. The theist will call successful attempts, Proof, the Atheist will call them Hope.

The propaganda would go on about it that you would be forced to think that this is no miracle, rather a spiritual revolution in its baby steps, and that the bad guys are the sceptics. Like the world is positively teeming with grannies in their rocking chairs and blankets who bend forks into art when they tire of their knitting. And the trouble with us is that we love contrasts, like the one where everyone(as opposed to a One) being already blessed with superpowers. And thus are easily suckered in.
Why lines like “Oh but you haven’t ever seen an Atom, but you still believe in its existence, no?” still work on us. Why cults based on science fiction get to flourish as religions.

Why despite of what transpired last week, when my Aunt told me that my flat’s never had a Vaastu Shanti, I regressed into doing the manly male version of collapsing, clutching my bosom and crying out in anguish “Oh no!”

Dreaming of better porn.

2008-04-21T06:42:00.000-06:00

There are degrees of perversion, and then there are degrees of *wink wink* abandonment. Both should be, suo rationale, completely unacceptable.

Yes, our retrograde populist movement in current media would want us to think they have us fooled. But us, the individualistically prudish clones of each other, would simultaneously beg to differ.

We simply refuse to buy into this revolutionary claptrap-ish nonsense about how some perversions are better than others. Burn the supermodels and other porn stars at the witch-burning stake.

Now, I am speaking as myself, as exactly the kind of perverse inconsiderate befouling person, no man would let near his daughter. I say, enough with the double standards.

Now for example, let us consider what happened to me not long ago.

Once upon an afternoon, I was hungry, which is not an exceptional premise. So anyway, I was wondering what to do. And now, this, the interesting part, is a large serious concern of mine. I rarely freshen up before the evening. The evening is when I would, theoretically, trawl for ass. So no point doing it earlier, yes?

But this one time, I had run out of supplies (I always move out at night, and restock the kitchen), and was forced to leave the comfort and coolness of my place, swing out an arm, lock the door, swing out the bike(with my bare arms) and get out and into the sunlit world.

So anyway, there I am minding my own business, looking out for pretty young uns, and there I am, out of the blue of the tared road, getting stared back at. And not like I like it, and from people I don't want staring at me. Middle-aged men and women, their eyes appraising me and soon enough, dismissing me with distaste. The shopkeeper being aloof, everyone trying to give me space.

Oh I didn't smell (I checked), just that my hair was messy. I thought it was a grand out-of-bed-messy-lookey.

So I wait for my rage to pass, drink something (I don't remember what exactly though), freshen up, and set out onto the streets . And lo! the come-hithers and please-do-my-daughters return.

Sigh, there is no point in going any further is there?

Recently, I was forced to come to terms with a long lost love. Well this is how it us, for men. Having to talk to a girl we have already slept with is like having to change the upholstery in a rental car. Like we are being punished for being naughty in the back seat; even though the company had explicitly winked while going on about how comfy the said back seat was.

And because I hadn't even been in the back seat of that particular car, I feel strange about the un-encounter. Can sex (yes, yes, I was being discreet earlier) really cure all? What if it is to be sex with the said person? What the fuck do I do if she is unattainable now?

Laced in tangerine dreams, delivering unto unwilling arms the mystique of unrequited passion, this gormless encounter relishes its hold over my squirming anima that has been brutally emasculated of all traces of confidence, ardor, elan, leaving only a dreary summer haze that feeds itself on my incapacity to confront my larger fears of my love lost is logged, that she will never forget, that she will not be replaced, that lost love is best lost; and I am struck down in the prime and dragged haplessly out and beyond into the graveyard of the ones that have no one to their names. What fearsome heedless unforgiving malady wants me to suffer so, for what past pain dealt have I, must I now be made to suffer for without fruition in sight, that may belie my actual longing, slap a wet blanket to my sores? Whose arms do I turn to now for the pretense of love and a premise of a little more? I am just tired enough to give up looking for more stepping stones before the one on which I stand grows too hot in its due turn, and tonight even though it has set, the sun becomes my only goal.

What is making me tick.

2008-04-08T10:19:00.000-06:00

A certain shopkeeper, from whom I usually buy my ice cream, asked me something everyone keeps asking me. But first, one, the ice cream is not why I am now a "phatty"; two, I am not a "phatty"; three, I am not being all mysterious and all, I really have never asked him his name; and four, I had an Amul Frostik that time.

So anyway, the question, he asked, and what everyone usually does is "Beta, where do you study?"

No, this is not an exposition of why I think there was a lingual link between ancient Greece and ancient India. Beta, in Hindi (or "Indian" or "Indianese") means, son. A term of affection or a preface explaining that the condescension that follows is legit.

So anyway, what I did end up replying with was "I'm a writer." I pause for effect.
No reply.
"I am a content writer."
"Oh oh"
"I am writing a book too."
"Ah"
"Meain lekhak hoon."(Indian-ese for I am a writer)
"So what is the book about?"
"Oh."
"Kis cheez ke baare mein hain?"(Indian-ese for So what is the book about)
"Umm..."
"That will be twenty rupees."(Indian-ese for gimme my money already)
"It is a commentary on religion, or religious commentary."
"Oh."

I hand him the money and we haven't spoken of it ever since.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away is all I ever wanted to do. It's been a long way from that. And one that hasn't lasted long enough. There is much I want to leave unsaid. But there simply isn't enough material. I still wear white t-shirts and blue jeans. I still shave.

There are these two articles that came out today. The first one came out in what I term a pretentious tabloid, The Pune Times. It is about how heartbreak affects men six times more than it does women. An example cited is Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi. Now I usually like to be as far from such press as is possible.

I do not care what about the article is true. But Salman saying it brought about a crippling bout of writer's block which threatened to end his literary career; it does make my fingers tremble, a bit. Maybe it is about the place where I come from. A place where all every little boy wants to have when he grows up is a way to have a great deal of everything for a little thing called nothing. Of course I am much less of a writer (published or not) and so my writer's blocks make little difference to anyone but me because there is no deadline waiting to woosh by. Now if only I could stop feeling sorry for myself. There is no shying away from it, I am quite the loser. And there no longer is a "she" waiting at that coast. There probably never was.

Moving on, I suddenly have found myself with a lot to say about the education system. How it is a terrible waste of talent. How stupid it makes us. What sort of factories schools have become. Why the schools are run by a bunch of idiots. Why everyone knows this, and would still rather talk politics than patiently spend time with their young. How coochie-cooing isn't parenting. From where I meditate, a cross between an atheist ascetic and an irrational lover (there being another kind or so I am told), I can but despair because it is summertime here, and my work could not possibly be less misunderstood by yuppies who smile every time they see the sun. Shackling yourself to your tile is a step backwards when all you want to do is fly. They might look rough and ruddy, but the tillers can never sprout wings.

But again I transgress. The Large Hadron Collider is about to be up in a few weeks. What it means for us, I cannot say. But the world is suddenly changing for the better. I would like to say the internet is to be thanked for helping peel away the dried up layers of our big onion styled society. We might still evolve into civilization.

Brother, that is something that is, I have been reminded with a great deal of condescension, possible only if everyone is a philosopher. That if everyone could think for themselves.

And brother (Scottish accent and all), I see that happening soon. And perhaps without anarchy.

So screw you in the arse, brother, you royal pain in my side, I am looking forward to the day I can fold away my paper, look down up on your servile countenance as you finish licking my boots for the day, and get to say "I told you so".

For now, brother, I leave you with a news article about how more and more students are taking up philosophy in colleges. For whatever reason. It is the thought that counts.

A preface to me, God.

2008-03-31T10:29:00.001-06:00

I can safely say this post could stretch into a goodish book. Which would be a pity because there is no way in heck that any of my work is ever getting published. Now that that has been made immutably clear, we can proceed into the post. It sucks, of course, that I have to do this sort of preface to every post I create. I am a creator! I am God! So screw you if you decide not to read the entire post based on these few lines.

I just need some cool white dye and flowing hair to apply it on.

Ah, so that leads us into the first problem. What started out as an obsession to prove that religion was an unnecessary middle man to affording a benign society has snowballed into defining me and my work. I am super duper intelligent and that goes without saying.

And of course, going on the basis of regular (or irregular) monotheistic theodicy, I have proved that I, Nikhil or I, a pencil sharpener am God. Oh alright I haven't really proven it all by myself, but because I am, after all, God, I can do what I want with credit-giving, and I won't give anyone else credit for it. Again, mostly because I, as God, set the standards for goodness and righteousness, the whiny little runts amongst my theoretical subjects can suck it.

I don't see why I should have to expound on my thought process here, me being God and all. But because I can, I will.

Monotheistic religion, much to my consternation, is the most popular kind of religion. But barring a few good theists, the playing field is pretty barren. There no longer is such a thing as natural theology. It's inclusion in every argument is such overkill. So, I put it up that all rationality can explain satisfactorily can qualify as "being". The rest is shunted into the "unbeing".

Now this can be a pain in my side, because what is rational and easily explicable commutes the penalty for unimaginative and hardcore belief. And we can all be pressed back onto that old "my superturtle pawns your superturtle's ass". Which is what Hinduism is being religiously downsized into.

Getting back to the point at hand, about why I can safely conclude I am God. And so can my pencil sharpener (oh I don't really have one).

Let us examine the 'omni' properties a monotheistic God is blessed with:

1. Omnipotence.

Well to be fair to myself, I have already discussed this one here. And so I will register only a few afterthoughts. So I cannot create a stone so heavy that I cannot lift it, and so I am blessed by the theist with being able to do only what would not negate in any which way my own immutability or the one and only defining instancing of omnipotency. Ergo, I can do only what is rationally possible for me to do without the actual limitation of my power in aid of preserving my eternal instancing of omnipotence. Which again means, my power is limited, but only by rationality. So, supposing I weigh a 170 pounds (I do), I cannot possibly lift a stone weighing 200 pounds and still live. Ergo, I can do anything I want to in my rationally possible probability flux thing. So, even though I cannot fly, I am still omnipotent because I cannot possibly fly because of my body structure. The same can be applied to my pencil sharpener.

2. Omni-benevolence.

I am sure you know about the Leibniz-Spinozaon argument. If you don't you should be ashamed of yourself. But this, particular set of disagreements prove to be good enough to be classified as antimonies. The short version goes something like this.

Leibniz claims God does not act out with an arbitrary will but always does what is good; for if God does not always do what is the best, then He would do either acts which are either evil or just pointless, and this would be contradict our conception of a benevolent and loving God. Ergo, not possible.

Now, Spinoza, being my hero and all, claims, God (me and my pencil sharpener) are perfectly free to do what we want to do. Because having such complications would limit our omnipotence, and that would be so uncool man! Furthermore, if God is the Creator of everything, then He is also the creator of all standards of goodness, which means that whatever He does is good by definition and a priori.

Of course this is like mozzarella cheese, unpalatable without the proper context. Because God does indeed set the goodness standards, whatever God does is irrefutably good, by his own definition, and so it is pointless to go around reproaching Him for what men find to be unwarranted acts, since, even if we think we are not mistaken about what is good, the good is no standard independent of God to compare with God's actions

Now, let us discuss this in the proper context. Without applying Bayesian model logic to this, it is very easy to draw conclusions and leave it at that. But because I suck at maths, and it took me weeks to understand the proper context (I fall asleep easy, it is something to do with the vein/nerve/something I press in my cheek with a bored wrist), I leave it up to you to infer what you want.

For now, Like Buddha, I refuse to elucidate myself on this one. Because antimonies (like the ones Kant gives us) are best left "unsolved" because our knowledge might be defined by our uncertainty and partial knowledges about such subjects.

And because I am uncertain about my own actions and am firmly opposed to determinism and yet cannot clearly define my actions as good or bad, but only hope to take full responsibility for them when I grow up into a moth, I am Omni-benevolent. Because my pencil sharpener cannot think for itself, it is in pretty much the same situation.

3. Immutability and Omniscience.

No I am not trying to cut corners and cheat you out of my labor, I am trying to kill two birds with one stone. God, it is alleged, is the creator. Oh here, I would like to bring to attention the neat maneuvering Hinduism does in this matter. According to the Rig and Atharva vedas, Varuna is God. Someone we can compare to a monotheistic God. The creativity of creation is not his though, as this hymn from the rig veda says:

"At first was neither Being nor Nonbeing.
There was not air nor yet sky beyond.
What was its wrapping? Where? In whose protection?
Was Water there, unfathomable and deep?
There was no death then, nor yet deathlessness;
Of night or day there was not any sign.
The One breathed without breath, by its own impulse.
Other than that was nothing else at all.
Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness,
And all was Water indiscriminate. Then
That which was hidden by the void, that One, emerging,
Stirring, through the power of ardor (tapas), came to be."

But he is soon replaced by Indra as the god of all gods. This, Hinduism, is an accessible religion, and very user friendly. So, Indra is dethroned as the supreme being in the later henotheistic hymns. And still later, we see the emergence of the Vaishnavite and Shaivite schools of thought that collectively divide creation, protection and destruction into three aspects of godly existence. Something which bypasses the need for immutability and the need for being captured as an instance of eternity, a present that never ends.

St Augustine, one of the better theists, worked well on what he has to say on the matter of eternity.

"Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Thy years stand together, because they do not stand; nor are departing thrust out by coming years, for they do not pass away; but ours shall all be, when they shall no more be."

The trouble is of course clear. Immutability and Omniscience cannot coexist. Immutability is difficult for a creative choice being made by God when he made it to create time (for Augustine wants a timeless existence for God, and that time was created by us, or for us, its users). So how can God have been immutable if he made at least one creative choice at time, t-0?

Surely time cannot be but a faux reality our minds make up to note the passing of events? We too are stuck in a present with memories of the past being edged into a further past by the future? How irrational is that? We must believe we are different from an eternally existing immutable god, because our "years come and go". But if he is ever-unchanging, the opposite of dynamic, how can be omniscient? Isn't knowledge my existence and all I do too? Oh oh please let me have a little free will.

What is knowledge then? What is the point of action or inaction? When all knowledge there is, is already stored away in a large immutable container? How is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony creative? Are the pious really that desperate to be loved? For He can only love the pious and the pious can only but love Him. If he is omniscient and immutable, and stuck in an eternal moment forever because his existence is timeless, he is just as about alive and relevant and potent to change the world as my hypothetical pencil sharpener.

And all the bloody shaman-ism that eclipses into the real world fabric of rational thought is such a sham. It is like cold reading an audience to guess what the people want from a thing like theology. And make your own religion out of it with area-specific tailoring for that extra smug and snug fit.

Peace out!

This was God.

Stuck in Crisis Management.

2008-03-27T07:50:00.000-06:00

Well there isn't much to say. And that is precisely the problem. This month refuses to end, and this dawns on me just I get thoroughly sick of it.

It, this month, was about finding a new voice, that would be easier to listen to, wouldn't grate on the inside, and take forward the story without letting the reader try and dissect the work for elements to kill time on the way. This, is becoming, to my hair-wrenching-out level of frustration, much harder and an excuse not to write in the template I had crafted for just this purpose sometime last year.

If I do write, all I do is create complex lists of emotions some act (that I have already put in) brings about. Enough with this dopey shit! It isn't hard to make out which parts I wrote when I was high on my myself, and which parts actually carry forward the story. Even simple acts like going to the loo or eating a jar of pickles needs examinations? Do I need to describe all that I, as my characters, am instancing?

It is fairly sickening. I have decided I am not deleting any characters and keeping all the nine narratives, but at the expense of reinventing the wheel and refashioning the wheels. The tacky wordmeter is stuck at 42,158 which is a number that sounds good but I do not recall stopping at it, to make the wordcount entry. And so, because the relationship is founded on a lie, I never bother changing it.

At this point, which is eternally half way along the way, I am stuck in crisis management. No development. I even made a relationship tree with all the important characters. But this switching between soppy emotional stuff, crass toilet humor and action scenes is killing me. I wish I could say what I want to say without having to layer it and hide it so well under a lot of above mentioned humor. That shouldn't be my job. I am a philosopher too, why must I be entertaining?

What is my job then? Why should i waste time on this development bit? Why not write one word after the other and not care about structure, emphasis, narrative style, tension, tautness, scene development, plot devices?

Fuck fuck fuck, I am royally screwed this time.

Oh, and I have decided to delete about half of my work, start afresh, and be as poetic (if cliched) as a lone pretty daisy in a green field struck by the blooming freshness of spring.

And here is the rest of it.

In memoriam of Arthur C. Clarke.

2008-03-20T10:42:00.001-06:00

It is hard to put this down, to publish it, to make it real, to let devotion take precedence. But the affliction this affection causes me is real. Arthur C Clarke, mentor, guide, light is gone. And I bally well miss him.

Its not like I have read all he ever wrote, or met him. But dammit, I wanted to meet and greet him. And a lot more than some stupid model bimbo who would turn me down anyway. It is strange how he managed to leave such a big impact on my life. The first "serious" piece of fiction I wrote was when I was about fourteen and it closely resembled 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much so, that I had to abandon it after I came to know that rat bastard sonuavabitch, Hubbard had already stolen my idea about the Kabba at Mecca. but I suppose those 8k words or so made up my first fan fiction writing. One day, when I am comfortable with my genius, I will publish it too. Here, online, so you can choose not to read it.

The fact of the matter was, I was, and still am a hardcore geek, and with mentors like Clarke, what was there to be so embarrassed about it? The fact that science fiction helps plug in a sinking boat's holes where mankind is the boat, and the holes are the ever shortening attention spans, makes it something any elitist bastard would want to poke and prod and shift it off to the pulp fiction category. Why do people blame science fiction for being so popular? Why is popular science pooh-poohed?

My first encounter with his work was 2001, and I really don't remember who I read first, Tolkien or Clarke.

What I do remember is the ecstasy of perching on the verandah wall, holding a slab of six cubes of cadbury's milk chocolate in my hand, slowly licking them till they melt, turning and so smudging the yellowing pages with little brown fingers. It was summer, late summer, and the monsoon was about to roll in with good news and I wouldn't be able to sit out in the sun for much longer, and yet I was so riveted in my perch by the possibilities of my forefathers being coerced into evolution, the core of Jupiter being a large diamond and most importantly, the possibility of massless existence, I was incapable of any motion but that of turning the pages and dismissively rubbing clean my hands on my shorts, and all the while while the rain made its intentions clear, came in and drenched me, my curly hair, the sticky palms, my shorts and even flecked the pages I kept protecting. These ideas were, of course, well invested in "mainstream hardcore sci-fi",
but it was after all, my first time. And I do remember it well.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer." -Arthur C. Clarke.

And I never even emailed him! It was so comforting to think he lived only a thousand miles to the south of me, and simply unthinkable that I would never get to meet him. Maybe I will get to see the space elevator. Maybe my children will.

Merci wikipedia for this rare donation:

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I am either terrible at elegiac prose or don't want to apply myself to the task. But maybe, for everyone who has died and is about to die, and is like me, dying:

In travel, I will still find solace. In death, my destination.

And on a personal note : Mark II

2008-03-13T11:48:00.000-06:00

I cannot be put down. I am in fact and in effect, unputdownable. I cannot be stemmed, the wounds I leave cannot be staunched. And yet, I found out that I am quite, au contraire to your and my expectations, very boring and tedious company. They love me after being drawn to me like forbidden fruit and that love-lorn ape, like moths to a bush-fire. And I know, I know, I said because it doesn't look like I will be having sex for a long time, it had become priority number one and my libido was on code black alert(not a pun about how black guys have a better sex life) But anyway, keeping this in mind, I have been reinventing myself. It is a tricky bit, which has me playing the Fool. He is well liked, and so will be me.

I have a great music collection, but hardly anyone in the well defined set of "I would like to have over at home" seems to share my taste or geographical locations. Oh bugger them all.

The point is, I have this constant (actually a bit like a trickle or a faucet that refuses to chill the fuck out) supply of devotees who love me for what I am. But they don't like me for me! (Insert appropriate unlovable unloved teenage girl act) Also, for the fist time in many many years, I don't have people I can point to and say, these people right here, are my best friends forever (I know, I know). I keep breaking up with friends.

I figure I'll soon have enough money to buy new ones, any day now. As soon as the book gets published (and written). I have already spent about two years writing it, it is common sense to expect it to get finished pretty soon. And then I won't need to go out of my way to befriend people. This got to the point where I started to play hard to get to people who I knew deep down don't give a flying fuck about me. But, this is something I have learnt -mostly from sitcoms and movies- isn't true.

So, the re-inventing. For example, I like to give lifts to people walking on long lonely roads. Not because deep down I am a good person. I am a bastard coated bastard with bastard filling. But it is just something to do, just because not many other people will do it. Probably an elitist thing. Like that stopping for traffic signals that I do.

But anyway, I always lie to the lift-ee. It is a fixed routine. I ask him what he does. He goes on for a good part of the journey, with just the right doses of prodding from me. I am after all a great conversationalist. So, when there is no chance that he can dislike me (because everyone wants to be asked about what they do and how they do it), I pause the interview, and he is forced to ask me about what I do.

And here is the clincher. I don't say I'm a novelist! Ha!
Or a satirist. Or an author. Or a philosopher. Or a humanitarian.(Yes I know!).

For the common man(aam aadmi) all these terms are placed in the same set as "bum". So, I use the word "lekhak" which does mean writer, but in a mild, non-threatening sense of the word. And, I pick a newspaper I write for. Usually the Indian Express. Though tonight, I used the Times of India (yes! I know! screw you too!).

And the person doesn't dislike me! Yay!

And I get to be loved for what I am. Oh joy me!

As a result of such endeavors and maneuvering, my sex life has been irrevocably terminated. That show has been canceled. Sure, a lot many pilots were made, and all of them showed a lot of promise in the years to come, but its arrivederci for them now. Maybe I should get married. But, really, I couldn't care less. I don't dislike the asexual me.

And on a personal note.

2008-03-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

The problem with me, I say with a firm conviction this time that this indeed is the crux of the matter, is that I have Judas Priest lined up on the playlist after Joni Mitchell. This is a reasonable enough excuse for me being me, and not a child prodigy who grew up into a billionaire, or in NASA or you know, a published writer. Do not fear dear damsel, by reading this you won't be more distressed, just irked. Not much rhetoric. This one is for me. Here's to looking at me.

Last night, as I was about to sleep, I found my left biceps aching like I had pushed them too far in the gym. Which, as far as I know my own habits, is rather impossible. I haven't been exercising (gym or no gym) for a very long time, which doesn't mean I haven't seen the inside of gyms, admired the metal and the air conditioning and the comfy sofas and sauna for the same period of time. I regularly do that. In fact, it is time for another gym examination session. And after that, the test drive of fancy cars session. I find myself way too predictable these days. Like I have worn in this pair of feet and this particular blob of gray matter. But for some frustrating reason, I don't see myself having sex in a long time. And I know when and where to trust my instincts.

And it says, Nikhil mah boy, you ain't gettin' no tail for at least (content suppressed).

And all I can say is Gah! because I know its probably true.

The trouble is, I just figured this out, that I haven't been on a first date in ages. Actually, and I am quite smug about this, that is the exact number of days of this magnificently long dry spell. I mean, I have had my share of opportunities (even though I stay at home now, and do not socialize as frantically for tail as I used to) I find myself having rudely waking up to the fact that I am so much older now. I need someone to fall back upon. Who won't mind my idiopathic sociopathy.

And that almost resembles the much dreaded shatterproof concept of commitment. I mean before actual contact, I find myself wondering(not fantasizing) about the woman. what is she has bad teeth, can I live with bad teeth all my life? Why, o god, can't I find someone perfect like the scores of pretty models? Aren't there millions of them out there?

And this is pretty much screwing around with my screwing around.

Then on something like a blind date, there is the entire idealizing factor chipping in to make me lose it and the tail. That is so much more than screwy. So if she says she likes linkin park, hip hop or greenday, I am out of there before the waiter can get to me(which isn't that bad a thing). Of course, I still don't see myself "falling" for someone or into her bed if she does like anything but my kind of music and/or literature.

But enough about sex. I have an arm ache and it well, aches. So au revoir. The chronicles of Nikhil remain unfinished. I haven't touched the novelist for anything yet, have I?

Same time next week under the cold shower?

From the road less traveled.

2008-02-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

A something of a plan got us across of 50 kms of scenic beauty and good roads to Mulshi Dam. Impulsiveness and a stray less-read sign dragged us and our bikes to Lonavala on about 70 kms of the road less traveled by. And how!
Location: Somewhere.

The narrator is me. Me is being camera shy.

The stills are here: Album.

There isn't much to describe. The area around the dam was rather arid, so we just kept going on. But then we chance upon this very muddy, well roughed up, decrepit signboard that says something about Lonavala being a possible 52 kilometers down that way. The scenery with the road in between, as it turned out, took about 2 hours to traverse. Probably more. We sort of lost track of time. Gave lifts to three people, out of which one, might have been a ghost because we were supposed to meet him down the road after we finished fooling around with the video chronicling. But a fun tip. Sort of the place you would expect westerns to be shot.

Pointless art.

2008-02-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

What again is it that we are so proud of? Sure we can come up with funny obscenities by combining two or more random but well placed words. But O ye slack jawed troglodytes, why be so smug about it?

There is a clear need to downplay this entire creativity bit everyone is harping on. So we can come out with literature with a few more shocking twists than its predecessors and a few less than its successors. Is this all we have to look forward to?

Satire that combines unpredictability with good ole' leg pulling? Gala gags with ever increasing momentum? Where is the creativity everyone wants to lampoon in their chat shows? Literature is art, and falls cleanly into two categories, the contemporary and popular art, and the art that is ahead or behind its times. The rest does not exist.

The trouble with society is that it fails to have any room for foresight. The individual might, but he will reserve it for his personal contemplation that only serve to drive him away from society. It is so easy to be disgusted with society, it's not even cool anymore. I do hope I am, despite all I have done these last few years, still cool. I really do.

Every bit of this time's futuristic whatnots is dismissed as crude or lauded for its simplicity or appreciated for those times' naivety. I just read that cars are being left on the shelf because they are so twentieth century.

The present is soon fossilized into a phase as soon as that day's sun sets. The only enduring factors remain the very passage of time, and not what the people thought, but the why and how.

So, returning to the matter at hand, why are we still toiling under invisible yokes for no sweat and no gain?

What now? After the thrill is gone?

Care to light a light for me?

On Experience.

2008-02-22T19:45:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should start off with an excuse for the 'why' of the post. So here it is 'blah blah blah'. But experience tells you I have more to say, and 'tis true, I do, and on that very subject of subjective experience.

For this is but an introduction to the problem, I will start with the pleasing ambiguity the term 'experience' usually gives. For the sake of this being a short enough read, I will leave out my conclusions and present only the questions that consume me.

The term as it is thrown about a lot. Far from what it actually was intended to mean, we have the justification of someone's abilities. That because he has seen and does this sort of job before, it makes sense to assume there is a certain degree of reliability we could associate with him. That he would do reasonably better at the task than someone with less of this experience criteria. But how is this learnt? More of the very same experience? But its easy to digress into ranting about how no one ever thinks anymore.

The blah essential to this topic comes from various corners from various schools of thought. To start off, we have the illustrious idealists with whom I would agree the most, but less for their content, and more with their means to ends. I, indeed, have used their stance in my own writing. For, experience, this familiarity I feel with life, tells there indeed exists nothing beyond the realm of our knowledge gathering. How is it our concern if it lies beyond our means to know?

The mind rejects it as implausible but also lets in a little of wiggle room by assuming there can be both the knowable which is finite and comprehensible and the unknowable which is a priori surely there, and ever elusive as it is meant to be so. I suppose this touches religion. Very infectious, I know.

The trouble with this topic is the vast spread of development we can associate with it. Experience, as removed from emotional content, can be set up as the property of the mind, and so completely a mental development. But from what stimuli? What of reflexive movement?

Philosophy like science and mathematics, is not supposed to be restricted to expositions in the past. It is about to be built on the past and not live on in the past. The trouble here, is again with the common misconception about the paranormal and the metaphysical implications that philosophy can draw and which is much more popular than the actual science. And au contraire mon frere, philosophy isn't quite dead. just updating its servers.

There is vast lag between acceptance of everything science and actual work done to understand what it actually means.

Everyone wants to see a definite conclusion to this study, so they can die peacefully. I would want it to, but the vast majority of the work that remains lies in the domain of understanding evidence. And again, experience must tell us, how much we can subject ourselves to before we pass on to well, dead-ness.

And of the usual suspects? What of them? Every occurrence that constitutes an experience, every choice, every rumination about free will, every encounter with our surroundings, our hard to accept reality, having to accept that our life is abut the end result of a constantly iterating time line that does not (au contraire) smile down upon us, the trial and error by which we must survive, the entire acceptance dealio that we constantly live in denial of, there is indeed quite a bit to cope with. So we must take all this nonsense with a pinch of salt?

Experience, this regular acquaintance we have with life, day in day out, is after all what we call living. All we do is attach a verb form to the noun that defines our sentience. And we live.

It is disheartening, yes. But then all life in all its forms is. The experience of life as a collective accusative accumulative entity that grows from all over the place wants us to clearly separate the mental and physical states of the self. This clearly is not sound when compared against the biological evidence we have thrown up about how memories are stored and accessed. One day, it will be able to perfectly map their entire brain, and maybe we can end quite a few speculations then, but until then, we must make do with what we have.

For, we live in very exciting times. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.

Dirty little scribe.

2008-02-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

"'Twas a good day. Billy attacked Sweden and Toby returned from his boy scouts' trip to England. Sometime around the afternoon, I got hungry and ate. Then I slept."

-Anonymous Nordic diary entry.

It might all be about that peaceful easy feeling. But it is easy to get uneasy, distracted and sidetracked by the rest of the world's problems that are removed from you by reasonably big buffers. Maybe it is the romance and the contrast you see that gets you. You're there for your own selfish purposes, untouchable by any of the filth you observe from your perch. And you're free to chronicle life as you want. The most fun part of any newspaper being the caricatures.

But when did this switch in places occur?

Must have been the most subtle social upheavals ever. Or more probably, the sniveling groveling jester came to power without anyone coming to know. It sure looks and feels like one of these success stories his posterity comes out with with alarming frequency.

Or, the most successful sort of them all, armed with all the majicks and mystery our Order could come up with.
"And thusly, the world of religion came to be."

Probably born of the order's unwritten credo, this surely must mark where the change in social strata. From being the ghostwriter of diaries for the lazy you-know-whats to entertainers in courts to proponents of religious and other forms of schism, this set of individuals has done it all.

Such shameless exposition of skill has gone unpunished and how. And now, a handful of millennia down the road, we have a society we can truly and unabashedly be ashamed of. The thrill is gone, and we're like an old teeter-tottering couple hee-hawing in an otherwise calm of longing and despair. I am going on from where I left off last time, about the creativity problem. Because at the depths of the lonesome gravity well, without entertainment, what do we have? There simply isn't a sweeter, slower way to kill yourself.

One day, we'll have enough of quality programming to sit a newborn in front of a pre-decided upon sequence of literature and video and audio and cut out this pointless mucking around in life altogether. Till then, for posterity, we must do our bit.

On another note, I notice how it is so easy to support fundamentalism if you happen to be part of the community it stands to 'better. However fascist its methods might happen to be. But, press the wrong button a bit too much, and you have a poll turning against you. Meanwhile for all its media bashing, Hindutva continues to gather momentum. Ah the underrated and unchronicled sin of hypocrisy.

And, again, there is more evidence of the term 'bourgeois' becoming more of an adjective and less of a noun.

The Creativity Problem

2008-02-17T04:16:00.000-07:00

This one has been making itself at home, and it takes over and presents itself so before I burst with well meaning enthusiasm that is starting clog my neural pathways.

Well, this isn't a problem I would be proud of enough to send off to the Royal Academy of Donnish Inquiry. But then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. It has proven to be a dull Sunday so far, but I'm holding on and taking my chances with this gig I've got. So I leave aside the irrationally rational logic language I've been developing for the book and go on with this extra thinking bit.

Shove off, it says. I refuse to comply.

The creativity problem, says I, rises from a need to be creative, the possibility of genes adapting to decadence, and the new figures demographers have to cope with.

There are figures we must come to terms with. Especially the ones concerning our growing populations. Even if this is not a logistic problem, we can approach it so. The man and material base is rapidly growing at an almost exponential rate, then why is the creativity, which must be the end product, lagging behind so?

Is it investing itself somewhere else? Can there be only a standard and pre-specified number of creative people in any slice of time? What about expansion of that base? I have always felt the creative person reflects the highest and purest manifestation of latent intelligence that we all possess. This is an impression I see no viable challenge to. We do celebrate it, don't we?

Now that Belief has become an optional way of life, we, the inheritors of much laud it above and beyond pretty much everything else. Then why is that so much of what we see is lowly atavistic art?

How much time will it take for us to realize what we're building is hollow infrastructure for an unthankful future that will be stuck with us for a past? How different is our supposedly thoroughbred output to those nameless Chinese who built and died under the Qin? Struggling to erect walls when there isn't much to contain within?

I am inclined to believe a lot of human creativity has survived past the hundreds and thousands of wars, mundane homicides, dangerously well kept vows of celibacy and regular social pistol whipping. Or maybe it hasn't and we're all a confused mass trying to huddle closer to stand-alone sources of creativity for warmth, but are indeed doomed to an eternity of bad art.

Of course this doesn't mean I'm being pompous and not ruffling my own feathers. For me, I am being rather selfish and reworking the work till it is more relaxed and laid back, and less of this "taut" nonsense everyone else seems to appreciate. I am after all, writing for me.

Please stop wasting yourself, get a life, see the world, do something!

Non-fictional Fiction.

2008-02-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

Of the few things I do to fulfill the day's quota of regular procrastination, which includes (but not only) airguitaring, airdrumming, substituting-pen-with-actual-drumsticks-drumming (which is exactly what it sounds like), watching three movies(no more, no less), watching recently acquired TV programmes I happen to be currently fascinated by, wondering what I am to eat, music-ing(which is slightly different from what it sounds like), reading and writing and longing(the three INGs), I have been giving time for extra thought.

It is of course similar to the sort of thing someone (you most probably have met) who will call a Gorky extra-reading. To be fair to me, this condition isn't really a fait accompli as much as it could be, but this supposedly self imposed abstinence is killing me.

To start with, these 24 hours are far too limiting. I could possibly drive myself to do a lot more if I had more time between my kips. But again, it helps me deal with my spells of disconcerting loneliness.

I write furiously, passionately for about 14 minutes on a regular no-frills no-tutus no-umbrellas weekday. On a good weekday with a goodly and long powercut, I write quite a bit while I am trying to doze off. So about half an hour on a good weekday. Of course, this is on white paper with a black pen and not directly into the actual draft (the fourth now). So the Saturday is spent looking for weaker spots I can interject this week's work into. The Christian Sabbath is spent resting and more of this thinking bit I was going on about earlier.

This new psychical upheaval might have been triggered by this series called Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 days. Micheal Palin needs no introduction, Jules Verne needs no introduction, the BBC needs no introduction, but apparently the World certainly does. Notice my choice of words? (In case you didn't, I refer to my using 'apparently' and 'certainly' in the same sentence for the same verb, does.)

Frankly, I do not care much for the city bumpkin, the urban urchin that refuses to grow up because well, there are so many of them. Millions upon millions of the uninspiring masses that grew up into what they are for no one's sake, much less of their own volition. I could write about them, what they do, but it just makes for dry fiction and that is a risk I am not willing to make so early into my 'career'.

Why?

Because there is hardly any individual left in them to write about. I see vitality in them, but the kind you would expect from a huge shoal of fish. Nature dictates a huger whale must swoop in, open massive jaws, and slowly digest them while most of them are still alive. It is like they live to benefit others and die. An immensely generous offer. But it doesn't make for good fiction does it? Maybe a short story, maybe witty satire.

And then I see someone like Michael Palin (please do google and youtube him if you don't know him) and his camera crew set off with some Gujaratis (from Mandvi, a smallish town) from Saudi Arabia to Mumbai in a dhow that can do an average of 5 knots. A journey of something more than a week on a slow radar-less boat with absolutely nothing to do. Sure they tease him in gujarati (like for the gaudy cartoon-ed towel). I caught a bit in gujarati that I doubt he understood. But all in all, an entire week with them, eating their food, doing it the way they did et all.

In his interview afterwards, he mentions he misses that dhow crew and goes on about how that week might have been the best bit of the journey, and that is very heartening. These unassuming men from a small town in Gujarat with all their reservations and idiosyncrasies, who had no idea who this white man was, were able to do what their millions of city bred brethren will never be able to do without some ganja and bar dancers. Behave like individuals and be good company. And this dhow crew warmed the cockles of my heart(however gay it might seem to use this phrase). But there it is.

I would like to exclaim "That is the real India" but we all know it isn't. But this upheaval has removed all my reservations about meeting new people even if all they like to listen to is the lavani.

So, world don't fuck off for the moment. I still have unfinished business with you.

Racism one-oh-one.

2008-02-13T05:21:00.000-07:00

Ah the long overdue post is finally here.

Time for me to swing out those well concealed Omniscient bits of me and wag them at pricks who offend me. Puns intended. Time for them to meet their maker. (Now, that is just bad phrasing)

With their teeny little junk wired to go off prematurely, you suppose they'd just get classified as impotent and be left to rot in the jail where they can get their fix by dropping the soap in the showers all they want. (Damn, I just can't stop, can I?)

May their little masculine bits finally hernia into their closeby and actual recreational areas, and pass out safely so no one will ever know and they can resume cross-dressing after the ritualistic election-inspired media-whoring is done with. Stupid little dung beetles must miss home. Ah, 'tis often said the best jail bait bitch isn't a woman, but bastards with much to prove. I'm sure their oratory rabble-rousing arousing skills should serve them well anyway.

Oh, I suppose I should introduce my objects of interest: the Thackerays and their beasts of burdens. I should not stoop down to such affairs and they shouldn't concern me at all as this should be the concern of the daily waging writing. Creativity optional.

But they just get on my nerves and refuse to get off at their stop. I have little against their kind when they're not in power. But getting to do what they will, having the sympathies of big nosed bastards who refuse to wipe the snot off anywhere but their mama's pallus, and not get arrested for it after creating THIS much scandal and wasting good primetime news slots deserve a lot worse than a pat on the wrist or semi-molten pokers up their botties.

How much time does it take for the majority-minority clash to end once and for all? Do they think they're sacrificing their present for posterity? Immature sons of cheap harlots. Bal Thackeray is nearly ancient now. Can't he grow up for their sake? This can get fucking unbearably pedantic, this rant can. But I won't get into that because if "they" haven't read and heard enough to understand my angst, I'd rather just go on and just abuse them. It is more satisfying.

Screw you Raj Thackeray, Bal Thackeray, various members of the MNS, Shiv Sena and all you other emasculated shits who just so desperately need to belong. May your genes die with you. Seeing as there are only 1400 tigers left in India, I suppose you could get off the news and neuter yourself and all your pets.

Very little creativity required, and I am ashamed to have to stoop to bashing something as (un)popular as regionalism. I suppose I am just a big jealous baby.

But what I cannot stand for is repopularizing stuff like Pan-Aryanism inspired genocide. It is just so not cool. Why is the public so easily swayed to idealizing "stuff" that is so definitely outrageously inappropriate, defiantly naughty and decried as terrible by everyone qualified enough to comment on such matters?

Are they really to be put down as sniveling jealous big babies who hate anti-elitist intellectualism?

Bugger the bourgeois.

(Oh, what a giveaway)

Sinning with Pride.

2008-02-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

I have yawned eight times in the last five minutes. And I have been counting. That's nine.

Truth be told, i have much to be excited about, a lot more to be worried about and yet this attack of lethargy won't give up. Eleven.

There is so much I could tell you. So many interesting incidents or something like my having taken to writing on white paper. Or why I hate some recently married folk. But if you know me, you probably have heard it all, over and over again and I'm surprised to see you here. Twenty.

So anyway, I was having my siesta. And this persistent ringing wakes me up. Persistent ringers and afternoon callers usually mean familiar spirits/folk. Grumble grumble.

It rings again. I get up, pull on my jimihendrixliveatwoodstock T.

Encyclopedia saleswoman sketch and too bad this is true:

- Yes?
- We are doing this project blah blah blah, and I open the door.
- So?
- This is an encyclopedia for ready reference with properly sorted out information that you can have your fingertips. Lots and lots of information. For everyone, from children to adults. Lots of information about everything, facts you simply wouldn't know otherwise but very important for your general knowledge like in quizzes.
- I'm sorry I really really don't need this to tell me what I need to know.
- But there is so much information in here that everyone needs to know.

I wave across the room for her to have a look-see.
- I already have quite a few books.
- Yes, yes I can see. But this is about everything in one small book.
- I have the encyclopedia britannica on the pc.
- Ah yes. But this is new. Just released. With all the new information that you would need.
- I am sorry but I really don't need this sort of reference. I already have all I need.

I walk across and pick up the Blackwell companion to philosophy which is certainly a lot thicker than her book. I smile at her. Later on, I would realize she was pretty in a homely sort of way.

- See?
- What is the book about?
- Philosophy.
- Oh. But see, this is full of all kinds of information.

So I do something I would never do in genteel company.

- I am already a writer. I probably know all your book can possibly offer me.
- How about why January is called that?

And fuck fuck fuck all I can think of is Janus. Which incidentally is the correct answer. I eventually shove her out of the door in spite of the 80% discount she was offering me. It really isn't about the money.

And the damage is already done.

And now, my mind flits back to that recent conversation I had with this Austrian woman and her friend. And the tiresome discussion I had with them on religion.

Towards the end of our multi-hour session, they both pointed out that my stand-alone stance which removes the need for God is simply the sin of Pride.

I mean, I am this writer, with enough fluff stuffed between my ears to fill many discounted encyclopedias and this is what they dare reduce me to?

sigh.

There are so many stories itching to be told and here I am stuck with a lot of discussions without a clear narrative? Am I being too self obsessed after all?

And then there are these days.

2008-01-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

When you wish nothing would call you out of your blanket, and let Procol Harum and your hangover do their bits for you.

It is cold and the mind's gray matter has crystallized into something through which aches pass easily and thoughts reflect off each other.

For once, I long not.

Happy wintery winter days.

May this black marking on white white paper survive past my embarrassing euphoria.

'tis but a flesh wound.

2008-01-22T22:29:00.000-07:00

Up and against the wind, drawing itself out into relief, aided by a persistent pregnant moon, the sheen of a light empty plastic bag flutters by my window and into my insomnia. Another five hours, and I can have an excuse for being awake.

The moon is unreasonably bright tonight. I see my hand stretch out and pull the curtains shut. The action only aids to isolate my distracted consciousness from the world outside. Why should I? A flurry of thoughts bustle up and muscle their way in. Why is it that I will think more of what lies outside if I cannot see?

I close my eyes. The impromptu question session becomes unrelenting. Why is the loss of a sense compensated so? Is this knowledge another sense? Is the justification for its credibility to do with the mind, and the mind alone? Isn’t the knowledge a part of the mind? If I isolate myself and am placed in a tank until I feel weightless, and there is indeed no sensory stimulation at all, would I still have any input to the memory registers?

Is the loss of all senses mean there is nothing but static being played? Alternatively, does the lack of all communication without hope of resuscitation mean I am dead?

Would I still matter to a world I cannot interact with?

-That’s quite enough of that, a voice in my head says.

I obey and get ready to do some more busy work. I yawn, stretch my hands out behind me, lean back dangerously in my chair and try to think productively. My character is hell bent on destroying a lot of this world, and I am stuck with figuring out the how’s and why’s.

This must seem so childish. I mean, if I meet Homer or Virgil or Tolkien, they could have given me pointers. But why destroy an entire world, and bring in a creature older than the known universe to do the job? How isn’t it infinitely wiser too? For Pete’s sakes, why the hell is it feeling peachy? Why does it all feel like a spin off from all the British satire I have seen and read? One big fucking Monty Python sketch?

Sure Tolkien wouldn’t have minded. But it just doesn’t fit if the hierarchy is set to claim Omniscience. Ah, and therein lays the challenge and the reason why I cannot sleep yet. I should have been content with my past lightheaded ambitions.

A lump rustles under the sheets. I am finally hallucinating. The drink does not do this to me, stress does. You see, when I am unduly stressed, I shut down, and sleep. Stupid chair posture I must have. I wonder if these words will make it past my nascent imagination.

It raises its head, frames its pretty face with the blanket, squints two pretty eyes open just a bit and looks at me accusingly for having woken her again. I rest my chin on an elbow and smile. She probably means to bare her pearlies aggressively but all I see is a tired toothy grin. I am not intimidated. Sigh. She is so pretty and for some reason, I do not quite know her. There is a degree of frustrating lack of distinguishing features. I know I probably love her with all my heart because I feel an emptiness in my full stomach and a massive sigh coming on.

A past love? An object of admiration I never did anything about? Could be. Maybe she is what I wanted from all those pretty faces. Ah, who cares. Since when did dreams have colors or lines to fill them in?

The vile temptress turns her face away and into the blanket that smells pleasantly of detergent. She sighs. I sigh.

How can I work like this?

In this dream, I close my eyes and again, I am cast back into narcosis by her sweet concern and images and memories slowly turn themselves over into inspissations of nostalgia. I feel yanked off my high throne and cast into their daily reflections of how I, their past, was doing; whether I ate well, whether I brushed, whether I showered regularly, cut my nails, shaved. Their concern is a sweet necrosis that I allow to set in because it helps my puppets feel pain.

I open my eyes, and she is still there. I must have slumped in my chair or maybe reached the floor by now. Her bare back is bathed in a faint blue light from the monitor. A ribbon ties up her hair, but over her restlessness through the night, it has come undone. Crushed soft dark brown hair is spread irregularly across her flawless back, almost making a fan-shaped barcode. Knowing she would be pissed at me if I didn’t do anything about her hair, I reach over, collect her hair in a loose fist, get the ribbon and tie a loose knot just below her neck.

- Yes, alright, she mumbles exasperatedly and I know she is dreaming of me.

I kiss her nape and move back into my chair. I still cannot snap out of this dream or write. I pick up a book and flip through it. I let a toe wander aimlessly across her warm cleared back. I let it play with the only knot of her dress, pulling it away from her back, flipping it repeatedly until she wakes.

At first, it is a low subaqueous grumbling, and then when I start tugging at the knot, it becomes a low warning growl. She still doesn’t get up and I prod her with my toenails.

She gets up, reaches back, and undoes it.

- Happy? She asks crossly.

- No.

- That’s it. You aren’t writing anymore. Ever. Get back into bed.

- Ah, vile temptress.

- Now, she says and turns her back from me.

I switch off the pc, undress and climb in, and lie down fitting into her zigzag. Her hair smells of something nice. I toss it over neck, interlock fingers and legs, and wait for tide to take me in.

…

Hours later, when I am awake and she is gone, I can still smell her, taste her nape and see the depression she made. I get up from the floor, find the pc still on, and write of her.

‘tis but a flesh wound, but this helps.

Wishy washiness.

2008-01-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

I have been redoing the entire opinion sharing deal.

It's great to take a stand, face the sceptic battery. But it gets morosely pedantic, the entire deal does. And it is hard to draw the line between where I state myself, spread my legs and take a firm stand and where I begin to defend it like a precocious virgin.

Now, as it turns out, everyone knows Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. They're certainly no breakthrough people. But what of the many many others?

The trouble is in their unwillingness to take a stand, be blunt, thick-headed and defend their interpretations of things that be and should be. Sure it means they get ridiculed as time passes by, and the set of improperly justified beliefs but none the less very popular beliefs aka the Scientific Method overtakes them.

But at least they will be applauded for their efforts when people consider the resources offered to them. People will go clappity-clap and name their characters and sons after them.

Now for example, let us take this recent discussion I had with someone on a forum.
She asks, "Does Virgil's 'Aeneid' bear elements of Existentialist philosophy?"

Of course it does if you look closely. All literature is full of it. For Pete's sake, your nearest religious blah-blah text (which in turn is probably great literature) is full of what we could jot down to be existentialist references. And, so this is what I say:

"Now when you say Epicureanism does not forward the case of existentialist philosophy, you are partially correct. But to go on and say the Aeneid, which most certainly came after the multitude of orgies that invested themselves in the roman state, does not rebel against the cause-effect mentality that dominates existentialist thought is well, very silly.

I have nothing against theistic existentialism. But, in oppositions, when you have someone always intervening, looking over you shoulder, and you accepting their presence and obeying them however irrational the commands might be, we're losing the thread completely.

The Aeneid is a vast epic of well, epic proportions. It describes his journey through almost all of the known world. He even goes downstairs to meet his dead dad. Something I find particularly moving. The entire deal can come off as sycophancy especially when you consider the subject matter and how the poem justifies the rights of the then rulers of rome, comparing them to gods and how that is evidence enough to establish a totalitarian theocracy.

But then when you consider his own reflection during his trials, the layers begin to peel off. Revealing his angst for one. I mean he has a good thing going on with Dido, and he is asked to shove off. I mean who wouldn't be pissed. Now that is certainly divine interference of the necessary kind. So, then how are his actions to account for his destiny becomes the question that drives him livid. His role is small, and gets inconsequential after Juno decides its time for fun.

Thusly, the Aeneid is not really an existentialist work because Virgil probably believed in what he wrote. But it can be interpreted against his will as a struggle against the powers that be. It is rather depressing to note his failings."

Now what is wrong with this? Why would I defend this? Because I don't want to give in to the warm tide of wishy-washiness that rises everytime I see arguments.

Again, as a Novelist, I find this taking stands a lot of fun. I can get two or more characters to bash their heads together, put in all my conflicting ideas, disown the unpopular ones, and seek credit and éclat for binging out the intense conflict that lies latent in everyone's psyches. Or something to that effect.

Hehe.

A Café Romance with nuts in it.

2008-01-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Slowly, bashfully, two sets of eyes are lowered. Cheeks blush, coffees are intently glared at. A thin strand of quiet connects the two. Hush, it says, the spell may break. Thus, in a hush, does begin their slow dance.

Cheap Trick with their ‘I want you to want me’ come on. Someone protests a generic protest. Someone offers a generic ‘It’s on random’. With long bony fingers, she cups her big wide mug of cappuccino. A friend passes him a pipe. Their silence reverberates thrilling them. The averted gazes shyly accepting the mutual attraction, and without orchestration, all the eyes concerned simultaneously close. Two eager hearts wave away their unwarranted but well ingrained scepticism. Across the outdoor café’s aroma-heavy air, they feel the yearning for more.

Discomfited by their hushes, unaccommodating friends shake them. Eyes open. Eyes find each other. In a cold trickle, relief pours down their backs. Under her lumpy black sweater, she shivers. They blush and the coffees get glared at again. She cups her coffee and tries to lift it to her lips but fails miserably somewhere in between. Eyeing her through the edges of his eyes, in spite of himself, he smirks and inhales deep from the pipe. Strong minty goodness laden smoke rushes up his airway, congests it, chokes him, and he has no recourse left but to reflex into coughing embarrassingly. She smirks, gently lifts up her coffee, sips from it, and watches over the rim as a friend offers him help by slapping him hard on the back and shoving him onto the table. She grins.

He recovers from the onslaught, sets upon his enthusiastic and well meaning friend and pummels him playfully till he is sure his appraisal has been rehashed. Gaze still averted, glaring at the coffee, he grins a sheepish grin.

With much deliberation, she turns away and presents her profile to him. With the lumpy sweater blotting over any unnecessary imagination, the effect is complete. His heart plummets from the back of his throat to form a lump in his stomach. He slumps back into the cane sofa. Reflexively, he knocks the pipe out of a friend’s hand. He inhales and this slow but frenetic dance slows down for him. The kingdom and the peoples are examined with a dignified sweep of the eyes. They rest on her profile and move on. His friends are going on about the animation industry. Hers are blubbering on about whatever would be likely to excite them so.

Her coffee is almost gone now. He is calmer. She is itching to be stirred up. He shows no signs of stirring up anything. He inhales noisily. The water bubbles up again. She distinctly feels underwhelmed. She sighs at her mind’s ability to go a million miles an hour at every returned gaze.

Someone rather fat moves in between them. They sigh. The tension relaxes, but this thin strand maintaining mutuality and silence survives. Relieved of their visual static, their minds flicker across vast and yet finely rendered images of a possible life together. Earnest, honest, intrusive questions spring up unbidden. They are content. The two against the world alliance slowly, firmly raises itself from the ashes of lost loves. The answers they find are much too encouraging for the minds to think otherwise. The sizing up, the psyches they build up of each other cannot be blamed. They, without reproof, find what they look for.

Now, for the approach. The breaking of this much too satisfying silence. Their minds drum up a tattoo they are sure they must follow. It is about rhythm. About soul.

The fat person is invited by someone to sit at the table between them. His pants are far too tight. The unmentionables leave no breathing space. He lets his feet sprawl out beyond his table. A waiter trips on one, regains his balance, sees the tray and its contents fly beyond him and mutters a justified obscenity, ‘Oh toodles’.

Most of the café is transfixed by the flight path. A glass of slush lands safely in a potted plant. Some cold cocoa splatters out of its plastic container. Ice cream leisurely slops down onto the cobbled floor. But, with some fortunate play of physics, some café latte and assorted nuts accompany each other to land in and on the bosom of a rather well bosomed young woman. What ensued was fascinating and riveting. Within eyeshot, only one pair of eyes kept away from this frantic and less than subtle struggle against consumables. She looked at him, his expression, his lowered jaw and sighed again. The spell was broken. It was done with. Over.

She pays for everyone at her table, nudges them out of their somnolence and exits with them.

He watches her go. He knows what happened. He winces. Another night of keeping awake with what ifs. Mental braces must be up quickly, before he lapses into self loathing. But the chain of thought has already been acknowledged. Now all he was to do was let it pour out and away. It will eat away for a day, his friends would notice, take him out and a similar dance could begin again.

Of the many what ifs the semi-crazed mind throws around, one sticks, lodges itself. He swipes a small white handkerchief from a friend.

He is astir.

Happy Birthday to me.

2008-01-14T01:00:00.000-07:00

Another year rolls by. One digit changes. Apparently, I am happier.

With thunderous applause, dies does this soul. The floor is yanked away from under my feet. I sink back into this chair. I am no longer just imagining things. I am not soused. Miserable. Hurt. Alone.

Lonely? Almost.

I ought to be soused. That is the order of things. Me soused, my mind pickled, the soul sloshed. Ready to kick the bucket on a moment’s notice. Ready to do drastic things that would make the world remember me as one who did drastic unpredictable things at a moment’s notice when sloshed. But what’s the point?

I’m not famous enough to matter.

I have spent the last few years being Mighty. Hard to get. Hard to please. A selfish, arrogant prick trying very hard to not to be proven ignorant. I go on about how love drives the world, and semen is the lubrication. But frankly, I am just about miserable enough to play this part.

I was different. Special. Enough to drive and shoo away anyone who tried to get close. How long does physical intimacy last without the yearning for more? Flaring into relevance, getting sunk, why should it matter when I don't? How long did the flocks take to scatter?

Sigh.

Another year without a threesome. Damn cheeky monkeys.

I hope someone comes and lifts me out of the depression I make in the velvet goodness of the carpet. Let this not be my grave.

My limbs ache.

I yearn for my lost love(s) to return. Not as much for them as for me.

I cannot go on without a muse. Heartless gravity, let up my bum. I thinks I has a belly. Fuck.

I am stuck.

Something strange cometh my way.

2008-01-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

I could go on about how I have done what it is I have done. Why I do such things. Why when I smile, two rather sharp incisors deem it fit to poke out. Something else has come up. I reckon it will keep me up at nights.

A strange beast approacheth. It bringeth promise of something funky. I feeleth a warming comforting yayness.

The wind changes course. (That’s what she said).

Discovering my incomprehensible genius, au revoir. I will stop poring over texts and complete my own treatise.

Welcome plebian philistinity.

Less Pointless Dialogue.

2007-12-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

Alex: Sure there are better things to do on a day like today.

Alexandra: A Tuesday?

Alex: No, Christmas.

Alexandra: Oh.

Alex: Now what is it again that we were created for?

Alexandra: Well, he’s just had his coffee, so, probably poop and boob jokes.

Alex: Again?

Alexandra: Again. Unless you factor in the fact that he’s been kept away from this crappy blog for nearly a month and a half. Maybe a confession? Of sorts?

Alex: Gay. Gay. Gay.

Alexandra: He’s not gay.

Alex: And how would you know?

Alexandra: Forget it, I’m not putting up with a gay radar joke. O great one, get on with the dialogue?

Alex: Wait, I see something.

Alexandra: Psychic? He, the great merciless one, made you psychic?

Alex: Spiderman!

Alexandra: Typical. Now get one with it will you? What do you sense?

Alex: See.

Alexandra: No, you see animated activity of both animate and inanimate objects. Any correlation with either must be sensed and believed in.

Alex: Do go on. And are you like Socrates?

Alexandra: He intends me to go on. I sense that. And yes, I suppose so. The point here, again, is that we cannot trust anything but ourselves.

Alex: Our perception of things as they are? What if the perception itself is flawed here?

Alexandra: See, even in medical problems and problems of the psyche, and even though the image is disturbing, it is our own perception. Something unique. Sort of a wall we can back up against and see how the world is rendered for us by external agents.

Alex: What external agents? Is the body not part of the psyche? Can we blame the body for restraining the mind and so on?

Alexandra: The body is our housing. Electric discharges across the neuron interconnections are repetitive iterations that help us think. It is a very fast process, but involving quite a bit of checking and iterative looping, It must be complex, but we all know how a simple adding machine operates on the very same principles. Why, I suppose evolution was no different.

Alex: So this systema nervosum is an essential host, but no more? Is the mind a virus that infests itself in meat?

Alexandra: Yes, perhaps all sentience is a virus feeding off a host. But then in aid of what?

Alex: See? This is exactly the kind of question which leads to the setup of foundationalism. Of course there is nothing with foundationalism. But, essentially putting up walls and no-fly zones makes all philosophical debate taxing. How can the world be defined if the neck is pulled back and yoked? Side blinds to see nothing but the beaten track? Ah, religion has much to answer for.

Alexandra: But can you blame them? Reasoning things out for yourself is a lot like re-inventing the wheel. Plus, you lose conviction in all purpose. Reason swallows its own tail, you mistrust everyone, lead a lonely life, refuse anything more than physical intimacy. Plus, you start starry eyed only to end up glassy eyed, dejected and defeated, day after day, night after night. Denying axioms, you realize, is just as bad as accepting them. Where is reason? Rationality? Mediocre theorizing and prophesying soon take over normal friendly dialogue. The background is always a debate which leads nowhere, but is all-consuming all the same. How can everyone agree to that? There simply must be something we can lean on. Religion is essentially a simple-minded backbone for governance. And it pains me how many of us would actually subscribe to it just because it is comforting and the rest seem to be happy about it.

Alex: Enough about religion though. Do we really have a suitable substitute to religion? I mean, if this turmoil we go through were made public, would anyone work beyond instead of around it? Would science have got us through to such a brave and beautiful world? Maybe our mental faculties are still much to impotent for a more that a few desire. Isn’t all life better off with our progress?

Alexandra: Would you go on and assume sentience and life are the same?

Alex: Maybe?

Alexandra: We are part of the set called sentience? Yes?

Alex: Yes. What’s your point?

Alexandra: Ah, what we have here is white superiority on a grander scale. We probably inhabit a microcosm of the entire universe. Again, it is probably limited to somewhere in between the macroscopic and microscopic view. Each sides of the scale extending into the distance. And we presume all life is sentient life? And that there is no other kind? With no clear purpose and a malformed intent, how are we any different from any machine we make? May it be the wheel or the saddle. Life is a universal cloak that shields us from non-existence.

Alex: You keep making less sense. But then, what sense do you make to me at all?

Alexandra: All you have is an infection of sentience and an inflection to imagine.

Alex: How do you know so much more?

Alexandra: I know nothing. I imagine I do. It is called having justified beliefs. At least I imagine I have some justification I can hop on before my own scepticism makes it too warm. Then I jump onto another.

Alex: Did the greatly potent One tell you all this?

Alexandra: Maybe. But how can I trust him?

Alex: You mean to say you and Him?

Alexandra: Well no, He doesn’t like wide bottomed girls.

In the shade.

2007-10-26T07:05:00.000-06:00

I. I always like to start off with an I. Or me, or I have or I have been or I did, or I wish.

O I! May my odes to you never cease to be anything less than completely self-indulgent. Oh I love myself so much. I will now make a mental note to I-self: I must try and write odes to the overwhelmingly awesomely fantastically superb I. I have also decided to not jump through any more hoops. Unless of course, I want to, and I am sure it will be a lot more fun than deciding not to. I am also noting how Ms. Word is no longer caring about my horrible grammar. I must be the One and/or God, either works for I just fine.

Now because I am the One (chosen or not) and/or God (worshipped or not), there must be little reason to improve myself. But what I see in my mirror is a distressed god. Nothing good can come of further distressing a god. Maybe it is because I is bored with all creation. Maybe because it is lonely at the top. It does not matter. To give oneself a purpose is very important. The illness that comes with boredom is known to cause homicidal urges. So, I will churn out crap like this to keep myself from homicidal solutions for this pest problem.

And because I am this unimaginative little bugger, another pythonesque sketch is called for.

Narrator: There is nothing like a typical man. You have a typical druggist and tobacconist. You have your typical heartthrob, you have your typical man in tights, you have your typical middle aged homicidal maniac, you have your typical barkeeper, you have your typical trapeze artist, and perhaps your typical gimp. But there is no typical guy you can expect to react to circumstances from an averaged out response from three billion or so males. Not that it is quite impossible to achieve this, what with the mortality rates and consequent birth rates in some countries. You see, when we go on about life, we go on about it with the premise that we know all about it there is to know. Therefore, what we see of life is a preset of our own imagination. This is being unfair to our imagination, yes, perhaps so. But given our hyperactive imaginations and the few actual conversations we make, ours is a very sheltered existence. And yet, we would be hard to move from our self erected pedestal. You see, the problem with us as a race of “I think so I am” is very simple. We think too much. We get caught up in our reveries and inner monologues much too often to notice life; even if our reveries are unimaginative enough to be about life itself. What exactly am I trying to prove here? Man needs to think less, and shag a lot more. Now since I am not your typical man, much less your typical narrator, I will not stand in the corner to wait for my cues and deliver cheesy lines to buff up the acting skills of the twats appearing in this sketch. Following my own advice, I will now walk into a typical whorehouse in my quest for a decent shag.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Why am I to be called that? My name is Dennis.

Unreasonably terrible shag: At least you’re not being called this, or being made to wear a tutu in this weather. Now shut up and ask him what he wants.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Well? What do you want?

Narrator: Now this you what may call a typical whorehouse, with typical occupants. Nothing out of the ordinary. But even if there were something terribly wrong, we could still call it a whorehouse because of what it means to us in our bi-dimensional sketch. It is wrong to assume the backstory is the same as the other hundreds that nestle by our streets, in our places of worship, or in our backyards. Still it is probably true.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Erm, mister, could you hurry up? I have to get back home and trash my children and do my share by ignoring the wife.

Narrator: Oh great, a neo-nazi whorehouse. Where are the jewish, or for that matter, non-Caucasian whores? Are they kept in the back with your panzers and gypsy children?

Fat ugly middle aged woman: I am not getting paid enough to pretend I care.

Narrator: I’d like a prostitute please.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Prostitute, eh? Is that what you call it? Would sir like some champagne and caviar with it? Or would this purchase be on the go?

Reasonably good shag: I’m available.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: You mean you’re up for whatever. I don’t trust these narrator types. They think too much. You go along Bob.

Unreasonably terrible shag: Alright.

Director: Her name is an unreasonably terrible shag.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Not in my script it isn’t. Terrible for the business. Makes no sense either. A whore should be called by her real name.

Narrator: I’d still rather have her.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Why?

Narrator: Well mainly because this one is a dude, and the one yonder isn’t.

Reasonably good shag: Is that a sexist jibe?

Narrator: Well yes. But I’d rather pay to shag you.

Reasonably good shag: Oh they’re all the same. What does a girl have to do to be accepted? Who must I sleep with now?

Narrator: I’d be happy to do the needful.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: No you won’t.

Narrator: Yes I will.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: No you won’t.

Narrator: Yes I will.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Oh shut up.

Narrator: No you shut up.

Policeman: What’s all this then.

Everyone: Hey, its superman!

Policeman: No I’m not.

Everyone: Oh yes you are.

Policeman: Stop that stop that.

Everyone: You stop that.

Policeman: Now, what seems to be the officer, problem?

Narrator: Are you soused?

Unreasonably terrible shag: Yes he is. And he looks like John Cleese. He is John Cleese!

Policeman: Oh I get that a lot. I moonlight as a bicycle repairman though.

Everyone: Our hero!

Reasonably good shag: This typical narrator here, is a sexist.

Narrator: No I’m not.

Everyone else: Oh yes you are.

Policeman: I think you look like one of them, yes. Hands above your head mister. Lie down on the floor slowly, spread your legs and go ‘ooh oooh aaah’.

Narrator: This is uncalled for.

Policeman: Are you questioning my discretion?

Narrator: No I’m not.

Policeman: Are you questioning the badge?

Narrator: No. Look now, all I want is a good shag.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Well so does everyone here.

Policeman: Madam, please keep quiet. I am trying to take down a felon here. Now then, you are questioning the State?

Narrator: No.

Policeman: Are you questioning the very slight raise in my pay over the last decade?

Narrator: This is a terrible sketch.

Fat ugly middle aged woman: Ha! There is your confession. Now shoot the little pig. Make him squeal.

Policeman: We need a judge right away. This is an emergency.

Unreasonably terrible shag: Erm, there is one resting in my room. Be careful, he’s still bleeding.

Man on the telly: Next up is the fall catalogue from Victoria’s secret, and after that, the reporter who made a bet -when she was sloshed at last night’s orgy at the zoo- to bare it all on national telly.

Everyone: Oooh!

A fey and fell Conquistador is come.

2007-10-19T10:33:00.000-06:00

Extract No. 2

2007-10-18T14:02:00.000-06:00

The end of a world is a remarkable and exciting event. Sometimes it may go on and be remarkably exciting.

Excitement, contrary to popular belief, is quantifiable, and so the incumbent question of ‘how much exactly’ can be answered. Rather lengthy discussions were carried out in the hallowed halls of Applied Emotive Philosophy. The AEP has been in the news for some time now. Why it has been the subject of public criticism is hard to say. It might have started with the expected lull in their hallowed halls meant for discussions, debate, rebuttals, and other kinds of counterproductive nonsense. The calm was disheartening, and on weekends, the place was altruistically let out as an extra smoking parlour for the children who were shooed away from the recreational centre. The parents hurrahed and the children wept silent tears of joy.

Before their tears could dry up, the authorities that be –who they might be is still in question (mainly for certain crimes of passion) - decreed that this could not go on. Interesting and contemporary topics were introduced. The idea was to cram in a show in quasi-primetime highlighting the need for an AEP in modern society. The public grew very excited for no particular fault of their own. A solution to all their problems was at hand, and the harbinger of such a doom was something that sounded comfortably close to animals they had seen playing with faeces in zoos. A reasonable level of interest was aroused, and very soon everyone had an opinion about the matter.

At such a point, the AEP presented a sample of their merchandise. It was a simple computation and fairly accurate prediction of some trivial detail related to the dating ritual. The male of their species could now safely guess at how far he would get depending on the colour of his counterpart’s undergarments. This was worked upon in all seriousness by trained professionals who had previously spent much of their lives making up and solving complex questions pertaining to free will. They did a very good job, and sacrificing their personal lives for those of others made them heroes. So, most of them quit, and became lion tamers.

Their research made some people very unhappy. But, the heavy cavalry of the meddlesome media arrived at the scene, and People Against Undergarment Prediction or PAUP grew famous for their random acts of random and senseless arson. They accused AEP for sabotaging a very large number of relationships. Predictable event-chains sprung into action in relationships where at least one of the partners had read AEP’s baby. He said, she said, he retaliated, she fumed, he whined, and she shot. A massive tort was launched and won, and AEP was now on its last legs.

At such a time, a lone researcher still loyal to AEP took upon himself to disambiguate all this once and for all, put the subject to rest, redeem AEP’s honour, and become famous. He toiled night and day, from dusk to dawn, and in other time periods expressed by idioms we will not use here. The expense involved was very great, and he had to consume very large quantities of very expensive alcohol. He consequently died when his liver malfunctioned. His son, who professionally circulated pamphlets of self-composed second grade porn literature to pre-school children so they could ask their parents what this funny word meant, came across his father’s work. He was the output of a decade of struggle against sheer tedium.

On the subject of excitement, he had much to say. Excitement is a derivative of a baser emotion, happiness. Happiness is at the very base, and can be used to derive almost everything else. A person can be happy or unhappy, he can be subjected to it and also cause it. It can be deducted, added to, multiplied with, divided amongst a group, and though the cause maybe different, the effect for a particular race is always the same. The degrees of abstraction, complexity, sanity, salaciousness, thick-headedness and other attributes that determine the mark up price of a mind can be attributed to happiness.

Thus, this entire happiness deal, he reasons, is a very able element. The units are subject to change from race to race. For simplicity’s sake, we will use the human race.

Consider for example any given human male whispering sweet nothings into the ears of his potential partner. He asks the potential partner just exactly how much they love him. The potential partner will gesticulate with their hands to show exactly how much. The space between the paralleled palms is the unit of love. This is a very accurate approximation of the actual unit, and because this is a very imprecise science, no more effort is put into finding a very accurate value.

The sweet nothing-ing male’s happiness then can be measured by the effort he puts into his ensuant hug. Then, his excitement can be measured by his rise in happiness upon his rhapsodic discovery of the sudden vaporization of his potential partner’s clothing. The relation of happiness to excitement is not unlike that of velocity to acceleration.

The end of any world is thus exciting, and quantifiably so. However, just how remarkably exciting someone might find it to be, is in fact relative to their maximum probable position at that particular point of time. This is better explained by the following simulated conversations between two individuals A and B placed near each other who simultaneously observe a planet called Reesta end, and decide to gossip about it.

A, B and Reesta are in an inner rim galaxy:

A: Hey, see that?

B: Yeah?

A: That was probably that lame-ass planet Reesta going boom.

B: So? Heard it was a really low budget affair.

A: Yeah, with it being a seventh-generation one. Who even cares to repopulate it every time? By the way, are you sleeping with your gym instructor, yet? I gave her a go, and so did about a million of us. Man, she is still so hot.

Now, an outer rim placed A and B and Reesta:

A: Hey, see that?

B: Yeah! That was so awesome man!

A: Man! That was some decent party Reesta got!

B: Yeah, huge budget it had too. Heard there were beasts custom- crafted especially for the event. That rocks, man! Die Hard!

A: Die Hard! Oh by the way, are you sleeping with your gym instructor, yet? A few of us boys have nailed her, and she is still so damn hot!

Now, A and B placed on Reesta, moments before complete annihilation:

A: Hey comrade, hear that?

B: Yes, that is indeed the sound of inevitability. You know what is the only inevitable event in any mortal individual’s life?

A: Death? Yes, I know. Ah well, very soon we all will be one. One gigantic sentient entity; and we will no longer be parts it munificently allows partial autonomy.

B: Yes, yes I know that. But, I do wish I could strangulate that suicidal bastard with his own bazooka. Why did he have to kill her too?

A: Your gym instructor? Why? What difference does it make now? You would have had to woo her. Although, the normal wooing period is slashed by quite a bit in such scenarios, you would still be requiring more time than you two have. I made love to her, and am happy with the memory. For the memory is more important and satisfying than the act itself. But, you wouldn’t have had time to do it, and find time to reflect on your accomplishment too. However aroused women may get during such times, it is never a good decision to lose our heads and copulate like lesser organisms guided solely by their baser instincts. Perhaps, instead you need to spend these last moments in gratitude for all that you have been presented with. Allow only calm thoughts to enter your mind, and a catharsis you must perform.

The interesting part in this last scenario is that B kills A before more homicidal maniacs or the end of the Reesta world can get at him. There certainly are extremities in the psyches observed. Perhaps facing your death is traumatic, and maybe this causes the sudden outbursts of rage, panic and very strange confessions.

An attempt must be made to draw the right conclusions from the given simulated conversations. One must not draw irrelevant conclusions like those establishing outright falsities about gym instructors, as a breed, of being salacious and easy game. But given the extrapolations of AEP’s genius, this may very well be so.

End of world events occur fairly regularly, and are celebrated with appropriate degrees of pomp and festivities. Since, every second, a few thousand sentient worlds cease to exist, it is difficult to keep track. ON does manage to record such events, and only unnatural spikes of distress are reported to and investigated by the elders. The Traders are spread out thinly across all the axes; and it thus impossible for them to give joyous send-offs for every such event, they tend to concentrate on newer systems which have not received their share of attention. This little blue planet was one such planet. However, their interest was held by something else about it, something quite less trivial than the celestial attention due to it.

*End of extract*

Be nice or I will sell you.

Extract No. 1

2007-10-14T05:23:00.000-06:00

“There. You did it again you son of a cow.”

“A son of a cow? A calf?”

There is no point in arguing with the gentleman in question. He does not understand the subtleties of non-archaic dialogue. It must be simplistically real and taken at the face value to be understood well enough. That is what he wants me to believe anyway. He is dressed peasant-like and has the bearing of a marquis. Why must I recognize his claims? My sickness extends a rough hand down my throat and playfully squeezes my liver. I curse him again, perhaps to relieve the pain. The bed creaks under my weight as I shift to adjust myself to sit a bit more upright. He has taken upon himself to sit on the only chair, and I fear he will descend into condescension if I fail to see eye to eye with him as we speak.

“A son of a she-dog? A pup? Now how is that even mildly offensive? I fear you no longer wish to make sense.”

He graciously takes another swig at a bottle I am certain I did not offer. It all feels like a bad dream. While he takes his time to swill down my last bottle of medicine, I reflect back to why he seems more in character this time around. Being more in character does promote his authenticity, but since when is anything a man who professionally raves about the end of the world considered bona fide? I suppose there ought to be a nice authentic list of details to look out for. As well as I can see in my delirium, there are no horns, no goat legs, no tails, and because the only light comes from behind him, I cannot really see his face. Those vital details that might have given way such a person are obscured, and I curse the bulb.

“Say, do you believe in God?” I ask him before he gets around to lighting that obnoxious cigar again. I have not been listening to him, nor do I care for what he might have to say. My mental illness might have caught up with me, and I am only poking around looking for some fun, a harmless enough pursuit. I have been tethered down so I cannot cause more harm than I already have. Mine has been a good run, and contrary to popular belief, I imagine I had a lot of fun. I might be fried soon, and then I will know for sure.

“Are you serious?” He casts off the threadbare shawl, and walks over to the only window. The hands are coarse, and covered in lesions the kind only hard labor can gift. His face is not really as hard and chiseled as I expected. He looks like someone’s benign uncle who always brings the right gifts. The skin is melted away by alcohol and consumption. His breathing is slightly labored and he looks a lot closer to the Lord than I do. His hands grasp the bars, and the knuckles tighten as they try to rend the bars apart. He is silent, and possibly expects an answer from me. His short beard is speckled with white and grey, and that being a good enough judge as any, I assume his raiment cannot be more than fifty years old.

“Well I don’t suppose I could really believe you are anything more than the result of bits of my crazed imagination tearing away from my mind, but my question is a question anyway. I suppose I address it to myself.”

“My kind sir,” he begins with much magnanimity, “It is up to you to decide what is real and what might be shadow play of a tense intelligent imagination. I am not being provocatively malignant am I? Your own folk may kill you before I decide to act on my feelings for you. As for your imagination, I trust you know I appear only because you hope I am more than a product of your eschatological fascinations. I suppose if I were indeed part of a long drawn out nightmare, you could wish me away just like you could wish away your tethers, this room, and the jury who will decide your fate. Maybe you should try it before it is too late. Your mind can kill itself just as effectively as a couple of man-length spears.”

I close my eyes, scrunch them shut real hard, dig my nails into the soft skin of my palms till I am sure I feel the requisite amount of pain, and wish it all away. Surprisingly it fails to work, and I catch him at it again. There, he smirked again. I point it out to him again with another dose of illicit verbiage.

“An illegitimate child? No, not really. There has to be a genitor to make me a worthy candidate to your claim. But if I do agree to having one, then it would prove I am a fallen angel, and there is a point of creation we can date all this back to. Now why should I give you the satisfaction of knowing the answer to the chicken and egg problem? Even though you still suppose this is all about bits of your systema nervosum acting up. Why you would trust your fellows to determine how far along you have come down the insanity path is beyond me. On one hand you refuse their touch and shun them for all your life, and on the other hand you accept it as your very own moral duty to relate to what some of them have written in their holy texts and agree to do their bidding by massacring men and women the allegedly pious group calls infidels? How are you thinking for yourself and what self esteem can you possibly salvage out of this mess. Oh now I really want to know: do you believe in God and who are you?”

The ache now shifts to my right side, and I squirm as the belt straddles not my waist but a little higher and exactly where it would help my illness hurt me better. There is no point in asking where we are all off to. Our building is still hurtling through the cosmos, and while I am stuck here, the rest of the hastily assembled crew is scurrying around trying to be useful. Though the door to my cell is shut, I can hear them shuffling along like the stunted apes they should have remained. Their having descended from the trees is at fault and I consider it sacrilegious. Considering normal evolutionary behavior like that of the sharks and saltwater crocodiles sacred makes it all the easier to massacre these monstrosities. My guest is getting impatient, or at least I hope he is.

“Let us move on from those subjects for the time being? To the undiscerning eye we would seem kindred spirits, yes?’

“Because we happen to inhabit similar bipedal structures?”

“Surely you would expect the undiscerning eye to know a little better? It would fear us, and see us in the same light it would see a saltwater crocodile.”

“I see what you are pointing at. Your race is not very different from mine. I would go on to say all sentient life is pretty much the same. This is something which makes the saltwater crocodile practically your cousins. More so because you come from the same small blue planet. Your being mortal makes it simpler to fear and be fearful. Mortality may not be such a prime mover in other less existence-challenged races, but the fear of something remains. It gives a purpose to live, and paves the road to much evil. But I would still like to know if you do believe in a God.”

I sigh, and shift myself a little more to get a bit more upright and try to pull on a straight face.

“For all I know, you might just as well be this God, testing my faith and ascertaining whether deep down I am still of good virtue after I tried to blow up a packed discotheque. I still fail to see why there must be a jury collected to decide my fate after I failed? Is the intent enough to go on to condemn a man?”

“Ah just because you encounter fallen angel numero uno, you suppose a God exists? Does all evil need a source? For all you know, I might be the chief scapegoat of a million billion cultures. Bless the insufferably pious ones. They find it the easiest to shirk all responsibility for their actions and claim and blame an uncontestable foreign hand. Now would you like to hear a nice story?”

“No.”

“Once upon a time, there was this wise old warlord who periodically slaughtered those he deigned to call his enemies. He would pick out a new neighboring village every month and unleash his gracious despisal upon its inhabitants. The raid would be conducted in a very orderly and unchanged fashion. The start would be at the eve of the first day of a new month, when he would consult his mystic. The office of the mystic was much sought after, and was gifted only once a year. After the tenure offered, the mystic would be devoured by the warlord’s dogs. But the benefits of the office were too great to let this devouring bit be a dampener on the applicant’s spirits. The dogs were considered sacred, and they were the only guards the wise warlord would accept. Whether this was a lesson learnt the hard way, we cannot say. But as is customary, there a-spread great rumors about the grandness of these dogs, and they were much admired as they escorted their lord without leashes and in perfect mien. The old man had no vices, and certainly took no more wives than was required. The only source of amusement was the ritual sacking and plundering he commissioned his armies to conduct.

“The mystic that decided the inevitable fate of the entire valley was chosen by a mysterious ritual, kept secret from the public ear, from a group of many many voluntary candidates. The worthy prospects were herded into a stable where the elimination would take place. A pack of six or so rabid wolves, painstakingly captured from the wild and starved for the auspicious day, would be let loose on the former group. Since the roof was domed, with little room to run around and hope to tire the wolves and there being no weapons placed to defend themselves with, a mad scramble would ensue for the metal pole connecting the centre of the dome and the ground directly beneath it. What they failed to realize in time was that a hungry and angry pack of wolves can use their haunches to launch their jaws high enough to drag them down. They also failed to note the weight of the rest of their party clinging to their heels would be heavy enough to drag them down a smooth metal pole when all they had to latch onto it were clammy hands and sweaty torsos. The new Mystic was not the last one left on the pole. Everyone on the pole was eventually devoured or died from being bitten by the rabid jaws. The new Mystic was the one who wondered if the door he had just come in through was still open, and acted on his urge to find out.”

“Is it moral of the story time yet? Oh do go on, my many illnesses cause me to occasionally take in deep breaths through my oral fissure. This has been terribly interesting so far.”

“I expect it to be. Now as the wise warlord’s life drew to its twilight years, he gradually became less interested in worldly affairs, and as it seemed to his people, grew softy and yielding. The harem was disbanded, some slaves were granted full pardon for the crimes of their birth, the temple’s stash of dancing girls was replenished less frequently, and much to the chagrin of the sizable army, the sacking of new villages was not allowed. The commanders had to roll a ceremonial dice to pick an already savaged village to re-savage. This was much less fun than ravishing new villages. Details of the ritual began to circulate, and the number of applicants ready to let themselves to be devoured by the sacred dogs diminished. It had dawned on the people that the rabid wolves must be the sacred dogs and they congratulated each other for being this clever.

“Revolution is the simplest solution to most socio-economic ailments. The economy suffered greatly, and its inhabitants needed their share of hedonism to survive. The problem reached crisis levels soon enough. Fortune smiled on them soon enough, and with popular support, the son came to his own by his rapier. The old man was all of two and fifty years of age. He died in the comfort of his bed with his family by his side. The dogs on the other hand were unfairly tried by a jury not of their peers. Then came the emasculations, eviscerations, beheading, and quartering in a packed amphitheatre. Unjust judgment for a pack of dogs who were bidden to consume large quantities of human flesh which is much less delectable than humans suppose. Now who do you suppose were the personae non grata?”

I close my eyes to show I care very little for whoever the personae non grata might be. As luck would have it, our glazed window passes by a red giant. A searing red flashed across my closed eyelids. My eyes open and I am forced to look upon his countenance yet again. Before I can turn away haughtily, his expression latches onto me, and I am held helpless by his gaze. The details melt away; the receding hairline, the scar on his left cheek, the pudgy nose, and the double chin relax and gently and convincingly slide out of focus. I am convinced this is not really happening because those details probably never existed. I see two eyes, and the semblance of a face they must be attached to. The room and my tethers lose meaning, and my redoubtable rationality stumbles as it tries to run forward to try and explain what I see. I struggle to close my eyes and not see any more.

There is a hunger, the ravishing lust of want. Impermissible, wanton hunger for my answer and everything I have to offer. The hunger in his eyes is far too great to resist, and I give in. There can be no argument strong enough to stand up to this foe. This unchecked and most certainly unsanctioned desire cannot be contended with. It cannot ebb away with time and of that fact it is confident and resolute. More, more, more- it screams out of his wide eyed stare. The desire is to sate itself in the largest orgasm possible, and to know what joy there is in to have it, and reject it for even greater self gratification. And I know he means to devour me; all that is me, my past and the future. What makes me what I am, what made me what I am. His desire is perfectly rational, and I sink in and wish to scream out aloud that he may use me, that he may devour me. No words come out because he already devoured that bit of what could have been me. My permission to acknowledge my self no longer means much, for he has devoured me.

It is Him.

“Do you see what I see?” His eyes ask to humor my last vestiges of will.

“Yes.”

The inevitable might have been unforeseeable but I will not bow down to his might while he toys with me, and accept his subordination while he tells me this excruciating foreplay must go on.

“And what did the new warlord do?” I ask though the effort pains me more than my side.

He smiles, and a familiar voice replies while his eyes hold me in a flicker-less gaze, “With all the wisdom of his five and ten years, he had his brothers killed, and new dogs bred. But coming to the joie de vivre which is vital to all life, the new and wise lord insisted on making his subjects pay for their pleasures. The rich were happier, but this time, the slaves killed the young lord as he was being bathed, and it dawned on them that their last lord had been wiser. They chose to become a democracy, and they each chose to abide by their own personal laws. And in the absence of a Lord, they became Lords, each and every one of them. Soon, in the absence of Gods, they became Gods. In the prime of their invulnerability, they were cut down by a neighboring warlord’s pillaging goons. Now would you ask me the moral of the story, yes?”

“Well, your telling ambiguous tales about my race does not prove much that would aid you in your quest, whatever it might be. What it does prove is that you have too much time on your hands, and too dry an imagination to carry on intelligent discourse without trickery. Your notion of freedom is flawed, and your desires do not reflect ours. Life and sentience do not wish for ever more, and even if you did exist, you would fail to surprise us. Cruelty, fraud, lies, and violence are not new to us, and you certainly cannot claim credit to all we have ever accomplished. Violence and misery are just two facets to our industrious souls. We do not live in abject poverty because we have to. We wish it, and you are but the wind that blows past us telling us it must not be so. A shallow whisperer of words is all you will ever be. The tyranny of a few does not define what we are. They chose cruelty, and they chose to wield their power as they did. Degrade my kind not. What Will do you have, except an urge to somehow and anyhow feed your hunger? We can starve ourselves, but you are the shark that must never stop swimming, the ill wind that must never stop blowing to keep itself in existence. Know this, a want for more does not make a mind. What is more, I still believe you to be no more than a passive thought stream that got pushed into my dreams by my dilapidating weakness! Now begone fiend, for if I do not acknowledge you, what power do you have over me?”

“Child, it is time to wake. I will come again. Soon.”

A rather large pail of water is emptied over me, and I wake drenched and find myself soiled by my recent unhappiness. The soirée around me seems unhappy about something too. But, my heart brimmeth over with love for them and a newfound lust for life.

And, I, Satan, burst into tears.

*End Of Extract No. 1*

Be nice, or I will kill you.

My mien in the Milieu.

2007-10-01T08:14:00.001-06:00

Just another fortnight of self-degrading ruminations involving self-evaluation so very important to the self-bashing that was incumbent on me this time of the year. It was supposed to be anyway. I mean the weather is just splendid to be drowning myself, but but but I decide to waste it all. Just because the sods who sit in a frantically whitewashed house may feel better about themselves?

Well, no and yes that was a rhetorical question.

The fact of the matter is that there are no facts of the matter. I know all this sounds very cheesy, but I assure you by the end of this duel you will feel less manically depressed. I mean there is just no litmus test to it all. But as is promised by your friendly neighborhood godman, there indeed is a whiter shade of pale before you pass onto the blissful sleaziness of thick headedness blessed with just that right bit of anger.

That phrase “It All” which Adams means by “Life, The Universe and Everything” is quite irksome now that I come to think about it; mostly because it is quite vague, and yet very probably quantifiable and complete. But as it turns out, “It All” and the meaning to “It All” which I will like to refer to IA, which is quite neat because as luck and erm, the order of its letters and thus the Order-Of-All-Things-That-Be™ would have it, it stands to be the reverse of AI which of course means Artificial Intelligence, and also I mention that remarkable coincidence of sorts because I would like to lessen the impact of my new doctrine by seeming to be more floppily arranged than I really am.

IA, and I mean It All and not Industrious Ants, not that I am in any way racist, but I just meant It All this time. Ah yes, IA might just have a meaning, and I feel it is my moral something something to discover what that might be. It (and not It All) gets rather tiresome to listen to all those talk shows where some self help book authors go on about the meaning to IA, like they were the fabled God guy or a priestess at the Oracle. Trust me, the only self help they are qualified to give involves hands and groins.

It might strike you that I am in fact being jealous because I possibly have a fewer number of F460s in my garage, but honestly, why would someone be jealous of a bunch of no good pimps who need the dough to afford to get in touch with more of their flock? Surely the prophet bug bit them, and belonging to a society tempered well with cynicism, they understand the pointlessness of standing on boxes in street corners hawking their prophecies to whoever has nothing better to do than listen. It simply doesn’t help with the Ultimate Quest. That of course being the Quest for more F460s. But but but, screw them too, I have no time for Tits and Twits™ (thank you loo-time for this one) who would not care to listen to me.

IA is all about who has the meanest, loudest and most salacious growl. Rowr! It might be a bad analogy for such an important point, but it will have to do. Mutiny against all that is good and sugary and spicy. The bump on my head keeps getting bigger, and I feel much like a fool in the rain. For all the love that is there, and that there is shared, there are close to a million other guys looking at the very same goals you are. Evidently it also means these competitors -however noble your cause might be- will and most surely will have an eye on you, and consequently go out of their ways to screw you over.

The Thing Is™, such realizations must only come with time, and it is like losing your virginity to an elephant on the Atkins diet. Which of course means it is still a rather large elephant. A seagull on your neck, an elephant on your chest, and perhaps the traditional ball and chain.

And then they have the nerve to ask you what holds you back?

Whether I say what you already know does not matter. You might have reached that peak, that crucial point of inversion, just as I have and passed it untouched. It may already be too late for us. The momentum pushing us towards our fates may be unyielding, and all we may be able to do is squirm in the coffin we spent our lives lovingly crafting.

The Thing Is™, we can still call upon our cynicism to embitter ourselves against reflections and advice we find cheesy. The guy born tomorrow a hundred and thirty eight years ago, might have said “It is the small things that catch your breath”, and you might dismiss that too as cheesy, but what good are you? Why do you matter? You just do not fit in anywhere. You model yourself to be the intellectual pseudo-feedback to us all, but In The End™, the only thing you can call your own is your bitter self. One of the easier paths you find involves standing in the rain, drenching yourself in self loathing and misery which feeds on itself to keep you nice and numb.

Two words: Organized Religion. I would love to surrender myself to the mystery and magics that form the soothing lullaby of an undulating layer of a million billion chants. However, things such as the Ram Setu keep cropping up to destroy my faith in faith. I mean how could I possibly spend the rest of my days loving and learning to love what the order of things should be, and bitch about how they are not ideal, and defecate on someone else’s idols and ideals because mine are much prettier?

The rain goes pitter patter, pitter patter, and my heart is a-flutter with the promise of a better place I am going to. But erm, no that is just the inversion point I am approaching. And I am beaten to it too, by someone a bit more devious clubbing me to reach that inversion point. So, I pass it too, untouched by the beauty of change, and the gloriousness and gorgeousness of getting untangled, and being served with a purpose to life. I am still too angry at the guy who clubbed me to notice the guy who trips me.

Why?

Leave me alone. I promise not to change you.

I hope I have something I can classify as my glory days before it all passes me by, and I have nothing to go on about where everyone remembers my name. I mean the pub from Cheers of course.

It is just too darned hard to beat them at their own game. Considering they have had a lead of being thick headed over the last million years or so, and I have just started with my bout of thick headedness, it just might be worth my while to join them in their game, and bombard my own lofty paper mache towers. God I feel so dirty, cleanse me so I can feel better about what I have done. I promise to be good and clean for as long as it takes.

When did I last see? How many days has it been in the hole? Why is it so crowed in here? What is it that we share to be here in spite our mutual isolation?

There It Is™, the light at the end of the tunnel. I need to take the Hypocritical Oath. I need to become what I was born to be. I need to become someone’s friendly neighborhood Godman™.

There is no argument at all. Head or tails, I Be or I Un-Be.