Blogs
Mar 10 2010 - 2:45pm
After the madness of momentum comes its death. As inexplicable as its birth, in its death, it leaves in its wake a feeling and a sense of puzzlement and a weary expectation of its next visit. I have lost count and track, there is no longer the pursuit of seeing and finding patterns. The forfeiture of all yesterdays and tomorrows brings forth a beggar's poverty in accepting the present and only the present -- what is there is only now.
As the days slip by, there is order, accomplishments and the memories of milestones past, but there is also the rancour of tepidness in most things. Things work as advertised, predictable and accounted for. But it also brings with it a restlessness that refuses to die. Things go wrong, things go right, but you carry on as a certainty. If in this goodness there is no great sense of accomplishment or joy, then what is it that will bring that forth?
The pursuit of which is the hardest one to handle: avoid temporary deviations, stay the course and let imagined ghosts remain just that - imagined ghosts. Five years ago, from the other end of the spectrum, I could not bring myself to even smile, for I could not remember what that was like. The smile is no longer a problem, but belief certainly is. There is much that habit accounts for, but belief has little to do with it anymore.
As I sit and wonder about the years passing by, I see people, friends, family that I have known going in different directions and becoming different things. Through a large part of my twenties I distanced myself from all of that and having gone back and closer over the past couple of years, I still find a distance that can't be measured in words exchanged, time spent together or any other metric I could think of.
It is like a stain that refuses to go off.
Over time, I have come to understand that there is little I understand of most things. If there are limits to learning, there seems to be no limit to unlearning. Unspooled, the yarn of life is just a pile. It feels like a constant return to that pile, in a theme replicated over various acts. When there is little that anything establishes, it is only natural for the responses to also grow tepid.
Feb 14 2010 - 11:23am
As expected, it has been a tougher-than-normal winter. As expected, life has gone places where it was least expected to go. There has been much that was sought. There has been much that has been a disappointment - the self being not the least in leading the list. I wish the story was different every year, but it has not been. As I am fond of saying, you do the best that you can bring yourself to do. And this winter has been no exception on that front.
Love is such a weird thing. It is about what we have and what we don't have at the same time. It is about what we can measure and what we can't measure at the same time. It is conditional and unconditional at the same time. It is all that you are about and it can be everything that you are not about at the same time.
Okay, let us cut the crap.
As usual, come every December, I manage to fuck my life upside down and this year has been no exception. Yes, there are contributing factors and those will always be aplenty in this world. But, that someone put a gun in your hand is not good enough reason for you to pick it up and kill twenty others with it. And, as usual, in hindsight you can see everything clearly, but hindsight is never realtime, which sucks, but life is always only as realtime as you want it to be or as realtime as you can handle.
In every possible way, I am leading a life that I never could have thought I'd live. That is an interesting predicament when you never thought much about the life you wanted to have. Do you ever have that feeling of waking up one day, looking at your life and saying, "hey, this is just a joke, a gag, OK? We made all of this up, can we have out now?" As we know, that is just a little fantasy and a short-lived one at that.
I think we all lie and delude ourselves to varying extents to get along in life. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, the extremes of either truth or honesty won't be desirable in this world, leaving things absolutely unhinged. The trouble happens when you realize that what you think what the "is" is is not really is what it is. It leaves every colour and feeling drained out of what you've known so far in life, leaving only a dull monochrome behind.
To put colour back in it is a tedious process. To do that, first you need to understand what colour is and that is tough going when all that is there is monochrome.
So, I have been trying to get some colour back. It is tough, indeed. I do not even know what colours look like at the moment. Forget partial knowledge, there is little that I know in terms of knowing itself. So, forward is largely blind. Forward is largely a decision to jettison direction as defined by the past. Forward is not trusting yourself, yet trusting yourself to understand that you don't trust yourself at all. Forward is knowing that tomorrow is not something under your control, yet you need to give it and yourself a chance.
Sometimes, even in the worst of moments, life just fills you up so much from the inside that you are no longer sure whether it is being filled with good or with bad, but like the chill of a winter's night, it just leaves not a single part of you not overwhelmed. Where I am at right now, I am not sure whether it is something that I really feel or if it is something that I want to feel.
Jan 29 2010 - 5:27am
It is a homecoming of sorts. It is a feeling that is familiar. We have much to celebrate. It is a return to a lack of innocence. It is a victory of sorts that smacks of defeat. But you have to cut losses, you have to cut losses, you have to cut losses.
For all its worth, it may have been a curse, it may have been an unintended observation, but it remains the truth, a fact to be not ignored by time or events. In all of it, if there is anything, that is much to thank her for.
Nov 22 2009 - 1:05pm
The month is always an interesting one. It brings about the best and worst of things in this little world of mine. I love the hazy mornings, shivering my way through getting things done and the rekindling of a romance with the northern plains that started over ten-years ago. But there is also the shadow of the inevitable breakdown in relationships, the strong accent of loneliness in every movement of life and a rawness inside that neither the cold can't numb nor the odd moments of sun can soothe.
Even before winter came around, it was known that this December would be tough. Actually, not. It is easy to excel in making predictions, post factum. This year, actually, was meant to be different. And as far as different goes, it has indeed wound up being different. Just that it is not the kind of different I was looking for. Not to say I had nothing to do with it all. I decide, each time and every time. It is my choice, each time and every time. Even if the choices are often not that great.
I have almost developed this pet theory. That life follows a four-year cycle, 360 degree turn that spans 1440 days. At the end of it we start right back where we started -- knowing, believing and understanding nothing -- to build it up all over the next four years before we lose it all again. I think the secret elixir to life is to not ask. Not that I would know. Even if you were to hit me with a shovel in my face, I'd probably just glance a bit in your direction, say "oh" and walk on.
There is nothing poignant in being a butcher. All you ever do is to introduce meat to metal, dismantle the whole into parts. There is gore. There are parts strewn around. Every four years you sort it all out, clean it all up and pretend it is all behind you. But, as a butcher, all you'll ever do is to cut, chop open. All you'll ever have are the remains of what you've just killed. Once you've been a butcher, there is nothing else you can be.
All that you are ever left with for company is blood, remains and ghosts of the souls who have long departed those bodies.
Meat sells rather well in December. You don't need to wonder a lot as to why.
Nov 13 2009 - 9:20am
It does not feel like that long ago when I moved into this house. I had had a major fallout with my then flatmate and wanted to end that relationship and strike out on my own. So we (the third flatmate came with me) decided to look for a new place to stay and we were not having much success with it. By a stroke of good luck we wound up finding out about this place while we were hanging out at a nearby place where a friend used to stay. They said it was a nice place, even if the landlady was a bit bonkers. Since we were running out of options a bit of craziness was something that I was willing to overlook. We walked in, checked out the house, met with the landlords. I did not find much wrong with the landlady. The place was on the smaller side, but it would suffice. We agreed on the rent, paid a bit of advance money and the deal was done.
It has been 9-years since that time, almost to the date.
Almost, because the lease agreement says the first of December 2001, but we had moved in before that. I just don't remember when. I could pile up the cliches, but it is hard believe it has been that long. Over the years this house has become my little hideout.
The second flatmate moved out a while later, bothered much by my proclivity for living in a state that was not untidy. I never kept a flatmate after that, in the strictest sense of the term. I am way too protective of my own personal space to do that. That, though, was turned upside down for a bit for about a year and maybe a bit more, when I started living in with my then girlfriend (we sort of ratified that arrangement after the living together had started) and I learnt a lot more.
In these 9-years this little shoebox has stood testament to many of my antics, the many women and the many loves that passed through my life; the only other short cohabitation stint where my friend who walked out of her house lived in this tiny space with me for a month before she could find a flat for herself. The time when I wanted to drink myself silly on new year's eve because I was rather upset with myself and sneaked out from a gathering of close friends under some other pretext, stood in a snaking queue to procure the booze (two full bottles of cheap vodka, no less) and guzzled down almost the whole of the first one in about half-an-hour, only for my friends to turn up unannounced, suspecting something fishy. I had more alcohol than blood in my veins by then. What followed could have been funny, only if it was not that tragic. I spent the next year mending burnt bridges and putting back together pieces of trust that lay shattered all over the place. Not mine, I should clarify.
Not many have been welcome here. It is, after all, my little hideout. But those who have been welcome, have always been welcomed with open arms and all the warmth this place could summon up. There have been exceptions too. Instance of absolute coldheartedness where I've not let a very old friend in because I was trying to prove a point and left her crying outside the gate. Instances where my parents were not welcome here for at least the first four years of my stay here. There are many flashes of memories. The advancing of age and persistence of time colours it in hues that are different from what it could probably have been like then. I don't feel so militant anymore about so many of those things I've felt militant about.
I have aged and grown weary. The spirit is not that willing much for fighting the good fight. Be it windmills or real battles, I leave most of them alone now. The instinct, though, does not die that easy. The fingers still twitch at the sight of many things, muscle memory does not die easy. That is where experience intervenes. Orders are handed out to stand down, step aside, listen, think, understand, and grasp the situation. After a lifetime of charging headlong into where the heart asked me to rush into, it is only natural that I am a bit confused these days when the mind jumps in and pulls stronger in the other direction. If all has not been either entirely right or entirely wrong, why is it that there is largely not much else but only almost ten-years of memories to live with?
That is not to say it has always been taken away from me. I guess rationality and an objective viewpoint would determine that when all is finally said and done, things measured, notes tallied and interpretations made, it would stand out that I've walked out more than I have stayed and let go of more than I've hung on to. I guess I could put in a bit of token resistance and protest feebly that it was not so. But I don't think it matters much anymore. Viewpoints are largely incidental to these things. It matters if you are keeping score. I stopped doing that a while ago. If the present needs to be underwritten by the past and overshadowed by the future as a rule, scores make sense. And I've always sucked at keeping scores, because I throw them away where it really matters.
Coming back to where we started from, I don't know for how much longer I'll stay on here. I've previously tried twice to move out of here. It is more a habit and familiar comfort for me. I knowingly do not know the answer to the question whether this is a place I identify with as home. Somewhere I do think all of this matters. I should pursue sense, sensibility and purpose, but it is the consistency that is lacking in that pursuit. Like dogs chasing cars, after the first few seconds of giving chase passionately, you can't even remember why on earth did you even set off at all in the first place?