Scum of the Earth

Dear Hemingway,

Midway reading The Old Man and the Sea, I paused for a while to look you up. Pardon my negligence about before, but I found out that you had killed yourself in the end. That book, is now lying somewhere, unfinished. I am deciding, whether to pick it up again or not. Because, through out that book you write about how we fight till the very end, struggle against our environment. Stand up to anything that confronts us. Like the old man does. But what does it all end up to if you push aside all the optimism and shoot yourself in the head?

Hey, I ain't judging. Half the time my own ass is on fire. I am brooding so much that I might just evaporate. Hit something and go up in flames. I respect the dignity in death, the liberation it begets you. I admire the courage to die. Nevertheless. It just doesn't fall into place.

Plath killed herself when she was a few years older than I am now. Like Chekhov said - Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. I find this chase of day in and day out, what seems like a pointless struggle against invisible forces, obnoxiously nauseating. Virginia Woolf just walked into the water and vanished. It does feel like it is too much to take.

But you Hemingway, you? Of everyone else alive. And dead.

You should have read this poem by Bukowski:

The Secret

don't worry, nobody has the

beautiful lady, not really, and

nobody has the strange and

hidden power, nobody is

exceptional or wonderful or

magic, they only seem to be

it's all a trick, an in, a con,

don't buy it, don't believe it.

the world is packed with

billions of people whose lives

and deaths are useless and

when one of these jumps up

and the light of history shines

upon them, forget it, it's not

what it seems, it's just

another act to fool the fools

again.

there are no strong men, there

are no beautiful women.

at least, you can die knowing

this 

and you will have

the only possible

victory.

Because, darling, we are, darlings. The Scum of the Earth. There is not much need to get ourselves killed. 

Doppelgänger

When they were young, they had fallen for the same man. Those were not mere infatuations; but full blown affairs. It is believed that these affairs happened not simultaneously. But who can say? The foggy boundaries between being in love, the ache of a broken heart, the patch up et al are not for anybody to govern. So sometimes, those three, the two women and their man in between formed three vertices of a triangle. Isosceles triangle. 

They must have been similar, somehow-somewhere. Given a man, mostly may choose an approximate prototype of the opposite gender each time he gets to choose. With certain common traits. But these women were far from same. A had a docile exterior and a blatant inside. B, on the other 'and, was uptight on the outside and all gooey within. A was the submissive in her relationship. B, was obviously the insatiable dominant in hers. A was shy, fearful, a poetess. B was very vocal of her needs, her frustrations, even her dreams. But once unclothed, each woman turned inside out, i.e. behaved like the other woman was on the outside. The man switched his roles between the two. Such chameleons they are. 

Sometimes the median vertex of that triangle vanished though. The man, I mean. It was like he wasn't there. The triangle became a well meant straight line. A and B lusted for each other through the man who was like a membrane of mist. And like someone poked a finger into it, he disappeared. Sometimes they felt like prototypes of the same woman. Sometimes they felt like alter-egos, despite their cardinal differences. Sometimes like lesbian lovers. But mostly like doppelgangers.

You, Me & Vacuum

# This blog is full of someones. Each post is obviously about someone or the other. But some have an alarming majority, like I am screaming their bloody names out. I am not aware of what they did to deserve this honor, but anyway they don't know a bit, so it's no honor anyway. But however still.

# Life is so not well rounded sometimes. It takes you all the wrong ways and then makes you choose. What you feel you are meant for. This too, is one rare case. So, you're lucky if it happens with you. This is exactly where that bitch called life, squares it off. Pros and cons.

# As such, there's a mess. Irreversibly fucked up imbroglio. There's choking traffic. Mails to be sent, asses to be kissed. There's internet that has issues of its own. Very frustrating. Handicaps of our own. Secret debilitating humiliating handicaps of our own, that we don't have the balls to deal with.

# Also, a past of broken hopes, meandering routes to happiness that never practically ended, there's dresses that don't fit, nails that are bitten, beauty that is unattainable. Fear, trepidation. Shame, some more fear.

# There is no time. No space. No continuum.

# Sometimes, Virginia Woolf may not have been that wrong after all. Walking into a river with pocket full of stones. What was she thinking. She knew whatever she was thinking.

# But for you. You are at the other end of this line. Did you realize that what I just wrote could have been one of my those endless monologues about how everything is doomed? You would say, 'Stop, Stop!'

# I see myself through this tortuous day, because it ends with you. A means to an end. Sometimes you make me feel. Like I am floating in a gravity less vacuum. And one happy vacuum that is. 

Negociación

It's french for negotiation. Err.. Spanish actually.

I watched Before Midnight. I mean, I did finally. For the uninitiated, I claim that Before Sunset has left some pretty strong imprints on my mind. I have been quoting Celine and Jesse (well, mostly Celine) for years here. And after such a tireless wait, Linklater gives me this. I mean this. It's almost like a lover's betrayal. 

Wait.. I am kidding. It's not betrayal exactly. But then, somehow the sequel to your favorite movie can never be good enough. Mostly, I had been delaying watching Before Midnight for so many months probably because, I did not want it to touch my perception of Sunset so much. 

Call me a fanatic, but there was a time I used to watch it every Friday night. It has made me stand through the most disastrous of heart breaks. And helped seep truth back in. I used to say their lines along with them. Their accents intact. Yes, I was crazy. Still am. Whenever things go dull, I watch it again.

Before Sunset did whatever it did to me because a) it stood by the fact that love mostly is a transient feeling and b) once in a while, one deep conversation with its share of non sequiturs, does help. Our rusted soul, our breathless mind. 

I am not averse to everlasting love, but the truth is there might not ever be such a thing. We are on the same point here. Know, things fade. Passions overflow for a while and then. We get really cranky. Irritable, messy beings, who forget what it was like to be young and deep in wet love. 

Also, there is this association of romance with angst. I mean, it stays raw in your head if it falls apart. If you keep it from falling apart every single time it has almost gone off the edge, by your enormous patience and fear of dying alone, you leave it to die a slow death. 

In Before Midnight, Linklater makes you see Jesse and Celine in such crisis. Like they are barely afloat. There's a tonne of issues. There's kids. Oh my god. Responsibilities, money. And suspicions of infidelity. A lot of screaming. I mean a lot of it. Tempers catching fire. What beasts life has made of them. It's fearful watching them as it is. 

The love is now faint. Tied by a multitude of constraints. They euphemize constant fighting by calling it negotiating. Negociación, as Celine said. Accent intact.

Endorphins

We are little children, writing names on dusty windshields of cars

Our fingers reaching up, running through layers of grey powdered powder

Parting clean lines, forming letters for the first time.

The sun smiling on our faces in return,

Our bare muscles just don't know how to rest

Because there is nothing that is forbidden.

Our memory, ethereal

Merging reflections of now and then

We ain't bound to remember or abide by

There's stars above, glittering..millions of those

Scores of unnamed galaxies

And the mystery inside us, you and me, Un-unravelable. 

A sea sits calm beneath our settled feet

And the stars see themselves in it and smile,

Creating a new sky underneath.

We, utterly sandwiched between two skies

Move so on and so forth, 

Gathering love, momentum, rhyme 

Our hearts leap, 

Glee, in the corner of my lip;

The endorphins in my head. 

Loving like a Woman

She did not run away with all your money. Any of your money. Neither did she cheat on you, nor break any promise. There were no promises anyway. She did not say hurtful things. Things people say, when the love turns bitter. Never wanted any bit of your skin to change, or your eyes, or fingers. Or toes. Or your heart. Because, once she had fallen, with you, in love, you were her boundaries of beauty, noone outside of you, could be merely close to being beautiful. Love wasn't any poetic supposition, it was a real thing. Thing.

It is once and for all said, very difficult to love like a woman. And even more convoluted an impossibility, to marginally understand that love. 

She had gathered you in the pores of her skin. Saved you like rose petals like in a school girl's diary. Loved you like not like a mother, but close.

Very close.

What did you know?

Now don't feel bad already. She took hardly anything away. Except for herself. As one last resort.

Let her go, now that she needs to. For good. Her skin, eyes, fingers, her toes. Her belittled castigated soul. She wronged nowhere else, except but for now. When she, in a trifle probability, broke your heart. A man's mighty heart. 

Remember now, you did that too. Didn't you/.

Hotel Room

Not those dingy ones you take up once you have suddenly eloped because there was no other way for love, but that. But those ones to which you have to come back to, once every night. When you're travelling alone, and for work. Alien city. That same elevator to the thirteenth floor. Clean white sheets, the faceless housekeeper. Who turns your pillow cases inside out once in a while, places neat sachets of shampoo in the bathroom, packets of sugar on the coffee table. You wonder if she's a woman or a man. Because she is the only human contact you have had in days. Is he a pedophile, does he touch your underwear that you might have left out to dry. Each night, after you get back within an exhausted body but your mind is sleepless, you wonder if the view of a sleepy city going to stand you any company at all.

Whenever I told Him that I was a loner by default, how I felt lonely no matter where I was, whatever I was upto, there was always this shallow meaningless void in my head that no one could fill. He would quietly absorb my metaphysical unstoppable three minute of a lecture and then retort, softy with a remark. That in that hotel room is the loneliest you could be. And that I wouldn't be able to realize how completely abandoned he had felt each of those nights across those months and months he had hopped among a multitude of such rooms. 

I was not a fool. I knew. Sometimes I was relieved that the man wouldn't in the very least, take my being with him for granted that he knew how absolutely painful loneliness could get. But did that work for me? Not, I guess.

I would often imagine him. Loitering around on those tiled floors. Taking short quick steps to the closet, or leaving his shirt and tie on the bed before he went in to take a shower. Adjusting the temperature of the water according to the place he was in. Too hot, hot, lukewarm. Hot showers did well for mild insomnia, he would say. Or just picking up the work on your laptop where you had left it at in office, helped too. Sometimes logging on to Skype, seeing his mother would work. Or calling me.