untitled/underworked

“Onions! Onions! Bah!” hollered Kashi, frowning.

So it’s food now, sighed Mira. She should have gotten used to the metaphor laden laments Kashi leveled at life almost on a daily basis, but his choice of connotations and the vigor with which he propounded his newer claims took her by surprise even now and then.

She wanted to smile now, and she even allowed the tiny twinkle that had been dancing on her eyelashes to stray down her face a bit, in the general direction of her lips. Just then, Kashi looked straight at her, and she froze. The half smile faltered, petrified, and hung itself by her nose, like an icicle, and tickled her till she could no longer keep it in, and she let out a massive “Aachhoo!!”, spraying a mist straight into Kashi’s startled face.

“Bah! Ptooii!! Phlegm! Onions! Bah!”

“I’m so sorry, grasshopper. Aww, gee, it’s all over your face. Sorry, Kash! Here, lemme wipe it off for you.” Mira offered, apologetically.

“Nyehh! F’gettit! It’s awready too bad you weren’t listening, you don’t have to rub it in my face now!” retorted Kashi, but he couldn’t suppress a smile even as he said that.

Mira grinned. Kashi broke out into loud laughter.

These were young days still. People with windblown ungelled hair and unfashionable long coats would huddle together in canteens, sip cold and very sweet chai, and talk excitedly in hushes and shushes, taking great care not to call Red Red and generally being politically correct. Young and defiant men and women wanted to go around distributing scandalous ill printed pamphlets, though they had little to say. Artists, especially those that didn’t produce, were springing up by the score, in mossy urine wet alleys and abandoned cinema halls with paan spittled staircases. Benzene was everywhere, and everyone wanted to get on it. Bright young men were having sex with crippled beggarwomen and beautiful smooth skinned women with kohl lined eyes straddled naked ash smeared sadhus with matted hair on sacred river banks, and they all kept dog eared journals that described their escapades in autopsied detail, page after page of bad grammar and burning passion.

Kashi Ahmed was a nebulous paradox of a being, or so many believed. Apart from his fashionably blasphemous name, he had a colorful resume to his credit: he had arrived at the University gates as a Literature major, flunked every third course he took, and dropped out twice (He got back in the first time around because University rules allowed only on-roll students to access the press house and the prescription free drug store. The press house was razed to the ground that subsequent September, and by then Kashi had met HariOm, a med dropout, so that he no longer needed the University. The University had always harbored similar sentiments towards him and obliged quickly, kicking him out a second time.) He had once publicly accused the Dean’s daughter of trying to rape him, and on more than one occasion had been seen attempting to perform vasectomies on litter dogs. He called himself an artist, and was rumored to be one, but he avoided expression in any form, lest he be debunked as another of those ‘junky tourist types with paintbrushes up their anuses’, an expression he himself had coined and popularized into circulation. He passionately abhorred that kind, those that got ‘high on horseshit’ and believed they had it, and who then spent sweaty hours furiously scribbling ‘infantile poop on brown envelopes’, collaging together ‘pop culture vomit’, painting ‘Kali-doing-Keith-Richards’ murals on dirty bathroom tiles. He subscribed to a ‘higher lineage’, as he called it, and claimed he had ‘intellectual ancestors’ in supermen like Newton, Nietzsche, Faulkner and Joyce. But his inherent contradictions would suddenly overwhelm him, and right after he had delivered an eloquent lecture on ‘the grandeur of the ego, the pride in existence, and the trash that was leftover culture’, he would pick up cans of paint and a couple of hard brushes, and then cloister himself in his room for the next forty hours,( The University hadn’t kicked him out of his room yet, there was some paperwork still remaining) painting a wall with a zoomed-in version of the ‘Somdomite’ note that famously ruined Oscar Wilde.

On Friday evenings, he held forth at the ‘yard’, a derelict circular bathing tank with stone steps leading down to it. The tank remained devoid of water for the most part, and resembled a Greek parliament house, or an amphitheatre. Kashi would take stage in the middle of it, and the company would be seated on the first couple of steps, with adequate supply of alcohol and other substances. Kashi, though gifted with a way with the written word, wasn’t much of a public speaker, and he tended to warble and meander, but he would intersperse his monologue with a generous helping of theatrics and noises, groaning and moaning, and swaying and sashaying along, and the audience wasn’t the complaining type either, so it went. Kashi would describe how he tried burning amphetamine with his own piss and ingesting the residue, and the audience would go “Noooo! You awesome bastard!”, and he’d wait in suspended animation, and then burst into laughter with, “Youse are so easy, illiterate peoples!”, but he’d have a worried, melancholy look on his face by the time the “I knew he wouldn’t!”s amongst his listeners died down. By twilight, no one would be in a state to either talk or listen, garbled grunts and morning cigarette smoke rose to the brightening sky, and in a matter of minutes, the remnants of the night would slink away, and sunlight would swathe the round arena like a utensil, clearing out darkness and people, and everyone would be dazed and irritated, and they would shuffle out mumbling things, and head towards the buildings or the nearest wooded areas. Afterwards, they would gobble down omelettes and gulp down hot chai back in the canteen, and then disappear completely, to reappear later in the cool evening, their slept in, bathed and shaved bodies brimming and saturated back to everything they had traded over for the ‘night in the yard’.

Mira was one of the ‘company’ now, but Kashi initially had a hard time fitting her in, mentally. When he’d first met her, he had let his testosterone take care of the perception part, which had been more or less the general predicament in Mira’s life. She was often outright stunning to look at, and wasn’t adept at contorting her face in a manner that would overshadow her dark luminous eyes, her luscious lips and her delectable complexion, so that it was pretty difficult for men to listen to her attentively, and respond appropriately. Also, unlike Kashi, she wasn’t in the habit of letting those around her know, by the sheer force of silence or through detachment, that she was thinking. She laughed naturally, at almost everything, and talked like she had no intentions of changing the world. In those crazed, label-happy times, when the regular gods had fallen by the wayside, and everyone was desperately looking for new ones, and more than ready to confer godhood on mortals at the slightest sign, when all anyone had to do to be worshipped was remain silent for a couple of hours and then burst into vociferous profanities, Mira stood firm on the taxiway, laughing, talking, bustling about, and generally evading taking off into a fickle sky dotted with hallucinating stars. No one quite knew what to think of her, she didn’t paint her eyes with truckloads of kohl, or drip hair oil, or wear brown lipstick, or shave her head, or flash everyone around instinctively. She wasn’t even very right or wrong enough all the time. Reluctantly it was that people classified her as more of a ‘band-aid’ than a rock star.

But Mira did think a lot. And she could get inside a person more than the person ever had before. She had a finality about her likes and dislikes, and she rarely mixed them together. She developed a quick derisive loathing of Kashi in the first few days after she met him. He was a man to begin with, and she somehow had little love lost for the species. And he appeared to be the vilest of them, the flaunting, presumptuous, trying-to-get-into-panties kind. He had seemed vain and, as she told him later in a moment of acid haze, ‘snakelike’. She thought he was thinking out his life like a soap opera, replete with advertisements and endorsements, more than he was living it. Through all this, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. He became something of a natural barometer for her contemplations, he provided her head with a lot of material to chomp on, and as she continued with her mental experiments on him, she’d be time and again reminded of how different they were. She couldn’t deny that he had a quick mind, that he was witty, and somewhat learned too, with all his wild wacky wisdom. About a year and a half of toying with her subject toned down her caustic take on him, she even came to like some of his characteristics, his terrible passion for things that were close to his heart, of which there weren’t many, his childish treatment of traditionally grown up matters like death and parents and religion, the way he was putty in the hands of people he liked. They would even talk now, off and on, and they were both good at certain kinds of conversations, so on it went. She used to believe he was a slick womanizer, a view she had formed of him when he’d hit on her right from the moment she set foot on the region of earth he supposedly popularly commanded, and from what she’d heard of him, but this perspective was on eroding grounds, since, during a rather long winded tete-a-tete, he had quite forcefully posited the idea that he was one of those people who didn’t mingle because they wanted something out of it, but because they liked it, they were interested in humanity in general, and this was something she didn’t find incredible, since she was one of that kind too. Kashi, on his part, found this revelation endearing, and dropped the contemptuous demeanor he wore for her for good. She was soon inducted into the Yard of Fame, and this marked the beginning of the Kashi-Mira period.

With time, Mira found out that there was a whole bunch of traits she shared with Kashi. Besides being the quintessential dreamers, they both had an almost profane appetite for life. It bordered on the disgusting, to watch two young beautiful people take to life like that, pliers and scissors and hammers and axes, ripping apart the wrapping and pawing the insides, instead of wishing on and hoping for and tiptoeing around things. Soap bubbles never really became them. They never set out for the chefs. It was always - always - the blacksmith.

Once, after one of the Yard Nights, they were lounging in the shack, midmorning, busily forking bread crumbs, shaded from the buzzing sun by the shanty top. Kashi was making glurging sounds as he swallowed the oil soaked bread. Mira took a long drag from the damaged Statesboro (It had been in the back pocket of her jeans all night) dangling in her long white fingers.

“Why do people paint their homes, or doors, or anything else? ” she mumbled, mostly to herself, holding out the cigarette in his direction without looking at him.

Kashi wiped his oily fingers in his lush black hair, took the smoke, held it at a certain respectful distance mostly accorded to a delicate artifact, and looked at it.

“Whadidja do to this?! Fucked it kya?” said Kashi. Then pufff. And fwhooo. A traumatized smoke ring hobbled out from between his lips. Kashi watched it climb up the air and disintegrate prematrely, irritated.

“I mean, what, like you’re gonna be happier or make more money or have less stupid kids if your door’s aqua blue?” she furthered, now looking at Kashi.

“Mira, jaan, my dearest, why do you always have to ask me questions I happen to have answers to?” said Kashi, a languorous smile easing up his face now. He had forgotten the rings, and now had his mouth ajar, face up, and a thick grey wad of smoke rose swirling up from the bottom of his throat.

“I got lots you don’t have a clue about, but I try to make you feel happy about yourself, that’s all” Mira retorted, grinning.

“I’ll pretend I never heard that, and go on believing you don’t know as much as you seem to”

“Whatever. Answer my question, though, if you feel like”

“OK. Fear”

“Fear?”

“Yeah”

“And how so?”

Half A Pot Of Clay

You climb up a pink tree
and you look down into its eye
and a girl in a blue glider
slowly passes you by.

The tree puts on wheels
and starts to skate downhill
and Grace from the Airplanes
hands you a red pill.

You hear a guitar in the distance
screaming at its strings
they’re all still Minor but lately
they’ve been acting like BB King.

The tree has burnt its rubber
and caught fire at the roots
he asks you to get off politely
and walks off to buy new boots.

The river, meanwhile, chugs on
carrying sandmen to the west
they’re mining for gold there, you hear
and they’re dressed in their best.

You run into half a rainbow
he’s weeping as he turns a bend
“Eastman’s stolen our treasure!” he says
“have to talk to my other end!”

You then step into a bush
and out pops a doorknob
he’s worried out here, you see
he’s looking for a job.

They’re partying down at the electric store
the Toaster and the Oven
Kettle and Stove chime in with glee
“Ben Franklin’s in town!

You think it’s pretty early for a party
but you can’t really recall
cos a man named Dali took your watch
melted and hung it on a wall

You start to get worried now
since you can’t figure out the time
and lo! walks up Einstein
with his friend from Desolation Row, the Mime.

“It doesn’t really matter” says the mime
and his friends promptly points to his head
“my friend here sorted it out, you see
or else he’d still be dead.”

You decide to be happy for a while
so you gulp down some ecstacy
Mary Jane comes to you popping wisdom
“Fettooshee! Fettooshee!”

Attempt #3: Excerpt from the Commencement Day Speech, 1978, by the acclaimed poet Beatniche

I would like to begin with a disclaimer. Two, actually. First, I never belonged to anything. And second, I had an unspectacular childhood. I will tell you what I intend the above two statements to accomplish.

I never saw a war. Any war. Least one that was mine. I was once in a school skirmish and another time saw someone being shot at. The school altercation didn’t amount to much, a couple of bruises at the best, and after the first few potshots were traded, both parties quickly forgot who’s turn it was next. The shooting was equally indecisive. The bullet missed Someone by quite a distance and flattened itself out on a wall in the background.

I grew up in a pretty tedious fashion, and fairly unremarkably at that too. I was never too short, or too tall, or even too dull, for my age, and safely stayed within the prescribed boundaries of regular conforming anonymity. My father beat me up in reasonable amounts. I was never molested by an uncle, and never tried to kill myself. I didn’t squash cockroaches for fun and rarely laughed out of turn. Honestly, no one quite saw me grow up, let alone resent me for it. I grew up like the grass.

My family was moderately religious. They knew precious little about the whole affair of faith and thus justifiably believed in it. No one quite remembered how the parable ended, and this surreptitious collective ignorance ensured that of the reprimands and rebukes parents dealt out to their children, a measly share concerned divine issues. They were meek people in that regard, and wisely kept their mathematics textbooks and their scriptures in separate shelves. Not surprisingly, no one in the house could defend the household gods when needed, even though the hagiography came with a lot of convenient ‘holes’ ( The hallmark of an intelligent religion is a generous sprinkling of such ‘gaps’ in the story, crevices in the mountain of mythological expostulations, buffers of sorts, into where gods and their colorful bickering legions can dive in for cover when under attack, and where from devotees can pull out fantastic birds of magic that might be able to aid and abet a clay-footed god on the run in his flight back to divinity. A well thought out religion always has possibilities open for a reverse deux ex machina!) In course of time, the family faith graciously stepped down from its high pedestal and took its place amongst other similar growing up knick knacks, like bedtimestories and fairytales, devices young parents use to discourage growing children from asking too many uncomfortable questions, or going to bed late, or having sex early. The cardboard box marked ‘Used Toys’ was subsequently shut, cellotaped and dispatched to the nearby orphanage.

Adolescence wasn’t especially hard on me. I took passing fancy to a petite little thing in my high school trigonometry class. The intervening period between when I first saw her, and felt something akin to love, and when I first banged her, the expanse of time that can prove to be happy hunting ground for much of boyhood poetry and many of the sleazier dreams, was cut short considerably by our mutual randiness and love of triangles. We got together under the pretext of study sessions, derived some important first theorems and soon parted ways, amicably. The lack of any ill will, again, proved a dampener to any pyrotechnics of creativity fueled by vengeful hormones. I didn’t get into bed with another woman for a long time after that, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone drunk or horny enough, but also in part due to my chancing upon Gandhi and Nietzsche, under the most unusual of circumstances. The former’s philosophy of preserving ‘body fluids’ to strengthen the intellect and the latter’s sheer disdain for womankind kept me happily justified to myself. The thought of having intercourse with a man never occurred to me.

College was a miasmic pastiche and a deja vu mashed together, a collage of messily pasted cuttings from teeny flicks and comic books I had read before. I tried many things, like many others. Philosophy and tattoos and cool, though I admit I met with obscene failure trying to pull the latter off. I would dabble in the uncool, occasionally and accidentally, and my cool veneer would wear thin under reproachful peer glare. I quit cool soon enough, not because I ‘realized’ I was inherently uncool but because I began to see that the brand of cool everyone else used wasn’t natural. Nobody could be that cool naturally, and it took some effort to billboard it up all the time. And then, it tended to get funnily scary when you were alone. I was a sloth by nature, so I decided to get a style of cool all my own, and with some expedient trammeling, I had cut enough flab off ’sloth’ to make it passable as ‘languorous’. I became ’smooth’, ‘easy’ and ‘casual’. I was in no hurry to reach places, I was too polished for that. That was how I saw it back then.

It’s hard to study things that screw around with the apparatus: Dr. W.Heisenberg, M.D, Psychiatry

She breathed in. Evenly. Without effort. It had rained, and the city air had been cleansed. It was easy to inhale, even logical, and for an appreciable length of time, she just stood there, beside her car, in front of the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities.

Then she made her move.

A sickly draft of air tugged at the ends of her subdued black flannels just as she reached for the handle on the glass door of the brightly lit superstore. It wheezed out of the thin slit at the bottom, moist and cold, and false, smelling like the insides of a rich man’s coffin, foliaged with refrigerated flowers. And refrigerated peas in cold misty plastic packets. It made her jerk her hand away partly, startled, undecided, like an allegory, barely there. The flat two dimensional gust had, by now, grown warmer, and murkier, and it now lay limp on the sidewalk between her feet. She looked down at it.

She was back in her home, in the sunny south, and had just woken up after that tiring weekend of ghost partying, and now, as she flip flopped down to the front door in her pajamas, a metal mug with hot rancid coffee in one hand, and the other shielding her bleary eyes from the strident golden beams coming in from the window slats to her left, she imagined she was squelching whiskey dregs in every step, accompanied by a quirky ‘choo choo’ sound. Under the front door lay some yellowed letters, probably delivered last Friday, she thought, and just when she bent to pick them up, the realization, the time of the year, struck her playfully on the head like a prank. A wry smile skipped lightly over her face.

She looked up just in time to catch it reflected in the glass, before it disappeared amongst the undulations of her long drawn countenance, lit up like an 80s discotheque display board by the frothy fluorescing lights from the insides of the store. It had been a fleet-footed look of apprehension; of a tidy nervousness. She looked down again, at the space between her feet. There was nothing to be seen, just like there never had been.

The letter was blank. A loud blank rectangle of paper, with no more a purpose than hide what it did, when she held it in her hand. Abdominal parts of the old burgundy upholstered couch. Half of the chinaclay tumescent Buddha on the mantlepiece above the couch. Some knick-knacks. To be honest, the blankness staring at her from the paper wasn’t surprising; the surprise it evoked therefore was.

She gave up trying to find anything there. She knew she was actually trying to stall the inevitable. She knew she had to go in. She knew she had no say in the matter. She couldn’t possibly be altering alternate reality. She rushed in. She did.

Once inside, she became fidgety and shaky again, staring at her shoes, and her fingers fooled around with the edges of her deep grey blouse. She sensed gazes on her. They felt hot on her skin, like in the nude-in-high-school dream sequence. Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes and cast a tentative look around. It was bright, far too bright, and her hand went instinctively to her eyes. She now began making out shapes. Aisle after aisle sat like expectant students, their faces turned towards her, each face telling a different story. “Aisle 3B: Sanitations”, said the narrow green one in the front. A broad and low brown one at the back claimed, “Aisle 5A: Paint”. A small prim pink one near the left end coyly admitted, “Aisle 1A: Luxury”. Others similarly attired chimed in, and her eyes burned with the noise. For the next moment or so, she contemplated turning back and running out the way she came in. But before she could make up her mind, a honeyed voice cooed from somewhere amongst the plastic flora.

“Rrrrring !! Rrrrring !!”

She dropped the withered pale letter into a vase on the mantle, and lifted the phone off the hook. “Heyy, sweetie, G’morning. He left a letter for you before he left. It had been in the mailbox for sometime. I had the gardener drop it off at your door. Did you get it ?”

She looked at the vase. It was a crusty clay thing shaped like a mermaid.

“Yeah.”

“That’s gweat, Miss! How menny uf these shall I pack fer you ?!”

“Huh ?!”

“How menny, Miss ?”

A petite blonde with a jarring lip gloss and a blue and white toothpasty apron stood in front of her, holding oddly shaped objects of different colors in her arms, cradling them like babies. She thought they looked more like toys, in some parallel universe she didn’t understand, and the woman looked like a disgruntled kid, looking for someone to play with her.

“I don’t wanna play, ummm, I mean, buy those. Do you mind if I look around some more?”

“Suwwwiee.”

She shuffled on, her foot steps the only noise in the whole store. She walked through rows of aisles filled with plastic uselessness, foam filled inanities. They didn’t make any sense. She held her temples, and tried to figure out uses these objects could be put to. The aisle seemed a mile long and, as far as she could see, was filled with these insanely colorful oddities. She switched aisles, but it felt no different a neighborhood, with an orgy of colors and an overwhelming stupidity of shapes from one end to the other, without respite. Her eyes started to hurt again, her brain refused focus, and she felt herself corroding under the cheerfully virulent gaze from the aisles. Her pulse quickened, and she began to panic. The lip gloss woman called out to her again.

“Scream ! Scream your cunt out, you lousy bitch!”

She opened her mouth to scream. Someone else beat her to it.

“Fuck her, Danny! Fuck her kidneys to pieces!”

“Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!”

She heard someone laugh in the background. Her brow felt hot and cold at the same time. She couldn’t bear the pain in the color, the smell of the polymer, the weight of the refrigerated air. She looked around, for something that would soothe her eyes, something black, something gray. Bright green hit her from the left. Orange from the right. A fountain of shiny red burst from her mouth.

“Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!”

She remembered she wore black and gray. She looked down. She saw bare flesh.

She was in high school. Everyone was looking at her.

She was in a pale blue van. She was being raped.

It began to rain.

As she walked out of the glass door of the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities, she seemed scaringly sure to herself. Her light hair sloped down her forehead in hair colored channels, and water ran down along those in trickles, and, as she fumbled for the keys, she remembered something he had once said.

“Before it falls, it’s a cloud, and afterwards, it’s just muddy water running down street drains. When it’s falling on your face, when you get wet, is when you call it rain.”

She smiled. And drove off. And all that was left of her visit to the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities was a bunch of hundred dollar bills wrapped in a pale yellow blank paper, lying in the mud.

*Footnote: Crap! Crap! Crap

Four Degrees of Trash: A short critique on discernment and subjectivity, culture and taste

 

 

Existence (surprisingly, verb) def. Beyond red streaked shopping lists and short change at the gas station; somewhere between fresh laundry smelling of floral ersatz and a musty old book in the attic; shining stridently under the intermittent fluorescent gaze of a cheap tube, twinkling in a deserted subway; hewed into fragments and then swept away by a rickety ceiling fan in a seedy hotel room; lying crumpled, entangled in metal clips and tape, in a paper bin by the side of a polyesterene desk in a back office; amidst a forest of furtive glances and blatant stares at a jaunty night club; reflected in the slant of the eyes of a complete stranger, in the eyes of someone known, as the sun shines off them; without a background score, without rhyme. Almost without reason.

Mere description is glorification enough.

 

Let’s get started. A stone is a stone is a stone. It can’t be anything else. Moreover, it doesn’t have to fight to be a stone. Human existence, au contraire, is a moment by moment struggle to be, rather than a complete, inexorable reality. It is colorful, but it is by no means as glorious as it is made out to be. Existence is what man makes it. What he wills it to be. There is no higher purpose to existence than just existing, the Big Guy notwithstanding. This idea, at the outset, is scary, to be frank. Once you accept that you alone are responsible for what you do , and more importantly, what you are, not culture, not societal norms, not age old wisdom, nor any other man, you begin to realize that your hold on things isn’t all that sure. Your own radical freedom and the spartan awareness of your death overwhelms you. Sure, we bounce the idea around all the time, spewing nonchalant words that apparently seem to be saying the same thing. But we never really intend it in the same vein as this. There’s always the possibility of falling back upon some higher being, or a make believe charter of events , colloquially called fate, in case something goes wrong. Believing in existence per se, for its own sake, is sobering in one sense, and takes courage, in others.
Now, as Sartre would have you known, we don’t particularly appreciate the idea of a bare and meaningless existence. Human nature, that, to somehow view our own selves and existence as having profound implications. To avoid eye contact with this new realization, we create devices. Devices to distract, and to augment the illusion. Religion, for one. Reason, for more than one. A man named Kierkegaard believed reason and rationality was a mechanism people used to counter their existential anxieties. And how ? If I can believe that I am rational and so is everyone else, then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free.

In the light of the afore detailed, sample this: kitsch/pop art has more reason than does haute. I can see where we wander into seemingly blasphemous territory, but consider reason as a form of an existing pattern. Something your mind is accustomed to. As a perception to a sense that satisfies the clamors of that sense. Something that doesn’t evoke a ’Why’ or ‘How come’ response. Something that you’re so used to it doesn’t even challenge your intellect. Like food. Herein lies the crunch. By the above token of reasoning, creations of art that have a semblance of familiarity and reason in them would be more agreeable to human nature. More easily accepted. Less demanding of thought . Well rounded justifications provided, only second hand perception needed. No rough edges, no shaky doubts. No Jean-Luc Goddard, or a T.S Eliot, or even a Tchaikovsky, for that matter. Popular culture is a fabric made out of our own fears. There’s no point in asking why people like what they ‘like’. Because there’s no honest answer. And till that moon shines, JK Rowling will be the queen bee.

‘Tuck’, Lies and a Videotape : Also has a Ninja, a Lizard and some Frogs

The world really is round. Things come and go in circles. In cycles, if you must. They go, and then they come around all over again. Things as objective as seasons and as so not as reasons. Your motivations, the motor whirring under the front lid of the yellow car you call your life, are almost equally, if not more, fickle.

Rewind.

You are Joe. You’re 10. Its a sparkling bright washing machine Sunday morning. You are on the phone, and its Daddy on the other end. “You can come over next weekend, promise, tiger. Daddy’s gotta work today. But we’ll have fun, throw the ‘ol pigskin around, have pizza, and yeah , kick the hell outta that ninja that’s been buggin’ ya. Kiss Mommie fer me.” The doorbell rings. Its Stan. The guy who’s currently screwing Mommie. You hate him. He’s a loser. Thinning pate. Red tees over blue jearns, and a bown alligator belt with a metal buckle that says “Tuck”. There’s just this one thing that Stan could possibly have to his credit. He drives a truck. Interstate. Alone. While Daddy’s crunching numbers in monotone  and filing redundant data into his Mac, Stan drives a 20 tonner at 160 across meadows and deserts and ravines and, possibly, oceans. Maybe it’s just out of spite for your own father, maybe it’s to salvage the awesome profession from uncool assholes like Stan, but right now, in that very moment you hear the ‘click’ at the other end, if there’s one thing you’d give an arm and a leg to do, it’d be to drive a truck. A big shiny steel truck.

You are Crayton. You’re 18. You have a stubble. A guitar. A stash. And a scowl. You’ve read some books, looked up some of the harder words and listened to almost all of Floyd. You go watch this movie they’re talking about excitedly in smoky eyeglassed circles, and you realize you have it. The answer. And it’s surely different this time, you feel. For one, it’s not 42. And didn’t the ‘like really cool’ babe sitting next to you with brown wavy hair and breasts that pointed the politically correct way through her Peace! tee, she of the Mensa lineage, she of the yoga in spare time and hugging the endangered whatsitsname scaled beige lizard found in Tahiti in the rest of it, tell you it was gonna be here ? Soon. That it’d be so strong and so powerful and that it’d blow away every little piece of crap that believed otherwise.The screens go blank. You stumble out, squinting, into the sun. But wait ! You f’got to ask her what exactly was it that you were supposed to believe in ?! What if IT blew you away too ?! You weren’t chaff, you were pretty sure of that. But why weren’t you ?!

You are Val. You’re 27. You work as assistant to this chemist. You don’t think much about anything. Except for frogs. And an occasional lager. “Why frogs ?” is a question you haven’t been asked many times, possibly because not many people know you exist. Which is kind of good, since you probably don’t know the answer yourself. And a frank admission to that effect, a simple yet enigmatic “I don’t know. Come to think of it, I never really thought of it that way !” honestly won’t pave way for any further conversation or even as little as enquiry. You know people aren’t really interested in frogs. They aren’t interested in much else either, but they’d do better pretending they know about the Greenhouse effect and Hilton’s latest sex tape than about frogs. You’re weird, and it’s good that you know it. Because otherwise, it’d just be a whole lot of pain.

Rewind harder. Kindergarten. A classroom bustling with kids, who fall over and hug and kiss others they can not even know yet. The teacher has a question. “What dya wanna be when you grow up ?” Huh ?! What kind of a question is that to be asking someone who talks with a drool perpetually hung at the base of his lower lip, can’t even wipe it off by himself ?  Surprise, surprise, though. The retarded looking kid has an answer. “Sailor”, he says, pretty solemnly. The teacher beams at him, with a smile as wide  as a canyon. She says it’s really good that he wants to be a sailor. That distinguishes him from others, like other things differentiated them from him. Also, he could sail around the world, see new lands, meet new people. She didn’t say where he’d get the food to eat from. But, then , kindergarten is supposed to be simple. Many years later, he was in a lecture hall, listening to another teacher talk about how personality is something that helps people fit in, be compatible, work in an organization. And, as if on cue, as if irony needed epiphany, the primordial question is popped, again, this time in a room full of adults, in a classroom full of scholars.

I lied.

“…he Do the Police in different voices !” : Lamenting Language

It is amazing how words seem just that when all you are doing is listening or reading. Amazing too, how some words, when crowded together, maybe in the same breath, do something more than just stand in a queue, formally called a sentence, and shout, “Read , read!”. Ordinarily, they’d just be ball bearings, rolled in between ruled blue lines, while a high school essay, a newspaper headline, a suicide note or an alimony contract slides over them, as smoothly as possible. That, nonetheless, is why language was invented. To be as effective a vehicle for thought as can be. To provide little or no friction to communication. To be a mute canvas, a non conflicting backdrop for human interaction. Quite.

Here’s a short story. A long time, let us say, four score and eighty hundred years, ago a fine gentleman noticed something funny. Or maybe someone else before him did, but was afraid to own up to it for fear of being branded a heretic and burnt, or being drawn and quartered, or disembowelled/dismembered. Or maybe he was straight and just wasn’t amused by funny things since most of whatever they called life then wasn’t. In any case, we had a eureka moment. Or wait, what if it was before Archimedes? Sheesh ! Digressions kill. So do indigestions. Either way, our man was walking down the Bridge on this beautifully bright day when lo and behold ! he heard someone shout, ” Baked buns, blueberry biscuits, buy a bunch, get a bunch free !”. Yeah, okay, so i added that last bit !.

Our man, who we’ll call Bob for the story’s sake, was befuddled and beguiled. What was it? Surely, ’twas not illegal for people to sell their ware on the street. This generally needed making some noise as a device to attract attention too. What then was so unmistakably ungainly about the whole affair ?! And then, right when he crossed the orchid seller who beat his wife every Wednesday, it hit him. He jumped for joy while the epiphany eluded everyone else.

Bob died of Beriberi on his Birthday. Sheesh !

Alliteration is one of the many ways of rusting the aforementioned bearings of language, metaphorically. Metaphor is another. Figures of speech provide flavor and flair to the dry as desert structure of common word usage. This is accomplished by breaking the flow of thought transmission by a sudden change in semantic structure; either incongruous, or more than average lyrical, or just plain weird. The reaction is a subconscious equivalent of “What the …?!”. Precisely because the effect isn’t very pronounced, it provides the occasional clever court jester opportunity to show off for the Queen and the occasional slick marketing executive chance to get an inside track with the target buyer.

Consider alliterations, again. Ever wondered why all tongue twisters are, almost without exception, alliterative in nature ? Okay, so this crackpot allegory may have no neuro/psycho logical backing but is it a really huge leap of imagination to assume that maybe, there’s a fixed, finite quota of each alphabet, or more generally, each sound, in the universe ?! And that , maybe, the universe prefers lower entropy, phonetically. So maybe, it’s the universe’s fault that she can’t sell sea shells at the sea shore. The universe would seem to be against this particular figure of speech, though this certainly doesn’t explain the Big Bang, its alliterative genesis. But then nothing much explains the Big Bang so we may as well skip this inconsistency. Whichever reason suffices, it’s kind of an established fact that our brains slow down while processing alliterative structures. And that momentary lapse of reason is precisely what the poet and the copywriter hopes and aims for. Trust me on this one, this was what was on Richard Wilbur’s mind when he wrote Junk:

Of plastic playthings, paper plates.

and on Walt Disney’s, when he created that legend of a rodent, Mickey Mouse and the equally famous feather ball Donald Duck. What do you think of Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Dilton Doiley and Moose Mason ?! Want superheroes ? Peter Parker. Bruce Banner. Clark Kent is phonetically alliterative. Meanwhile, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luther and Lionel Luther are every which way. Coca Cola is alliterative. So is the World Wide Web. I wonder if there’s much that isn’t.

Heard through the grapevine ( which essentially means I made this up , which in turn means I expect unmitigated admiration and worship for creating this awesome a thing !)

Q : Why doesn’t it take ‘four’ to tango ?

A : Beacause that’s not alliterative !

I don’t have much else to write. I’ll just reiterate the universe’s sentiments, that someday, there’s gotta be about enough of crazy, cheesy and crappy alliterations. Borrowed heavily from the 1999 movie Mystery Men, when the three protagonists are trying to decide what they’ll call their superhero group.

- Wait! Wait, that’s it. We are the Super Squad.

- No, no! Alliteration in these situations is corny.

on the nature of things

First things first.

Things change.

That’s it for lesson one.