slowly slowly i'm becoming a person

somehow i've never envied the man sleeping on the pavement. never believed it when people said he was in such a deep peaceful sleep. how would we know? perhaps he sleeps wishing he'd never wake up. perhaps he's intoxicated upon a bottle of disappointment, fallen there giddy and grateful for the window into oblivion, however narrow, however brief.
perhaps he is after all not any different from any of us.

then there are those who can't belong anywhere else or to anyone else but themselves. haruki murakami. chuck palahnuik. they write in a style that itself becomes one. murakami is heady. you just don't know when he brings you to a point where reality is suspended. and at what point he becomes the chatty next door neighbour drinking from a carton of milk. surrealism recorded in a real language, the thought itself is so bizarre. and i think palahnuik is what you get when a brilliant writer re-arranges himself inside out, skin protected by slippery guts. he's raw, bloody, shameless, perverse, self-indulgent and yet, or is it therefore, purely magnetic.

it gets bone-tiring sometimes, this losing respect business.

read a little ted hughes online. i find his writings, well, rectangular. scientific. i'd go for sylvia plath anyday.

i find most hotel rooms extremely cold, both in temperature and temperament. hotel lobbies too. not their loos though. the loos are warm and reflecting and clean and fragrant with crushed petals and used face lotions and hurried hairsprays and floating snatches of fake conversations powdered with the true impatience of two starched attendants. the loos are what hotels must be used for. nothing else.

clean your ears. and no, using earbuds everyday is not always good enough. feel the crevices where the ears fold over. see how they are crusted with dried soap? and yes, it looks uglier than it sounds.

over the past couple of days i saw two things i thought i would never see.

1. an archies gallery - seriously, i had forgotten about those greeting card places. do people still send those? in the age of email and cellphone? of course, nobody should have sent them even in the age of greeting cards but that's a different story. in fact i'm going to drop in someday just to see what they have in there, if the tacky keychain things and shoddily finished, trilling musical cards are still there.

2. pierced cheeks - no, not the eyebrow/tongue/navel kind, i'm talking of some kumbh melaish people, men and women heavily garlanded and smeared in white red orange, with ten foot long metal tridents going in one cheek and coming out the other. spots of white powder around both holes in the cheek probably to mask the crusted blood. and then, a young boy with a ten foot trident stuck into his cheeks, holding each end of the metal rod with a hand, poised as if he was about to run. true enough, the boy sped past and i saw two metal hooks stuck in his bare back with a long rope hitched to a cart laden with two dozen unshelled coconuts. several boys did this coconut cart dragging thing and one last boy ran past dragging along a big cane box filled with god knows what. and of course, accompanied by south indian music similar to nadaswaram. all this on a busy road in the middle of thick evening traffic. fuck.

finished the bell jar. it's fascinatingly open, demented and today. i love the way some writers can never be pinned down to one particular era. their writing can be read and experienced at any time across centuries. they create characters that could exist right now, in 2008 or in 2045 or back in 1906. like ayn rand. and of course j.d. salinger. in fact esther in the bell jar could be a slightly more neurotic holden caulfield, but i can't be sure because i'm not sure what neurotic exactly means and i'm too lazy to google it right away. besides, i'm quite sure that if i read it up, i will end up convinced that i've always been neurotic, from even before i was born.
coincidentally, i had watched girl, interrupted just a week back. the similarities struck me so often that i thought the movie was a secret interpretation of the book since it wasn't mentioned in the credits. turns out it was based on a book by susanna kaysen by the same title. am very tempted to read that one now.

i woke up to a strangely non-sunny room. i had forgotten how close we've come to the rains. and how much i hate physiotherapy.

http://tokyo-girl.blogspot.com/

old flame

i had read some of her stuff and stayed away. perhaps it was the way her words scraped my skin, each letter a subconscious red flag. but when i stumbled upon her while blogsifting, i knew i was seeking her.

i ordered her only book from crossword, which to my shock, had stocked it in their children's section, what amazing fucking morons, and every page i read i ask myself what i was doing not doing this before now. perhaps crossword is right after all, i could have been different today if i had it when i was young.

the boyfriend was alarmed when i mentioned her name, "she is extremely dark" and explained in detail how she died. i later discovered that she killed herself exactly the day i was born, at exactly the age i am right now. for a moment and a rather long one, i could feel some indefinable thing racing the length of my spine. something very different from what crossed my face when i discovered i shared edison's happy birthday.

it’s so easy to be weak. throw up your hands and say i know it’s wrong, what i’m doing or sometimes, what i’m not doing, but then what can i do i am like this.
ever tried putting your foot down? ever tried saying i am like this and i don’t like being like this and i’m going to not be like this and i’m serious? ever changed yourself when it isn’t convenient for you to change? ever changed that part of you which makes you, that part which is you?
ever changed for real?