It bothers me that when I try to write about I'm feeling, I cannot string it into a coherent sentence. What bothers me is not my inability, but the compulsion to string a coherent sentence. It is an inherent inadequacy of Language, that it has been manipulated by order. That is has been twisted to not cater to the irrational. 

I just discovered William Matthews. He's brilliant. The first five lines are officially one of my favorite poem beginnings. 

Mingus at the Showplace


I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,


and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat


literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,


casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.


And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.


So I made him look at the poem.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,


and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought


bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot


to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children.   Of course later


that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.


“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
he explained, and the band played on.

If you care also read Telegram from the Muse and Living Among the Dead. 

The good, the bad and the internet

On Friday I took the pilgrimage to Gurgaon to spend the night at my adopted family's, The Sen's. I've already teared up the blog with sentimental ranting about them so I'm not going to do it again. The teenage brat brigade announced as soon as I landed in their home, that it was ice-skating day. Ten years ago someone this might have been interpreted as a code or an imaginary game, but anything in possible in Generation Insane. Initially I was super apprehensive because I have never worn skates in my life and was tired of being reminded of my complete lack of athletic capability. But after I trotted on the side like an old woman for a bit I finally got over my fear of being on wheels and did alright. But my life's new mission is to learn how to whiz around on ice skates for which I will have to sell myself (Fake ice in tropical countries costs the world) or move to Canada. 
So on the way back from ice skating and the kids going to every single shop in the mall and claiming that anything inside ten grand is affordable (my bracket is five), we started walking home. 
After about ten minutes of walking we noticed a Ford Fortuner was trailing us silently. If S.U.V's are the jocks on the road, the Fortuner is football captain. Soon we realized that the driver had a gun and got into an auto and raced home, still followed closely. After a very scary twenty minutes, me and six teenagers(two of them being girls who were the asshole's main interest),  somehow got home to a couple of drunk parents watching C.I.D. 
While sitting around the table pretending to still be frightened but actually cracking up from moment to moment, Tan asks me if I remember the guy's face. Absolutely, I say. In no time a blackberry is out and in five minutes the asshole's face is on it. 
'Yahi hai na?'. 'Haan dude yeh kaise kiya tune?'. 'Abbe, aaj kal sab ho jaata hai'.
Tan had already thought of possible names while we were in the auto. Someone had talked to him before about a guy who lived near his house and owned a white Fortuner. ('People don't buy big cars if they don't want to be seen'-important wisdom from a 16 year old) . Someone on his Facebook 'could have been' this guy, or friends with him. After going through various photo albums, he found a photo of a bunch of guys in a Ford Fortuner. He slowly went to each one's profile and sought out the most probable, the face he remembered most. Because of Facebook, we had found his name, address, education details. They called the police and everyone took a good look at his photo knowing what the hell to do the next time they see him. The asshole driver had been found and warned and addressed by his name at first sight which had taken him by surprise and scared the shit out of him. 
Everyone is on facebook.
It didn't solve much, but to the kids, knowing that their dangerous stalker was on Facebook, he posed for pictures like them, and they knew his surname and ex girlfriend's details, made them feel better. 
Everyday, I mourn the loss of anxiety, the thrill of not knowing something, but sometimes it is time to accept that we live in an age of speed. We live by aggression, not passive patience. V and I recently found that the man who we love across continents has a girlfriend. Not out of malice but sheer curiosity and the ability to actually know, I found out who she is. 
My friend got into university to play guitar because he got the most likes on his song. 
My uncle told me that one time he had to wait five days for someone who lived in the same city to tell him that she loved him back. Recently I met someone from another country who is leaving in two weeks. Two days back, when I hadn't gotten a Facebook message for a whole 24 hours, I had several panic attacks. Between about fifty exchanged messages and ten encounters I believe that I have spent with someone a time that I know I will remember always. Our existence is no more fluid, we exist in fragments. We don't evolve over years, but go back and forth from time to time. Connections with the world and moments of definition are brief. Like the instance when someone offers you a light at a bar. Or when a song plays that everyone knows. Or when you write a sentence and it happens to make sense even for that second. We live in hyperspace. Reality disappears almost immediately after it is created. Right now I can feel one thing and in ten minutes I could be feeling another. It is an age of instantaneous indecision. 
  
Aristotle insisted that man is by nature, a social animal. We live communally. We exist BY people, not just with. To believe that technology has stolen an intangible human essence, one preserved over centuries is essentially wrong. There is no human nature, it constantly invents itself in changing realms of subjective truth. Today we live in Facebook, in twitter, in a world when you meet someone at a party the thrill is growing out what you already know of them. Growing is to realize people's lives always look better on facebook. Anything we know for ten minutes becomes mundane and we turn to google to broaden the restless limits of our knowledge. Collection, and not cognition has become the way of knowing. Technology and social networking must be used rather than as a huge sea to wallow and drown in as a tool to make whatever of our lives is left better. Because there is no complete escaping them. Everyone has an online fix. High speed internet is the new oxygen. We wake up in the mornings and run to our keyboards. Everyone is on a quest of connection beyond see-able limits. We write blogs, we go to chat forums. We fall in love with faces on our desktops, with words from unknown sources. Facebook is just the most self confessed of all. It is voluntary submission. It feeds into the notion that superficial knowing is complete knowing. On our blogs we rejoice in supposed anonymity, but pour more of ourselves onto the screen than on our Facebook profiles. Under the blanket of anonymity we transport more of ourselves for the rest of the world to know. 
The loss of a preceding era is natural but it is important to realize it is not possible to exist outside a system. I know none of this makes any sense but I have decided to wake up everyday and rid myself of a little melancholia. Be Nietzsche, not Rousseau. In non-pretentious coherent language that means something along the lines of not to mourn, but to celebrate. 
I totally want to be Rousseau though, all hot and brooding and shit. 
Look how cheerful Jamiroquai is.

All day I have read 'young successful(published) Indian authors' online, via their blogs and have gotten seriously pissed off. After writing this I am deathly afraid that at a lot of times I sound like writing that I hate. So I feign self hatred and claim transparency to make myself feel cooler and believe I am better than most my age because at least I KNOW that I don't(know). And I say it again and again so at least you will believe me, even if I don't. 
All I know is that I don't know anything, you know. 


“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves.” 
Julain Barnes, The Sense of an Ending 

I'm struggling to get through my critical reading of 1984. Reading is hectic being a literature student. Sentences erupt into different meanings and contradict themselves repeatedly. The strength of words amazes, but the lack amazes more. Must constantly read into what is not being said. Absence defines presence. We form meanings by the lack of, by negation of. Relative meaning must be examined. But all meaning is relative. And differential. They are not the same thing. Cannot think in binaries. Power isn't only oppressive, it is productive. Slash your own discourse. No discourse is legitimate. Sub cultures define structures more than oppose them. The author is dead. Do not take moral stand points. DO NOT take emotional ones. All reality is hyper. It is constantly changing. It is also subjective. It is also socially constructed. Do not define. Definition is a drawback. History is insufficient. So is Language. It is patriarchal, structured, passe. Think beyond dictionaries. Language excludes. Truth is a cultural myth. Fictional and fictitious are different things. Meta-anything is a myth. Correlation is not causation. Be evoked, but suspicious. A text may smell good, feel good, but don't let it dictate. Totality is a farce- contest it. Feminine, feminist, female are all different categories. A woman's account of a woman's life may be as insufficient as a man's, maybe more. Do not aim to integrate. DO NOT sympathize. 


This is why I haven't gotten past sixty pages in the last two days. Also because I am incredibly lazy and a total show off for doing that but I have NEVER, in my defence, written a lit-brat post. I would sprout some Sartre but I am afraid that everyone will hate me for being too smart or whatever :D You know what they say about people who study literature? One day they get a drink thrown in their face. 


Also, Happy birthday Bruda. I know you know everything I have to say, but thankyou once again for being my comrade in being stupid and contagious. Love ya 4E&4A. 

I don't understand how to play it cool when it comes to sex, or the forbidden four letter word. Today my friend told me that plunging into things completely was a 'dude thing'. Apparently I have to be distant and aloof and pretend like my life doesn't depend on it.

But you know what they say about the heart doing things for reason that reason cannot understand or comprehend or something like that. And also what they say about kambhaqt ishq. 

But what I really need to hear right now is what Honey has to say. 

Today is yaara nu chaska day. Rebecca Black had a point about Fridays being funfunfun.


But another friend told me today that 'dude, jis cheez ki humne baat ki thi, uska intezaam ho gaya hai'. You know what they say about friends with weed. 

Today I lost one of my best friends. Bono and I met when I was seventeen and he was five. With more wisdom than anyone his age or species, Bono first played hard to get. My extreme emotional and irrational approach wasn't suited to beings like him. Bono was cryptic, yet transparent. He was stern and loving at the same time. I spent a good deal of my time in his house heartbroken and often inebriated, of which Bono was accepting but not welcoming. As I grew up around Bono, I got signs of approval, enacted by letting me pick him up or take him for a walk. I felt like I had made headway in Bono's school of Zen. He was my Mr Miyagi, my Master Schifu. Nish fish, Bono's one and only love and co-resident, tells me that you carry people you have loved with you everywhere you go. Today when I sat around Bono's room I felt him settle into the world. He wasn't an absence, but a strong presence. Even when he was sick and dying, Bones managed to look nonchalant and solemn about the entire thing. After burying him, I felt lucid grief, but not severe helplessness. Bones taught me more than anyone on two legs and with the power of speech ever could. In silence he taught me to grow up and recognize myself as the only person I could ever be.


I love you forever Bones. you were my Confucius. And the coolest friend I ever had.

(on a different note)
Facebook kills chances of any real connection, but also any chances itself. I do wish I lived in a previous age. One in which sincerity wasn't dead.

I wish the 80s would return so I could dance with a random cute person at a party to this song.