Smile, You're Travelling...

"To love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again."

— Ellen Bass

*****

"Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have"

— Henry Rollins

*****

"I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them, "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup."

— Henry Rollins

*****

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

have someone to sit by and be with.

I would like to cradle you and softly sing,

be your companion while you sleep or wake.

I would like to be the only person

in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.

And would like to listen to you

and outside to the world and to the woods.

The clocks are striking, calling to eachother,

and one can see right to the edge of time.

Outside the house a strange man is afoot

and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.

Beyond that there is silence.

My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;

and they hold you gently, letting you go

when something in the dark begins to move.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It's In The Air...

While India-Pakistan talks are being held in Thimphu, here's an interesting fact about Bhutan.

THIMPHU, Bhutan — Most of the penises painted on houses or suspended from rooftops in Bhutan are larger than humans.

They come in various sizes, color schemes and embellishments. Some have ribbons tied around them like jovial holiday presents. Others are coiled by daunting dragons. A few even have eyes. They typically feature hairy testicles, from the neatly trimmed to full-on Yeti-style. And, of course, all are fully erect. [full article]

Yep, very exciting!

They Know What Boys Want...

I don't have kids, heck, I am not even married yet, but this article has me scared for the future kids. I almost want to lock up my imaginary kids and cut off their internet and take away their smartphones, which I do realise is never gonna happen. And I am left to wonder what next? Kids might as well come out of their mother's womb and start demanding/having sex with the next baby in the incubator. I won't be surprised.

On Love...

"Love should bring joy, it should grant a person peace, but here and not, it was bringing only pain."

Love has always brought me pain. And I realise, it is because I have always been running away from it. I've been thinking about a lot of things in the past few months, and feeling depressed about a lot more. There's comes a time when you need to stop moping and evaluate your choices, yourself.



I've tried to be honest here and I will try to be in the future. But I promise I'll be honest, not only here, where I know few people read me and fewer still know me in "real" life, but I promise myself that I'll be honest, in the real life, about loving. I will love with complete abandon. I won't hold back. I won't run away. I won't hide. I'll love without the excess unnecessary baggage. Without brakes. Without thinking about the scars I wear. Without worrying about the future. Without worrying about getting hurt.



Anything else, I realise, is a travesty. A lie. It won't be easy(Even as I write this, a small voice mocks me), but I hope such a love won't suffocate you, won't suffocate me. That such a love is possible. And maybe, just maybe, such a love won't hurt.

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl...

This made me weep and jump with joy; joy of coming across such beautiful words, almost like finding a lottery.

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.[...]

[...]Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

This article made me feel grateful that I can read.

*****
I realise, there is a certain beauty in failing. Of not going through life being happy always. There is a certain meaning to living a life that's mired in sadness, misery, failure and loneliness. I realise, maybe, it's good that I am still struggling to find my calling in life, that I didn't meet my soulmate at a college fete 10 years ago, that I found and lost, that I tried and failed. There is a certain beauty in struggle too. And when all this is over, maybe I can say I lived a life worth talking about.

The Idea Of Our Happiness...

Wouldn't it be so much better if we remember where we came from before this life? We might actually like this life. 

A Mouse, A Helmet And A Motorcycle...You Know What Else? A Camel!

Compulsive Confessor could not have put it better!

Rule number two, and one I’ve learnt the hard way. I’ve just come out of a pretty long, pretty serious relationship. Now, the problem with that is that you expect the next guy to pick up exactly where you and the old guy were when you broke up. Start at square one. Remember he’s not in love with you (yet). Remember he doesn’t know all your stories. Remember this is new territory, and you, even you, are a whole new person.

I have had more failure than successes and one of the main reason(Okay, fine, there were 200 main reasons!) has always been that I was stuck in the past. Well, one can't be entirely blamed. You are used to a certain person, a certain routine. You are so set in this life you have built, that it's hard to come out of it, harder even to see what you're doing-what you end up doing is essentially replace the old guy with a new guy, in the same old world.


I always thought I was same with everyone. I am not. With certain people, I feel safe enough to be myself, with a few, I am fake, with others I am guarded and controlled, but genuine. With a certain few, I am toned down and sobered down, essentially, not genuine not even fake (You get the worse deal rabbit). With a few, very few, I am weird and nuts and totally uninhibited (I think you'll love me like this, I like myself like this too).


You are a different person with each friend/colleague/acquaintance in your life. And if you think back, you were a different person with every guy you were with (or girl). Each love was different. You can not expect the same love! You have to let the new world unfold in its own time and in its own unique way. But you get into a new relationship, and you end up expecting same answers for your questions, you expect same gestures, same emotional responses, heck, you behave and talk the same way too! It's really stupid, but I believe it is something quite natural. You expect your new world to be the exact copy of the previous one. Cause you don't know anything else any more, you have forgotten any other way.


I think the solution to this is that you take time off. Don't get into a new relationship unless you have given yourself enough time to recover. "Enough" can vary from person to person, I normally take atleast a year(Yea I know!), a friend I know takes 2 months (How cool!). But never rush! You are going to end up hurting yourself and worse, the new person, who doesn't deserve the burden of your baggage. No one does. Not even you.


This is for a friend who wants to move on. Take time off. With love, you'll find old memories at every corner if you want to and aren't they just so painful? And what you end up doing is look for a band-aid. D, you're young and beautiful and smart and funny. And you deserve so much more! Take time off. Go see new places, meet new people, talk to strangers, read, cook new food, dance, sing...laugh. Do all that till you forget how your old world looked like. Then go out and make a new life.


Now if only someone had told me all this 5 years ago! :|