New beginnings

A Diamond in the Rough

Ghosts

How I miss being missed...

Minding gaps

Rivers of steam

Because everything has a shelf life.

In the peak of summer, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible crabbiness.

Hazy Chain

Scours. Scars. Cars.
Lees. Leas. Lease.
Seer. Sear.
Fear.
Here.

White Nights

Late nights in white walls. Silent passages, vacant chairs. Words falling on invisible ears, water through a sieve. Silent streets and stiff breezes. Vacant lots, empty roads. End trails and entrails. Rustling leaves, echoing footsteps. Dark houses and cold draughts. Weary feet, withered eyes. Steaming coffee and bottles of water. A warm, restless slumber and quiet dreams of no waking.

Summer moved on

24

Bye, bye baby.

Set in Stone

Nothing is...

This will be my videotape

A grey day, completely out of the blue. After a week of uncomfortably sudden spring warmth, quite inexplicably, Today plunged headlong into confused autumn. Forced everyone to walk just a little shrunken, with heads bent low, sucking in mouthfuls of frigid air, hugging themselves a little more. People enveloped in themselves, seeking warmth within, bravery without.

I guess it just isn't easy doing everything backwards; I don't suppose anyone could blame poor ol' Mother Nature down here for being confused as hell. As the 'right' side of the world yanks out her winter-wear-- crunchy, red-leaved carpets, blankets of fog and foggy breath, desolate trees, and stunning mornings, people in Perth have started strolling around barefoot. Yes, somehow, belying the blatant "first-worldliness" that this country (where running into someone, heck, anyone, who couldn't afford shoes is rarer than running into a yeti) basks in, more and more blithely vacuous "yoots" (Danny DeVito. Need I say more?) are taking to walking around with naked feet. Apparently, 36 degrees is too warm for footwear.

I do wonder how Aussies would deal with a Rajasthani summer...

Last night, I stayed up for hours scavenging through the myriad bits and pieces that I'd accumulated over the past year, sorting through a mountain of memory to decide what I could discard, and what I needed to hold on to. As it turns out, the more I dove into the pile, the more I discarded, and I discovered within myself a frighteningly honed skill for detachment. A sub-zero skill of unforeseeable magnitude.

Maybe it isn't only a fondness for melancholy that makes me revel in grey days. Perhaps it's the familiarity of coldness, albeit on the outside, that I seek with greed.

Cellar Door

Look closer.

Fog

It's been a funny week. Got back onboard last Friday and dove headlong into the thick of things, revelling in the long, taxing hours, content (dare I say, even glad?!) about "active", about being of some use, somewhere. But each day scratches away at the novelty just that tad more, and the gladness is slowly starting to resemble a dry "Hmmmm..."

Dry. Dry is what I feel. And no amount of generous slathering of moisturiser seems to make it go away. Think. I try to think, but it's almost as if my brain's slowly atrophying. An unobtrusive atrophy. No thoughts, happy or sad. None at all, not even the intangible, nameless ones. Empty. Not empty and aching. Just, empty, stoically hollow.

But there still are dreams. Those ephemeral five minutes between sleep and waking every morning, when my mind is still living its other life, are when I feel most alive. Most human. And the day I wake up to the knowledge that my mind never made that journey the previous night is when I'd know I truly died.

Zero-Sun

And all we are worth is just zeroes and ones.

"Stop the guns, stop the guns!!"

... is what I heard this afternoon, exactly 10 seconds before I was to leave the ship's bridge, done with my marine-mammal-lookout watch for the day. I lifted a pen to sign the roster, and at that exact instant, the bridge radio bursts into frantic yelling from the engine room, which, we were to find out at that instant, was filling up with seawater.

What ensued immediately was one whole minute of wild chaos, with more incoherent, panic-stricken engine-room hollers coming through the radio, and the captain running up to the bridge, banishing all us lowly seismic crew to the instrument room (where we spend over 12 hours a day), while he set about, with unnerving calmness, to decipher what exactly was underway. We tore back to the instrument room, on standby to shut all systems down in case a blackout was issued. Senior crew members on night-shift, frantically summoned, poured into the instrument room, bleary-eyed and puzzled at first, then quickly progressing to urgent alertness. Guns stopped, ship to a grinding halt, the chase-boat racing towards us to tow the ship if needed, and frazzle, frazzle, all around. Morbid excitement. Every person in the know making mental checklists of precious personal belongings to abandon ship with, if needed. It's embarrassing, the enlightenment that comes with making that checklist. Of priorities, imagined. Versus those, real.

In the end, in a nutshell, valve shut, leak stemmed, water pumped, and back to business, an hour later. Like nothing ever happened at all. I don't know what's more horrifying -- The possibility that things could have gone very wrong, or the fact that an hour later, it was all back to business. Frantic business. Single-minded business, unwavering priorities. Tick, tock, tick, tock, must catch up with the clock. Must make that money, must not stop, no matter what.

Demon Days

That's about the closest thing to 'sunset' I've managed to watch in days. Well, alright, five days, but that really is downright shocking and reprehensible and terrible and head-shakingly sorrowful by my standards. Offshore-ing standards, that be. A far, far cry from March when I shamelessly flooded this blog with enough pictures similar enough to be made into animation! Which, I absolutely swear I never did. But then again, the alternative to less sunset pictures here means more spouting of words and things, in trite, bloggy "trains of thought" and "fragments" and "ponderings" and thoroughly pretentious rhetoric.

Er... I think I'll stop now.

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Post title courtesy a Gorillaz album. Which I have, but can't quite remember if I've heard entirely. It's always usually (hmm... isn't that some kind of oxymoron?) El Mañana. I would've preferred it being called 'Today', but 'Hoy' doesn't quite have the same ring to it, now, does it?

Title also in tribute to Samit Basu. Read the last bits of The Simoqin Prophecies this morning and grinned wildly for absolute hours. And since nearly everyone here positively despises bobbing about for five weeks straight, of course they think I'm thoroughly weird and smile and nod benignly at me, probably muttering "Poor thing. Losing her mind, she is," to themselves. Um, actually, more likely they're fantasising about that first beer as soon as they land on solid ground.
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Mmmmmm. Am finally taking the time to sit down, do mostly nothing, and drown in music that I've had to reluctantly set aside for days now. Such immensely pure bliss!

Ok, I've absolutely stopped now. Really.

Holy Moments

Sitting in a dark hotel room for over a day with nothing meaningful to do, trapped by pouring rain in an entirely new country with only all of me for company, doesn’t seem to agree with me. An overwhelmingly unreal feeling. Like I’m in another skin, by myself, in my shoes, but entirely unrecognisable. Maybe it’s the movie I’m watching. Or the silence. Or that unshakeable feeling that I’m not really awake. Like I’m sleepwalking through these strange, alien moments.

You would expect change to become familiar after a while, after moments and moments of relentless change -- days, weeks, months, people, language, the view from your window, the way you spend your waking hours, the tumult of thoughts and feelings swirling in your head, your experience of things, the way your head feels between your palms, the amount of white sprinkled in your hair, the shape of your face, the look in your eyes. You’d imagine you’d stop feeling so… uncomfortably different. You’d think it’d all make more sense as time goes by.

Maybe it’s just transition that I struggle with. It takes a while for things to settle down, to be daubed with the slightest tinge of familiarity. But isn’t that process change as well? Does change really ever stop? Or does it just blend into recognition? And what defines the boundaries of these segments of recognition? At what point does transience morph into habit? Does it ever get easier? Would it be a life less worth living if it were easier?

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There’s a well-known, much-recycled opinion, a pervasive theme about dreams that I think I’m only just starting to completely comprehend, to consciously assimilate. The one that contends that every single thing we dream about while we’re asleep has to have originated from our own minds. Everything we ‘know’ in a dream, every absurd idea, every ludicrous action, every horrific dream-monster, exists in each of our heads, somewhere, even if just as tiny seeds. Every stranger’s face in every unfamiliar place is one you’ve seen before, felt before, thought of before, have known of, in entirety, or in entirely unrelated bits and pieces randomly glued together. And they are as real and as much a part of our consciousness as multiplication tables, or memories of faces, or lyrics to favourite songs. Yet, somehow, by some inscrutable filtering process, they’ve been imprisoned, confined, tied up, and exiled to the dark corners of our minds, forming the pillars of an alternate consciousness, one that bides its time until the rigours of surviving the day have finally enervated the ‘conscious’ mind and body and plunged both into this alternate reality.

Even as I write this, I know that I’m incapable of saying exactly what it is I want to say, of lucidly defining every single intangible smudge in my head. The inevitable failure – Thoughts, always, lost in translation.

Mad World

On my way to the airport, with frayed nerves, a scrambled mind, and a steadily growing feeling of unease, I stared out into the black distance from my cab window. Even the gorgeous night couldn’t wipe clean the glazed expression, churning thoughts, iron out the furrowed brow, and numb that dull ache. Eagerness and optimism thwarted by wistfulness and regret. And chains, rabbit-holes, faces, expressions, words, the faintest, guarded whiff of emotion. All mixed up. All over again.

Was witness to a small car accident en route. At a traffic light about five minutes away from the airport, at an intersection, a car in front brakes suddenly to avoid running a red light, and the one behind, caught unawares, slams right into it. Car #2 pays the price, the front end scrunched like a crumpled sheet of paper. Out steps Driver #2, a dishevelled looking middle-aged man with straggly, shoulder length hair steps out and hollers incoherently. And then does the strangest thing. If I’d known better, I would’ve said he was headbanging! A straggly-haired man, doubling over and yelling, over and over again. He didn’t appear to be injured; he walked around a bit, hollered, waved his arms in the air, and… er… ‘headbanged’. Over and over again. Yet, it isn’t the most likely thing in the world that music appreciation was what was on his mind, out there in the middle a busy road, in the cold, with a scrunchy car to contend with. I can only imagine that he was either a) drunk, b) distraught, c) furious, d) stoned, e) losing his mind. Admittedly, no stranger to the morbid fascination that fills bystanders at the scene of a ‘crime’, I was tempted to hover around and watch the drama that would most likely ensue. However, there were planes to catch and duties to follow. I sighed, shook my head with just the appropriate amount of commiseration, and left. Cursed the soulless life that didn’t give me the time to stop and smell the roses. And participate in noble activities like gawking at streetside headbangers.

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Balikpapan, Indonesia appears to be almost exactly like any medium-sized Indian town, if the ride from the airport to the hotel is anything to go by. Even that tangible balminess in the air feels so familiar! Little grocery and convenience stores sprinkled all around, all devoid of neon signs, the numerous two-wheelers, tiny tea-stalls decked with potato-chip-packet-streamers, brash election posters smeared in the ugliest manner possible, dust, and honking cars. If only I could read Bahasa Indonesia, I’d say I was home.

And Now

Days just go by. Roll by. Day after day. Relentlessly chugging. After a while, you just stop noticing anything. Boredom cloaked in routine, cloaked in habit, loses its sting. And I can't imagine a scarier thing. Failing to notice boredom because it's become so... familiar.

And this is what they all warn you about. Them with the trophies of grey heads, sad wrinkles, potbellies, healthy bank balances, shrivelled dreams, and dead eyes. And I bet you smirked and scoffed at the idea that it could happen to you too.

Ice

The movie Fargo has the most breathtaking photography. Photography, as against cinematography, because that's just how certain scenes unravel. Random, startling, stunning snapshots of moments, frozen in time, right out of nowhere. Stark, frozen, pristine, bleached, desolate landscapes, snowed in, drowned, caked in white, and silhouettes, and breath, and smoke, and watery eyes.

If that isn't enough, the rest of the movie should be worth at least some of your time. A very strange story, even odder accents, the icy, unapologetic black humour -- the kind that makes you laugh cruelly, wallowing in the comfort of solitude, free from judgment. Or because of (or in spite of, perhaps??) Best Actress and Screenplay Academy Awards. Whatever works for you.

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Can fresh air and a frail, terrifyingly, achingly tantalising dream in your head keep you alive?

A thought, an idea that isn't mine to take pride in, to coddle, to derive purpose from, and yet I do, with uninhibited optimism, an utterly alien lack of cynicism, and inexplicable naiveté. I'm struggling to make sense of this absurdity, this aberration in my belief-system (or lack, thereof), this brazen contradiction of attitude. Mine, that is. Yes, I'm shamelessly self-involved.

The point being, the mere idea of the possibility a big picture down the road, the faintest whiff of arriving somewhere lifts the fog a little bit. Hope may just be an obese illusion, an upper, but I'm honestly past caring. Hell knows I need some escapism right now.

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Imitation/inspiration/influence/(insert suitable euphemism) may be the best form of flattery, but, like the elephant in the room, once pointed out, once acknowledged, reduces you to nothingness. Clinically peels off those layers, strips you bare, and painfully, painstakingly, coldly crushes you into pulp, that elephant's foot.