Morning Note

Jai Paul Track 2 Str8 Outta Mumbai by le-pere-de-colombe

Hit Play.

I'm usually a person who wakes up on the right side of the bed. Mornings are beautiful for me. The sunlight hits my face after making a million kaleidoscopic glares on the stains of my half-open window. The aroma of daybreak permeates inside, infused within it the smell of all the small eateries scattered in my neighbourhood. A gull cries out with a wail amidst traffic, as if to enviously remind me of my own happiness. I text my friends, with a need to share the fuzzy feeling in my heart.

And every now and then you wake up on the other side. The sunlight slaps you in the face through the crack in the curtains. Hums of airplanes and animated choppers give an industrial sheen to the urban decay. The stupid gull just doesn’t shut up. And everything you feel is shit.

Like someone unscrewed the back of my head and gave my brain the closest shave. Raw skin and frayed edges and melting plastic. Desolate hopelessness. Nothing seems to point anywhere and feelings lie dead in a cocoon of rotten soul. And nothing be undone and unworked. Just like a backstage pass to an orgy of evil clowns.

And then you see a funny cloud. In the big blue of the sky. You hear the call to prayer. The brown stains on the shingles don’t look so dirty anymore. No, it’s beautiful. The clothes drying on the line. You hear something else. No, your speakers are fine. You laugh and you realize this is the first time you laughed all day. The thought makes you smile. And the smile widens, with your leg tapping the ground. You start humming to the music. And all the sounds and all the feelings connect in your body in familiar fission, blobs of colour everywhere. Romance in imbalance. We're all just chemicals after all.

[ Exits, content ]

Sleep Rant

It's all Skype's fault.

I love my laptop. Being a Core i7 clocked to 2.7GHz, with 1TB of space, 6GB RAM and a GeForce GT 555m AND JBL speakers to boot, it's the best thing to perfect my losing streak on First Person Shooters. In the case of a fire drill, I often forget to put on pants before exiting the building but I never forget my precious baby. But last night I wanted to smash it silent. Now before you call Child Protective Services on me, let me explain:

I'm having a wonderfully surreal dream when suddenly: too too toot .. (weird sound of a shit hitting the water) .. too too toot

..and on and on and on and on. The all-too-familiar sound of Skype starts blaring on full volume. Like a responsible student about to graduate (hopefully) and scared to shit about the future, I'd put myself in bed around 12:30, only to be woken at 2:44 by a very jet lagged friend from Pakistan who just returned from Australia. There's a moment where the dream merges with real life and you're clinging to your subconscious, hoping and praying you're still dreaming, but this idiot just kept going with his call. And then when every inch of you is awake, the call ends. And after hours of turning and tossing with closed eyes and then open eyes, I finally fell asleep again. At 5! Only to get up at 7am for class. Which stretched til 5 pm.

[Ladyhawke starts singing]
Life inside your head has come undone
Your soul descent to madness has just begun
But this is real life, oh no
You can’t fight it, oh no
Cause this is real life
[Gives Ladyhawke a bitchslap to shut her up]

I'm now going to bed to start the cycle again. Eyes closed, and Skype too.

Out of the Rabbit Hole

[Enter Scene]
Writer: Hi, I'm Usman and I've forgotten how to write.
Crowd: Hello Usman! Let's talk about this so we can delve in to whatever's holding you back.
Writer: I'm writing again! Fuck this.
[End Scene]

It seems that God or White Jesus has put a plug in the overflowing drain in my brain that previously had words gushing out in spurts. Now I can't even get a good metaphor for describing this block. Not only, I can't even put a consistent flow of words together in business management assignments. Come on, man! All it takes for that is stringing words like "Critical", "Flow", "Process" and "Team" together to get something going. It can't be that a semester of constrained funds forcibly causing me into writing papers for money for my language-handicapped friends and dumbing it down enough to make it look like they actually wrote it was enough to crack the foundations of my love, personal expression! But who am I kidding, I can't even imagine doing that job anymore.
So something did crack in the past few years resulting in an abyss of unfinished and incoherent entries in this very blog that were never published. I'm writing this in the vague hopes of discovering what came up the rabbit hole that put a bullet in the writer's head. See! I totally borrowed that from the new Stallone movie, probably as a result of viewing the trailer a billion times before I play any song on Youtube. Makes me wish I was still in Pakistan, in the Land of the Pure and Ad-less Youtube. No, not really. Apparently the whole of Youtube took a cue from their advertisements and decided, like thousands of other Pakistanis cleaning car windshields in Greece, to scamper. I do miss it though. The family, friends, domestic help and even the rain and its predictable cousin, No-Lights. I'm wondering if that's the reason I can't write anymore. Maybe, it's the absence of my muse, HH (no, the wrestler has 3 Hs) who does't seem to remember me anymore. Maybe it's the MSc I'm doing in Business Systems Analysis and Design that caused my brain into rewiring itself for a more technical discipline. Maybe it's the pressure of finding a job after the end of it. Maybe it's the parental threat on getting me married the minute I get back. Or maybe it's just me being stupid and immature.
So now we're talking about maturity? The idea of it has long haunted me. I think my mind stopped growing after I hit 18. Hell, my entire head did. I don't think any guy likes getting asked for their ID when they're buying cigarettes when they're 27 years old. I'm 27, for fuck's sake. Give me my goddamn smokes!
So anyway, maturity is an ideal that's long eluded the likes of me. I think about it sometimes, what it is and how I should go about attaining it. Maybe the process involves not writing about stupid things at 3:44 am on a Sunday night. And then reading articles on Jack the Ripper operating around Whitechapel (my current address!), a hundred and twenty five years ago til it's 4:08. And then continuing to write about maturity!
I think Lars and the Real Girl had it kinda right when they say it's when "you don't jerk people around, you know, and you don't cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you're wrong, or you try to, anyways." I have a long way to go til I get there but at least with this definition, I still get to keep my Superman socks when I do. And in order to get to that, I should definitely call it a night and try to get some sleep before I wake up tomorrow and start my research into internships for the summer.

[Enter Scene]
Crowd: But we never really got into why you stopped writing!
Writer: Yeah, but in the hopes of continuing to write around it.
(crowd kicks writer out of the room)
[End Scene]