Weather-depression

Rains, and absent parents. The gloom that had drifted its way into Isaac's mind had to go. The movies on television were sour and bleak of their own. It wasn't fair, he thought, that it wasn't appropriate to make fun of a cripple, but was just fine to air the most damp shows amongst the plethora of sad, damp shows before one who was weather-depressed. Every turn on the miserably slow timepieces that adorned the walls of his house made him feel worse. Worst part was, it wasn't even raining right now. It's just that the sky was a stark white, a dreary, awful shade which wasn't even a shade. Morning skies were white, evening skies were white. Afternoon skies, which were supposed to be the brightest yellow were also plain white. Isaac couldn't take it. The fitting music that he played on the speakers that lay a few feet from him was perhaps the only depressing element that he had some control of, but hey, everything was so sad anyway that it didn't really matter which song of unrequited love or song of poetic death he played.

Vacations. He'd rather be back in college, where the multitudes of folk, annoying though most were, would give him some relief. But he was here, back too early. All of his friends of old were still stuck in their respective institutions, answering some term-ending exam which would set them 'free'. He couldn't take it. His parents had left for work five minutes ago. Without much though, Isaac located the duplicate key of his mother's car which he had so carefully hidden amongst the old photoframes of ever-smiling and now ever-dead grandparents. He descended his stairs, and drove off, taking the long route to the second gate of his housing colony, for it was manned by the gruff and unresponsive guard Ismail instead of the cheerful Bradley, the latter of whom would definitely announce his departure to his mother, for she had befriended him by bringing him the leftovers of every meal. Isaac drove to that shady little establishment behind a tattered building which was notorious for selling alcohol and cigarettes to underage students, and there he purchased a pack of strong cigarettes. A twenty pack, although he knew he wouldn't even consume a quarter of that. He knew he'd be ridden with guilt soon into his second smoke.

He returned to his parents' apartment, latched the main door, and walked into the prayer-room. There he located the lighter that was used to light incense sticks or lamps before the face of his parents' many gods, and then climbed up a spiral staircase to the terrace above. The skies had cleared up temporarily, and he was going to take advantage of that fact. He wore only a sleeveless shirt, and nothing to cover his privates. He lit his first cigarette. What am I doing? He was done with it, and moved quickly before regret would wash over him. His head was already a bit fuzzy with the haste that he had put into every deep puff. He lit his second, and unconsciously started stroking his penis. The cigarette grew smaller, and his penis grew larger with every puff. Soon, he was in ecstasy. I'm not even thinking of her. He stubbed the cigarette and carefully placed it in the corner with the first. He lit another and started stroking his penis rapidly, as if to make up for the delay that the process of lighting the third had caused. His pre-ejaculatory semen covered his left hand, and the third cigarette soon descended into ash on his right hand. It burnt. That aroused him more.

It was raining. Without any warning, water was falling from the sky. He looked up in wonder. This was the one aspect of the rainy season that awed him most. Water falling from the sky! And there were barely any clouds! A sunbeam hit him square in the face, and he had to squint to understand the rainbow in the distance. He covered his cigarette to keep away the water. He was onto his fourth cigarette before he ejaculated onto himself and the ground below. Regret finally overcame him, and he prematurely stubbed his cigarette. He refilled the twenty-pack with the used up cigarettes, and tossed it far into the adjoining housing colony, although the wind blew it further than he'd have liked. There was still semen on the ground; there was still ash on the ground. His father was no fool when it came to semen and ash. But the hateful rain would cover up for him.

Bleak II

There comes a time when a cigarette won't keep you satisfied. Love, lust, careless hedonism - all lie blind with the arrival of the time of discontent. This phase of youth, where opportunities should abound, is taken away in a flash when the dull epiphany of 'this-is-not-your-life' strikes. Come on, says a voice very distinct, you aren't what you are trying to be. Happiness is not key here: in fact, you aren't truly happy right now. You're stuck in that place where hope does exist, but isn't plentiful enough to throw away all vices and emotions - and yet, temporary absolution does naught to keep your real self content.

When I recall the passion of you and the memories we made, they do not linger as they did. At first, I'd said to myself, "you must record these feelings, you must be able to relive them!" I wish I'd done that, for I cannot achieve those feelings once more. I think of the summers - so high! so very high! - and I cannot, again, recall the vague knowledge of throwing frisbees past the surf while the sky gloriously waned into inconceivable hues which were never the same the next day. Even the songs that made those long drives oh-so-streamlined and oh-so-perfect don't sing the same way anymore.

It is lost, says the voice. You can never reach those same levels of unrelenting joy again. Like a cocaine rush, the very first experience can never be reclaimed. My first kiss threw my very being (to be is to live, and to live means endless surprises) into a standstill - I deserve that again! And so the hope, the just-enough hope, recuperates as I await even more terribly temporary highs in the days to come.

Bleak I

Drip, drop, his ears spring up
Three a.m. and someone filling his cup
Head is heavy, floor starts to spin
Ignore the intruder, take a deep breath in

Light from one reveals another
C.G. sparks it up, he truly is my brother
Numbing sensation, grin on my face
Can't wipe it out, so a puff in its place

T.B. quivers; this isn't a virgin mix
His eyes crimson, he'll be high till six
I take a drag, it sets my mind alight
Body in a cubicle, soul in flight

I pass it on, three pulls each
But C.G. puts another in my reach
Epiphanies strike in the realm of the spiritual
And so goes on this innately fulfilling ritual

As the light moves closer to my finger tips
I slow down my intake to feeble sips
One puff each is the call
They taxi around, pleasing us all

Flick them into the bowl, it's time to go
Or let's linger on a bit; can't reach the door
Zombie the way out with ashes in our wake
We'll return with another, for I.F.'s sake

But first, I must dissolve into my playlist, the Ultimate Trip
Undulating bass lines cherish me in their grip
Music video playing in my mind
Yesterday's problems left carelessly behind

Knock on my door, time to boom
Red eyes greet me outside my room
Unwavering grins obviate all strife
To the cubicle - I love my life!

(This image is not my property.)

---

Note: This piece has many fictional elements.

Remy on Merlin

The siren emerged from a distal source, as the shout-tower was located a few hundred metres from the main station. "Remy, the tracks bend away too soon," it called. Remy shook his head. He didn't like this train station. It was too big and too populous to be associated with the tracks he was familiar with. His life - his only life that counted - had begun on the hills of Nere, and there it had ended as abruptly as it had begun. Frozen and preserved at the back of his mind, his time in Nere remained to taunt him. I have been through everything that matters; my remaining time alive is just a bonus. Only the steam from a noisy engine could begin to mimic his time jumping tracks, with her watchful eyes smiling at him as he clumsily tried to stand one-legged on a rail.

The train he boarded was crowded, and his cramped seat between two fat tula merchants afforded him no glimpses of the disappearing platform. The seven hour journey was draining, and Remy kept himself hydrated with cans of crystal soda. He sighed. Manfried would be twice as crowded as this train and, being planetary capital, it would never shut up. This would be the second time Remy would set foot in the metropolis, the first time was when he alighted from a spaceship after an even longer and exceedingly more painful journey to almost literally the end of the galaxy.

His first time in Manfried was not a pleasant experience. Merlin was a newly settled planet, with Manfried being the first outpost established only eighty years ago. Hardly a million people populated the planet since then, with ninety-five percent of those people located in Manfried. His visit to Merlin, unfortunately, had taken place during the mass influx of labourers, technicians and the usual cults, which would one day be known as the first step in the "true" colonization of the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, et cetera. Remy had had to trudge his way through a mass of dysfunctional security robots hopelessly trying to maintain order amongst the incoming visitors, pilgrims and workers. He'd then needed to explain, in length, to the power-blinded and lonesome tourism officials the purpose of his visit. He'd lost a lot of money on mandatory bribes and sodas, and had then tried to make his way to one of the swelling motels in the main city. Failing to do so, he'd had to commute for three hours to the suburbs of Manfried for accommodation offered by a grocer to anyone who could carry a message to Vern. After eighteen more hours of travel and pointless delays, he'd made his way to Vern and its loud railway sirens.

It was true, though. The biota placed on Merlin eighty years ago had made itself comfortable in the valleys and undulating plains that spanned most of the two primary continents. Manfried itself has boulevards now; lined by trees and shrubs whose hues betray their extra-planetary origin. Merlin was part of the small minority of planets which had breathable air and non-toxic soil, so the Merlin Terraforming Agency was, in practice, an outpost for some company to dig its tendrils into the compact culture of Merlin before it even has a formal currency. Yet, there was something naturally unnerving about the way horses on Merlin were still tame enough to be saddled by a random visitor from off-planet. Indeed, Remy had travelled several hundred kilometres on the back of a wild horse while on his way to the dig site beyond Vern.

The dig was not of the archaeological kind, but was instead engineered by biologists. Seventy years ago, when Vern had first been established as a sort of secondary capital in the southern hemisphere of Merlin, some biologists (many of them great-grandparents of the biologists he’d met himself) had added some Escherichia veni to a hollow portion of the soil, rich with the excessive faecal matter of planet Nappa which the E. veni so often feasted on. These initial E. veni had been subject to directional, non-mutagenic radiation, so that they would all cluster onto one side of the hollow so as to avoid decimation. Two hundred thousand generations of these bacteria had past, and the radiation had ceased to penetrate into the hollow some fifty years ago, yet the E. veni tried to cluster to that one side.

Genetic memory was the term that had been decided upon by the Vern biologists. Genetic memory is the reason why every single person stemming from Earth’s Israel still felt uneasy while looking at a holoform of the Concentration Camps, they stipulated. “DNA is the most protected and valuable resource in this universe. The fraction of objects that possesses this compound is so small that all the gold on Goldrush wouldn’t be able to buy a microgram of DNA, if DNA would be thus suitably priced. But it isn’t, and herein lays the very instability of humanity – we place a higher value on things that do not truly belong to us. DNA is us. And DNA remembers. If my soul could have a material form, it would be not my DNA, but rather the DNA of all my forefathers. As such, the soul is continuously evolving with the birth of every new generation.” So said the lord philosopher-biologist Reswyn Peck, and so bowed all of his follower-biologists and pursuer-biologists, without even gathering the implications behind his words.

Remy scowled. When the respect for a man precedes his teachings, the respect for the man becomes his teachings. Remy knew that only too well. Nice new that, and Nice bowed and surrendered herself gracefully to the Fleet. “Remy, you aren’t from here. You can go back home.” But she was home. She will forever remain home, and when I am done blasting a hole through the genetic memories of my lords and ladies, I will return to her.

Reswyn Peck knew that DNA was upgrading itself with the rise of every new generation, and that nothing from the past was truly lost. Reswyn Peck knew that DNA was the ultimate weapon and torture device. Being an independent group, the Vern biologists shared their observations with the rest of the scientific world only after much deliberation and review. The Vern biologists were now rotting inside a pit with E. veni feeding on them to fulfil their last rites. Reswyn Peck had died when ancestral pain had seeped through his gouty knuckles to his gouty heart. Assistant-biologist Beatrice Salomon too had writhed and succumbed, with her frothing mouth still wrapped around gouty little Peck.

If only you had accompanied me. We’d have found a place far away, even farther than Merlin, where we’d raise hills out of the horizon and lay down railway lines through twisting valleys. Remy knew he had to get off planet as soon as he could. The “inflammable” DNA they’d extracted from the bacteria in the pit couldn’t survive long in the blanks (microorganisms devoid of genetic material). The genetic memory was active in this DNA, and using it, he’d managed to trigger the same in the DNA of the Vern biologists.

Remy Raoveti - celebrated biologist, anthropologist and soon-to-be heretic. He’d have cults forming around him by the time he’d be halfway through teaching humanity a lesson. Youngest winner of the Deutschenwaldow Prize, number one on the ’89’s Top Ten Rising Stars, and Mass Murderer of the Century, I give you… Remy Raoveti!

Remy could see the Angled Spire of Manfried rise out towards the setting sun, in a bid to touch it at its coolest. The smells of the city reached out to him, but they were different; they were warped due to the steadily rising inflow of off-planet visitors with their queer, off-planet smells. This, too, angered him, although he knew not why.

DNA apparently had some kind of ‘field’ which stored genetic memory. Activating this required some changes in the current state of the DNA, both conformational and totally virtual. Remy did not care what exactly went about when this happened, all he knew was that humans would DIE on exposure to their genetic memory, simply because their mind was evolved enough to decipher exactly the contents of these memories, but not quite evolved enough to absorb such knowledge. Maybe that was the original purpose of DNA and evolution, for a certain being to evolve until a point wherein it could digest its genetic memories safely and thus transition into some kind of “singularity” being or something. Remy did not care – much. He did care enough to make sure that this “singularity” would remember Nice and her affable ways.

The train stopped, and Remy descended onto the platform in a hurry. The sooner he’d get off this planet the better, as authorities would soon realise that the Vern biologists were missing and would maybe somehow stumble upon the dig site. The burial site, Remy reminded himself. Was he halting the growth of science by this act? This gave him some pause, but a passing engine drove an image of Nere on a beautiful summer day into his mind. Nere, with the pretty house and the dipping-pond, with the smiling faces of Rory and Neville, Ava and her grandmother. Would this pain be imprinted into his genetic memory? Would his descendants be forced to watch him rip himself apart from the inside with every waking breath? Then this was his curse to them. Descendants. Children. Nice and I had once talked about having children, children who would jump onto me every time I returned home from a long day at work, uncaring that I’d be soaked with perspiration. If there are children without Nice, then may they be cursed.

He made his way to the spaceport with, surprisingly, very little delay. His reputation permitted him to carry the biological samples on board, and soon he was off. The earliest flight to Assez was five days from then, so he’d decided to hop on a long flight to Vaha, in the system of Canopus many thousand light years away. The journey was superluminal, but would still take him several years. By then the mishap on the secluded planet of Merlin would be forgotten, with “incorrect safety measures while dealing with the deadly Escherichia veni” recorded as the cause of the deaths of fourteen biologists.

Five hours into the flight, Remy started to feel the breezy upliftment that he often associated with superluminal travel. He knew that this would soon transition into a mind-numbing hurricane of illusory wind, so he decided to strap himself into the fugue pod adjacent to his seat. Superluminal travel couldn’t even technically be called a form of transportation, as it mainly involve the spaceship, or, rather, individual fugue pods of the spaceship linked within a primary matrix, disappearing from existence here and materializing there.

This was largely due to a modification of classical quantum tunnelling – a large distance impossible for even light to cover in a few minutes was somehow traversed through by the spaceship-matrix. In essence, the “large distance” acted as a limiting energy state which could be breached by the tunnelling. Remy did not know the details, and he doubted that he ever would. His activities in the past few days would certainly curtail his freedom to explore unknown territories of life, let alone science.

After reading projected magazines in his pod for an hour, Remy decided to get some sleep. Within the pod, it was eerily silent, something often attributed to for the scarring of weak human psyches. Remy took a while to get accustomed to this enforced silence, and as he drifted into that plane of thought which is suspended between the conscious and the unconscious, steam from an engine clouded his mind. Long after the noiseless engine faded from view, the smoke finally dissipated.

When the sunlight glinted off her teeth and the cool midday breeze ruffled her hair, he was in heaven. Tears welled in his eyes, and he smiled. The crook of her elbow found its way around his neck, and she turned, taking him with her. The unprecocious naiveté in her eyes beckoned in the direction of the hills far away, fencing the horizon. Railway tracks meandered and were lost, out of sight, at the summit of one hillock. Her head bobbed up, and she caught him staring at her, his eyes full of tears. She was to be left behind today, as he went on to greater adventures. Yet he was the one crying.

She said, “Remy, the tracks bend away too soon.” Swallowing the sorrow in his throat, he replied, “but they go on forever.”

“Does that mean they will never bring you back?”

“No, that means they will always be there to bring me back to you.” He smiled. How cheesy that had sounded, how cheesy it still did.

“Take me with you.” Was that a question or a command? He’d never know.

“I… You know I can’t. How I wish that I could, but you can’t move like this.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” She smiled, and played with his hair. “But I will be with you wherever you go, won’t I?”

“Of course you will.” Remy smiled, and finally wiped off the tears streaming down his face. He kissed her once, twice. He then turned and left, leaving her behind; she with her mechanical body rooted to the ground and the wind ruffling her hair and the cables that connected her to the soil. Once more an engine passed, and took him away with it.

Train, Set and Match

It's over. A long summer, a glorious summer. I wish it would never end.

I'm writing this at midnight on the 30th of July, 2013. Tomorrow is when I leave for college. Tomorrow I leave behind my friends and Cidade beach. Tomorrow I quit doing questionable activities and driving at 120 kmph on eternal Goan roads in heavy rainfall. I leave behind the sea and sand and fields around pleasant walkways. I leave behind family, I leave behind home. I leave behind that shady KA-registered Maruti with the frisbee in the back. Tomorrow is going to be bittersweet.

I love my college. I love campus life. I love the independence I get in my 3x3 m room over there. I'm excited to see what this new year brings - I'll have juniors, I'll be studying something that I haven't bothered to explore before, I'll be playing as much basketball as I can handle. Yet those lonesome stretches and our hidden cove on the beach will be missed. The eerie, dark Bambolim lane will be missed. The 24 hour cafes and pastry shops will be missed. The beaten-up Santro I've driven thousands of kilometres in this holiday will be missed. The faces of my friends separated by states will be missed. The windy house in Miramar and the painting easel will be missed. The guitar teacher I spent exactly 33 hours this summer with will be missed. The poker sessions and pointless gym hours will be missed.

Why can't anyone see that sometimes you just need the ability to pause? Every few years, take a year off. Grow up in ways other than attending classes and scoring grades. Live life to its fullest in order to make up for the hours you've lost in routine. Travel, explore, rediscover. These aren't words I'm tossing around to add to a word count. These are words I'm tossing around as an ode to days better spent elsewhere.

Always the summers are slipping away. Always.

To the Festival with a Lad of Ten

Look up at the moon, boy
For I need some rest
This weary road has taken its toll on me

We'll be there soon, boy
I know this road best
We must walk the mud road out to sea

We'll arrive at noon, boy
In town there's a fest
I'll get you a top and a candied bee

And even a b'lloon, boy
Let's see if it stands your test
I wager you'll rub it until its air breaks free

You know you're a goon, boy?
You should still be at your mother's breast
So hold your tongue or leave me be

The Raindrop that Falleth

The Raindrop that falleth
And fell through my rose
The rose was a roof under stary bed
The Raindrop hit me in the square of my chest
I saw images later describled biblicle but better
That led the fellows to declare that day my godhood
The Raindrop that awake in me happiness
"On that maximus that your study derives you
This is the moon with undulating plains, even trees and distant hills in view
Yes this is the furthest happiness that holds cannot hold"
My life lived a book today

I wept later, for I would not ever behold as good as that holy day
The Raindrop that falleth was neard by some
Like the turn through the cars endless wheels
But never in that amassed happiness
Althino hill happiness
Would they near the Raindrop and breese
Will you find the god at the top of the tunnel
The true image of god or what you dream him
This whole life a videogame
I know not if this is poem or real

I lived a life in just a car ride
For the Raindrop that falleth fell through me

---

Don't even ask for the origins of this 'poem'.

Highs and Lows

<This post is not intended to be fluid. Fluidity was lost somewhere along the way, probably in between 'there is nothing to do' and 'this was a lot more fun when i had work to do'.>

This void in me knows no bounds. After an eventful year as a freshman in college, I'm back home. And I'm left empty. This has been a year of information. Living with hundreds of other like minds and reaping fields of sown wealth from a matrix of file sharing, there has always been something to do. Difficult course matter makes studying always a good option if you ever seem knee deep in time. So many things come your way on a daily basis: scheduling the perfect time to break your fast so as to have garnered enough sleep - yet to not be so late as to lose out on the last morsels of this timed meal, choosing wisely which hour could use a bunk, choosing wisely whether you should watch a TV show that meets its DC release an hour before an exam, choosing wisely whether to eat something before play or to just go empty and go all out on dinner, choosing wisely whether to eat dinner or to fast until the night canteen opened, choosing wisely an hour to hit the bed so as to get either six hours sleep or eight, nothing in between.

Music was another aspect which developed massively, with the possibility of downloading entire discographies in minutes, and deleting them in seconds if they didn't match up to most compelling band names. Bands you thought you knew well would force themselves upon you with the insistence of your peers, and leave you wondering whether you'd actually ever given any of their songs a listen.

This campus offered me a new life. New people to be surrounded by, new opinions to get perturbed by. New personas to explore, new personas to reject. Even after a year there are more people to be amazed by, or to be let down by. Each person an endless stream of himself-ness or herself-ness. It's like an endless stream of endless streams. Drastic changes in character accompanied different settings. The quiet library worm is a beast in the regular group hangout spots. Who knew moving house a few kilometres would make you a sociologist and psychologist?

Here, there are distractions aplenty. Every week usually had some kind of special night or event or exam or match or online page or controversy. There's always someone to vote for, always something to watch, some beginning to witness the creation of a future symbol. And if this gets overwhelming, you can project yourself inwards alongside the rustling leaves of a truly beautiful day.

Now I'm back home and I'm broken. I don't have access to endless lines of information. The people here are people I've known for eighteen years. Everything is so static, so welcoming, yet more than a little bit disappointing. Yes, I am happy to be back, but even my large to-do list seems tiny in comparison to the time I have before me.

I seem to be suffering from information withdrawal. I match the symptoms shown in Steven Wilson's Fear of a Blank Planet record. The fact that I don't have to bother about life's trivialities such as waking in time to break my fast gives me even less to do. During the harsh heat of April and the grueling exams of early May, I thought being released from the excessive workload would relieve me. But it's just left in me a hole instead. The things that seem 'fun' during exams, like browsing through meme pages on Facebook, seem decadent and drab right now. I guess the exams serve as a sort of foil. My father always told me to take with the sweet a little bitter. I'm currently drowning in rich milk chocolate.

Thoughts Inspired by a Watchman

A friend's birthday, and for the first time in a long while (a week), it was the night mess for me. I've been trying to maintain a healthy sleep cycle, the norms of healthy being 'early to bed and early to rise'. Anyway, on my way back, I noticed the hostel watchman reading off of a small book, perhaps the size of a dictionary. Whether it was a dictionary, or a religious book of sorts, I know not, nor did I ask, for Hindi isn't my forte ("kya pad rahe hai aap" - did I say that right?). The thing that piqued me was how this good man was up at an hour when most of our watchmen are, ironically, sound asleep, reading. Under the dim white glow of a tube-light high above, he sat against the wall cross-legged, and squinted queerly at the small font whose language I could not discern from my position.

The joys of reading! How I wish we could put aside all these troubles, this routine, to just sit in a corner somewhere with a book in our hands! The simplicity, the sheer priceless simplicity of the entire matter! How much I'd give for those holidays to last forever - holidays when I'd be up until four o'clock with a thick A Song of Ice and Fire book or one of the Dune sequels (irrelevant, but I'm talking hardcore Frank Herbert, not his son, the usurper!). A few of you may find the idea dull and boring, but a few more would relish it. One of my dreams, alongside flying and Mars-to-stay, has always been the idea of owning a wooden-floored library, with a thick floor-rug and a sinfully padded armchair, lit only by yellow lights reminiscent of the kerosene lamps of the 1860s.

So a watchman made me profess my love for something on the less technical side. I'll further my claim by saying that I have a deep regard for the arts. Yes, I said something almost blasphemous to the modern-day engineer. How does art - something so careless, so fragile, as to be unbound by physical laws - make its way into the heart of an engineer-to-be? It's simple, there never was a distinction in the first place. The science I fell in love with was romantic, poetic! Mathematics were art, nothing was defined but the obvious. Obvious, naturally-occurring traits developed into transcendental 'laws', all the way from approximately 3000 B.C. to the present day. And what is art if not something so complicated made of something so simple? A few brushstrokes can depict the state of your mind, and a few notes can sing its song.

I wistfully look at how everything has been made so mechanical that we take little pleasure from it - no more visualizing your engineering graphics diagrams, instead follow a set of steps! No need to tackle a problem purely by utilizing basic concepts, for there will always be another who has practiced ten similar problems who can race you to the solution. Yes, competitiveness does indeed have its flaws. We pray more for a number than for joy and hope et al. Not that any of this is bad. No virtuoso is created by giving a man an organ! Yet, I feel that something is missing, something profound enough to discredit any overthought I may have indulged in while writing this text.

It's simple really, and often something that is found amongst the captions in a multitude of seaside, coconut-tree pictures: live life to the fullest! How this rant-like monologue turned into an adolescent life lesson oozing with clichés is irrelevant, but if you do wish to know, here goes: "drill into that problem like it's hiding an oil well beneath it!", "delve into the deepest crevasse of your mind to find the elusive, ever-lost x!", "kick that ball like it's an annoying pigeon on your air conditioner (no offense EPAC, PETA)!", "slide into that solo like it's dripping acetone on a sultry summer noon!", "kiss her profoundly; let an image of you be imprinted upon her momory forever!", "eat that gatta curry like it's a boar from an Asterixian banquet!" You have no problems, brother. Only seas and oceans of unbidden delights.

Anger

I have never been so angry. Frothing, unbridled rage burrows into me. I am angry, hating, loathing my own principles of leading a life. I believed in minimal efforts to get as far as possible. I'm drowning in my own cavern of lies, every day spitting to deepen this monumental karst hole, binging on vanity and self-deception. Wanting to be good at everything, I'm failing at things that matter most, still telling myself that I can pick myself up due to sheer, stupid pride. Need to put some reigns on myself, punish myself. How vain am I to not want to enforce simple restrictions when I've succumbed to the most obvious of temptations. Only an idiot thinks himself capable of more than his fellows because of a few effortless successes, and I am he.

Here I am trying to 'channel' my anger into a safe medium when I am so close to just breaking this computer with a hammer I conveniently have so very close. I tell myself I am cut out for it all, and now the taunting voice goes, "where are the results?" And where are the results indeed. Must end this charade, I'm a broken tool with a superiority complex.

The Sleepwalker

Amr woke from a dream.

Its heightened rate of passing scenes was echoed as translucent screens flowing into the golden sunlit passage before him, blurring out bright moving colors - colors which fused with the dream-images to sometimes blot them out, sometimes enrich them. Cool wind blew, shaking at the suspended images, setting them into a timeless disarray finally lost when coherent reality flooded in. The last scene he managed to get a glimpse of sent through him violent ripples of deja vu, for it was so resemblant of the actual street ahead of him, with its pillared walkways and glistening hardened cow-dung tiles. When he finally blinked away the last few remnants of his fast-fading sleep, his eyes widened, and his face gave way to an expression displaying his shock. His eyes blurred again as dismay took over. I've been sleepwalking again.

He turned, and looked behind him. There was the fruit vendor, shrieking his odd call: "boort-aah-kul! Aayaaha! Boort-aah-kul!" Besides him was the shoemaker, who had charged him nine fils for a pair of wooden sandals. He remembered the transaction with some clarity, he remembered how the shoemaker had spat with disdain when he'd suggested a price of six fils. Further along was a tent he knew he'd walked through. If he went back there he knew he'd find the jolly man with an exposed hairy belly sitting behind a saffron milk counter, laughing at the japes of the mustached, reedy man next to him who would undoubtedly still be staple-fixing cans of sugarteak juice. Amr had purchased a can before the man had staple-fixed it, preferring to avoid the hassle of gnawing at it later with his teeth. The man had smiled, for every staple-pin saved meant a profit. The tent had a sorry lot of jambiya dancers - just half a dozen. Most tents of this size normally paraded over two dozen, along with other missing entertainers like snake charmers and scimitar weavers. He'd walked out of the tent, without pausing to gaze at the dancers who offered to slide a kukri into their ears for a dinar or two, his parched throat absorbing every milliliter of the sweet, cool sugarteak juice which he had drained in a matter of seconds.

Awake and afraid, he walked to a stall with a thatched roof - undoubtedly thatched with palm leaves, for the stall dealt in all kinds of products derived from desert palms - from woven mats and decorative stump-stools to hair oils and facial hair-removing gels. He paused for an instant, pointed at a stool and twisted his face into a tired semi-wince, looking at the shopkeeper. Looking at his garb and drained state, the shopkeeper nodded. Amr grunted as he seated himself on a stool embossed with glass pieces painted to look like rubies, onyxes and aliyas. He asked the shopkeeper for the date, and he just received some sort of guttural rumbling as a reply. This is obviously an Arabic culture, but certainly not what I'm familiar with. I've probably traveled half the world in these few weeks of distorted realities. If 'weeks' still means the same thing as it did during my last waking. It's physically impossible to travel a hundred miles on foot every night, yet every time I wake I'm a thousand miles from where I started.

The last time Amr was awake, he was on some kind of frigid, barren island, mottled with some reddish patches which he later identified as large crabs whose pincers really hurt. There was no one there who he could even approach to inquire the current date. Or the season, for it certainly was cold. For a minute he even wondered how he'd gotten there - he suspected he'd somehow mimicked a feat of Jesus, a particularly popular character from one of the Old Religions, by walking on water. Or maybe it was even colder then, and the water had frozen enough for him to walk all the way to the island. Later, when a shelf of hoarfrost had fallen on his head from a tall conifer, his mind had been brought back into enough focus to remember that there had been a boat. Yes, he'd arrived there on a boat which seemed to be a cross between a dinghy and a throne. He couldn't remember where he'd gotten there from. Or maybe he could back then. But he couldn't remember if he could remember it then, so, still seated on that most uncomfortable stool, he decided to let the matter rest.

And then, as it had done countless times before, his lungs caved in to this intense feeling. A feeling of great longing. An image of endless suffocation passed before him. He was in a sea, an unnatural sea. Green light dawned in a distance which stretched on into time. He longed to be submerged, but in that future miles away, he fought the deathly embrace of a thousand others. He smiled when teeth bit into the skin of his weeping self, and suddenly, when a hand forced its way into his mouth and his groin was punctured by a toenail six feet long, he fell into a deep slumber with his eyes wide open. Amr stood up, blessed the shopkeeper in the only Arabic he'd ever care to know, and walked into the dusty marketplace.

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This is part of a story unfinished, a sort of preview to something greater.