Globe trotters

Waking up to a phone alarm is like dipping your toes in acid. You’re sharply aware of how it pierces through every membrane of dream, thought, eyelid, brain.

This morning my phone did a relentless little discordant vibratory jig very not in step with the alarm audio. It is certifiably the most pissing-off thing to wake up to such flagrant disregard for rhythm [this, despite my evident lack of any sort of aural perception.]

*Unnameable Cellular Phone Company*, bumshines, at least get the spurty vibrations right; those little ones which frivolously skirt around the longer ones, trying pathetically hard to sound useful. See, I don’t mind a continuous steady vibration. It is reliably annoying. But I don’t take kindly to such startling schizoid shudders thrusting obscenely at my pillow with mounting desperation, WHILE my head is on it.

This is particularly offensive and distressing on Disco Morning.

Disco Morning is the morning you wake up in keen anticipation of Disco Night.
Disco Night is the night you show them what you’ve got.

Thus, rudely awakened by an indecent alarm, I epilated.
I painted my toe nails toxic pink.
I ironed my happy shiny shirt.
I hemmed in my sequined belt.
I polished my black patent ho-pumps with a bit-o-spit.
I shined up my silver domina neck-piece with toothpaste.
I tossed my glitter face cream in my black bag.
I packed in the big glistering globe I had laboured over on Sunday.

There I was, ready to go to office.

I wished my parents a fond farewell aware that things would be different somehow the next time I saw them, knowing, as I do, that the universe can shift in keen though imperceptible ways by the flash of a disco globe.

I’m sitting in office. I have chewed my nails down to my knuckles, I have written out this post. Edited it endlessly. Cyberslacked my brain out of its obsessiveness. My pink toes are burning up; my trotters are convulsing with febrile flashes.

I have passed the day, somehow.

The time has come people. I can barely say bye.

Angst [is the turd prince of shitty titles, which is why it’s] over You

My blog, I’ve realised, is a load of scat and gas.

Mostly it’s depressing to fully comprehend how little I’ve managed to say through such a barrage of verbiage; for the rest it’s gut-drowning embarrassing.

But before you come bustling in with boisterous good cheer and a great clucking cacophony of protest and sympathy [see how formidably foul my mood is?] consider this:

How much do you really know about my much primped and preened and strutted head?

Hanh?

Be honest.

Gotcha potcha. Ha.

Before you scratch yours and wonder aloud, allow me:

All you really know, and after over a 100 reiterations of the same in as many ways as shit can be pasted on toast, is that it houses a brain which is divided in a left lobe and a right lobe, which by some stroke of genius, yours or mine, you’ve been conned into believing is a singularly extraordinary act of deviance.

The gleaming cherry on top, of course, is the Walt Disney cutesy personality each has.

Bravo H, what a fucking fucking idea.

But do you even know what I think about Bin Laden or Godhra?
Do you know what I think about the UN policy on controlling the spread of Avian Flu?
Do you know what I think about Pratibha Patil’s election to the President’s post?
Do you know what I think about the rising price of diesel?

No Ma’am. You just know that I speak in elaborate parables of shit.

Because honestly, I don’t think about these things. I just skip like a donkey, sing like a toad, hop like a rhino as I bumble heedlessly on this highway, feeling great gushes of overreaching achievement at every arse-analogy I can squeeze through my tear ducts.

So it should come as no surprise that suddenly, with a borrowed perspective that I chanced by on the internet the other day, I’ve become acutely aware of how nothing this is. This Shout. This hollow excrement of noise in cyberspace.

I’m aghast at what you must think. You dear reader, who’s lavished your attention, time and thought on our corner here.

Are you for real?

Or are you a kinky connoisseur of such trembling whiffles of flatulence as I’ve been passing for words here?

No. Don’t answer.

Because either way beloved reader, this is to say: I cherish you. Thank you for all the appreciation. This far into our relationship, I accept you for who you are.

Karma Chameleon

I’ve been written about if you please. Under an alias of course, because it has nothing to do with my achievements [when they be, if and ever]. Well, okay, not in the cold cash-like material sense, or even in the Nobel contribution to humankind sense but more for the unwitting abuse I’ve heaped upon my self. Once upon a time.

So the writer of this piece, she interviewed me, charmed my toes off and got me to say all sorts of droll things until I realised that I was saying them about myself. You see it’s all very well to have my fifteen minutes of fame, but thank you very much, I’ll have them when the Pulitzer committee chances fortuitously by this page.

So after having partaken of a genteel cup of earl grey with me, when she left carrying her cloud of charm quite suddenly out of the room, I retrieved my senses rapidly and sent her a pathetic little text, clinging to as much dignity as the abbreviated lettering of sms allows, saying “pl, change name. thank u v much”

To which she replied “ok” after a gut wrenching, swear-vocabulary exhausting four and a half minutes.

So yesterday when the magazine man came with the latest edition of The Magazine, I raced through it to discover that I’d been quoted, under a not real name that’s shuddersomely close to my real name. It is that obscene mispronunciation of my name that sets my teeth on edge and makes me a very very tight-lipped person [in all its florid interpretations].

But what really caught my eye and stopped me in my track [which, given that even during my most lucid moments I’ve the attention span of a split lizard, isn’t saying much] was this: appended to my thinly masked not real first name, was the name that has become my secret nemesis.

Secret, because we like to pretend we don’t notice these things. Nemesis, because two successive boyfriends-with-the-same-surname down it’s become difficult not to notice; especially since, in one of those incestuous quirks of history or quirks of historical incest [we might never discover which] we’ve discovered that this particular clan of ‘said surname’ are ALL related to one another.

So, this surname that reeks of historical quirks and axed-Xs now has the dodgy distinction of being the ONLY surname our little writer could trawl up from the cacophony of Indian surnames that clutter one’s surname consciousness – that little corner devoted solely to remembering and slotting people by their surnames [something that we excel at so excellently in these parts] – to attach to my not real name.

But.

Then I figured, breathing deeply, exhaling impurity, inhaling goodliness, that there are so many widely, gaily, uniquely different reasons in the world to get pissy. Why blame one’s emotional orientation on a lovely little girl who was only trying to do her job?

See that’s the thing about little girls and little boys who dimple their sunshine smiles at you, setting the room aglow with gay showers of charm and sweetness. It’s difficult to remain pissy, even if they show you up for a deluded loon, armed as they are with damning evidence that “you said so yourself”.

Reminds me of a recent episode in my soon-to-be short-lived career as a filmmaker, when I showered similar meteors of charm in the decadent drawing room of my English teacher from college, conning her into the most atrocious self-lampooning interview I have ever conducted, as I sipped on delicately brewed Darjeeling tea from her stodgy English teacups.

Obviously, there is some great karmic cycle at work here.

Last Call for the Magic Carpet

It is the season for Adventure.

The moon told her so.

She knows what you’re thinking. That her mind works like trashy poetry. So? If it does.

It’s begun, this season of adventure, for her, soaked in the mellow light of a bloody moon, planted with a duck’s kiss.

Like a cloud veil, it’s crept into her dreams, lending them a delicate muslin haze. From a writer’s acid pen it’s seeped into her sleep, and poured into the lips of a duck.

This morning she awoke with the duck’s kiss on her lips. A moment earlier upon a staircase, depressing and under lit, the duck and she paused for a fleeting eternity, weak-kneed from running from the police. Someone robbed. Something lost. Trust misplaced. Suspicion unfounded. And two fugitives, trembling with buried words and bursting lungs, spiralling down this murky plot.

Against the betel-spit spattered walls of a dingy stairwell, finally, duck paused to make a clumsy confession. The words she could not catch, just the shapes he threw from his pleasing duck mouth. She, being older, wiser and the princess of her dreams, just smouldered her eyes and parted her lips to receive a volley of adorable duck shapes.

So, it’s begun. Exiting one world, riding the shifting shadows of nowhereness, swinging by uncertain adventures like a lunging langur, before she finds her footing surely, again, in now.

Till then, duck, she’ll adore you her dreams.

Meanwhile, may the carpet remain aloft and the adventures never cease.