Booksbane

The most perplexing part of packing (tongue twister!) is "Which book(s) to bring.."

By and large, there are several determinants: How much time would I have to read? Leading to, how many should I bring? What would I feel like reading at the time. Degree of distress if this one got wet at the beach. Should I bring books that I've read before in case I am interrupted regularly?

While sieving through those questions I've packed my clothes and is already staring at the bookshelf. Why is this always so tricky..

Why is it bothering me in the middle of the work day that I have not picked out which book OR books (ARGH) to bring??

Heart, and lack thereof

The contrast between life and living cuts two ways. Less people, less unsolicited hearsay, no blackholes where a variety of "-ships" sail past into a vanishing point, no days where the skyline shades off into monotone, where even the most insistent pain fails to reveal weakness. no sense of complete abandon.

At the risk of essentializing an entire condition, these pills are a jolting contrast with freedom. But there is a different sense of freedom with respect to drug interaction, binding together to keep from fading. Conversation seems to average out several decibels higher, there is a kind of inclusiveness that i used to be accustomed to - but now find invasive. Warped as it may be, but my idiosyncrasies has fed off this different sense of freedom.

Throwing glitter into the wide open sky, that's how freedom feels like. And results are the fallen glitter onto my face, arms, clothes, even between my toes - the pattern muttering a poem fit for Blake's reading pleasure. But the thunderclouds continue to form, clustered near the horizon, creeping ever closer, inexorably, to unleash the storm.

I would like to be able to post the heady scent of roses that marshal the sidewalks of my freedom. The smell of sweet roses blooming out of the screen, in through your nostrils, and up into your brain, where, on its peregrinations round your neutral pathways.. it might just be translated into a small sense of my unadulterated joy for being alive. Or at least an inkling of how much I love the smell of roses.

Clanking and clicking

I'd like to pen an incisive comment on certainty, but that the moment that would be like painting plaque into the inner walls of coronary arteries. Something I know too well, to be quite uncomfortable.

Any casual scrunity of my artistic notions will reveal a distinctly lukewarm ability, and a complete dearth of originality. Perhaps even the occasional stroke of genius.

While it's commonplace to hold a job one legitimately hates, I reassure myself that the sanctity of my creative loves - writing, reading, music and art - are preserved in all their untainted, uncommercialized, woefully amateurish glory. Or something to that effect.

Everything was settled, and I would slide kicking and screaming into the role society has carved out for me, the very embodiment of TGIF and Monday-blues citizen.

But, storms are a'raging, death's not so far away as I thought, and a slow asphyxiating panic is starting to creep up on me, coming sqaurely down on that question: what do I really want to do?

What I've really, really wanted to do for a while is sit in a dark room tapping on an old typewriter, the clanking and clicking immortalizing experience and footprints in text. Erratically glancing out an open window into a sea of tulips, amazed at the wonderment of life's mysteries. Like why coins have to weigh as much as they do. surely coins are merely a representation of value, and therefore don't actually have to be that hefty when collected in the wallet. Surely the thinnest disc of metal would suffice. And that the spare metal remaining could be used to make a wheelchair for the physically-challenged, and it would improve someone's quality of life. Ain't this a win-win.

But we can't have all we want. That would be having my cake and eating it too. Instead I constantly dream of that delicious mouthful of cake sliding gloriously down my throat.

Now that's romanticising romance.