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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Fear & Ends.....

I am on my last packet of Indian cigarette’s…..

I have also just received my results for my master’s degree exams….

Funny that both should coincide with each other….not that they are necessarily related…..I had brought a 1000 sticks of cancer and emphysema with me and bitter ashes in my heart…..

After nearly nine months later, I am down to my last 8 sticks, thanks to khan and others……not that I mind….I roll my own cigarette’s now and have been doing so for quite some time…..In fact, rolling a cigarette is perhaps a fast ending art…..perhaps it is better so…..but its an art nonetheless….you have to patient and dexterous and delicate all at the same time…..its Zen for idiots…..but there you have it….

But coming back to my original topic at hand, I find myself today down to my last few shreds of Indian tobacco and perhaps even vestiges of my past life…..

If I may borrow a rather pathetic line – I had set out to be the monk who sold his Ferrari, but then I was no monk and I damn well didn’t have a Ferrari…and moreover the damn destination was not the mystical east but the material west…..You just cant get more corkscrewed than that……..

Clutching an aching heart and mind, I had come here for penitence and perhaps even salvation…..and I did find it here, of a sort….but it was peace and slumber unaided by alcohol……it sufficed….till now…..the alcohol was and still is far too expensive to form a habit....

Within the confines of enforced education and employment, somehow it so happened that the fires flaring in both mind and heart were finally doused into cold, unfeeling ashes……and within those parameters of sodden, unresponsive flesh, I clasped the weak straws of peace and immortality….for what is immortality but unending life…..bereft maybe of soul or even of hope or feeling…..but you’re alive and life drags and crawls on…….

My final cigarette’s remind me of burning days, of flaring nights……..like a wick in a earthenware lamp after the oil is consumed……black, cold and burnt out….perhaps even my cigarette butts in my soap dish ashtray….that’s my life now…..listless, detached, fearful

And I face finally my greatest enemy within myself…..fear.

After months of relentless search and analysis, I have finally drawn, quartered and divided myself into sections from the coagulated whole that I had brought to the light from the far horizons of mine own land into this damp, chilly and alien land….

Holmes had once said that no problem is unsolvable – all that remains is to unearth the whole and break it down into pieces so minute that the flaw finally reveals itself….

And diving into a 8 percent solution of morphine on my own terms, I drew up and dissected myself here, within these blogs, section by section till I have reached the end……and not too soon either….

These things have a wonderful sense of coincidence……..

Basketball players call it the “zone” – when the way into the basket is clear and nothing opposes and all lanes finally converge upon a single whole – an utter clarity of purpose and realization….and yet all to no use whatsoever…..
For what use is dunking an inflated rubber ball into a iron hoop enmeshed in a rope net or even to find realization of self and yet be unable to do anything but merely look and say, “there, I have finally found it”…….Maybe I lack a Watson to exclaim “elementary” to….or whatever…..and therein, as the bard puts in….lies the rub….

Pa says I ramble all over the world when I write and other’s choose not to notice or worse, like bro, have no idea what I am talking about…..

I fear fear…..fear of fear is perhaps such a cliché that even justifying it is senseless….

Attention seeking behaviour, rash and reckless endeavours, burning ambition, wild swings of euphoria and depression, a brutal will to dominate, fiercely defended beliefs and an unquenchable thirst to prove myself, over and over again…..

For such am I and it has taken me months of relentless searching to understand why I am such…..Why did I not care for so many and yet immersed myself in one…….and then again, walk the arid wastes of desolation…….to the point of self-obsession and beyond….

At the end of it all, the reasons are so pathetic and common that it does not even serve to consider them, much less laugh at the arduous efforts to reach them…….my mythical giants have turned out to be measly ferrets …… the beast on my back has turned out to nothing more than my past riding on my imagination and ego….not easily shaken off, but shaken off all the same…..

My cigarette’s are almost over…..and so is my course……as in my search for peace…..

I can see the end….on the horizon…..and I must face it with all that I have…..this I realise now….I have run long enough, far enough……withheld hard enough, long enough….I am not this cowardly creature that I have turned into….cowering beneath the lash of fortune like a cur, broken spirited or even disembodied……..For broken bones must knit and blood must sing……for the ashes must glow anew….the phoenix arises on its own will……and the will that I forsook is yet in me…..tempered in the chilly winds of shattered hopes, the steaming vapours of nameless agony and the icy waters of shame and undiluted rationale….

For all the shit that I have written above……all it means is this is that I have to believe again….in myself and move beyond the shell I have created……it was not enough that I broke through the cocoon of my past life but I need to break through the image that I had built for myself……

And I am finally ready to face the world…..this is not the end, but it is definitely the beginning of the end…..and so it begins…..

As the Scottish clans would scream, claymore in hand, the wild winds whistling above and beyond……

Crom a boo …..aye…… pluis dru…..

I will burn ….indeed….at the thickest…. (Gathering of enemies)

In modern day language perhaps…… Come on if you’re hard enough!!!


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