Clutter

Carrying on from here, I haven’t had a peaceful moment inside my head for ages. No time to plot and plan. There’s always been something else around the corner that has demanded my immediate attention. And inevitably, without plotting and planning, my chores – yes, that’s what they’ve become – take longer, robbing me of thinking time.

There hasn’t been a moment in quite some time where I objectively analyze my life, the universe around me, and everything else related. It’s always from the frying pan into the fire. A long series of complicated steps which have ensured that the LIFE part of my life has been on the backburner for long… sufficiently long enough for me to get unused to having a life.

Which implies I don’t quite know anymore what to do when I have a spare moment. These spare moments, usually few and far in between, get sucked into a black-hole, unused, underutilized. It seems so long since I’d hurry up and finish my work so that I could have some fun. First it was finishing up work so that I could work some more, but now work and non-work more or less overlap, sucking out the joy in both.

There’s a mad, mad screaming in my head, and I just can’t seem to quell it. I’ve kept going by telling myself my moment of glory is just ’round the corner, and after this one task, that’ll be it. But another voice in my head clutters up my work by saying I’ll be stuck doing the same thing for a long time more, sapping my initial enthusiasm. I no longer have a fire in me that wants to get things done with. A vicious cycle, there.

And there’s another voice that asks about the elusive glory I’m trying to chase, where is the manna promised so long ago? It asserts that I haven’t got my due. A sense of being sinned against, and not having sinned enough to merit it. And not wanting to, thanks to my set of principles. It only hurts more when I see lesser efforts and chicanery being rewarded more. And, to add fuel to fire, I don’t anymore feel the satisfaction I’m supposed to feel on a job I did well.

My priorities, thus, are muddled up. My sense of ethics and morals and principles are cluttered. I wouldn’t go so far enough to say I don’t know which way is up, but I’m nearly there.

I certainly have tried breaking free from this eternal cycle, but have failed miserably at that. Life has a way of making things fall into the same dull old routine, and the strange buzzing in my head doesn’t help. I first thought taking a break might put things in a new perspective, but no, things are too deeply ingrained for any major change to happen. New activities don’t help, either.

I wish organizing my thoughts was as easy as organizing my hard disk, where all I’ll have to do was defragment, delete unnecessary files, and put things in appropriate folders. Unfortunately, the human brain isn’t as easy to organize.

The Art Of Mind Control was something I laughed at a couple of years back. Why would someone want to control their thought process, I wondered. It was as beautiful as it is, going from one unchartered location to another. But the realization of an unclinging train of thought which stops to entertain everything, and absorb nothing makes me wonder otherwise.

There’s also a feeling that all this is merely temporary, that my current position will come to pass soon, and I’m going to have no relics of these moments, and it would be unwise to cling on to these moments, they don’t quite count, not worth clinging on to. I’m so inured to the kind of life I’m leading that I at first pretended not to care about the various slights and maintain an external calm, and now this poker face comes naturally to me, and I don’t quite seem to care what happens to others. It’s also a list of lessons learnt, which is, as the cliche goes, once bitten twice shy.

There’s also a whole list of things I used to be dying to do, but couldn’t, and now when I have enough time on my hands, I can’t recollect in the haze of what’s coming next, which I am sure of, if at all, in a very hazy way.

I think I’m so used to pressure that once my tail is not on fire, I go into deep hibernation.

Oh, hell, I think I’ve been too deep into Bridget Jones’ Diary and Devil Wears Prada, which, while being hilarious to a fault, has the same effect on my mind which all chicklit does – puts me into introspection mode a la American and British women all of who think only of looks and weight-loss and relationships and all the stuff sold by the first-world media. Oh, and I also talk and write in cliches and truisms all the time now, apart from snowclones.

Why the hell can’t we have decent role models apart from an ex-rocket scientist ex-president who thinks just education is the road to salvation for the nation, or a wannabe-IITian who started a mass-recruiter software co., or his wife to whom every possibly imaginable incident happens which she pens horribly into collections of short stories, or as columns in popular periodicals? Or a bunch of anorexic starlets, or overpaid sportsmen, or overhyped and underclothed sportswomen?

Something tells me this is just the calm before the storm that’s gonna drown me in so much work that I’m not gonna have time to even take a deep breath before going under.

PS: It’s 38 years of Woodstock as of today. If I ever come across a time-machine, I certainly know where I’d want to take it to. I prefer remembering Woodstock, a culture/counterculture I’ve never experienced or seen first-hand, to wishing everyone a Happy Independence Day, ‘coz you just look at Woodstock, and if you can still do something like that, and if it’d be a success, then you really truly are free.

PPS: Happy Independence Day. Revel in the joy of being able to say just about anything you want.  And in doing whatever and whoever you want. We are one of the very few lucky ones across the globe to have that freedom.

Wanna Woodstock

On this day, 37 years ago, was the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival at Bethel, New York. I guess you can call that a never-before-never-again event. With the sort of commercialization there is today, I don’t think there can ever be such a celebration of gaiety, freedom and Art. The most interesting thing about it was that

<extract from wiki>

Though the show had been planned for a maximum 50,000 attendees, over 500,000 eventually attended, most of whom did not pay admission. The highways leading to the concert were jammed with traffic and people as they abandoned their cars and walked for miles to the concert area. The weekend was rainy, facilities were overcrowded, and attendees shared food, alcoholic beverages, and drugs. Local residents of this modest tourist-oriented area gave blankets and food to some concertgoers. However, no violence was reported and the fact that attendees were remarkably well behaved was particularly noted.

</end of extract>

Wish I’d been there, listening to The Who and Jimi Hendrix……….instead of spending half the day today stuck in a traffic jam for nine hours in the middle of a forest.