your vision blears, you carry your weather with you

 This is a story I heard from a friend of a friend. 

Usually something to take with a pinch of salt. But I've been watching 'I've been thinking of ending things' - and listening to this story, at that particular time, was just like being hit in my solar plexus. 

A friend of a friend lives in a big apartment block. Recently, they had been dealing with a dirty smell permeating the entire apartment block, especially the pathway just outside the apartment entrance. Then one night, the friend heard a big splash. it smelled like urine and feces. The friend screamed at whoever it was. Silence from all around. 

A few days later, something similar happened. But the difference now was that the friend realised which apartment direction it was coming from. They stormed over. Banged on the door. Finally, an old woman in her 80s opened the door. Shock and confusion. The old lady apologised. She didn't have electricity and water. So she had to resort to throwing her urine and feces out the window.

It appears the old lady didn't have family to help take of her. so there she is, in her sunset years, struggling to live with dignity. Perhaps achingly lonely. And sad. 

The story has a somewhat 'happy' ending. The friend called social services who promised to arrange to bring back utilities for the lady.

But I've been thinking and thinking.

In the movie 'I'm thinking of ending things' everything is crazy and surreal and disturbing. A sort of menace is underlying every scene. I couldn't take it any longer so I googled the movie. The story is about loneliness, deep loneliness, and a fragile mental state. You'll have to watch it to understand what it truly means, I suppose. 

I wish I were a better writer so I could encapsulate what the movie is about and how much it scares me.

A a modern horror story.

There's poem in the movie called 'Bone-dog' (apparently it is written by Eva HD).

Read this and ask yourself if you don't feel rattled.

The way it is delivered by the actress is astounding. There's a moment where she looks at the camera while delivering the lines, and it is chilling.

Bone-dog Coming home is terrible whether the dog licks your face or not whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you coming home is terribly lonely so that you'll think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you've just come from with fondness, because everything is worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice-creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect and made from different material than those you left behind you yourself are cut from different cloudy cloth returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots. Seamy suit of clothes, dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home, moon-landed, foreign the earth's gravitational pull--an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of... anyway, you sigh into the onslaught of identical days, one might as well, at a time... well, anyway, you are back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body, your vision blears, you carry your weather with you the big, blue whale; a skeletal darkness. You come back with an x-ray vision, your eyes have become a hunger, you come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone everything you see now, all of it: bone.

Little light

I think about death and dying and life and living. The bane of human existence, of being conscious is precisely this. Not the death and dying or the life and living part. But the thinking and feeling of this undeniable truth.

One more thing has started tacking itself to my unoriginal thoughts - the shortness of it all. 

What a fucking shitshow.

Life no longer seems long and endless or whatever I believed it was, previously. Now human beings are fragile, fragile creatures. Like a hummingbird with a little light inside them, flapping its wings for 10 or 20 seconds before suddenly dying, no longer existing, its place taken by dust and light and another hummingbird.

I catch myself thinking these unoriginal thoughts - my unoriginal musings taking me nowhere new, nowhere fun. But in the last few months or maybe weeks, something floated by and brought my boring train of thought to a screeching halt. If life is short and we die and cease to exist before we can fully even comprehend who we are then perhaps our duty is to treat each other well. Or maybe it's just what I must do, regardless of whether it's a duty or obligation. Treat people well. Starting with my family. Treat them better. Hold the light inside everybody preciously. 

Maybe that's the point of existence. Not to create something great. Or to enjoy life. Definitely not to be brave and take on whatever shit life throws at us. Maybe the point of existence is to treat each other like a precious little light. 

UPDATE: Just a day later, this reached my inbox. Here's the Marginalian/Maria Popova with her deep insights on the same topic. 

'You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.'

Read up more here - Love Anyway

Sad? Food pics as balm

Feeling a bit down in the dumps. 

Looking at what I ate since the beginning of the year helps me feel a bit better. How come I don't have any pictures of our typical rice-veggies-meat-daal dinners??? 

                    Yesterday's dinner                    

                                                                                           Chicken dumplings and soup

 

Not a big drinker. Bought a case after work. It was okay.

                                                                     This was a 'second dinner' situation.

                                    My fav snack

                                                                                                In my diet era

          Back to regular programming

The achars were so good, alu dum and momos were so-so.

         

            One last hurrah for my skinny self.

                                                                   Pulled back into the world of midnight snacks. 

trudge

it's so scary to think i have to live, exist, persist, etc., for decades....all the while, i'm slowly rotting and inching nearer to being wiped off. before i jump into the question of existence and purpose and everything futile, i just want to add that i am lost and i don't want answers. i don't even want to question. all my sorrows are puny. i am not the first nor the last nor anything consequential. my only wish would be to dim my desire for wanting anything out of life - most of all the desire to find answers to questions that have evaded all of humanity that came before me. my only consolation is the slowly forming trick i've begun to put into action whenever something pinches me - whatever i am doing is temporary, so this disgusting, challenging thing i'm doing right now is more than a figment of my imagination certainly, but it is fleeting in the vast scheme of things. goodbye! i will learn to look at it dispassionately and move on. trudge, trudge, trudge....toward death and decay.

one night in December

think about how life is haunting

how it pricks and pins you 

as you struggle

how haunting it is 

in its beauty

or is it despair

like a yellowed afternoon

that is both soft and scarred

depending on the memory it contains

do you hold on to life

do you thrash to unwrap it claws off you

what do you do

what do you do

you do not know

you do not understand

all you do

all you know

life is haunting

it haunts you

from the moment you experienced your first heartbreak

you discovered your friends gossiping about you

it broke your heart

or maybe you found your mother counting pennies

and it was a peculiar feeling seeing her stack up those coins

the slight air of helplessness permeating the air

something reared its ugly head

when your lover called you names, not of endearment

the sound of a heart breaking, into twos and fours

are you doing well?

Spent 10 mins yesterday crying over the masterpiece that is Jaurim's 25, 21

Something about her voice and the atmosphere of the song always gets me. The words she sings can feel so simple but each one is dripping with meaning and life. This song has stood the test of time. 

This led me to think about other songs that have pulled me in. I've never thought of myself as a music lover. I think that's because I always measure passion by the yardstick of my deep love for books and stories. I love books so much. To give an example, I get teary-eyed when I come across booktubers who are clearly so excited and passionate. There was this one person who was filming his reaction to some book award and he was so nervous as if he was the one up for the award. These days I don't have the best feeling about existing so this experience made me feel glad to be alive.

Back to songs that stir my heart in inexplicable ways

• Sajjan Raj Vaidya - Hataarindai, Bataasindai
• Jerusha Rai - Barud
• ONE OK ROCK- We Are
• Jannabi - For Lovers Who Hesitate
• Epic High Ft. Tuna - No Different

sneaking in Jaurim's 25, 21 again as a reminder

hello, darkness, my old friend

some thoughts fleet by my mind suddenly, sometimes - what does it mean to die? why am I afraid of dying? why is death so interesting to me now? why do we consider death so taboo?

I don't know where it started or how, but I found myself suddenly wanting not to live. Not because I had anything terrible going on in my life. In fact, even during my darkest moments, I never contemplated dying to avoid the pain. But now I am gaining morbid curiosity about death, dying, the effect on those we leave behind when we die.

who will I hurt when I die? my parents, for sure. my siblings, yes. friends, only the closest ones.

but how long will they grieve? I wonder not because I want them to grieve for me for a long time but because I am calculating if my not being alive will only inflict unnecessary and a long drawn out pain for them. I want people to forget me when I am no longer around.

yet, I worry my parents will carry pain shaped like my void around with them, forever and ever until they die. I worry that in seeing my parents, my siblings will then grieve twice as hard as they normally would if my parents were not around with the ghost of my once-existence lingering around them.

for my friends, I hope they forget me soon and build better memories with their loved ones to replace the ones marked 'me'.

I wonder if everyone I think of also thinks of dying. 

how to be happy

 I find myself typing 'how to be happy' - seeking answers on the internet, hoping someone smarter and wiser than me has already found the answer and will teach me.

I don't know what I'm looking for. 

I can't manage my stress levels the way the internet tells me I should.

I hate exercising so that's out.

I think I have a good handle on my negative thoughts and typically practice 'good thoughts' quite well but that's got me nowhere.

So, I am back to square one. I have nothing to do but type 'how to be happy'.

There's no answer. No human has found the answer, it seems.

We were all forced to exist. We make do because that's all we can do. Then we die. Death isn't even a relief according to what some people say. Apparently, our consciousness continues to exist in the ether. And that's somehow worse. Floating and floating. Cursed to be aware of everything for eternity. 

I'm so glad I don't have a child cursed with the burden of existence

trying to clutch at something

there's a truth that is poking at the corners of my brain and my subconsciousness, but it is still raw and doesn't feel fully informed. I wish I could tell you what it is.

new year, old me

 I thought I'd make 10 million resolutions to turn into a new person this new year. But I don't have anything I want to try. I mean I do but I don't really want to make resolutions.

new year, old me is the theme. but if there's something I want to do, it is this - take each day as it comes.

nothing exciting about this but that's the whole purpose of this. I don't want any excitement in my life because with excitement comes stress and anxiety and I want to stop thinking about the future and reduce stress and anger. So, I'll live in the today and stop worrying about tomorrow. 

that's the 2023 me.

things I want to know

The onset of winter has always been the cruellest month for some people I know. As the days quickly grow darker and the gust of wind blows coldly, it is a reminder to me to remain vigilant. Not just to bundle up. Take care of that cold. Return home before the sun vanishes from the sky. But also to check in and see if there's anything I can do. How to grate less on someone's nerves? How to subtly remind someone that May, by contrast to the approaching cold, is the doorway to the warm summer days that has always acted as a balm to me? That this long, wintry tussle with the demons is a fight worth winning to usher in the next year?