Sunday, January 30, 2005

Fresh Tendrils

Some lessons re-learnt in 2004:

1. Music is everything.

2. Objectivity is relative.

3. You can fall in love with a girl within 3 seconds of meeting her.

4. Never-fucking-ever take your friends for granted.

5. The plot always thickens.

6. Honesty is the best policy, except when it comes to Foreign Policy.

7. The difference between a bottle of wine that costs 30 bucks and a bottle of wine that costs 70 bucks is the company in which you share it with.

8. Club culture isn't dead; it's just very fickle, that's all.

9. Grudges can be meaningful.

10. The past always catches up with you.

Monday, January 24, 2005

The Sound of Inevitability

The difference between an incoming shell and an outgoing one, says Dad, a veteran of the Emergency and numerous live-fire exercises, is that unmistakable whistling sound it makes as the warhead (with your name on it?) is about to impact on your position.

Not to be confused with the deliberate whoosh of an outgoing shell, which makes a sound like ripping linen as it arcs across its flight path, or the concussive whump, whump, whump of the consequent explosion. No, says Dad, you'll know yours when you hear it.

Today, my sound of inevitability was the whir-click-whir of a dentist's drill as it made contact with the yellow wall of plaque on my molars. That tumultuous second before it bores into your teeth and starts to screech and whine like a kid with a particularly bad tantrum. That eerie buzzing sound, so itemized with finality of intense pain.

(They're made of diamonds, did you know that? Fucking diamonds!)

So, I sit there with my back slightly arched from the expectantcy of pain, my mouth an obscene gaping maw, my tongue hugging the roof, all in a day's work, the drilling goes on and on.

It's purgatory, it's every dentist in the world winking at you and saying I told you so. It's every single nerve in your mouth on fire. It's way overdue.

That was actually the first time in many months that I went to the dentist. So what!

It's not that I don't believe in the miracles of modern medicine, but I brush my teeth at least twice a day and do my 30-seconds with the mouthwash like everybody else.

Isn't that enough? Jeez, do you really have to go every six months?

Evidently, you do.

Well, OK.

And so:

"This might hurt a little..."

They always lie, don't they?

Monday, January 10, 2005

The Birth of an Entropy

In being born, I was commissioned to occupy this space.

To develop this personality, to commit to a future that I cannot yet comprehend or describe.

Twenty-five years of living and I have yet begun to live.

What happens now?

Thursday, January 06, 2005

A Formal Absence of Precious Things

This is how the New Year starts.

Or at least, this is how it feels. Some things are missing. Even on the sixth day.

I experience both a continuing fear of abstracts, and an intense longing for them: Peace of mind, closure, release etc.

People and things.

I wonder what waits for me this time around. And I shudder to think at how it will change me even more.

But here's to a new beginning, anyway.