3.04 am *fart*

Hi, I'm Praveen and I am actually a rather content individual.

For those of you who know me only through this blog, all one of you, it may seem like an unbelievable statement.

It's a habit I've dropped recently that is the cause of this. Writing only when you're depressed or feeling melancholic leads to people thinking you walk around with white makeup and all 28 frowning muscles flexed.

I whistle as I walk. True story.

I whistle so much it annoys my family. My dad once told me that if I whistled at night, ghosts would appear. I love that Asians have all this fantastic folklore to draw on.

I also tend to smile more than should be appropriate. I smile at funerals, at arguments, and when the waiter brings me the wrong order. I smile when someone cuts me off in traffic. I am THAT zen sometimes.

Its moments like those that remind me that all you can do at the end is smile. Though laughing is recommended for true fuck my life moments (pregnancy scares, car accidents, divorces, deaths).

Back to me.

I guess at some point I associated my creative drive with the deep pang of melancholia, and that connection has remained and flourished. Like Pavlov's dog I salivate at the thought of the endorphin high brought on by the joint acts of creation and apathy.

And in the end isn't that the bald man behind the curtain struggling to work the knobs. That we are all constructs of the pain-pleasure centers of the brain. Chemically assisted brainwashed drones. And we provide the chemicals. But if everyone is brainwashed the same way, is anybody?

And on that rhetorical bombshell I end tonights rant.

nowegian wood tee design pat 2

Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood releases in a few days. This book is very special to me, more than any other book, even others by Murakami.

As much as I tried not to, I will have insanely high expectations for this movie.

And in celebration, and because I couldnt sleep. Here are two tee shirt/poster designs with quotes from Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.

If the stars align just right this movie might just change everything.

Heres hoping

Lorum Ipsum Dolom

There is a first line in a story somewhere that I am sure will explain the beginning of my life.

It is simple and content with being itself. It is small and tells of beginnings.

This story that I hope to read I am also writing. It has many pages and tells of many things.

The hero grows and has many flaws. I believe this makes him relatable.

The earlier pages are written in a shaky voice, that which hasn't yet learned itself.

The paragraphs here expound the beauty of every day, of every rare starry night, every kiss.

That stops eventually.

He falls in love. Too many times in my opinion, but that's the way it's written.

Eventually he will get married, settle down. But it seems to the author's mind unnatural that the story end this way. It fits at the end like a bad toupee, awkward and at an angle.

But he is at a block.

Maybe he could make it a choose your own ending book. Let the reader decide.

But thats as much a cop-out as the picket fence ending.

The hero of our story yearns for an end drenched in flames and beautiful song. But the author is of a different mind.

He years for the peace of an end rocking gently away in the force of the moon pulling the ocean and the earth pulling on the moon and black hole at the center pulling everything.

There will always be this conflict between this creator and his creation. This life that began with a small, sure line is now twisted and tangled in its own paraphrases and ellipses.

Because of this, the story will always come short of its true potential, and the words will always

2 sleepless nights, A rant

All we are all we have and all we can lose are our illusions.

Are you free? Really?

What do you have to do at 2pm today? Gym? Work? Family?
Tomorrow?

What is that thought that wakes you up every night in throes of fear and sweat? Every night you can almost remember it, and then it fades into the grey fog.

All you, I and every last damn dirty ape has is the illusion that we are free, that we are in control of our lives, and that if we exercise that control rigidly, we can achieve an artificial peace someday. Like a faked orgasm but better. This one comes with a side effect of an uncomfortable lukewarm happiness. A social placebo effect.

Trying to achieve peace takes you farther away from it. Peace and freedom are one. Trying to achieve either destroys what little of each you have.

You take control of your life. Don’t worry everyone does. It’s what we’re trained to do. I plan, you plan we all have plans. We plan to be free one day. Society has taught us that peace is at the end of the Golden Path. Work, fuck, raise some kids, retire and die. Peace is in there somewhere, don’t worry, don’t question, just do.

A man on his deathbed will cling desperately to the hope that in the last second of his life a great light will open in his mind and peace will come flooding in like rain on the Sahara. And as the life leaves his eyes even that scrap of hope becomes void.

What do we get in the end? Most probably our golden years spent in a rusted metal box adjusting the t.v. antenna and shouting at kids.

The irony!

By the time we have time to be free it’s too late. We’re locked into the idea that being free requires something else. Something physical, a car boat house. Something emotional, wife kids family. As long we grip our lives so tightly in search of peace we will never find it. We salivate and pull at society’s leash hungering for this fake meat it’s laid out in front of us our whole lives.

BUY THAT AND YOU’LL FLY WITH THE BIRDS. FUCK A LOT AND YOU WILL FIND PEACE. WEAR THIS AND KNOW TRUE FREEDOM. AMEN. AMIN. OM NAMAH SHIVAYA.

Trying to achieve peace ensures that you fail. Because we don’t know what that is. It’s just a word.

Analogy time: Imagine trying to dig a hole by piling dirt on the ground and calling it a hole.

Peace is losing control. Peace is not wanting anything, or needing anything. Or having anyone need us. Peace is just existing. Just being. Filling a space in the world without any expectation.

Buddha hit it on the head when he preached that material wealth is the cause of all suffering. He didn’t mean just war, hunger, famine and disease. He also meant the suffering caused by us never realizing what real happiness is.

All we can lose are our illusions. No matter what that’s all they can take from us.

Example: You get arrested, you go to jail. You cease to have the illusion that you can do anything you want.
They know this, and just to be safe they create the possibility that these illusions will disappear if we question them.

Abandon the illusion that you have ANY kind of control in your life.
Knowing opens your mind up a bit. Allows you breathing room when before you didn’t even know you needed it.

I have come to a decision that someday all of this has to go. None of it can stay.

I have to lose control before I can’t anymore.

I have to keep only my finger tips on society’s Golden Path, just enough to get by till I can just be.

Just be.

Something

A Writing Exercise

Let's begin by describing a space. A place where things happen in a chronological sequence told like a story.

"Padang bola itu adalah besar dan mempunyai rumput berwarna hijau."

Nonono, you're not 12 anymore!

Create a place you would wanna explore. Create with subtlety and describe more than the color of the grass.

"The entrance was an archway of old mud that had turned to stone and old stone that had turned to mud packed tightly together and covered in moss. Where it met the ground it formed columns that dwarfed me, and were was as white as the bones of an old god.

Walking past it shifted the quality of light from balmy afternoon to an almost rainy dusk and the scent of the place seemed to move around to complement it. The smell of wet sand and small soft things.

A shaft of light streaming in from the ceiling lit a solitary spot of mushrooms growing on the floor. They held the light greedily and shared none with the rest of us. They had even stolen colors from the light and wore the greens and browns proudly in the gray glow of the cave.

The few photons that bounced off fell into a nearby trickle of water that carried them deeper and deeper and deeper.

The ceiling was so high the light seemed to be a cosmic giant's toothpick carelessly tossed out his space-car window after a heavy meal. A 2 stroke vertical line dividing the room or a metal pole placed there by an absentminded deity to keep the roof up.

I stood as far away from the light as the space would allow with the trickle beneath me to guide me when my mind gave away.

The light and dark seemed to change places continually and to the observer it looked like they took turns moving from fore to background. The mind is clutching at any structure it can find and distorting it to fit a worldview created by two decades of life.

I stood in that spot for two days to see if these things changed when observed continually and by the end of it my senses had adjusted to this world as being infinite. I had forced my brain into compliance with the rules of this place. And now I was a slave to the light and the dark.

The dark seemed only a fuzzy thing clinging to the edges of the light.

The light had won out and seemed almost solid.

I had to see if it was.

I had to hold this light even if it burned through epidermis muscle and nerve.

I approach it like you would approach a helicopter, working against phantom solar winds. Step after step I watched the ground, judging my progress by the color gradient of the stone floor.

I stopped at the border of grey and white. The sweat on the arm I was using to shield my face seemed to emerge and evaporate instantly in my currently exaggerated frame of mind and time.

Time was drippy and liquid like Dali thought it was.

I glanced over my arms at it, and after the initial pain of adjustment I could see that the brilliance was fluid. In this magnified space the light had particles identifiable and alive, flowing through space like insects from another universe.

Reaching out took forever, moments compressed and stretched. Days passed for inches and centimeters. Imagined heat burned real flesh as my mind manifested every fear I had built over the last two days.

Then I touch it.

There’s a flash in my head as the steamy remnant of my being burns in the brilliance and escapes through my pores.

Moving out

I need to find a space where my head doesn't have me in it.

Moving out of one's own head is a challenge cos its a comfortable place.

I know I'm gonna find it hard.

Its like saying goodbye to a car you've had your whole life.Its warm and familiar and there's a lot of holes and dents in it, but each one has a story. That crazy bender, that last substance binge.

Large holes in memory ripped out in exchange for the elation of a night spent outside myself.

I guess thats the problem mainly. Ive become used to escaping myself the artificial way, either by way of intoxicant or warm flesh, in a packed dance floor or dark room. So much so accomplishing the same feat au naturel is almost a new experience.

I'm a tick that got too comfortable in some rabbit's fur and now the vet's tweezers are coming and I still don't move.

To draw inspiration from Twain I could meet my doppleganger who's a prince of some far off land and switch places with him. He could enjoy my anxieties and existential despair to his hearts content and I could settle in to becoming a spoilt rich kid, maybe even get my own episode on Cribs.

Only one problem with that, you know any exotic Indian princes wanna switch places with a kid from the arse end of Asia?

What would a shrink say?

I've never been to one so I'll have to imagine something from the famous ones in the books. Freud would say my need to escape myself is my conscious mind's response to my guilt about wanting to bed my mother. Maslow would tell me to get to the top of the pyramid and call him in the morning. Pavlov would offer me a candy bar and ring a bell. Fat lot of good they are.

Except for the candy bar part.

That would make me feel better for about 5 minutes, then I'd have to wait till he rang the bell again.

*salivate*

The easiest way maybe is to fall in love, have someone else move in to your head. A house mate of sorts. One who doesn't pay rent and gives you more anxieties than you already had. Like biting the inside of your mouth when you stub your toe. Pain and discomfort to replace a pre existing condition.

I compare my psyche to a disease, but don't get me wrong. Its not like AIDS or cancer, but more like Tourett's or a nervous muscle twitch in the corner of your eye.. Its something you can get used to and even enjoy after a while. But it would be nice not to have it for a weekend or two.

Saying that I wish you all a Merry Jesusallahbuddha and a good night.

bali 10 part deux

bali 10

Close the curtains, put on a movie and dream of a rainy day. I see this as an intervention to my waking life from my sleeping one. I was once a class room day-dreamer, and I painted in the air of my class great battles for love and justice. I have ceased to dream in my days so I spend these slow days trapped in a cage with bars made of dripping water slowly travelling the aether with half closed eyes from between the folds of my blanket.

Photographical asplosion

Easing into working life has created in me a need to stay productive in something outside work. And I've been revisiting my old love of photography.

Combine that with some awesome art festivals and shows recently and this is what you get.

Its a weird kind of frustrating to want nothing to lose living in a system where you take on obligations for for cash. Its an oxymoronical situation I am in.

A silly thing called society

In the recent years I've come to realize a quality of this beast that is humanity. It is easily blinded and distracted; it is easy to subdue and tame.

It is obvious to anyone who looks at it subjectively. We support a system of government that is flawed by definition, simply because there has never been a strong enough realization and mobilization of people to make it so.

It's so easy to make anything become truth, if you use the media. Though it may sound like the ideas of a paranoid mind, I strongly disbelieve anything I see in the mainstream media. The dream machines in the ad agencies churn out images and ideas that are so irresistible it becomes second nature to accept them as truth.

I could rant about this for hours. But the truth is, I do believe we're pass the point where we could survive without the mass media. All I can do is hope that the right people are channeling the money into the right causes.

We have the technology and the capability to transcend to the next evolution of society,a second renaissance, but its just the hive mentality of mankind thats hard to convince.

From the perspective of a Subang kid.

When I was a kid living in Subang Jaya, for a short time, it was a very quiet place. Nothing too drastic happened and everyone drifted home from work tired and went to sleep.

Subang was a home, just that, and it was enough. My world extended from my house to the cyber cafe's of SS15.

That world I knew, and understood, with every fiber of my being.

So when you're young, change in your world can leave an impression on you. It's a kind of realization that you are not the sole architect of your lives. That the decisions of others, even indirectly, can affect you.

That's why I remember the day they erected the giant billboard.

I was 16 or 17 at the time, and I had seen one that size, but never up close. It was at least 5 stories tall, and it spread the joy of good hand phone coverage to the masses.

They built this one in front of my house. And for years it would be the first thing I saw when I stepped onto the street, towering neither menacingly nor non-threateningly. It simply was. A sign of the creeping advance of a the development seeping out of KL that had taken a life of its own.

The billboard was just the start, for soon Subang had its own cityscape.

There was a place in Subang, at the top of a pedestrian crossing, where you could see the expanse of Subang juxtaposed against the towers of KL. A photo taken at that place, once a year when stitched together would have been a time lapse video of an organism growing somewhere in the world.

The city seemed to breathe and writhe with a kind of purpose on the video in my mind.

Subang then became a place bigger than I could cross on foot. A place I didn't know every part of. My reality was no longer a finite space, and back then it made me feel irrelevantly small.

It was very soon after that I felt my first bout of disillusionment with the world. And had my first cigarette.

As melodramatic as it sounds the shadow of the city had fallen upon my home, and blocked out all the light.

End of It all

In the light of the dying stars we lay side by side on the grass wet by the early morning’s dew. I told you all I want for the world and all I want for us. With each word uttered a star explodes and I realize that our time is finite here.

In this perfect place the universe is ending, and I have waited too long to say all I wanted to say. Both of us now are nothing but memories of no one. We’ve waited till the end to find the moment when we could be together, and Time has given us the dying seconds of the universe to revel in each others smell sound touch.

And revel we shall.

I remove your dress and see a million worlds snuffed out, reflected in your tears. You unbutton my shirt and my skin pressed against yours feels like the surface of the sun.

I can feel your heartbeat. The memory of your heartbeat. The sound of it resonates with mine, growing louder with each beat.

Here comes the end of it all. I lean in for one more kiss. One more taste of your teeth tongue lips before they cease to be.

The end reaches us here.

I grab at the grass and dirt, hoping to keep us rooted, but the end reaches us here. The dirt disappears atom by atom. Your hair fades away before I can run my fingers through it.

We died lifetimes ago, and now we will die again. Along with the universe.

We waited too long my love. And here at the end time I throw meaningless word after word before we are sent to the aether. My sight of you blurs and I can’t tell if it’s because of tears or entropy.

Finally; the tears vanish, and all is gone.

I don’t want to say I’ll love you forever cos I don’t believe in forever. Forever gives me too much time. And in time I fear I’ll take you for granted.

I want to love you until I can’t anymore. Everyday anew.

Falling again and again for your smile laugh eyes.

Instead of an infinity of grey days, I want to make a handful of days that I remember every color smell touch sound of.

I will love you today, tomorrow, and the day after.

I will count our life by the moments.

inBetween

Lying so close and yet so far I awoke lightly. And as my eyes adjusted to the dim glow of the moon I found a mass of raven threads slowly beginning to appear, each hair like a web, cast upon the bed in a flowing pattern. The light caught each thread and reflected back a thousand memories of morning.

I looked up to gaze at the weaver and she turned to me, eyes closed but ever so softly, a smile.

In this moment I am between the waking and the dreaming. Between mind and body. And I fear to awaken further.

Staying in between just to remember her tender smile and the heat of a night spent outside myself.

Staying here so that I will not awaken to a reality that doesn’t fit this dream.

Jazz hands

Um, hi.

Is it still cool to be fashionably late? Cos if it is, then I'm not.

If blogspot were the universe I just missed total entropy by half an hour.

If you understood that, you're as geeky as me. And I love you.

So yea, take a shot of tequila, snort some coke and lets get the party started.

-prav