The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
I liked what they did. I am a sucker for surprises 
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
Essentially, I am conflicted, between
a. the ego trying to deposit monuments on life’s canvas
and
b. the fact that the ego can only drive you to chase senseless materialistic derivatives that are temporary emollients for the soul.
Ergo, to ego or not to ego?
Should I just be sitting on my veranda, smoking a pipe, and watching a sunset?
Ayurveda, one of the only deep paradigms I have recently had a brush with, says that the human body needs to eat, defecate, and have sex in the right amounts.
Similarly, the mind needs to meditate, learn, and think in the right amounts.
And we should be fine. Relaxed and groovy, yea?
Everything else can take a walk and have cake.
Life is like a full-time job. When you’re born and start showing signs of intelligence, is when you’re recruited. Intelligence – the only thing you’ll be interviewed on. Age 4. You’re handed a schedule of job responsibilities right at the outset. Like a newbie at a job, you’re all excited. You set up your machine, your email, your bookmarks on your machine. And then you have to work toward the set of responsibilities you have an unspoken agreement about. You go through your induction and initial training period – you get an education. Go to college and acquire communication + project management skills. Your first homework assignment is your first deliverable. Every expectation is already in place and you march on with the supreme confidence of going in the right direction. You get a graduate degree, like winning an award or recognition at work. And you keep delivering, performing, growing in supreme confidence, and then you move on to your Masters degree or next high paying job. So when you finally take on a job, you’re really being put to test about your capabilities. You’re proving you understood every little piece of instruction passed on to you in your alma mater. And you march on. Soon enough life gives you other forms of recognition – your car, your spouse, etc.
Eventually you reach a stage where every little piece of instruction you studied has been put to the test, you’ve passed, you’ve scored well most of the times and sometimes you haven’t. But overall you did well. At this stage is when you start settling down (at least you’re supposed to). And then you’re confronted with the dreadful “What next?”
I’ve always been a night person. Never really thought about why. As I stood out on the patio tonight, looking up at the stars in a rare clear sky, I suddenly felt the space that they grant me allowing me to just be. When the day comes on and the sun goes up, suddenly there is an awareness of a need to be somewhere other. To do more. To become. To do better than the present.
The night has no such expectations. The night has no eyes.
I have this sneaky feeling that something may have gone terribly wrong – you know like you start out making chai with sugar and realize you added coffee and salt instead and you have to serve it to the HOD of the electronics department in 6 mins and he will grade your Engineering marks card for life and you ran out of milk or worse, water? Usually I encounter this feeling in dream space, except for the past 2 months it’s been a constant simmer on the backburner.
It’s that kind of a bad dream feeling, only it’s not about tea, coffee, or engineering, but scoped to like … life.
I hope I haven’t become a barista yet.
I need for this to pass. Quick.
Jack Kerouac said, “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
It’s time to take a step back and evaluate the 3 decades worth of page filling.
Because above all, there must be beauty in everything we do. Including the gaps we leave empty and devoid of color.
The white noise that forms the innocuous background to your everyday activities such as washing the dishes or folding clothes, if you start observing it, it seems almost like a film is playing in your own mind that you aren’t watching. Take the voices in your head, for instance. Entire monologues from some part of the brain that is dissatisfied is grumpily murmuring dissent, or one part of you that is over the top happy is humming a silent tune that you’re bobbing to while you walk.
it comes it goes
It’s like discovering a full new you merely by turning your attention inward when you aren’t forced to do it. Of course all of this is disturbed when you try to meditate, so it’s not the same. Like the mere act of observing the unobservable causes the activity to stop. But try not to observe it, and just eavesdrop, then they don’t shut up. Do this kind of observation long enough, and you’ll see patterns emerge.
I imagine artistic and overly dramatic alternate universes. That’s my background noise pattern. A big revelation this morning. Accidents are a prominent theme given how fattu I am. Sex, for example, is another fairly common context. And another theme is imagining the full life of a character I have no clue about and seeing their imaginary just-concocted life flash in front of my eyes.
This morning while walking to the cafeteria, in the wake of a conversation I was passively mulling over, looking at nothing in particular, I was crossing the street. A car came to a halt on my right to allow me to pass. Almost as if on cue, my brain spun off a disaster in an alternate universe. A series of images play in my mind where the van runs me over - time-lapse photography in an art film style- the driver of this white mini van misjudged the braking. The van moved in slow motion. It knocked me over and went over my left leg and broke my tibia. Cut to an image of Mo taking a flight to my city as I was carted into an ambulance. People miming phone calling ensured I was insured. I sighed in relief at the thought that I was. End sequence. No perception of pain. Very crisp images. And very colorful. As if the whole purpose of the movie was not the sequence of events but the play of color on the screen. Exactly like cinema – where the response to the display is the ultimate goal of the capture and not the experience being captured itself. If you’ve seen Nostalgia by Tarkovsky, the scene with the woman walking across the dry water pool is the style I am referring to. Or the Run Lola Run style. Just to put this in perspective.
Every time I drive and some jerk pulls up too close in front of me in my lane and suddenly, I visualize the full chain of events resulting from me not braking on time. When Mo drives and does so in his usual flamboyantly flagrant style (read God speed), there are brief periods of time when I imagine each and every potential car crash we could have gotten into. Like a video game race track with cars flying into freeway boundary walls like flitted flies.
Another example: my workplace is full of characters that do not talk much. So these people become just moving images to me. And sometimes, when I am dazed, sleepy, or distracted, I catch a glimpse of this character from the corner of my eye and Voila! A full film plays in my head in like 2 seconds. Somewhere in the weeks of silent observation, my subconscious strings together vague hairline observations about this person, and suddenly in a dream state – out comes this flash about his/her life. What he eats, whether he has a sister, how shy is he, how many kids does he have, what’s his secret identity, how he will nearly die, how he will get a prosthetic and a heroin addiction that he will triumph and marry his cousin who would take care of him, and how I will save the day and his life (sometimes 
). I have to admit though it happens more often with males than with females – so there is a gender bias there. And the character must essentially have intrigued me to begin with.
Very often this movie in my head is a narrative – just like Fight Club. In fact, if I could have it my way, Tyler Durden (male) and Georgia Lass (female, Dead like me) would narrate each of my movie sequences all the bloody time. And Soo would provide all the backing dark humor visuals – always comic book characters.
On the days I do yoga – the ability to watch the full length of this self-subconsicous-directed feature film is enhanced. I can even do it while working, or when half asleep – sometimes even direct the film. But the film doesn’t stop playing. The smoke keeps swirling. With a lifetime of a matchbox to go yet. Or half.
Sometimes I wish I still had the zeal of a myopic neophyte willing to drive an autocratic vision for a carrot. I’d not find fault with anything. And I would be committed to a cause that I didn’t fully understand. I’d make loud statements and bulldoze gullible non-thinkers. Which is to say I acknowledge I had this once, and emotion ran rife in Planet Brain. Only now I am wearing corrective glasses and hating every moment of belaboring a lost and defective cause.
Subtleties are popping into my peripheral vision from all directions. I like sandwiches I don’t make.My sandwich style is to shock and overwhelm my palate. Too many condiments, dressings, and sauces. Today I got a simple sandwich and there is terribly large amounts of beauty in the singleton flavor in it. Honey mustard only. 2 slices of not too salty turky, a relatively bland cheese, and a leaf of lettuce on panini bread with lots of texture character. Subtle. Nothing loud. Elegant as if a symphony trying to bring out the crescendo.
One can only feel simplicity, there is nothing left to understand.
I wonder how difficult it may be to be a simple person. As if there is a definition I can go by. Yet, imagine, stripping yourself of all that is unnecessary, no frills, no fuss, no make up, no pretense about how good you are, were, could have been, or should be. One day of zero amplification. Zero noise. A vanilla version of you. Does the picture appeal to you?
I think I see why 30s is the big 30s.
I may not know where I am going yet, but it feels like I may have begun to arrive.
30s, my friends, feels like the funeral of the caterpillar.
(I think that’s all I wanted to say. really.)
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