what do you do when you see your words borrowed by someone’s thoughts? or your syntactical overtures wound around someone else’s idea.but what do u do when u realize u dont have the thoughts anymore.
life is a universe waiting to happen and cheap sunglasses frosted over by MS Word and Adobe FrameMaker transluscze the view. at sunrise especially.
i’m done raking weeds. for at least a short while. i prefer jasmine.
i’m going to change the world!
“See what is invisible, and you will see what to write.”
That’s how Bobby used to put it.
It was the invisible people he wanted to live with.
The ones that we walk past every day.
The ones we sometimes become.
The ones in books who live only in someone’s mind’s eye.
He was a man who was destined to go through life and not around it.
A man who was sure the shortest path to heaven was straight through hell.
But the truth of his handicap…lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories…and the path he chose to become one.
Bobby Long’s tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw. And I guess if people want to believe in some form of justice…then Bobby Long got his for a song.
i saw a film about people of words yesterday. i mention this because i am a person of words. nj once said that the words themselves have a bigger impact on me than the meaning themselves. seems like. of the films that have had a major impact on me, films i can watch again, films i recommend time and over, almost all have interesting word play. like reality bites. or waking life. or even closer.
it’s one thing to read it, it’s yet another to hear the words spoken, just right by the characters on screen. film in question yesterday: A love song for Bobby Long. An independent film made off of a novel by Ronald Everett Capps called Off Magazine Street.
at this point i can easily drift off into a favorite janis joplin number involving another Bobby but … phhh .. control.
so basically 2 near-bards-frosts-whathaveyous with an extremely sexy scarlett johansson singing idyllic songs and quoting greats left right and centre.
the film isn’t about the words. it’s about the people themselves, but the words liberally littered throughout the film, were where I paused and went back and read. inside the book cover for instance where bobby wrote to lorraine:
“No matter what she did, there was music.”
you could easily miss that. all the director ever wanted you to see was that the note as signed by Bobby Long.
and then the barrage of authors thrown across at each other – all the fucking time – it was my dream come true – i have always held a fancy of being able to hold a conversation – an entire conversation that really means something to me while all the time quoting different authors.
The narrative starts with:
Time was never a friend to Bobby Long.
It would conspire against him…
allow him to believe in a generous nature,
then rob him blind every time.
Ever read the TS Eliot quote that said, “Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood.” That communication is what I live for. And to Thomas Stearns, I say, its not just poetry. It needn’t be.
And when I looked up TS Eliot to confirm the quote, I found this:
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
A toast to Ronald Everett Capps. And may you live to have a 100 and 6000 Cappucinos.
1. Giving up on a gym routine for longer than a week can be seriously detrimental. Not to your waistline or weighing scales, no. But to other things. Like letharge. Your reflexes. Resistance. Efficiency. Sinuses. Stomach. So I went promptly back to the gym after 1 full week of tortuous work.
2. Daal is the most gassy substance outside of channa. Daal stored more than 12 hours is likely to give you enough gas for a hot air balloon esp if it’s bought outside.
3. Not eating fibre and fruit through the day and not keeping the 4 meal count can fuck your system. My late night snack pangs have caused the purchases of hajaar eclairs. I have binged beyond belief last week. I went back to fruits today, and find it a major relief. All is normal. In just a day.
4. People here don’t know how to make sourdough bread. N had told me about it when mentioning the high glycemic index bit. Look it up if you are really interested. So neways, it may have the HGI but fuck they make it the best in San Luis style back in SD.
5. Dahi kadhi is amazingly healthy.
6. You can eat more than one banana a week.
7. Destarched rice is a good idea.
8. No skippy mealy. Bad ideasmo. Tres badismo.
9. Don’t go on a diet. Don’t starve yourself. Just cut the fat, and rearrange the timings of carbs intake, split 3/5. Set. GM diet sucks.
10. You can loose upto 4.5 kilos in 2 months.
11. Yoga still rules.
one day Paaji walked in and asked, “when was the last time you read a non-fiction book end-to-end?”
my attempt to cite zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was thwarted because a. i haven’t crossed 277. b. it isn’t serious non-fiction. but i did cite it. for what it’s worth.
then he asked “do you know what that means?” and i said “we’ve stopped learning anything new. and hence we have stopped growing.”
it’s sad but true. i went thru 460 odd pages of Lee Child this week, and 300 pages of Alistair MacLean for old times sake. coz it feels good to go through 50 pages and not be aware of the time. coz it feels good that 50 pages don’t daunt you, shove learnings down your throat, and going the next 50 isn’t going to be sleep inducing.
but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we have in fact stopped learning. i haven’t stagnated more in my life – outside work – as much as i have since i left college. we all did. back then we thought up entire universes. back then we did nothing.
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