Snippets

Sleep comes in waves, never enveloping me completely and never letting me go free. I long to feel that drowning sensation and lower myself into oblivion but some unknown leash tugs at the edges of my consciousness. I try to follow it but it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere except through blurry and vague thoughts, faces, emotions. They seem to be making sense and then another wave engulfs me, by the time it goes I’m lost again.

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My office looks out on lovely green trees on one side and other offices on the other. Sometimes I sit back and let myself drift. I wonder how long it will last. The stillness of the trees, the mild evening sun on one side and the bustle of activity on the other. It is an unnerving contrast. People seem to be busy with something important, rushing around with papers, talking animatedly and typing at their computers. The trees are just there.

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As I look at this person who is talking to me, I’m thinking to myself why they feel the need to make small talk. The silence maybe stifling or maybe it’s just polite? after all I’m being polite and listening even though I do not follow a word that is being said. I don’t have it in me to say anything. Saying means a confrontation, it means developing that air of negativity and that is worse than this non-conversation masquerading as a conversation.

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Today I am intoxicated. The world seems very different. Someone is playing Radiohead and the music and the lyrics flow like geometric patters through my mind while I look at them passing by. I can almost see how one thing follows another how one thing must follow another, it couldn’t have been any other way. It occurs to me why music and intoxication are so deeply, inexplicably connected.

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I find navigating through traffic very stressful. I see the full range of negative, aggressive emotion there. People look at each other with hatred and spite and anger, ready to pick a fight at the slightest provocation. Everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere, unwilling to forego an inch of space on the road or a moment of time that is to be saved and when someone comes in the way there is hell to pay. Regulations are okay as long as they don’t interfere. How did travelling become so complicated? so full of poison for the soul?

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The moment when an idea is swirling in your mind with some clarity. It is amazing how intuitive it feels. It should be obvious to the anyone that you convey it to except that it isn’t. It has its clarity only in your mind and not in anyone else’s. It is hard to believe that, to overcome that conviction that you’re right and that this is the obvious thing to do. The idea is alien to the other person, they just don’t feel it. The conviction also hampers your ability to explain to convince them, it becomes an exercise in high-handedness and condescension and in disappointment.

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The activity of my day is aimed at keeping the tedium of life, the abstraction at bay. One has to look at the big picture but only from a certain distance, going further will result in the tedium and abstraction barging in. Why do we do what we do, that is the real question. Perhaps local happiness can be found momentarily but there is no meaning no purpose to things. This is the truth of abstraction and it catches up, sometimes in bits and pieces and sometimes in a burst of clarity. In these phases one needs external impetus, activities, friends etc. Otherwise there is nothing to fill the void.

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Social media is the temptress. It teases and pulls us in with it’s ability to connect us. It appeals to our base needs for appreciation, for being loved, for being part of a group, for being heard. It also repels those of us who sit high on our chairs of morality and think of its vanity, its pretensions, its debauchery, the lack of accountability. Most have made a compromise.

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