What is it like to be when you're alone? When you're not really alone. When drinking is just a sport with the guys. A coffee keeps your mind torched through the entire night. You see people you don't recognise. And for once you've begun to overlook their pecularities. You see them in crowded places and you see them in cafes. The young and the old. In contempt of each other. You are a stranger, or an insider and you you wonder how things look from the fish bowl. You listen to music to give some theatrical influence to life. You hear about blasts and encounters yet you feel distanced. You're emotionally recharged and ideologically crippled. You feel no one's around because you aren't really there yourself. You've stopped writing notes and messages you aren't going to send. Your skills and arithmetic have loosened over the years. You carry pouches of under-or-overslept misery under your eyes. You like to walk in autumn. There is no character in piss stains of the walls. The fruitsellers are tired and the paanshops are worried about banning smoking. There is arthiritis and cancer just like in life; just like in dreams. You feel like you can write. Your imagination is a smoky voice of a writer which talks to you. Tells you stories, gives you imagery. The iPod just gives you music. The internet, history and lies.

Oh lord. I miss writing. It's been more than weeks since I've opened the laptop and started pushing buttons. I had good news earlier this week. One of my short stories is being published by Penguin. It's going for their annual collection of short fiction and non-fiction stories for new Indian writers, First Proof 4. Some of the few Indian writers I admire have written for it. I even met an editor later and on -- she said we should soon start talking a book out of me. It felt good. I just hope it kicks in some inspiration to start really writing. This writer's rock I'm sitting under and this quarter life crisis I'm undergoing -- I need to get over it.
I know my writing is actually quite different from here. But I quite like writing the drivel here. It's my black page space in this big, bad world of web mess. But more than that, not that I know how many of you come here and read, I like to keep the engine of this boat running.
Speaking of which, I need a muse. Maybe it's about being alone. It could be overrated this alone-ness. There's Facebook and a strange impulse to catch up with the list of numbers on my cell phone. But still, I need to find me one.
Sure I think we're living in some strange times.

Generally I don't like Mondays. More importantly, I don't think Mondays really like me. But today seems ok. I suppose if you work on Sundays, Mondays don't have a terrible way to deal with you.

When your skin is burning. Your mind is a temple of fire. You lie for hours on sweat stained sheets. You're caught in a crossfire of fever. Your dreams are nothing but of an athlete running on a track. Your lips are broken and your tongue is bitter. You want death, but you feel something else. And only thoughts haunt. I've forgotten how you look. Your name is whispered by ghosts in my sleep. There is darkness behind the lampshade. Beyond that I feel weak. I am lost. I walk from one room to another with flowers looking for the perfect funeral. In front of mirrors I softly cry.

There are jokers in the hallway. The poets are drinking wine. The funeral is ready but the princess is laughing. The army has been called. The staircase is dripping blood. The violinist is a dreamer. The room has got new curtains. A list of hobos are singing and smoking dream pipes. The writer is weak and lonely. They are selling candy in the store. The napkins are red with lipsticks. The washbasin with semen. A wizard's lost his tongue. A strange fragnance fills the room. The choir group is getting to leave. The princess reappears again, but then slips back in the shadow. The camera is finding a frame. A dream is being trapped in a jar by the window. Snow white is feeling blue. The priest has a story to tell. In the woods someone's screaming. The dogs and the hyenas are around. There are headaches and there are storms. There are letters and there are answers. There are burning witches. There are dragons and caterpillars. There are mushrooms where I sit. There are roses where you lie. There's death and there's a silk pillow. There are words and words. There's melancholoy. But there is happiness. The princess smiles. The widowers hide. There's beauty in autumn. There are bending trees and swollen lies. Deciet. Gamble. Prose. Everything is blue, gray and lonely. Yet you smile. You don't want to paint a picture. A picture of Dorian Gray only this time you start to age. What trap in crap. The whistle blows. The train leaves at 9. Why don't we see dead birds drop from the sky. Why do we sit here.

And things are different? Perhaps. Perhaps they are. I don't know what sense you can draw from it. But they are different. Oh! I now have the entire Firefly collection. I've written my draft of essays. I met another old classmate; strange, but some women can look fine.
I trip on Oasis, goldfish and the little pleasure one obtains from watching people do silly in dark dingy places called nightclubs.
I also bumped into three school pricks of mine. Who at the fine age of 23 looked pretty messed up. I wasn't happy to see how they were. But I did realise that things come around. In the sense that when I was in my Woody Allen looking days in class 7, I remember being pushed and shoved around by a prick who didn't take things too politely when people asked them how they were.
The same lot not seemed as though the boats been upturned. Cheers to you mofos!
It's a Sunday. I'm at work. But it's ok. Things will change. Then I will look for a change again.
Okay, be cool!

Life lately has been slightly confusing but better. It was pretty low last month. But now at least the thoughts are settling in like cobwebs. I didn't really fuck up I suppose with what I did. I could've bottled up things -- and I thought leaving would've been easier -- but things slowly turned. I suppose turned for the ok.
The weather in the city has been intolerable. I have a cold to make matters more unpleasant. One of my closest school friend is in town, he's just got through Oxford. I have started to write my essays and hopefully in some months I'll catapult from this desolated city of love and squalor.
And in these strange times, I'm losing and gaining friends. The trouble is one gets so emotionally bankrupt and smitten with smite, that you lose people as you make your entrants into the strangest parts of paradise -- and you get old.
Work sometimes gets fascinatingly slow like the net here. The people are all right. I have neither bad things or particularly good things either to say. Besides, I now realise how impersonal print actually gets to tv.
Jo has become my a pretty close friend. In the sense that I hang out with him all the time -- he's been a bit frustrated with the trade. Sometimes Russled catches up -- but mostly it's just Jo. We've watched all the Californication. The second season should be out soon. And he got me some South Park.
I miss the old lot. Sometimes they make random scenes and I get to catch up. They all look happy but are actually all underslept and basically kind. I suppose the hours kill them a lot. Here I shall stop.
Otherwise, my place is well. Rolling and Tumbling end up trashing the fish bowl. But I seem to be getting good at cleaning them up. I feel sort of relieved that they've lived on. I mean I thought gold fish would just die on me. But it's been more than two months and I feel sort of glad.
Headaches and wedding cakes -- they sort of rhyme. This post was to basically catch up. So that you lot, whoever you are, known and unknown, know the faintest picture.

For weeks I have travelled from one room to another. I have nothing but memories, dreams and cut glass in my hands. I have the taste of fear in my mouth. I have one dark thought that hangs above me which thunders when it rains. Everything is in ruins. The morning has been covered by a blanket. The rivers are angry and the ditches are dry. We are in September now, weren't we here before? The Writer's Anonymous is in session -- all quiet and rise.
How exclusively lost are we.