The piece below is by a friend. I think its brilliant. The writer doesnt agree. We'd like to know whos right and who is not. Help! :) The clouds spread like white berries on a pudding, covering the sky in their pure candy cotton, slowly the icing begins to drip thickly upon the heads of scurrying urban pedestrians- It rains. “Society, the teddy bear the masses cuddled up to sprung to life and devoured its unsuspecting victims one at a time. Paranoia spread like an epidemic through crumbling streets of the slums to marbled floors of the new age palaces. Only the recluses that hid in cynical chambers of their minds remained unaffected. They had long lost faith in the cohesive property people believed society possessed and merely chuckled as the human mice ran in helter skelter. For them, the cynics, society stood on what dreams were made up of… stardust… It was their turn to laugh and laugh they did. The information age- as they called it- was the age of opening up scalps of mere nestlings and pouring down as much information as possible in the hope of creating some sort of super human race. But instead they created a horde of intellectual Frankensteins. The arms race, the space race, the god damned economic race, everyone was racing towards something, something that they themselves didn’t understand. It was a time of intense weirdness. Life’s worth was weighed on a scale against a copper. Art was the performance of emptying the head on sidewalks to earn a dime. Life was the art of breeding, accumulating and then dying.‿ Wrote Rohan, a youth of twenty four going on seventy four as he preferred to be thought of… The remains of Rohan’s amateur notes on attempting to describe the 21st. century and his life are the only surviving evidences of what it must have been like before the Avian Flu pandemic. In reading the latter, I found that I agreed with most of what he has to say; many do and many would. But I’d like the reader to be conscious that exaggerations and biases are indeed present in the text and advise him/her to keep an open mind, considering the times and conditions under which the following pages were written. Keeping things in context, you can only limit yourself to the reality of his tale. This tale… “Nature glowed in all her brilliance under the sun that illuminated the paths treaded by the Buddhas and the Christs of the past. Yet, the darkness hovering over every creature’s head spoke of impending doom. Like mechanical insects, human beings began swarming into concrete jungles of the modern city. Children burdened with bulging backpacks hurried into their respective ‘grocery store’ schools to purchase a package called ‘education’. Then there were others, burdened with a sack full of garbage, inhaling glue, restraining themselves from smashing up everything in sight. There were self proclaimed artists and intellectuals sipping whiskey in dimly lit bars, asserting their views upon each other in loud voices that transcended the streets and ended up in political arenas. And then there were those like myself, who wanted to break away from such social obligations that molded anyone involved into passive ‘sheep’. Sheep were one aspect and politics the other. Politics was intriguing. Ancient men who should be living in comfortable retirement homes, fought for power promising to bring about changes. The only changes were in names and ideologies though. They brought in various makes of fancy empty platter to serve the hungry, when all they needed was food. Politics was indeed very intriguing. It was in such times that I lived and observed, doubtful of where and what I would be able to dedicate my limited knowledge and skill to, in what seemed like a bastard whirlpool of insanity. Clenching the likes of Blake, Huxley, Morrison and Cobain close to my chest, I turned to literature. Like a stray dog I was kicked out of the literary world, for the way I perceived literature was different. That’s when I began to write for the sake of writing what I felt rather than for communicating to the masses. It was a hell lot easier; no more complaints, no more corrections on how things should be. I could express myself for myself, and a few others who didn’t mind reading what I had to say. As a child I pondered the night sky seeking out constellations. It wasn’t until a few months back that I started seeing patterns everywhere… the sky, the hills, the faces… everywhere. I starved myself for about a month, walked barefoot in leech infested swamps, slept on the damp grass and stared into the skies. The hills, green with patterns of a thousand Buddhas meditating, a Jew being hit by a Nazi soldier with the butt of a rifle, found more of my interest than the mechanical life I had escaped from for a while. I almost went completely crazy (I think I already am a little bit at least) the day I came back into ‘civilization’. It was complete chaos. Horns, people screaming, sirens…oh and the sights… my green meditating Buddhas were replaced by heaps of trash, vehicles… I had even forgotten they existed, of all shapes and sizes… men, women and children adorned in weird fiber with weird expressions on their faces… I meekly walked back home and stared at a few pictures. I then went up to the roof and I looked at my beloved hills… I was relieved when I could vaguely but still make out a few patterns and meditating Buddhas. You know how a lot of people say that humans and chimps are closely related? Well I think I’m more related to trees… absurd as it may sound, it’s true… I feel like I’m made up of wood. Mummies remind me of wood too… they don’t remind me of chimps or even of human beings… they just remind me of wood. I really don’t know why I feel this way… but I do… “So what to do, in Kathmandu?‿, I had a friend who used to say that a lot. Brings back memories… Talking about memories… I remember a time when I must have been around 2 years old or something. I had locked myself into a room and was standing on a chair trying to turn on the radio which was on a pretty high shelf. I guess I’d have stayed in there, grew roots and have become a tree by now if my grandparents hadn’t found out and sent some guy in through the window to rescue me. After confirming myself as a product of the woods, the four corners of a room ceased to offer me the solace of being at home. In the woods, my responsibilities were limited to looking after myself and providing for myself what nature had in store. Home was different. In order to be accepted into the family I needed to change, to defer… to become flesh and bone again. The love I felt for my immediate family was so much that I pretended to be flesh and bone, did what was expected of me but I was very much still wood on the inside. We all try to be someone who we’re really not at some point in time or the other. And we must be familiar with depression that follows when we’re not able to live up to our pretentious nature. The depression was clearly there. What made things worse was when I forgot my role as a person and became wood again. Such instances created extremely difficult upheavals in regular family processes that resulted in the depression within me spreading outwards. It was evident that my presence not only affected me for the worse but as well as my family. I needed out… to leave… and that’s exactly what I did one fine afternoon with a bag full of clothes and not a single penny in my pockets. I wondered down streets I knew since childhood but they now seemed in this peculiar light of newly found independence, unfamiliar. I found shelter under some tree from the glaring sun where I closed my eyes for a while and rattled my brains for a solution. Going back home was out of the question. Not for a few weeks at least… the only other thing I could think of was calling on some friends who had like myself, become wood to some extent or I thought they had anyway. We had become a tribe of three… a tribe of the trees and we were to make this crazy journey on our own. Amongst the three of us we had barely 500 rupees, a sum we usually would spend in an hour drinking some chilled beer. But money never is an obstacle to an explorer. The harder it is the better… wasn’t that the very reason we set out of our comfortable homes for? We found ourselves roaming around for a couple of hours and came to the conclusion that our daring journey would have to be postponed to a time more favorable. Defeated we dragged our tired feet homewards. I made some French toast and ate like a beast. It’s funny to think how, money, this awful vice, had such control over our lives. It was impossible to get anything done without it. Yeah! Sure the best things in life are for free… but hell… it’ll end up as debt on someone’s list one way or the other! My wooden body needed nourishment and unfortunately wasn’t able to photosynthesize. Utterly tragic! Tales of people wondering off into the forests, free from the tentacles of modernization and all its evils were everywhere. Why weren’t we then able to succeed in our quest? Did we lack the drive? Or, were we just born too late? The sixties sounded so colorful, the flower children, the love… but then that was a story of the west. The frustrated youth of the west had turned east in search of meaning… while their world was neck deep in conflict and war. So was ours… but we were the east… so where were we to flee to in search of meaning, the west? Well, that was what a lot people had been doing and I started to think that it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. They eye of the storm would definitely be calmer. What were political boundaries anyway? It seemed foolish for us, the children of the Universe to limit ourselves to set boundaries and ideologies. Now I wanted to travel. To conquer all the continents, learn and understand… but if we needed money just to live in the forest… how much of it would we need to travel the world? Man…. Everything was so complicated. Maybe if we never got to where we were… I mean you know this world dominated by fast cars, MP3 players and all that… we’d be better off. We should’ve stuck to agriculture and hunting. I envy those sailors who set sail to discover the world for the first time. How exhilarating it must have been for them! f@&* the information age for feeding us everything leaving almost nothing at for us to discover on our own. F@*& money for making life so complicated for those who don’t have it! I could boost of many friends but only of a few true ones. I guess it’s the same for most people. The college I attended had the weirdest bunch of people I had ever come across. Most of them seemed to enjoy playing mind games. The girls… they were for sure the weirdest… not all of them though… but this particular group… they kind of made me feel like jumping up and ripping their necks open for no particular reason and at the same time, they scared me. Though I was mostly smiles and acting stupid around them… I observed them closely and their behavior was different from any person or tree I knew. Deep down inside I thought they were some sort of monsters unleashed upon the world to scare the crap out of unsuspecting victims like me. I’ve attended a lot of institutions and I’ve met a variety of people, men and women… but none that radiated so much malice. There was a time I thought there was something wrong with me and I tried to change in order to be accepted by this malicious flock. Now however, I am dead sure that I couldn’t be whatever they want me to be like nor would I want to be accepted by them at all. I kept a safe distance… mostly smiles and making a fool out of myself… yet alert! Their discussions in public revolved around shoes, make-up, dresses and normal girlie things. However, their eyes… their eyes had that insane twinkle in them… as if saying ‘just you wait… I’m gonna have you for breakfast tomorrow’. But then there were these other girls you could go and talk about life and stuff like that, too. They for some reason usually kept quiet when these monstrous females were screaming (they for some reason communicated by screaming) at each other. I had developed a theory about the screaming part though. I believed they screamed in order to direct attention towards themselves. It’s a pretty simple theory but I can think of no other reason for their behavior and their screaming. Anyhow, I had become pretty accustomed to these, in simple terms, ‘bitches’ to be completely unaffected by them. My smiley and crazy act had an awkward affect on them which I hadn’t bargained for. Their superiority complex had become the size of a blimp… and to think of them playing mind games. HA! So the moral of this story? Never play mind games! It comes back to you ten folds and screws you up so hard that…. that … wait I don’t want to say that… that you can never get out of that innocent game you started to confuse little boys. Life without any difficulties would I believe be most dull. I’d curse heaven’s doors if they were to lock me within and would look for a wall to jump over immediately. If all conflicts were resolved, if everyone was satisfied and the world became a bowl of utopian soup, we’d become soggy pieces of toast; tasteless and ruined. The conflicts and unsatisfied longings give us reason to live, to act, to achieve… minus them and all that’d remain is boredom. Already we are running out of new things to explore, at the same rate we’re exhausting our fossil fuels. What meaning would love retain if it were so easily accomplished? A visit to the nearest whorehouse would be sufficient. It’s interesting to note how people complain about the very things that give meaning to their lives. Pain confirms existence… arise… go and drain that cheap liquor… go smash your head on the concrete and let warm female companions lick your hard earned wounds. My head hurts, my whole body hurts… my heart… hurts… it aches like a pregnant pimple… Life doesn’t get any realer… this is real… yet it is just a dream… a real dream… that’s what life is… but like the wise man once said “no one here gets out alive‿. Amidst all this pain… this extremely rare form of pain that stretches from my beat body to my immortal soul… I feel alive… because I feel… it’s a bloody miracle!!! The hangover from smashing up someone’s face, especially if it’s a person you know, is painfully pleasant. You just let go… all that frustration… all that anger… stored up for so long… just bring it down on a familiar face that triggers the explosion. Let the blood drip… paint the city red… with blood… print t shirts in the pigment of divinity… blood… let it spill… until you have had enough of it and calm rightfully reigns over the turbulent waters of your life again… then with the infinite as a witness… swear to never spill blood again… let your pagan soul reach out to the distant stars that continuously wink at your insane pursuits that have driven you to the depths of hell, the country club and your momma’s house for pardon. Smash all idols right now… and embrace the stranger beside you who broods in painful solitude of being born into a world of many with not enough heart and the substance it meticulously pumps… blood… Philosophies remain sterile until impregnated by the thoughts of the other half… the cosmic union works in ways that are mysterious to humans… who have capitalized on self indulgent institutions… branding relationships in the manner of cattle… swiftly ushered into specific categories that bear on the spectator and indulger a sense of morality and value. Damn them! We were wed in the stars… each one of us… the souls that make time bend in their favor are not to be taken lightly in festive celebrations born from the ignorance of one’s true identity. And what happens if they are taken lightly? Well, why don’t you just look around?