Days are spent with the wheezy cough and a wait for that funny jolt I get before i start panting for a lack of breath.It isn't much worth living. Only the engaging company of a very engaging paperback named Kafka on the shore keeps me alive. For the time being. Or else. Who knows?

Fuck, man.

Desperately in need of a blank page. One i can write on. Write anything other than crooked line integrals and draw figures as far removed from the roundness of say, an equipotential surface. I think i might be driven soon to insanity, I keep dreaming of being swallowed by a wormhole. Or falling through a vacuum. This is all so surreal, I might just be a very depressed, a very hungry electron for all I know.

A grey realization

And well, tonight, its raining sultry in Kolkata, i feel like logging into youtube and checking out the weather in Buenos Aires, find out if the sky over the country, so far removed from our own, the one for which I seem to be burning in dismay, is anywhere as sad as the sky over this city this night.

I will admit unabashedly that the dream was shameless. It is only after its over that you realize that. For even now, there is no shame, only a strange realization, as grey as the sky.

As Lionel Messi glides past a row of Nigerian defenders, with the entire stadium around him holding their breath in weighted anticipation, you get the feeling that even the wind dies down and awaits the moment when he's gonna finally do the thing. The thing you know, that which he threatened many a time yesterday, but couldn't quite grab. What thing is it? You'll know when you see it. For now, we await.

Tonight.

The sun won't be up for several hours now, but i'm dying to look at it. That's not the best note to start a birthday, to want to die for something. But such is the strange paradox of dreaming at night with your eyes open.

Tonight will never be the same again, for once in this streak of living, the past and the future are blown away by the sheer intensity of the present.

The sun, for all its handsomeness of feature, for the brazen glory with which it shines will still not make my day.

The night will. The night will make my day.

Of escapes and pearls.

These are dull days, no sun to look up at, no rain to ponder on, no chill so that you might allow yourself to be hugged by yourslef tightly, let that strange feeling of warmth calm you down. There's a lot to what i'm studying, there's a lot if you think of it that way. But then again, there really is nothing in it. I can loose myself in the dynamics of the natural phenomena that i'm studying, they call it a science, but it really is just another escape. It's a fantasy, the whole of it, a beautiful make believe world which people have carefully built up over the years. We all live in that fantasy.

It all really is an escape for me. I like escaping, that's the cold truth. And i like escaping from that cold truth.

About thirty six-hours ago, i watched 'Double Indemnity'. I took pleasure in watching it, an immensely crooked guilty pleasure. People have done the same over the years. I was chilled by Barbara Stanwyck's first appearance, she was loosely covered in a bath-robe, looking down at the man downstairs the same way a teacher looks at a student when they pose an unexpected question. Something would shine in her eyes throughout the movie, and yet we shall forever be perplexed by what those eyes really held in them.

That was another glorious escape for me.

I've been hearing stories lately. There was one about a guy who walked into a resturant by the Maine and treated himself to a sumptous feast. It turns out that he didn't have a penny on him at all. The resturant manager was swelling in fury, threatning court, when the man blurted out those silly words which won the day. He had been having oysters for lunch. Now, the thing is, by the side of the Maine, they simply grab the oysters alive in their fishing nets. Back home, we've all seen the dynamics of animal slaughter. By the side of the Maine, they're techniques for such murder are infinitely cooler. They just spike the oysters with fresh lemon, and all life is sucked out in an instant, a second and a few drops of lemon juice and you're gone.

But i'm digressing. This man, he had these oysters for lunch. And when the manager asks him for an explanation, he retorts with a smile and says, 'I had so many oysters, i'd simply hoped that i'd find a pearl in one of them. I'd hoped to have payed my bills with that one pearl.'

We shall all search for that pearl. I'm sure we will.