A day in the Life of a pre-occupied person-II

So where were we? Talking about being on paper, inside somebody’s head, if I recall right. Reminds me of my paper boat. It is not the kind you see in that cheesy Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) ad-film. It is a nice paper boat, made of crisp white paper without any dirt at the folds. My paper boat did not have too much space. To the end of the puddle and back. The puddle is not even deep, which means I can’t sink the boat. It just struck me that all I can think of are words or phrases that convey the feeling “to want to be someone else” The grass is always greener on the other side. to be in the same boat, to wear somebody’s shoes. Why? Not wanting to be myself means wanting to be someone else. Wanting to be someone else means not wanting to be myself? Can I want to be someone else and yet be myself? Some years ago, I had read a short story on astral bodies. It would be fun to hover your dead self and watch the action. You can be yourself and yet choose not to participate in the action of your life. You can just sail away on a boat to a random land while you lie on your bed at home, chained to your bed, unwilling and incapable of getting up because you are also on that boat. You would not know if it was day or night. Even your biological clock would be confused whether it should tick or not. What fun. At heart, I am an anarchist. I do not write for anybody, just to generate more meaningless, dadaist content that will occupy more space. Immer mehr Raum. Don’t we all need a room? To rest. To sing. To dance. To read. To jump off the bed with a bedsheet. To pretend you are a meaningless hero. To put your head inside your pillow and push against the soft matting.

A day in the life of a pre-occupied person—Part 1

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Well, I am supposed to be pre-occupied. At any rate, the awareness that I am pre-occupied is sufficient to give me sleepless nights. I need peace of mind. We all do. We live in troubled times, don’t we? Do we know when the earth below our feet will cave in and leave us standing on millions of wriggly insects, fresh out of hibernation? Don’t they say one man’s bread is another man’s poison?And so I waste my time, writing silly little notes to myself, making stupid plans that I know I will do nothing about and thinking. Thought is a dangerous thing. There are no fetters and it can just lead you, tease you in to entering the forbidden even if you erect your “Trespassers will be prosecuted” boards inside your head. Who will prosecute these thoughts that trespass? Now, if you could only shove your hand inside your spindly brain and pluck the thought even as it forms—that is a suggestion. Then, one day, something happens that jolts you out of yourself. Anything. Hurricane (or is it cyclone?) Nargis or Earthquake China or anything else. They tell me about 75,000 people died last week. How would 75,000 dead people look? One next to the other. A Chinaman here and Burmese there. What a wonderful pattern it would be. Imagine for an instance that you are squashed between a dead Chinaman and a Burmese woman (dead, of course). Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? Getting under the skin of the dead, CNN would call it. You would, of course, emerge out of it, not entirely unscathed. That’s when the fun would start. The TV interviews, the page-long stories written in first person. Editors love first person. Getting into somebody’s head, wearing somebody’s hat, wearing somebody’s shoes—we would even love to shove our hands in to somebody’s spindly brain and pluck thoughts out of it. Then there would be a nice new post-modern sounding word for it.