The Prestidigitator

I’d be lying if I told you that I haven’t thought about you since. It creeps on me during the strangest of times. I wouldn’t call it painful but it certainly is far from desirable, the reminiscing. Remember Almora? We talked about it; we spent the entire night under the influence of what may or may not have been hashish, discussing isolation and taxes. I remember because you mentioned it was too cold to be pondering meaninglessness.

You joked about how Zarathushtra may have been just a mad man suffering from some variation of cabin fever. In hindsight, I doubt it. The overman, we concluded, was a farce. We laughed at our seeming cleverness.  And I cannot help but wonder if that night had anything to do with what happened after. Did it?

No, don’t answer that.

I concede that a year is a long time. I do not wish to bring up the unpleasantness but I want to tell you that I’ll take you up on the offer. I’d rather spend a year away from this noise with you. In isolation. We can still prove that the overman is a collective.

I’ll hang up now.

Seeing that 2008 wasn’t an especially good year (what with the economic crisis adding to my perpetual existential crisis), new year celebrations were a relatively sober affair. Relatively.

If the experts are to be believed, 2009 promises to be a shittier year and that’s saying a lot. Ah well, here’s to us. May we have the tenacity to see through these trying times.

What was it that Neitzche said about things that don’t kill you?

Epiphanies are dime a dozen; even while packing stuff into boxes. Nomadic exasperation perhaps. I’ve realized I have just a single pair of jeans; that too, one that hasn’t been washed in a couple of months and has been worn more times than it was designed for. All my t-shirts have insignias of marginally obscure cartoons a la Thundercats, comic book characters and band logos. I live in my own little delusional biosphere; oxygenated by seemingly intellectual literature, obligatory rock and indie music, cinema and distorted nostalgia. I pretend to care about things I don’t and am apathetic to the things that may matter. I lift lines from films hoping people won’t notice. I have nothing original to say; And now I learn that I am a cliche. Not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Organic decaying matter.

I’ve been told I act far too old for my age as many times as I’ve been chided for not growing up. In all likelihood, I’ll be that guy who hits 40 and still thinks he’ll make it in a band. Will mediocrity be the result of my struggle for a non conformist higher ground?

And today, she calls me a hipster. There is nothing that soothes the soul like being reduced to a stereotype. Nothing.

- From Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor

If there’s one breed of vermin that deserves zero respect/sympathy/empathy, it’s the one that comments without abandon on sites like YouTube and Redditt. Going through some of the comments on YouTube (as entertaining as some of them are) is pretty much all the proof we need for dysgenics. For the average internet junkie, sitting in the confines of his/her room is all the empowerment he/she needs to air his/her retarded views onto an unsuspecting world. Most of the time they end up being just plain ridiculous and sometimes marginally offensive.

(Click to view)

There is a comment that shows up beneath an article on Wired,

I want to destroy young generation of India Delhi is the best place to do bomb blast in SouthDelhi mainly in Mohammad Pur, Nehru place buildings, Vasant vihar flats, RK Puram Lodhi Road, Sarojani Nagar are the best place to do the bomb blast and do lot of casualties. Lot of Colleges are are also the best place to do bomb blast if anyone will do bomb blast here then there are maximum casuilties done and ISI will become happy. I want to Tell that if anyone want to carry bomb laptop leather bag is very good for this.
Put the bomb in the leather bag.

Include punctuations where necessary to make sense of what you just read. How exactly do you react to something like this?

Additional Links:

• An interesting read by Andrew Chen
• What You Tube comments really mean

New Years back at home/college were usually heralded with drunken musings or solemn reminiscing. This is probably the first time I’ve been part of such a loud and bombastic New Year Celebration. Tens of thousands of convulsing human bodies reeking of alcohol counting down to another year…things don’t get any better do they?

Have a great year ahead!

Since hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I’ve decided to take the safe route and respond to Ruhi’s tag. This was harder than I thought it would be; so here are 8 random facts about The Prestidigitator.

1. He switches off his laptop once in two weeks for about an hour; he goes cold turkey if away from the internet for more than 4 hours at a stretch.

2. He has a recurring nightmare that he’s broke and homeless and is convinced that this will come to pass some day.

3. Early on, he wanted to be an astrophysicist but upon finding that he wasn’t smart enough, he set his mind on being a writer but soon found out he wasn’t good at that either. Film maker and philosopher were his other ambitions but these days, he sees himself as a  George Costanza for the 21st century.

4.  After Andrew Largeman from Garden State, he identifies most with the character Rob Gordon from High Fidelity.

5.  His Backstreet Boys phase lasted much longer than that of any other self respecting individual.

6.  He has Cheerios three times a day. With milk.

7.  If asked to his face, he will tell you he doesn’t care much for the band, Journey. But he sings (and taps his feet to) Don’t Stop Believing frequently in the shower.

8.  He is truly a child of the 80s; he will sit through any film, cartoon or song that was made in the 80s. If asked, he will tell you it’s simply because they don’t make stuff like that anymore but it’s mostly because he secretly pines for a simpler time.

There. Finito.

If social networking sites weren’t absolutely necessary to keep alive fading (and in most cases banal) relationships, I would have distanced myself from Orkut, Facebook and the likes. However, I find myself reluctantly holding onto them simply because too many people I know (and would like to keep in touch with) are on it.

A week back I stumbled across a profile that looked suspiciously similar, save the name. The Interests section in particular had the exact same books I had on my profile once. Coincidence? Kindred spirit? Pretender. He even put them in the exact same order with the exact same spelling errors. The enlightened few among you may know that the technology for this exists today. CTRL+C. CTRL+V.

They say that imitation is a form of flattery, but I disagree. Imitation is the result of the lack of drive to pursue an area that one deems interesting. Imitation arises out of laziness. Sadly, the internet is as much a bane as it is a boon. Pretenders with the attention span of an autistic chimpanzee can look up Google or Wikipedia for dumbed down data regarding slightly denser information. I’m not against democratizing information per se, but the way I see it the likely result of “wannabe intellectualism” is the progressive weakening of the human gene pool. Or at least have the decency to follow through. Call it arrogance, call it whatever you want. But the fact is that good number of people seem content going through what was once akin to understanding Sartre by reading the Cliff Notes version. I personally know a handful of people who wax and wane about existentialism and Picasso based solely on what they have read on Wikipedia.

Angry as I was at this particular pretender, I confronted him (albeit politely) about his profile. After feigning ignorance, he proceeded to pass it off as coincidence and later came out with a half assed explanation that would make Dubya’s War on Terror seem like a masterstroke of genius, reason and logic.

I shall now refrain from further pseudo intellectual masturbation.

One of the perks of having your office on the 41st floor is the view.

Not.

Melbourne like any other place has it’s fair share of weirdos; you have your garden variety mutterers, road side evangelists, doomsday mongers, middle aged Goth fans and drunken hobos. No matter how nonchalant you are to your surroundings, you still end up staring at the half naked, hairy, old man dressed in nothing but knickers singing ”We Are The World”.

As I pondered (yes, I’m known to occasionally ponder) on the kind of life he led, his social circle, the childhood he had, his dreams, ambitions, tastes and general perception of reality, a guy in a pin striped suit gives me a nudge and smirks. Holding a beer can, he exclaims, ”Crazy old f**k huh?”

I nod and smile hoping he’ll go away. He then bursts into song, clearly imitating the old man. He must have thought he was being clever, amusing even.

Leaves you wondering…sanity is just a point of view isn’t it?