katndawg

Bump over lil brown hardened humps to pick a spot that’s coolest so that by the end of the day my seat aint got a burnt hole darker than the black smelly rexin. That’s the first. Then fit face into a mirror that says ‘things are closer than they appear’…tell-tale signs of black heads, pollution clogged spores, and blossoming pimples and flaky lil specks of hair on upper lip…a rampage looms and the sun is an illuminator like no other. Flattening loose anti-gravity strands clipetty-clop over pebbles. The glass door recently turned hi-fi wont budge unless a card is flashed to announce that you have arrived. Darn thing needs to be treated like one of those annoying government employees who ponder over a small piece of paper pissing off time and the person waiting for a purple seal…patiently wait till it reads the card, burps and figures it’s you! That’s what comes of wanting to give an identity to inorganic stuff… bulldozes you into becoming barcodes.

An AC that’s as inanimate as inanimate can get. This is a shell. A real shell. The ones on the beach are animate with imagination in its colourful swirls, with grains of sands sticking adamantly in unreachable smooth spots. Stale sweat 24 hours old now turned sour not with yeast but microbes that send you fleeing and gasping for the air you were breathing just outside the door, fumed or otherwise. A vase with plastic flowers squishes the vibrancy the bright red wall attempts at infusing with its withered and yet undead look. Tis actually a positive thought, you know perseverance and all that jazz but the damn thing looks like it’s hooked to drudgery shots. At any moment you expect the damn flowers to throw up some of that vile colour dabbed on its petals, turn utterly pale and absorb the mashed exhalations of those who waited and sweated on three straight-backed leather chairs and go back to being its vile self.

Stride up over uneven stairs with an imitation wooden flooring sheet attempting to hide the not so rectangular slabs with its ridged edges. Push the glass door and get hit by a draft of hot tortoise kosu vathi…last nights wrestling with sleep evident till you cross the threshold into the studio.

Here, you smell the day, with the soon to begin fight of opening pores, of absorbing the sniffing AC’s cold frail strands and eliminating competition by turning others into poreless wonders through sheer will…willful dreaming. Windogurl! Magnetically charged air drafts, however minute, due to friction are magnetized and directed towards me with magnetic-tipped fingernails. She my doppelganger ;-) Janus! My Siameese twin, emitting farting noises every time she zaps a cool straying waft. There are various tones though…fly swatter, static (the kind you get when you trail a finger 0.5cm away from a comp screen) Long live DC comics! And I know no physics. Tiring of super-heroine with no real palpable powers, I eye the studio manager with envy sitting bang under the AC and the 2 fans in my heat smothered retinas look like giant windmills promising to blow away heat and its allies from my dictionary.

Come lunchtime and a shot of lead. The thought of food in a furnace with two funs churning it into froth till you’re this gigantic cotton candy of wispy heat waves wants me to turn into this mutt bounding off towards a muck filled puddle. Cud the food. Swallowing hurts.

Creativity cozies and snoozes the evening away, its absence jump starting every time the head lolls to the left and I travel through a black hole involuntarily. The vortex closes in and then the eyes smash open, the lids hitting the forehead in a look of blank emergency.

The pen feels alien in my hand. The letters come out in hexagons and the lines that make it aren’t in fact lines but squiggles like slimy worms. In disgust, creativity leaves. Then, a period of wooing. Enticing it with caramelly coffee works. Coaxed out, like an oozing mollusk, I scribble away before it slips in and gets washed away with the next tide of distraction, lethargy, or just for no weird ass reason. The warm-up pickles the mollusk! I am liking it now. I am liking my ideas.

Smugness the bitch saunters in and plonks herself on my gray beanbag. Then a lil fencing and a reworking session, sewing the miniscule strands.

Then it’s a war with the real world. If I am a pain to myself the outside is a freaking brick jammed down my larynx. A bit of herding, a bit of bickering, palpitating, materializing…the rack…stretched. Blistering blue barnacles! My bunch of appendicitis'...aches that turn up uncalled for, uninvited...part of me neverthless...the masochist has a ball.

Feeba! Feeba! Femur! Tumour!

Baah! Most of the times (which isn't much really) with men it seems like a half-hearted sea-saw ride. Bounce-dip-dunk your toes-up you go. Never, feet flat platypus like-knees apart for a squat pee-turgid calfs-and whee! and vice versa. And MF is the bony lass squiggling in palm-space seat, grunting down and up, hoping to make up for the happily smirking one on the opposite with legs dangling as though boneless. Ok so MF is an indecisive hotstepper too. But then there's this weirdass oracle nestling in my sinus wheezing thick yellowed affection, the colour of colostrum, point being matured and unconditional affection. Because somewhere Oracle deems that nothing lasts. The Oracle needs to put foot in mouth! If nothing, the nothing is at least filled with a peaceful, cordial relationship springing from non-existence. So arcanus in the tradition of remaining arcane figures that the only thing she will ever be is a comfort woman...great company. But thats all. You know...the Geisha types, Devadasi type...around but nothing defined. Arcane was comfort woman for 4 years (Arcane blames the sunflower kid who believes that it's ok to talk about love for another when you're going out with someone cause what the heck it's love after all). And then Arcane is comfort woman for 3 years ('cane blames satyavati for sticking to the deal and expecting nothing above the deal and calls it a deal eventhough it's much more in an attempt to depersonalize it. Pthrrrr!) Arcane lives. Inspite of all this Mata Hari texture to it without the really deadly elements of course, she's called Specks! True, her real name is the kind which needs a tongue with a likeness to MTC busses where every roll and judder is evident, but Arcatella?! How about Tarantula? That's not so bad. Dumb optimist.