Dear friend(s),
I come to this writing this tiny letter out of sheer confusion and through a tiny bit of procrastination. Unlike a lot of successful tiny letter writers, I do not have a specific day of the week/month on which I send this out. And it's not a newsletter, so frankly I don't even why some of you even read it. Plus, a lot of it is largely unsolicited. Understanding all these sentiments I removed a few of my subscribers. Yep, I can do that.
Anyway, so life's still been pretty all over the place, scrambled between work hours through which I wakefully dose and non-work hours through which I drink and open-eyedly snooze. Mostly inside my head it has been a non-acoustic place. There are no echoes, only a relentless torpedoing of thoughts and words. Which I sit on and barely ever bother to make notes of.
I understand now, after 2.5 years of using this space, that i might be using it the wrong way. And I don't plan on changing it anytime soon. Trends suggest substack and the likes are the new burgeoning places to be at, but my comfort with this format is pretty unprecedented. I'm quite happy to find it so companionate.
Apart from being on heavy UTI medications that made me quite woolly-headed for a good ten days, I did not really get anywhere. There are two drafts waiting for me to look at them. One is not even a draft. For the ten days I was mostly enveloped and enshrouded in a daze of remembrances. The Sasural Genda Phool viral dance video got me looking at it for hours. I loved it so much, I mentally wrote a couple (or more) essays on it.
But I didn't allow these vignettes to play with me for long. I took my their horns and chased the bulls down the damn memory lane. There was a continuum, a constant pervading sense of be-numb-ment, but I was happy to be able to "CLOSE THE LOOP ON IT". See? Am learning new things at my (not so) new job!
As we trundle through these shapeshifting, myriad days of ample nothingness, I feel that there is a growing climate of diminishing patience and increasing micro aggressions. Anyone who reads my writing knows that I don't engage with THE NEWS. So the micro aggressions I talk about are the ones of a hyper personal nature. Losing one's appetite, a growing sense of disenchantment with world at large, a triteness to the otherwise wondrous mundane, a stiffness in the dance of the domestic — these and such other tiny, trifle little nuisances that are constantly pecking at our brains are big demons at hand.
Preoccupied by the idea of the "new", undiscovered, unseen, I love to chase the oddities in daily life. But the mood to it all came to a pause. Perhaps it was the buzz kill caused because of the medicines. I rewatched old shows, movies and heard a lot of familiar music to reacquaint myself to the existing rhythms of life. To create a narrative to my days, I tried a negging bit of disruption. I tried to join several streams of my life — work, writing, note-making, observing through seeing, memorising through writing, cooking, cleaning the bathroom, staying dry during periods, and the likes — by writing.
I tried to listen in to these mundanities and how they yelped and screeched at the sigh of every minor rustle. This perpetuated rumble in this domestic/growing jungle showed a reluctance, and a slight wariness to change. But then I embraced it with open arms. The new schedules, the days of no writing, no reading, no watching, the amoeba shaped sleeping hours, the no eating, and binge drinking.
These sonic days and octane nights have found nothing new for me, and I perhaps am just where I had started, but there is some level of smugness in having tried my hands at something new. As my body recovered from the shock of illness, I realised that days and lives and Mondays and Wednesdays are intrinsically extremely ill-behaved. So to try to tame them is to torture oneself. Dwelling then in the musical mayhem of this endless blaze of a hot pandemic became my next obsession.
Anyway, everything else (this writing included) is of course but a charade. Who knows what time I will wake up tomorrow!
Tra-lala-lala!
a:*
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