Here I Am; This is not me -- And all that

It’s just another ‘Manic Monday’. And that was exactly what I planned to tell anyone who would care to ask me how I was today (the weekend, new week and all that) as I spent those extra minutes on my bed ‘lying there and staring at the ceiling’ reluctant to get up and go to work.

Ofcourse nobody really asked; and the ones that did, didn’t really mean to and all that. And here I am, feeling particularly bad. I have had my doses of depressing sessions, but this one is new, fresh. And I listened to this particular song just as I managed to yank myself out of bed but still had to sit supine on the computer shaking it all off and translating the feeling into mental words. It was perfect - Clapton, Stormy Monday- and the ‘babe’ part was a welcome goody good. This one has been rotting away for a couple of years on the computer without being discovered and it made me love Clapton with a rejuvenation after my recent spell of hibernation from what ever limited musical activity (my ears be subjected to), after reading somewhere with passive discomfort that Clapton became famous covering Bob Marley’s songs and all that.

And why am I feeling low, is something I don’t completely know. And im too low to actually do an assessment. Also, there’s no point. My work, —I feel a strange reluctance. This weaving of sadness, numbness, sluggishness and reluctance also has stray strands of fear. I thought id like it here, I don’t know why im looking for reasons to stay, and feel good. It seems so odd—me, a writer? What the heck, content or technical. Somebody told me im not the type who can fit into a ghostwriter’s shoes. Impulsive and compulsive forces impel me to scribble something; that can also probably be crap—but I still like it that way. But when the compulsion is from outside— im not sure. And when it’s all almost over, I wonder about ‘work’ in generality. I was riding to office and contemplated the night lights, the glitter, the big cars-and that I was underpaid- and thought everything aside, what counts at the end of the day is the moments you had some good time. And everything includes intelligence, work , achievement, Nobel prizes and all that ‘serious stuff’. I don’t know if it matters that probably good times no more come without a ‘price tag’, or that I seriously begin to doubt my capacity to hold a job (any kinds), or that the gangster didn’t even get to ‘touch’ the intelligent damsel for a full five years while the frivolous flirting ‘serial kisser’ manages to get quite a good dose of that touching just like that, but may be I should reconsider that childish plan of going to the golden land and slog for some half or full decade to come back to a no-need-to-work situation. (But this time no-need-to-work thing, instead of serving the earned-redundant-luxury will serve as a savior to a simpler just-cant-work).

Now coming back to the ‘work’ part, I consider the alternatives. Programming, say friends is more torturous. Stuff like R&D and innovation almost seem a joke considering that I screwed up graduation (and probably swerved too far for an easy comeback). Now art and philosophy is fantasy. And all that.

Now, shelve all that and I look inside if I can find anything that I ‘want to’ do. Inspite of the enormous impracticality and unfeasibility, and the fact that I almost lost more than half of the zest over the years, the only thing I can find in there is the-band-thing. This singular irony is possibly because there are hardly other things that I can ‘feel’ for.

Giving my love to a stranger. That was how I felt the first time I was going to play in my church. And the word is ‘stranger’ just out of reverence to the ‘church’ (or God aptly). I didn’t teach my self to play the guitar just so that I can play anything anywhere. Im not a guitarist. It was sheer love of the rock n toll movement; or just what it exuded or represented. Now I detach the end from the means and marry it to the church.

I don’t deny I had made a noticeable enhancement to my minuscule guitar talents due to my missionary exploits, but it’s just that it’s not me. I don’t feel anything, can’t relate to it, and probably even mar what’s actually going on there. Frightening still, is that it numbs my excitement (losing my virginity), and slowly but surely hammers into me the idea that this-is-almost-what-there-is-to-it, just a wee different the rock n roll way…ok, all that said, its enough to note that the spark isn’t yet dead.

All id need now to venture a band is a little money. Well, may be not really ‘little’. It would probably have been different if I atleast had the ‘people’; we would set out on an extemporaneous, ad hoc adventure. Ofcourse people do matter in the first case, but still. I sometimes see clearly during my church sessions how a complementing and ‘real’ band member could make a difference. And how the sky would be so open and blue after that. And wish Bryan Adams had not have to sing that jimmy quit and Jamey got married’; (And wish things had had my dude Sherry persisted, and sigh). People, you know, are the hardest thing to come by.

Owing to things completely exclusive of the above, and adding to all this, therefore my predicament, I have shed my doubts, that im a coward. :-S