A Wild Wind Blowing Down The Corner Of My Street.

So it feels like the Northeast Monsoon is beginning to set in now - light to strong (almost 15-20kn!) winds from NE - ENE, and generally wetter conditions observed. Incidence of isolated thunderstorms should start dipping as the intermonsoon period grinds itself to an end. An end to the hot, stuffy days of intense heat and equally intense thunderstorms!

Time to prepare my alternative career as a weatherman now, to prune and preen in front of a camera day in day out, oh what a dream come true that would be! In all seriousness, though, what a relief it is to be back where you get to hear honest-to-goodness thunderclaps and see lightning rend the sky. I heard one instance of thunder in 3 years in the UK, which is not something I ever thought about until I finally heard it one day and was stunned to my very core. Fine rain, light rain, cold rain, no rain thanks be to God! Talk about uninteresting weather... We literally did talk about the uninteresting weather a lot more than was healthy perhaps sigh. I miss the place.

A little strange how just as winter is probably picking up back there shades of autumn start appearing here. Kinda glad to have this seafronting accommodation I can dubiously call "home" now to enjoy this slightly more habitable weather.

And so, life. Wild winds. Picks you up and drops you just as suddenly. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.. When life's lemons give you AIDS or whatever, eh? When life's lemons do not give you aid, you just gotta suck it. Okay so maybe trying to think up variations on that adage is not nearly as fruitful (pun not even intended) a way to spend my time as it really should be.

The one unintended and much welcome effect of my long voyages to and from work has been the much needed time to read. Probably some of the only protected time I have to indulge in that most ancient art, and it is while I am in the midst of jostling with hundreds of people on the train. Life really does afford way too many distractions, especially in the way of the Internet. Why is it so hard to unglue oneself from the screen even when you know your time could probably be better spent any other way? Ah, an old lament to be sure.

This time on the MRT also lets me think, between pages, between books. How hard is it to find time to think these days? I go back home and I start watching stuff and waiting just for sleep to claim me. I go to work and wait just to go back home again. Which is kinda why I actually cherish days like this where I stay-in and have some sort of time, just as long as I forcefully unplug myself from my phone, from the internet.

Anyhow, here it is. The collected jumbles of thoughts and observations from the daily commute.

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He came to a stop, suddenly confused, suddenly hearing what the man was saying.

"First rate stuff bro! Genuine one, no bluff."

Who are we? Who lies to passersby on an everyday basis in order to... what, turn a profit?

"It's just business bro."

No, he wanted no business in this world of just business.
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He couldn't hear himself think. It was the city, all the friction of contact with all these people living in close proximity, all those silent abrasions, noisy encounters.

The seething writhing raging mass of the masses.
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It was hard to dream with all that baggage. Baggage: the homogenized past and present of our youth.

The stifled dreams, normalized hopes. How hard is it now to imagine someone dreaming of a different future? A dream of his/her own, not merely that of the petty bourgeoisie, culturally ingrained, inherited from a generation desperate to not fail and therefore afraid to dream.

It is no dream, these not-dreams. Not-poor. Not-lacking. Not-a-failure. Not-sad. Not-childless. Not-lonely.
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The sunset was particularly beautiful today, and we stopped, just like that, a five minute lull where we stopped thinking about work, the car, the mortgage.

We all know each day has the potential for boundless beauty, that hurtling at a speed of one thousand miles an hour about the axis of this earth and sixty-seven thousand miles an hour through space we are bound to meet something interesting along the way. But we choose to forget.

What's been buried even deeper is that people, too, are capable of great beauty. Yes, this seething writhing mass.

Maybe we never did want to bury all this knowledge, but we never had a choice, did we. Slowly we are smothered by this world, beautiful as it may be, by all the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of the various wrecks we've made of our lives. Until we die while still alive, screaming silently into our indifferent graves.

Until and unless we stop to see the sunset, to see each other, again.
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Never so shockingly alive as when he stepped fresh off the plane, nor so desperately alone.
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And if you, too, think these thoughts, then welcome! Welcome to being human.
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Have a good night then, y'all.

Oh love, don't let me go
Won't you take me where the street lights glow?
I can hear rain coming like a serenade of sound
Now my feet won't touch the ground

To Guide Me Home.

When you get what you want but not what you need; stuck in reverse.

How frustrating it is. To know what I want and what I need and that no, they are not the same no matter how much I may wish otherwise. Ignite my bones indeed! It's strange to feel so helpless, futile, and strangely swept along... I've kinda grown to almost relish it, even. The predicaments you almost wish you never get out of. Ah, well - we'll see things out, somehow.

Quite apart from all that, life recently has been serving up much of the same dishes - work, predominantly and unfortunately (although fortune probably hasn't got all that much to do with anything) and friends, thankfully! Healthy doses of squash involved too, and quite a lot more beer drinking than I'd have expected of myself..

Good thing that professionally, at least, things have been going rather well I guess. Feel like I am currently at or almost at where I have to be right now - at least I'm pulling my weight. Even as I am typing here at 12.30am while my friends are working into the night haha.

I've had this odd sense of.. displacement ever since returning back home. What did I return to, after all? A career, family, friends, the future? That's what I'd begun to think in my final year - finally I'm going back home and resuming life once again! And so here I am. And? Sometimes it feels as if I'm running as best I can, but without realizing it I have led myself onto a treadmill, into a cage on a mousewheel. I'm not sure I fit in anywhere, anymore. Permanently transient. It's almost like something that's been cut out and stitched back - it's never going to be the way it was again. And perhaps that's the way it has to be. I guess I am figuring out what exactly it is I should be doing, what I want to do, all that jazz, except I feel waaaaay too fatigued to do it. Like all I do is get by, get by, get by. 3 short-long months and what have I to say of myself?

Okay dokes ta-ta all, then.