Saturday, September 27, 2014

Look up and carry on.

Inspired by: 'Desiderata' by Max Ermann, 'If' by Rudyard Kipling and 'Advice, like youth, mostly just wasted on the youth' by Mary Schmich and adapted by Buz Lurhmann

Keep calm, even as the world around you speeds on with intent. Many do not know what they are doing or where they are in a hurry to. Find a pace that works for you and perfect it

Do not follow the crowd for following sake, nor be a rebel without a cause; you have too much potential to waste in either case; Be like the immovable rock and let society’s whims wash over you to show you for what you truly are.

Let not the principles of others become your mantra without assessing them for yourself no matter how noble they appear to be

Focus on finding your purpose and do not be scared of soul-searching; as brutal as it may be, it is the necessary reality check for finding complete personal satisfaction

Do not tie your hopes and dreams to an occupation; you are an asset to the world, not bound by a title and there are always countless things you can and should do in this life
It is premature to assume you know what you want to do with your life at this age; few people under 40 know this, even fewer still under 25

Never conclude on who you are; you will spend the rest of your life discovering this. So will everyone else. And know that everyone is insecure about something.
Be on good terms with as many people as is possible, but in your heart at least, learn to separate friend from acquaintance, no matter how amicable the relationship – There are only so many true friends a person will make in their life time

But let this not blind you to the infinite circumstances in which friends can be made; true friends come in all shapes and sizes, and not all have the coolest packaging

Be firm but flexible in your beliefs and do what you say and know that it is a lot easier to lie to yourself than to others, and easier to believe your own lies than it is for someone else.

Be sensitive to your senses; they are as important as your mind in perceiving the things of the world; and if it truly exists, heaven also.

Learn to love, but be honest about how many you can love lest you start lying to yourself.

Strike a balance between work and play and keep each day strategically similar, but tactically different from the previous – But be ready to change at a moment’s notice; life is full of eventualities

Come to terms with the fact that people are and always will be hopelessly self-serving, but be aware and embrace the glimmer of hope that is found in the rare exceptions. They exist like stars in an infinite darkness, brightening the void just enough for you to see your own way.

Even if all around you are losing their heads, keep yours – And never start a righteous endeavor with an unethical beginning – The final outcome will lack the true essence it should have possessed.

Find something that you are willing to give all for; even die for, and hone that to keep you honorable. It is infinitely easier to be self-serving like most people, but the reward is infinitely less satisfying.

Whatever the world brings your way, know that it is your inner character and not external circumstance that determines who you are.

Strive to find the best and most contented you that you can be

On the brink

How much time being coiled and spinging back will it take you until you can no longer spring from the last coil?
Or will you rather you never have to test your spring at all?
Do you even care about being able to spring back?

How many disappointments can you abide until you can no longer abide being impressed?

Is it better to be jaded and survive or naive and blissful?
Is it better not to care about anything, or care about everything....

Which would you rather be:
Indifferent or inspired?

Do you believe in accepting the world and being cold? Or being on fire; searching for somewhere you can be happy, and hoping you find it before you burn out

Do we even have a choice? Or is one side right and the other totally unaware about how doomed they all are?

And does this world, or places in it, even merit our feeling.

Or maybe, we are just passing through - Never mind we might not be going anywhere.

The whisper in the wind

The physical world is a lonely park, frozen cold by its own cynicism; covered completely in white snow and ice - a sight that is both hauntingly beautiful and depressingly lonely.

A group of singers, each holding their instrument, a harmonica, an accordion, a flute, stand frozen in place, eyes closed as if meditating, caught in some heart-felt tune.

An old lady sits at the corner of a park bench, her collar pulled up and her gloved hands wrapped around her person as if only asleep. A leash barely visible in one arm extends to a small dog seated obediently, looking up at its master. It too frozen in place.


A coachman sits in his seat caught in a middle of a yawn; eyes closed, mouth shaped in a O, his coach parked on the small road to the left, his 2 horses with their blinders; they appear blank, without feeling - the obedient servants to the old coachman.Snow matters his scraggy beard and heavy coat, even the wisp of grey in his farrowed brow matches his speckled garment.

The girl and her mother can be seen some way - the latter leads with the former, a child no more than 6 stopped in a skip, her buckled shoe and coat bright red, the only sign of colour in an otherwise perfectly white world - but she too is as still as the rest - and why not, for she is as dead everyone here.

Nothing stirs, not a sound can be heard in this winter wonderland.

Nothing lives.

The soul world is in the wind, a biting cold gust blowing through, animating the trees, the shifting snow, even the brief flutter of fibres in coats, from the corner of your eye would appear as life; and the whisting wind playing tricks with your mind. If you wandered that park long enough, you would hear the voice of the mother firmly hurrying the child along, a giggle, a single note from the harmonica, the accordion or the flute... The spirit world, a whisper in the wind, an illusion of life - a sense of something more.

But the truth, the beauty is in the stone cold winter wonderland of the real, and you ARE all alone. The soul of the wind may add personality, a sense of something you can touch, feel, breath - but there IS nothing more in the wind... No spirit, no mystique, no beyond

There never was.

The edge of loneliness

The edge of loneliness is a precipice you stand at, and its monstrous jaws yawns in your face, beckoning you to jump - as if the torture wasn't enough that you were even standing there

There is a crowd gathering behind, stopping to see if you will do it (Stopping to see, never stopping to save your life... Maybe, they are all there in the first place because they came to jump themselves - I mean, are there that many lonely people?).

It is getting embarrassing, because now, people know you have cause - pitiful you

Maybe you pretend you are simply enjoying the scenery. They wont believe that ofcourse, and you know this - But for your own sake, you go on pretending

And you silently hope that when you realize you are too spineless to do it, you will turn around and see her standing there; whoever she is - Its a nice fuzz hope - And maybe that's all it is.

Fuzzy.

Sorry Friend; but You have cancer... It is - bad.

The first victims of a friendship gone bad are mutual respect and faith.

When that happens, you're basically waiting for it give up the ghost.

Positive signs of recovery are fleeting. Something broke and organs will fail.

Do you give it the coup de grace, perform Euthanasia, leave it to die or invest emotion, time and energy to keep it on life support? And for how long?

And is the quality of the friendship at this point worth it, knowing you're just biding time?

How would you want to remember that friendship; forget the person (Illusions of wonder don't help closure) - but how would you like to leave things?

As a wonderful albeit brief adventure, or the agonizing dragged-out experience of watching a once beautiful thing in its final death throes?

Its not easy, but you should've known that going in,

Rather than singing freaking Sunshine Lollipop.

Favor to a former friend

And there she stays, trying hard to hide the smarting hurt bestowed upon her like a slap, her poise countenance so subtly but clearly disturbed by the ground having been suddenly swept from beneath her - She has suddenly tasted her own medicine and try as she might to remain composed, she is flustered.

Yes - Ye-ES! Revenge is Sweet, is it not? I mentally lick my fingers and smack my lips. Our unspoken words a deafening silence - How does it feel being on the receiving end of the shit-stick for a change? How' ya like them apples?!

The sweet, exquisite taste of Darkness

You really can't appreciate the world in which a depressed person lives until you have truly experienced depression yourself. 
Its well beyond simply feeling low. It crosses over to an outright exquisite feeling of despair, from which you never WANT to leave. It starts simply with a trigger, an inconsequencial event that unlocks the deluge, collecting decades of unresolved sadness, burying you in them like a thick, dark never-ending blanket of self-pity, self-loathing, and self-destruction.

It makes sense that only people at puberty or older can experience it, you need a good 10 years of dissapointments to be able doubt your entire existence. 
You don't 'solve it' - depression - or 'deal with it' or 'snap out of it', because it can't be rationalized or reasoned with to be solved. It doesn't go away. It simply let's you go when it has nothing more to take from you, with no more warning than when it overtook you. 

Its it own drug really. An abyss from which escape is not just useless, but pointless, and where the artificial construct of 'humanity' no longer hold's sway and you are reminded how volatile the human experience truly is.   
Not many people will ever quite appreciate it. It takes a specific mind to truly get depressed, in as much as it takes only a specific mind to truly fall in love. Perhaps the two afflict the same fools. 

Like all profound emotions, I can only describe it as a form of temporary madness... for already mad people. I dare say, the ordinary will never experience love as it has defined by Poets. So too, the ordinary will never experience true depression.

It requires at least ONE loose screw for the machine to simply act out in that fashion.

Solace for disgruntled lovers, faithful friends & sufferers

When faced with heart-aching realization that your unrequited affection is the result of being lost in a sea of admirers, 

Take comfort in the knowledge that Beauty is fleeting, The beautiful rot like us all with time, and the shallow simply dry up, 

but coming up the rear, are a bevvy of new beauty, younger & of greater worth than your
 mind's eye could ever perceive an earlier love lost to be.

And if the crime was simply douchebaggery, know that assholes too become more harmless with the passage of time, blunted by the knowledge that being a douche is only as potent as its ability to shock and amaze. 
It becomes mere obnoxiousness given years.

But per chance, your real problem is your own idealized, skewed perception; 
Then take comfort, my brother, my sister, 
for you too are growing with the years, 

And perhaps life may make a mature adult of you yet. 

Musings of a very sick person Ausf B

1st July, 2013 2:33pm
Its a clear sign to myself that I am obsessed with WWII when I draw parallels between a week of illness with the war of attrition on the Eastern front, likening the recent dip in my state to the Battle for Berlin.
One more desperate push by an almost defeated bug against an arsenal of medication, rich food and rest.
:-)

1st July, 2013 3:27pm 
 Lying there, with my head drooped over the toilet bowl, having thrown up all including the bile in my stomach for the umpteenth time today, I find myself musing at what type of hard-wiring would possess people to actually WANT to bring innocent lives into this world of unabated suffering, with the only one certainty being death, by a plethora of mostly painful means, with only a wistful hope of an eternity in some unknown helpless state.
How many billions of people constitute a good enough statstic that this otherwise accepted norm may in fact be, a very bad idea...


2nd July, 2013 01:13am 
 I lie in bed, eyes reddenend and moist by feverish insomnia; The last signs of illness, little more than heat pouring out of my ears. I feel almost fine, save for the sore throat, a reminder of the horrid afternoon I spent doubled over a toilet bowl, dry heaving and being very vocal about it.

I dare to believe the worst is over, that the battle is won, and that tomorrow I shall rise fully refreshed to meet the new day. I was fooled not 24hours ago, and I will not walk so gullibly into YET another trap. 

It is true; after 1week of ebbing & rising illness, I am wary of the endgame.This is my personal version of the Reichstag, the last vestige of a fanatic enemy. What we haven't shelled to pathetic bloody bits, await us now in the labarynth of debris grotesquely mangled with the remains of the casualties; pus, dead cells mixed with dead gems piling somewhere deep inside. 

The fanatic remnants of an all-but defeated enemy, commited.
This late in the battle, no one intends to give quarter and no one expects quarter in return.
The LAST MUST DIE - THERE ARE NO MORE PRISONERS OF WAR LEFT.

Musing of a very sick person

1st July, 2013 2:25am

 Is it altogether wrong, some times wishing this drawn-out bout of illness finally kills me rather than hoping for recovery; knowing well this may just be one of many agonizing sicknesses, in what is increasingly becoming more of a chore than a joy of living. 

I'd just gotten to a point in my life where I slept like a baby and now this...

I dont know whether its because I feel that for some reason, I'm on the verge of some great idea that otherwise escapes me - and yet, desperately needs immediate fleshing out.

Could it be instead the residual effect of being the sickest I've been in 10years, and hence for the first time since I was 18, I'm again suffering from Insomnia night after night.

I lie here, turning this way and that trying to keep my eyes shut long enough to still my mind,
but its all to nought. I hear my digital watch chime on my wrist once as the digits transmogrify into 0:00
then once again, after an eternity, into 1:00  and I realize,
"dammit, Yaw! Have you been thinking all this time?!"

The realization that tomorrow is a working day doesn't seem enough of a logical argument to get my mind to acquiesce . Instead, i seem to finally have adopted a synaptic equivalent of my own verbal diarherea.

My frustration with the whole proceedings is all too evident at 2:15am,
by my clearly having given up the struggle and deciding instead... to blog about it.

The next cup of coffee

The 1st cup,
And the world takes on a bit more colour & ideas start to jump out your ears like Jack rabbits. 
  
The 2nd cup,
And there exists a sense of urgency & all the ideas need to happen... NOW 
  
The 3rd cup though...
And everything and everyone is moving excruciatingly slowly enough to fill you with anxiety. 
  
Something is amiss; a dastardly conspiracy between the corner desk, the air-conditioner and the 3rd Tab from the left of the Browser on your screen - And it's all run by your big Toe.You try to figure it out, but you cannot concentrate on anything, and you realize that your hands -- or the planet is in fact, trembling -- 
  
Suddenly, the sky really IS falling... 
  
OR 
  
You might want to stop drinking coffee for the day,     

...and eat something.


Requiem of Self-control

Tonight I shall consume the epitome of a typical Ghanaian dish; A Carbs-filled mashed concentrate, a fat-sodden mass, laughably called 'white meat',  with a mix of stew covered entirely in palm oil (My mind has a more flattering name for it, Omotuo and Groundnut soup with chicken)... perhaps washed down with a large sized beer. 


Tonight, I knowingly go off to completely disregard my otherwise stringent diet, squandering my gains in this battle of the bulge. 



I will probably awake on the moro racked with an inconsolable pang of guilty and self-loathing -- At least until my morning coffee


But I must -- I MUST compromise and renege my absolute power over my constituents and resign myself (For the time) to being a constitutional leader over myself -- Lest I face an all-out-coup and disbandment of the healthier order for one of instant gratification, debauchery and total anarchy.


tis a better thing I do than I have ever done....

The place where happy thoughts go to die

At one point in my college years, I went through something of a crisis.
I was, to avoid the clinical terms or personal presumptions, depressed. 
 Now, like any happy depressive; 'happy depressive' here not being an oxymoron, I was contented in my state;
only too happy from time to time, to coo as I embroiled myself in my own self-induced misery like some blanket.
 In fact, I may have developed something of a gift, being able to suck the very light out a room of happy people;
and I relished 'entertaining' guests with this my party trick whenever I deemed the sweetness of my environs carping. 
But I think on it now, and I realize 'sucking out the light' may not be the right expression. 
Light, in this context is after all, based on idealized notions of hope and savoring assumed beauties of life.
These things aren't swept away by negativity, not really - Just hidden, for a time. 
And since we aren't talking Physics, the property of light being unobstructed by darkness doesn't exist here. 
In the realm of emotions, darkness can, and often does, obstruct light.
(For all would-be hippies and children of Happiness, you may want to pull out a steady notebook and a pen at this point)

So what my 'gift' was really about, as far as literary imagery goes, is in sucking out the darkness and replacing it with The Void.
A more sustained pitch where happy thoughts don't just get hidden, but are entirely consumed;
kicking, screaming and clawing without hope of being conjured up again...
Oh right -- Sorry. There is no moral to this story or cheery conclusion.
'Just felt like taking you on a journey into the more twisted recesses of my mind. 
What are you doing up at midnight after all? MY excuse is Coca-Cola -- and Sherlock binge-watching.

Go on then. Off you pop.

The Universe is a Troll #1

The term 'Writer's devil' flatters you that in some way, you are a writer -- or have something to write about. It probably simply means 'Aggressive Autocorrect'. 


Like the Universe is some how perched over your shoulder, grinning as you typed, just waiting for you to get up and leave so it can delete one letter here or mash two sentences together there that have exactly nothing to do with each other. 


How often have I pored over 5 short lines of text that I was convinced could save or damn a rocky relationship with a girl; How often have I decided to write something I felt strongly about on Facebook, Hit SEND, or Click POST, only to look back at it a day later and the fat, evil goblin would poke it's head out and spit at me, 


"Ha! Fooled ya. Now that chick thinks that your SMS apology was nothing more than some tasteless sexual come-on and all your Facebook Friends think you can't spell past your own name.


Oh no please. No need to thank me. Lookie-lookie! See that 1 LIKE over there? I bet that guy read it all. Probably had to do a mental running-jump over that massive typo I left in the 4th paragraph ... Always welcome, mate. Always welcome"  

Sunflower in Hamatan

Why are you in such a hurry to grow up, 
To wear make-up, lipstick or prance around in a suit?
How 'adult' is it now that you can talk without coughing with a cigarette perched between your lips? 
Does any one or any thing still care that you can drink beer -- Besides your liver? 

Is that your wife over there? 
Oh please tell me it is all that it was cracked up to be, or were you simply on the clock?
Was it all worth the wait having someone call you 'Daddy', 'Mummy'? 
Is it the heaven you expected? Or just another addition to the banal? 
Mister and missus unfamiliar.

And why are you now frantically trying to pull on the reins? 
Do you think you can now command time to stop after beckoning for so long that it go faster? 
And to do what? Command your white hairs to grow black, Or coax both your breasts to snap back to their original form?
Is this truly 28 going on 35? And when will you be 39 going on 50? 

Ha! I have no sympathy for your plight. 
Such things I hold deep inside, as though thrust into my pockets in a tightly closed fist.
It is cruelty, I know. And you, now filled with self-pity, as I have been, 
When wave upon wave of the likes of you beat upon my back,
Pressuring me to stumble, fall forward and be swept away by the pressure to 'grow up'
Carried away foolishly to the logical conclusion:

Death is upon us all. There is no need to call out to it.

Ma poison; ma femme-fatale





We take a break from one another; sometimes a week, sometimes a month. 

I convince myself its for the best.

rheumatism in my hand or ankle one time;
Violent mood swings the next.

"It's better this way", I finally say.
"I feel fine"; I tell myself.
" - Lucid. I can think well without her. Who needs extra stimulation, any way? Not me. I'm high enough on life as is!"

Then events conspire to place her back in my hands; another cup of heaven's brew; Not that pool of depressing instant black; that tramp, she always becomes in the end; taking her with a colloid of indifference and self-loathing that no amount of sugar and milk would cure.

No, no. Temptation as usual comes in the shape of a fine black mistress; her slender arms, curvy wisps of vapor that move slowly and sensually in front of me, close enough for me to feel her aroma and sense warmth, rendering me powerless to resist her yet again.

The pains in my joints now a lie; my violent mood swings a fiction I dreamed up. Nothing is real except her.

Now, all forgiven, I once again fall; sipping and slipping, down down into a world where every color is brighter, every sound clearer and more beautiful, and all the while, I'm thinking,

"O you bitter-sweet piping hot brew, Ye bringer of death and deception

...Where have you been my whole life?"

#Baggage

"Hey, do you realize you have a... ummm... THING... clinging to your back, right?"

"Ya. I know. I keep being told"

"What is it?"

"No idea. It's been there for so long, I can't even start to remember how it got there. Oh, and fun part is I don't know how to shake it off"

"Seriously?"

"Yup. Tried a number of times. it just digs in and holds on tighter.You end up just dead tired and sore"

"Well it's kinda weird...is it -- It it harmless though?"

"I'm going to guess, no. Most people I meet draw a wide berth for starters and... see those claws? I wont stand too close to me if I were you."

"hmm.. And it doesn't get off to eat or anything?"

"Nope. So suffice to say, it's PRO-bably parasitic"

"Oh my goodness! And you can't just, like, toss it away or something"

"Uhuh. Tried. Like i said, scratches and weariness"

"Ya, but that thing must weigh..."

"...45 pounds exactly. 'Carry it around long enough, you get to know everything about the beast except... y'know, how to get rid of it... Listen, you seem like a real nice person and I wish we got to know each other under different circumstances, but you have somewhere you need to be, so you better get going. I'm just going to slow you down and I honestly don't know what this thing is capable of so...."

"Well sorry to hear about your problems. Bye"

"...Bye."