When you can't subscribe, you bastardize.

“There is plenty of ground beneath rock bottom,” who said that? I did, when I was 17 and drunk on life and a slew of thoughts that got me floored at my worst hours.

I’m 25 now and the only inspiration to get me out of bed is really bad coffee at office and it took me 10 minutes to come up with that.

Is that what it is? The price of not being exceptional? The price of hanging in there? How about a nice big cup of stupid instead?

I’ve been through what you’d call a hazy few months: A whiff of controversy. Imagined scandal. Testosterone. Don’t get me started on feminism. Well earned arrogance at the end of the day. The price of being professional.

11 am: I skim through my laundry list of clients. This is how we operate, stock prices swell up, and data spills over. Coffee cups pile up. Breakfast bars are a thing.

Lunch is peaceful. Finally, there is some wind in my hair.

Sometimes I read up on oil and sustainability, look up Latin words, Reuters, China, Pfizer.

I make a mealy mess forking deals. Sometimes I clean up. Sometimes I am told that I am being played. Weird men you know, like to start their days with quotes.

Have I lost my mojo? Does the pleasure of drinking wine at 8 pm in the perfect glass outweigh events that led me to ask myself that question?

On Saturdays I drag my working class ass to the park, sometimes I scribble. Scraps of paper do it for me like fancy notebooks never could or would.

You have to realize that I am a straight shooter and that I won’t shut up.

I am such a dog waiting to grow wild,

I am holding my breath, watching the sun

I am dreaming of all the mistakes I’ve made

I am sick of his gold rimmed notebooks and his copybook charm

I am trying to stretch my imagination of this city.

I am trying to be gone, I am minding the gaps

I am trying to reach out, I am hanging on by a thread. 

Of Lullaby Springs and Damien Hirst ( Additional notes from the under deck - no convenience charge )

Natasha Choukkar – on why she is good at what she does and why she hasn’t been doing enough of it.

So these are "literary" notes from the under deck that have been scribbled on planes, buses, parks, outside grand museum stairs and motel note pads, sometimes fancier notepads and Pierre Cardin’s (with a cold metallic sheen) that don’t really subscribe to our generation.

And as I am writing this from a sublime and terribly gorgeous place in Whitefield's where the rain trickles down the window pane every ten minutes and skylights brighten up the room at dawn, I am thinking of all the things I swallowed up on my way here: 

These were the things I did take a very long time to learn about myself:

• I have vacation issues
• I deliberately like to torture myself by carrying the wrong books on my journey to help me get to write. Suicidal, ain't it?
• My life is not a Roy Lichenstein version of Sleeping Girl, it really isn’t. My life revolves more around every conceivable Jasper John’s you could ever find. Some people confuse it to be something like Degas and his drying women. Like seriously? Get a life.
• I can’t sleep on most nights – too much coffee and the fear of being rendered redundant gnawing at me.
• This is not a place to soul search
•  Having fun is hard work and you of all people should know that (Yes you, D)
•   I don’t have shiny hair either ( I’m talking to you D, don’t look away)

    Here’s what I have been doing when I haven’t been eating weird meat– reading up on Damien Hirst. Hirst is a man who sold his thoughts. Period. Love him or hate him for that. So you could blame Hirst for me throwing up stuff about me which shouldn't be surprisingly shocking if you've known me already and come this far.

    We live in a society with questionable moral ethics; need we blame our artists for their questionable artistic ethics?  I am trying after all to be almost as transparently fair as I can be. (D?)

Woman, are we ready to talk about your day yet?

I am glad I get to you, in bits and pieces though, I still get to you.

I recite my thoughts like a hymn waiting to unfold, itchy at the edges. My life somehow makes sense when sprawled across a post it.

I define my own tools and I define my failure and I notice.

Anger and creative hindsight – these are the tools with which I learn best. I guess I am not ashamed of being angry anymore, or bored or indifferent. I hung my shame out to dry and wither in the hot summer sun.

Having done that I now trust all the unfairness in the world to shake things up and stir up a storm.

If I see a beautiful bald woman and I can’t write about her – I call it a failure. I define my own failures.

I did see her today; she was the most beautiful woman I saw in a very long time. She was dressed all summery ready to swallow the sun if she had to, with piercing eyes that could take or leave all.  I realized it wasn’t her beauty that wrecked me; it was something that clamored back at me when she looked me in the eye. 

Where does she get that perverse yet astonishingly satishfying freedom from? - the one thing that I have been looking for all my life.

Happy fucking woman’s day – I mutter under my breath.

I don’t get what Woman’s Day is about – yes I am grumpy and no I didn’t dress up; yes I didn’t do my hair. Yes I got drunk, yes I’m in love, no I don’t do God anymore, or marriage – the institution repels me, suffocates me. I could do yoga, I could never give up meat, I am not a limited edition.

I sweat the details, for all practical purposes I adore the wrong kind of men, adulthood won me over when I was five.

I am not very excited about being a woman, probably because I am a feminist and I chose to run to the man I love to help me fix things I broke in the first place.

But I refuse to be a Stepford wife, I refuse to be told right and wrong because who let you decide all that stuff in the first place anyway.

Why be told you’ve come a long way? Isn’t that limiting ambition? Why be told you are lucky to be where you are?  Is that what we are going to do – keep telling ourselves how lucky we are? That we weren’t burnt or scarred or raped? Is that what we want to live off for the rest of our lives – luck? And what if we happen to be not so lucky one of these days?  Would we have run out of luck?

I get what tradition is all about – I however fail to understand what losing freedom is all about.

That kind of submission is worse than rectal smuggling.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – I notice. I notice the way you hold your coffee mug – I think it is truly fucked up. 

Yours Sincerely,

More bad grammar and lazy writing.

Why did everything have to be about running away?

Treadmills.  Coffee Mugs. Amazingly long showers. My day just began.

I always wake up thinking that once in life I’d have the serious courage to break free, but it is 11:15 now and courage only a metaphor, even better an excuse to get me out of bed.

This is my little world of no paper shredders, bad coffee and very little hope. I welcome it, nonetheless. Yes, paper shredders would’ve made a difference.

What’s worrying is that I had an opinion you know – an opinion on whats wrong with the world, Aaron Swartz, Global Warming, free content, tweeting, gang rapes and mass murders. A fucking opinion you know?

Well right now all I am left with is no paper shredders.

We are an army of angry little feminists – self wrought with damage and brilliance, drowning in a whirlpool of the wrong kind of men and it never felt so fucking right. But maybe, that is more or less a part of the plan – the grander plan that leads me to where I ought to be.

So then there is that conclusion that doesn’t entirely convince me: I am my own worst enemy.

Painted love.

When you ask a man, “How can you sleep at night?” He, in all probability does sleep at night. Nothing wakes him up – not the sound of thunder or the prick of guilt. I knew a man like that. I knew him over and over.

It’s easy, I ask you to name things that sell. You name them like children, little boys and girls waiting for the last bus home.

Sex, violins, drugs, paperback versions of the book that changed your life, corporate services, an engagement ring, dry martinis, apple cinnamon martinis, Bono, love toys, broken boys, ideas that changed the world, wigs, chemicals, facebook, crude oil, research reports, mutual funds, communism.

Paper jewellry, playstations, cardamom pie, a knife box, olive oil..

Us.

You tell yourself you would leave, when needed the most. You'd be gone on a train to nowhere at the crack of dawn before the faint patches of sunlight gather enough courage to lift up the sky.

But you're never gone really. You stand right there at the kitchen sink, looking outside a window when the faint patches of sunlight begin to show.  

21^St century romanticism –the fashion accessory we could all do without

My Shoes Don't Fit Anymore

24. That time of your life when you ask yourself : What's another bad joke? What's another lousy try? 
24. When you are much 'funner' when you are more 'drunker' 
24. When the only thing that could cheer you up in the morning is the coffee machine whining
24. A time when the best of us fell apart
24. When words like 'xenophobic' and 'questionable' and 'pussyfooted' and 'tumbleweed' and 'moral policing' start making sense
24. When ramming into a glass door would technically be the only thing that happened to you all day
24. When one of your bags is always packed. You never know
24. When you succumb to the realization that there are other ways to forget than banging your head against the wall
24. When the law of inverse goodness holds true (something is so bad that it is actually good)
24. When you have dinner with an asshole, because despite the fact that he is an asshole he has something important to say
24. Words. They don't impress you anymore
24. You now know why Alice had to keep running to stay in the same place
24. Affirm. "Just because I haven't, doesn't mean I'm not."
                 "Just because I'm not, doesn't mean I haven't."
24.The shoebox. That's where your secrets lie. Not smothered under your chest. 
24. When the smell of rain did it for you. Saved your day 
24. When you still want to grow up to be a cultural evangelist
24. When sketchy details is all you have
24. You really thought I'd come up with 24 of these? 
Boy I'm glad I grew up. 

Of crash carts and more..

2.00 pm  a hot scorching Wednesday afternoon

A visit to the Clinical Pharmacology unit: Twenty odd crash carts stacked in one corner of a spotlessly white room.

All the while I wonder, to what extent could, standing in a room where the floors, curtains, walls and sheets – all spot-fucking-less white mess around with your head.

I’ve been spending my days trying to understand and make sense. I also very sincerely try to keep myself from being appalling, vile and second rate.

And as I enter into this phase of my life where I’ve gotten around to feeling largely irresponsible for myself, I can’t help but look around for crash carts.

You have friends and lovers, but do you have crash carts? I think we’d all better start looking..

I sometimes cannot talk to a person without a voice screaming ‘Would you be my crash cart?’ in my head.

On the other hand NOW is when I am ready to say I’ve finally moved in.

With a David Foster Wallace on my bed and a Radiohead on my wall and a flurry of post its finding their way on the doors and cupboards and bathroom walls- I am finally home.

The poster on my wall says:

Fond but not in love

Still kisses with saliva.