When I Die

Ronnie. Fight Club. Carnivale. Shadowland. Wish List

15th December, 2004
I just got a one month upgrade. 30 days. Extended life.

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21st December, 2004

The Princess Comes Back

Standing outside the airport, waiting in front of the arrivals section, waiting for the Princess. It's 12:15 in the night, and I'm wondering if I'm at least looking okay. You don't want to meet someone after so many years with a sad or fucked up or tired face.

Her plane has arrived, and she should be out any minute.

That minute is now. She comes out. She has a brown jacket wrapped around her; she's pushing a trolley with two small bags. She's cut her hair so its short. I'm thinking this is a good thing because seeing her like this with long hair could break a man's heart.

She sees me. And then I don't give a shit about anything else. She sets her trolley aside, and I walk up to her. There is no awkwardness, we just throw our arms around each other. Five years have gone past and they don't matter--that's what that moment tells me. She's still Ronnie--that's what that moment tells me. It also tells me you don't really know how much you miss someone till you see him or her again.

"I missed you," she says in my ear, says it slow. I want to say something cheesy and in-character like, "I didn't." I can't though. I don't fucking want to.

I say nothing at all. What I do instead is kiss her cheek. Which is so fucking out of character for me that I might as well be someone else. And I don't give a shit about it.

When we pull back, she looks up at me, turns my head side to side. "You didn't change one bit, Saint," she says. "No, you're taller." How I know this is true is she has to look up at me.

I still don't say anything, like I almost never do when I'm overwhelmed. We just look at each other like that, and I'm grinning a stupid grin. She's doing the same, but her smile isn't stupid.

A plane takes off.

Then I say, "Let's get out of here." I pick up her small bags. Which is strange, because they're about as heavy as an ordinary schoolbag. I'm guessing she really isn't gonna stay long.

She takes off her jacket, folds it and tucks it inside the smaller of the two bags. She's no longer the thin girl she was; she's fuller now. Not fat, no sir. She now has the kind of grace that cannot be manufactured and processed or reconstructed.

We walk out of the area, go to the parking access, where we rent a taxi. It's times like these I wish I had a car.

"You weren't kidding about how hot it's got here," she says when we're sitting in the taxi, and the driver's about to start the engine.

"Yeah," I say. "You missed the most of it though. Come back in August and then we'll talk hot."

"December's hot enough for me," she says. Then proceeds to wipe her brow. I ask her if we should ask the cabbie to switch the AC on. She says, "Nah. Might as well get used to it, right?"

The reason we haven't asked each other, "How are you?" yet is that we haven't really been out of touch long enough to ask this. How we've been in touch is through email. And she did send me loads upon loads of pictures, but that is to seeing her in the flesh what eating a single M&M is to eating a whole strawberry cake. I didn't send her any cause I never had any digital pics.

We're going to her aunt's house, and I ask her why her aunt did come.

"She was gonna," she says. "But when you said you were coming I asked her not to. I mean, I wouldn't have had the nice welcome I had if she was there too, would I?"

She's right. Her aunt's probably just another old-fashioned Indian woman like my Mom, who would never acknowledge any other relationship between a man and a woman of the approximate same age which is not a) brother and sister, b) lovers. Option (b) is still severely frowned upon. Friendship? No way, the boy's just using that as a catchphrase to get into your pants, lady, so you just better watch out for him.

I nod.

Ronnie doesn't know about Amy, or about Dad. No one else knows, except Sonya. And I've asked Sonya not to tell anyone else. Right now, I don't want to go there. My friend's back home, and I'm happy. And what's more, Christmas is just a few days away.

"Hey," she says, looking out the window, "they changed the fucking name of the airport?"

"Yup. God Bless Thackeray."

"The same dude who renamed Bombay, huh?" she says.

I nod.

"You know," she says, "Bombay had class. Mumbai sounds like..."

"Like neutron-proton."

"What?" Then she remembers. "Oh," she goes. "Right, yeah."

"On mass recycled eel shit," I go. Only it's not me speaking, it's Michael Jackson. "I love Shiv-Sena. I love kids."

And then she bursts out giggling. I won't tell you this joke, would take four thousand words to explain it. Besides I don't think you'll get the humor anyway.

"How do you change your voice like that, man!" she says.

"Like thith," I go. Tweety goes.

She laughs some more.

"Will you mawwy me, matham? I lovth you tho muth, matham. Pleath, matham, I goth you thome twigth and thome bewwieth and thome wormth. Leth make loth of babieth. Whathya thay? Pleath? Oh pleath?"

She's giggling hard now. Which is about the same as me giggling hard, except that she looks a lot more happy than I could laughing that way.

"No?" I say. "Oh dea. You wonth mawwy me? Oh, dea, oh futh. Oh futh, futh, futh. I'm thuch a futhin lother. I think I'll kill mythelth now. You thick girl, I hope you ith happy now. I hope you ith tho happy you can fly. I hope you ith tho happy you can... no, waith, you can'th fly can you? Well, I can. Look! I can fly you can'th! Tho nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah nyah-nyah-nyah--"

"Shut up!" she says. "Just shut up, you bozo!" She's gripping her belly, snorting out those typical Ronnie laughs.

I shut up.

And then she's laughing harder.

"What?" I ask.

She shakes her head. She wipes her eyes. Tries to stop. Can't.

The cabbie, he's Punjabi. He's looking back at her and I tell him, "Oy, fikar na kar, oy, e mundi Amriki hai." Which means, in a rather extravagant Punjabi: Don't worry, she's American.

He nods. Says, "Mein India a raha hoon," in an almost uncanny Michael Jackson accent. Michael said the exact same thing when he toured India, in that stupid accent. "Amriki loganoo akal kithae hai, ji!" the cabbie says. Meaning: I wonder where the Americans keep their cleverness. Meaning: Americans don't have any brains.

At that, Ronnie starts giggling once again.

The cabbie says, "Oye twada menu ullu banaya, oye." Which means: you were suckerizing me about her, kiddo. "Mafi, memsaab." Sorry, ma'am.

And the rest of the trip is a pleasant ride where the cabbie doesn't interefere a lot, full of more in-jokes you wouldn't get.

When we get to her Aunt's house, we get out. The cabbie, he says, "Khush Rahiyo." Which means: stay happy. Which is odd, because as a rule most cabbies are assholes.

I tell him, "You too," and he zips on his way.

We go inside the house, and it's about the same as it was when she left. At least I think so.

Aunt's grown fatter, but in a matronly kind of way. She still looks at me strange, though.

There's some small talk, some tea (which I drink only because not doing so would feel impossibly impolite. Otherwise I only drink one cup a day--in the morning. And that too just to wake me up).

"You should probably stay over," Ronnie says. "I mean, will you get a ride this late?"

"I'll walk," I say.

She touches her head. "Oh, yeah, I forgot this ain't America, man."

I'm about to ask her what that's supposed to mean, but then she stretches with her hands above her and her eyes closed and right then she reminds me so much of a seven year old girl whom I first saw wearing pink pants and white shirt that I feel weak. You know what? If you take away her height and her bosom, she is that girl. Even now. Thank God for that. I mean, sure, she's changed--people who don't change usually suck ass--but everything I love about the little girl wearing her flower-print dress is still there in this young woman wearing her T-shirt and jeans.

If that sounds romantic, I don't care.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I say, and now I yawn too.

She nods.

Right, then. I walk out the house, and she calls my name. She's standing on the porch. She closes the door behind her, comes up, and we embrace again.

"Today is my happy day," she says. It's windy out here, and her hair sort of tickles my face.

"I love you, you know that?" I say, and there it is. Out in the open. "All of you," I say. "You're the best damn bunch of buddies any guy could have."

I almost expect what comes next. It's something she picked up from Ghost, the movie, and used so much it became another one of our in-words. I know she'll say, "Ditto." Ditto, KC, ditto.

What she does say is, "Except for Max, about the same, KC."

I look at her bewildered.

"Gotcha," she says. "Just kidding, you dummy. I love you folks too." A Fiat passes behind us, bathing us in its headlights.

If you never had a Kodak moment in this journal before, this is it.

"I'll call you," I say.

She says, "Nah. I'll do it. Not tomorrow, though. Tomorrow this chick sleeps all day long."

Then I leave.

What follows is perhaps the best half an hour of walking in a long, long time.

The princess is home, I think. She's come home. Now it'd be so nice if everyone else was here too. It'd be a blast. A bit like heaven.

A bit like a miracle.

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-1-
The top Stephen King books according to the chimp:

Hearts In Atlantis. This book is probably the closest any author has come to conveying real sorrow. I will not fuck it up by talking about it, but rest assured that this is the very best non-horror novel I've read alongside Lord Of The Flies. And I do not consider it a coincidence that Hearts mentions Lord Of The Flies. If you read just one Stephen King book, read this.

IT. Have talked about it before lots.

Dreamcatcher. It's about Derry. It's the book Insomnia should've been. It also has one of the weirdest, most satisfying moments I've had in my life: Jonesy/Mr. Gray go to the headstone where the Derry Standpipe once stood. The stone has the names of the seven Losers' Club members--Ben, Bev, Bill, Mike, Richie, Eddie, Stan. Scrawled across it in red spray-paint is this message: Pennywise lives. I think King was going to write a sequel to It.

Different Seasons. Four novellas, two of them very good: Shawshank Redemption and The Body. The Body is probably king's best writing--not storytelling, but writing. No other king book took me as long to read as The Body did, because almost every page had a line which stopped me cold at its simple magic. Take line number one: "The most important things are the hardest things to say."

Nightmares And Dreamscapes. Although many claim that his Night Shift was his greatest short story collection, I proclaim this one.

The Green Mile. I think the movie says everything I need to say about this one.

The Shining. People consider The Stand as his best early work. I consider The Shining and IT.

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The DJ-gig I mentioned in the previous entry was nothing like professional DJing. I didn't spin any LP/HP records. What I did is spin CDs. And the way I see it, in the next twenty years everyone will discard records and choose computer, anyway. MP3s are way better to carry and manipulate. Witness PCDJ. Witness Native Instruments's amazing DJ deck.

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A big fuck you to the guy who sent me Half Life 2's script in my inbox. Buddy, that was about two steps away from stabbing me in the back. I don't know you any more.

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Just wrote a story about an Elvis double. Not much happening in it, but it does have a pretty okay idea behind it. I'm almost dead certain that no one who reads my journal reads my stories, so I can safely give the story away here. (Besides, I'm not sure if I'm gonna post the story here anytime soon, seeing how my one month upgrade runs out in... like, one month.) In the story the Elvis duplicate finds out he ain't no dupe, but the real deal. He's the real Elvis who doesn't remember how he ended up where he is. Yeah. And I think it makes sense. It's a good job to have--being an Elvis dupe. And what does Elvis decide in the end? He goes back to being an Elvis dupe. He's happy, he doesn't get the media shoved in his face every two seconds, and can drive his Harley wherever the fuck he wants.

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Fight Club, the movie. If Peter Jackson's LOTR wasn't around, I'd have called this one the most compelling adaptation of a novel. Ever. We've got David Fincher doing the best no-compromise work we've seen from him. We've got Brad Pitt in the best role he will ever get, bar none. The role of Tyler Durden, I didn't think Brad would pull it off. But he does. Ditto Helen Bonham-Carter. Helen as the drugged out, half-senile Marla Singer? No way. But it works, and it works precisely because it shouldn't, I think.

But those things, all of them, are absolutely minor compared to Edward Norton. I first saw him with Richard Gere in Primal Fear. And there, at least in the beginning, he came across as a dumb fake. I mean, two reels into the movie and I knew he was faking the split personality thing. When I saw the movie the second time, though, I realized that was exactly what he was portraying. He wanted us to know his split persona was a fake--something you wouldn't expect in a movie whose crescendo resounds around that one point. And you know what? It's a bitch of a thing to do: trying to appear fake. I mean, he could've stuck to doing the okay job--trying to really look like a split persona and then whacking us with the ending. But he didn't choose to do that. I saw him next in a movie which stars Robert DiNero and Marlon Brando. Don't remember the name, except that it's about robbery. A bit like The Heist, which stars Gene Hackman. I think it was called The Score. And in this movie, this Robert DiNero movie, too, he does a double-persona thing. And the guy's convincing.

Cut to Fight Club. First scene--gun stuck in his mouth, telling us: with a gun barrel stuck in your mouth, you can only speak in vowels. Telling us, I know this because Tyler knows this.

One look at his face and you know he's insomniac. No one needs to tell you. Special effects aside, it's the bewildered expression he carries on his face all through the movie that gets you.

Cut to Bob and his bitch tits. Meat Loaf is perhaps perfect for this role. He's big, he's burly, and when he says, "We're still men," you feel both sorrow and disgust. Is that what Chuck wanted us to feel when he wrote that scene? Does fire spread? Can snakes kill?

Cut to everything else.

All through, Edward Norton's narration is dead on. Not melodramatic, not self-depreciating, not self-appreciating. Just telling it like it is, from outside himself. Like Chuck.

Although I sorely miss not hearing the first line from the book: Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, and after that Tyler is pushing a gun down my throat and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

The fight club scenes are well choreographed. I mean, they could've made it look like a Rocky movie, but they didn't.

In fact, that's the best thing about this movie: there were a lot of things they could've fucked up, but they didn't. They got it just right.

If you haven't seen this movie, you're missing one of the big events of our times. Don't miss it.

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Kingdom Hospital. The moment I saw the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X Files, I knew there would be a secret organisation a la The Syndicate from X Files. I don't know, you see that man and you think he's gonna screw you up. He knows his shit and he won't tell ya unless he has to.

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Carnivale. You can read what it's about on the net. Search it on google. I will not talk about that. I'm asking you, read about it before you read what follows, or you won't get it.

What I want to talk about is one single moment upto this point that makes me squeal in delight similar to the way that X Files episode about Mulder and Scully being trapped in a consensual hallucination about finding an E.T and bringing him to Mulder's house did. Clancy Brown, fallen reverend, is dragged away to a lunatic asylum, which at the beginning strikes me as odd, absolutely unlike the path the series has taken to this point. We see him being bound and probed and what not, and then we see him in a room with padded walls with some guy--presumably a psychologist sitting on a chair he brought with him into the room, and asking Brown questions.

Brown says, "I am God's left hand."

The Doctor asks, "Are you Jesus?"

Brown shakes his head.

"Are you the devil?"

Brown laughs. "No," he says.

"Then what are you?"

"I am what I am. I told you, I am the left hand of God."

The Doctor nods, starts to leave.

Brown asks, "Doctor, can I have something I can write with?"

"No," the Doctor says.

Brown looks troubled for a moment, then smirks. "That won't be necessary," he says.

Next time we see Brown, he's sitting admist loonies who're about their business, or at least it seems they are. We see the Doctor through a chain-linked window from Brown's POV, copiously scribbling something on his pad. I assumed he was making notes about his next paper. You know, like Madeline Stowe does in 12 Monkeys.

Then Brown looks at a bald loony, who comes close, bends down, hears Brown whisper some words and then starts to bang his head against a pillar.

Next time we see Brown, he's wearing his coat, standing in front of the Doctor. Brown's leaving the asylum. Before he leaves, the Doctor hands him a legal pad.

Brown smiles, walks out of the asylum, stands in the lawn, and a light shines on the legal pad. What it is, is the Doctor's scribbling. What it is, is Brown's gospel.

"That won't be necessary," Brown said. Because he used the Doctor as his pencil.

There's a sudden uproar in the asylum behind him. Brown turns around. "Quiet," he says. There's silence.

Brown leaves.

I asked myself one question all the time they showed the asylum stint (right before the final moment when he get the legal pad, that is). The question was: why isn't he leaving? He's so powerful, why isn't he leaving? Has he lost his power?

And then the resolution. He stayed there as long as it took to write his gospel. And then he left.

On the other hand, we're shown a Carnie troupe moving from town to town. In the promos they say that this series is about the clash of good and evil. But the HBO promo makers fucked it up there. It's not about good or evil or anything as pretentious as that.

It's about interpreting divine messages. For the first four episodes, Clancy Brown goes through a few revelations and builds a church, which gets burned down. He gets disillusioned, and that's why he goes stands on the edge of a bridge which hangs above a river. Why he doesn't jump and the whole episode titled "The River" has so much emotional resonance, the likes of which I haven't seen since the final moments of the X Files.

The show is about the carnivale. You realize this right off the bat. When the first episode begins, it begins with a narrative intro. They could've had Clancy Brown or Nick Stahl or even Clea Duvall doing that bit, but they chose Michael J. Anderson. And they told us something very important by choosing Michael: they told us that this story, we're seeing it from a distant, outsider's perspective. We don't really know anyone. Because in all of the episodes telecast so far, Michael is nothing but an observor. He's left out of the conversations between management and the blind man.

The pacing of the series is just right. For example, what I just told you about Clancy Brown's sanitarium stint, it lasts for three episodes. The revelation at the end is therefore that much bigger.

I won't even talk about the special effects, the sets, the costumes, the whole atmosphere, and the lighting--which is perhaps the most underrated device in all of the visual media.

There's nothing uptil now that I found forced or uneccessary except the bit about Jonesy sleeping with the drinker's wife. I'm guessing there's a reason for it--it'll count somewhere in the future. Or maybe it's just one of those offshoots, like showing Ben (Nick Stahl) driving to find the lobster-girl; but even that wasn't without reason. We found the salesman there, we found the ring.

You know, hiding is almost as important as showing. I belong to the group which is happy seeing hinted shadows instead of all out fabricated monsters--which is the reason many people hate Kingdom Hospital.

I've heard that HBO has given the Carnivale team full freedom to set the tale across as many seasons as they can. I don't know if they'll resolve the whole thing when it ends, and I don't care.

What this is is one smart product, carefully packaged, almost sparingly offered.

I'm in for the ride. No serial has had me this hooked since The X Files.

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-8-
I'm reading Peter Straub's "Shadowland"; a book many have called his atmospheric best. I deny it. I say this is his best work. Many say "Lost Boy, Lost Girl" is Straub at his pinnacle. I wonder if they've read this gem.

This is the book that Harry Potter strives to be and never will be. I'll bet you a good hundred rupees that Rowling stole--hell, plagiarized--this book's story and characters. And just like every hack job ever done, Rowling failed miserably.

Right from page one, Shadowland sucks you into it in a way only the best ever do.

I'm saying all this and I haven't even finished the book. I'm exactly halfway through. I'm at the point where Del's uncle takes Tom Flanagan to the next level, alone, and tells him a few things in his wolf's guise.

Many compare Straub to King, but that's unfair. Straub's prose is always tighter--he says more with half the words King uses. (Of course, it's King's bloat that we actually love about his books. Case in point: IT).

He gets away with writing gorgeous lines, and still making them relevant in the fiction.

You can't begin a Straub book from the middle. You have to start at the beginning, and you have to read it all the way to the end. His big surprises come out of nowhere.

I honestly can't predict where Shadowland is headed, or how it'll end. Just like I didn't see Fight Club's (the novel's) multiple persona thing.

Won't talk about it a lot, expect a full review when I finish it (of course, considering I'm still in an un-lazy mood). Go read it if you can.

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-9-
...And I finished Shadowland. Let me say this right out: The book's climax is better than any climax I've read. I'm not a big fan of climaxes, but here, the climax overwhelms you. Straub pulls out everything he's got and lays it in front of you. He propels you over the cliff, leaving you to figure out how to open the parachute. There's such an impossible grief at the end here--it's cliched, but it works. I thought Stephen King's IT had a sad ending--pretty much like real life, and Shadowland's ending stirs up the same emotion.

Sadness.

Is it the best book I've read? No. That mantle is shared by King's IT and Hearts In Atlantis and Golding's Lord Of The Flies and Tolkien's LOTR. But Shadowland is one of the great books. Perhaps the most effective tale about magic and magicians out there. Harry Potter kiss my ass.

I'm glad I never read Harry Potter (at least completely). That book would've left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth while reading this book.

The bits about Rose, about how her feet hurt when she walks... amazing.

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-10-
Saw a movie called "The Man Without A Face," directed by Mel Gibson. It's like the perfect mix of Stephen King's "The Body" and "Low Men In Yellow Coats" (from "Hearts In Atlantis"). The first half an hour of the movie is the kid spending time with his buddies, like The Body. The rest of the movie is exactly like Robert Garfield meeting Ted Brautigan in "Low Men...".

And all through the movie, I kept thinking, I've seen this kid. I've seen him. Seen him. I recognized him in the scene where he sits by the window hearing his mother send Mel Gibson away. The kid is Nick Stahl, who plays John Connor in Terminator 3, and Ben Hawkins in Carnivale.

Hats off to Nick, man. And hats off to Mel Gibson for directing the kid well.

The part Nick plays needed maturity, a lot of it, and Nick brings it. I'm not easily moved, and a small town tale about a kid who meets a stranger--especially after King's Hearts shouldn't move me, but this movie did.

Oh, of course, that scene where Nick drives a car to Gibson's house is pretty cheesy, but we can forgive Gibson for including it. And of course, the opening dream sequence sucks. But Even LOTR had flaws.

Gibson is, I'm pretty sure of it by now, one of the few really good guys in the movie business. I'm not saying he hasn't fucked up, everyone has, but his work is still quality--if you forget that obnoxious What Women Want piece of shit.

Consider that he made a honest movie about Christ. Consider how Hollywood wouldn't touch his movie. He didn't have a distributor.

And now that the movie is such a big hit, they're shortlisting it for the Oscars. I'm betting they won't consider it. I'm betting they'll say it's in a foreign language (Armenian) or some such bullshit. And then maybe they'll make a special provision.

I've heard Gibson's not campaigning for an oscar. Full marks to him. Absolutely.

If the movie wins, I wish he wouldn't accept the award. that he would reject the industry screws who deserted him initially. Why should he give them a chance to say, "See? We believe in free speech. We're giving this movie an oscar, ain't we, friends and neighbors?"

Instead he should just keep on making movies he believes in. As the box office collections will tell him, if he makes a good movie, people will see it. Fuck the oscars, fuck the media, fuck the press.

I haven't seen Gibson's Passion Of Christ yet, but I will.

Back to Man Without A Face, though. This movie would have failed if the lead actors hadn't clicked together. They do. Watch that scene where they're acting Shakespeare out. Watch the way Gibson is fluent, vibrant; the way Nick is a bit reserved, a bit shy, a bit yielding.

And the moment on the beach--a classic mush scene if there ever was one, but it works.

Let me just put it this way, and this is perhaps the best thing I can say about this movie: any kid watching this movie will not think this movie is bullshit.

When we're kids, say seven to twelve years of age, we're not completely innocent, and we're not completely mature--we're not anything like we are when we are eleven or fifteen or three or twenty nine.

Nick Stahl's part is a kid, through and through.

And a kid watching this movie would think that it could be him, or his friend up there on the screen. It could be any kid, for Pete's sake!

That's the best thing I can say about this movie, or any good movie ever made about kids.

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A confession: Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass freaked the shit out of me when I read it the first time. I'd read Alice In Wonderland before that, and that one was a nice, funny romp through just another childhood dreamland.

Looking Glass, though. Perhaps I read it at an age when I just tuned everything on to the freak channel, because I was scared--impossibly scared--of mirrors. I mean, think about it. What is a mirror, anyway? A piece of transparent glass with one side coated with silver. A transparent glass bit shows you what's behind it.

A mirror doesn't. It hides the world beyond. You look in a mirror and you see yourself... but someone else might be seeing you. Someone you can't see. And that someone could be harmless... but who's saying he can't be?

Don't want to ponder upon it long, but remember that the next time you're looking in the mirror, the longer you look, the longer it looks at you. And familiarity, they say, breeds contempt. Contempt breeds rage. Rage breeds... monsters.

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-12-
Things I want for the new year:

I. Monetary Needs

1. Half Life 2.

2. House Of Leaves.

3. An upgrade.

4. Pink Floyd's "Final Cut".

5. Shpongle's new album, which will come out in 2005.

6. Stephen King's IT, the movie.

7. Ramsey Campbell's "Alone In The Horror"

8. Ishq's "Orchid"

9. A pair of blue jeans. The old ones are so worn out you could scratch the fabric away with a fingernail and you'd see my pale skin.

10. LOTR: Two Towers OST.

11. Gladiator OST.

12. Talvin Singh's "Ha".

13. Massive Attack's "Mezzanine".


II. Money Don't Matter Worth Shit

1. All of my brotherhood together back in Mumbai. Guha can't come, of course. Amy can't, either. Everyone else should. All of us doing what we used to do: mess around.

2. Having Mom cool down a bit, ease up a little, enjoy her life for a change.

3. Everyone having a jolly Christmas. I know it's probably impossible, but what's wrong with wishing, huh?

4. Experiencing that Fresher's Party music crescendo again.

5. Dad calling up. I should probably hate him for leaving, but I don't. I can't.

6. A little snow in Mumbai. Yes, snow. One of God's miracles. Please. been eons since I saw and felt snow. Please?

7. I never dreamed of Amy. Not once. I want to. You know, seeing her, even if she's not there. Touching her face, even if it's not real. Maybe taking a walk, maybe just sitting on a beach, maybe something else. Anything. Except watching her die. Anything.

8. Getting ten straight hours of sleep. I don't have insomnia, but I have a disease called Engineering College.

Is that too much to ask for? All of the above? I wonder, I wonder.

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-13-
Some guy from Delhi shot a clip of a schoolgirl giving him a blowjob. He sold it to friends. Those friends sold it to friends. Soon, everyone who had an MMS enabled phone got that clip. Someone sold it on bazee.com, which is like ebay.com. He got caught. The guy who shot it got caught.

And you know what? I don't mind that guy shooting the clip. What I find disgusting is him selling it to his friends. How fucking low can you get? I mean, okay, if the girl wants it and you want it, you shoot it on video-- it's better than watching someone pornostar fucking some other pornostar--but you sell it to the fucking world? And the girl doesn't even fucking mind? Keep it private, for God's sake. Why do you have to show it to the world?

Where are we headed, folks? When kids don't even have these simple morals--no, morals is the wrong words--ethics?

I didn't see the clip; the mere thought of her being a schoolgirl pissed me off. "Schoolgirl" in India means she can't be older than 16. The guy would be about the same age. Now are you convinced?

The thing is that the teens are just full of sex; and I'm not sure if it's their fault. I know when I was in the zit stage of life how much of a sexaholic I was, but man, come on, this crap just crosses the limit. I don't think anything else can top this. No, wait, I don't want to know. Maybe there are people out there who masturbate using shit. Vomit, maybe. Who knows? And there are all those tales of self-asphyxiation-cum-masturbation.

We're all going no-fucking-where. What a stinking pisser.

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-14-
Half Life 2 has a demo. I can download it. But it's a 750 MB file. So I can't even fucking do that. Or maybe I will. Downloading it on this piece of shit modem connection will take ten days, but waiting ten days to get a small part of HL2 is still better than waiting God knows how many years for the whole thing.

I might not be here at W.com for the next few days if I'm downloading the demo, so if I'm not there for Christmas, have a merry one, okay?

---Chimp.

At a higher altitude with flag unfurled, we reach the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world... - Pink Floyd, "High Hopes"

The sphere was solid with Plunkett, and only waited for someone to be in. Like, like the meaning of a word waiting for a word to be the meaning of. - John Crowley, "Engine Summer"