The 'It's All About You' Song

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life, is life itself” – Milan Kundera

There comes a point where you begin to believe your illusions.

That precarious juncture where the world and all that is in it really does revolve solely around you. The few people you truly cannot avoid interacting with are no more than holograms floundering along your atmosphere, but temporarily seeking you out here... on 'your' turf. It is all yours. It isn’t necessarily isolation, rather a hyperbolic narcissism carved to help nurture your notion that you are indeed special, even if you choose not to acknowledge, advance or advertise the fact.
That this is your world, your dream, your delusion, your destiny and your dimension.
They are the phantoms, random ghosts floating on pavements and sidewalks, but ‘you’ are the story and if there is really a narrative being carved out, then it is all for you. The God-voice is directed at you, is about you and is for you.

Such highly cultivated neuroses can only come from pathological people-phobia.
Which is why you are beginning to doubt if it is you missing out on the social experience or society missing out on your experience?

You leave work early and as you are driving home, you realise you just want to drive somewhere that doesn’t lead to anything, so you let your play list drag you through an hour of extra traffic to a section of town that doesn’t interest you, save in the fact that the traffic is minimal and you stop at a department store to buy a coke and some narcissus posies from the kid standing outside without shoes. You look at the boys’ feet and give him a smile and an extra 30 rupees feeling that this ought to make you feel less guilty about the fact that you can’t summon up a suitable measure of guilt for his condition.
You park your car in a McDonald’s parking lot staring at groups of youngsters seemingly living 'a Life' in the midst of what is supposed to be ‘your’ floor show. You idly deliberate about what the real significance of extra’s on a film set is, perhaps they just make blank spaces look colourful. So you forgive them their irksome clique. You have finished your coke and wait for the next song to start your car and head home. You have no one to call, no one to see and no one to care about and you are not quite sure if it bothers you as much as it should or if you are denying your denial again. Someone said that home is like a naked person, you don’t really understand what that means but you figure it means a sense of completion and wholeness and comfort and the like. So you decide you aren’t really headed home, just to the roof over your head with everything a girl could want under it.
You wonder why you want more.
You wonder why you are so ungrateful.

You reach home to find that the power is out, so you discreetly creep up into your room and carry your computer out onto the terrace and compose this inane rambling run-on-sentence dedicated to your overwhelming belief that someday it will all make sense and a day after that it will all begin to matter.

You recall a Dylan biography you saw last night that mentions ‘Seven simple rules for life in hiding’:

1) Never trust a cop in a rain coat - You realise that you, like most of your countrymen and women, don’t trust cops on principal.

2) Beware of Enthusiasm and of Love, each is temporary and quick to sway – You are aware that you generally fake enthusiasm and are as terrified of love as you are of not getting it so you will always ‘beware’ of both sentiments.

3) When asked if you care about the worlds problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks. He will not ask again – You do not really care enough that you really do care about the worlds problems but you remember, with a lingering sense of trepidation, that you are scared of looking people in the eyes.

4 & 5) Never give your real name and if ever told to look at yourself, NEVER look – You cultivate as many names as you do false impressions and whenever you try and look at yourself, you lose the battle to the illusions that seem to define you. You are completely safe from self-awareness.

6) Never say or do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand – You never say or do anything of consequence in front of any person save yourselves.

7) Never ‘create’ anything. If it were misinterpreted it will chain you and follow you the rest of your life and never change – You have never created anything you have felt comfortable sharing and everything you create is misinterpreted in the process of its conception.

You wait till the power comes back to switch on some music and settle down in the middle of the floor in your ocean-print pyjamas with your paint brush in hand. You relish the acrid smell of turpentine and paint mixing with the rough gravelly strains of the folk-music strumming through your speakers. You dip the brush in blues for the Police man in a Raincoat; in pink for Enthusiasm, in red for Love, in a mauve haze for the World’s Problems; in yellow for Your Name and orange for your False Mirrors, in black for Not Understanding and you envelop it all in a green bottle for Creating Something.

And you cork the bottle in brown so that it doesn’t spill.