plain on a plane. beer is blackening my brain. I am perched on my porch where people pass by and I am wry, I am rockin it celibate and this is why:

I think I just accidentally swallowed an ant. this is the story of the flood, and while I tell it the sun becomes dusky with shadows, the tree-leaves seem limp. arm-in-arm people patter past, AND I SEEM SAD. and entropy envelopes everything. and my heart hums with hubris.

obviously.

yesterday a student in the software architecture department committed suicide, but time is still progressing, like it will until it won't. in the flood a few months ago my sister and I were in a taxi, following a car filled with our luggage, lugged by lenny, the IIT driver. the taxi driver was passionate. sam, my sister, kept singing a song with the word 'sexy' in it, and each time she sang it the taxi driver would turn and beam at us lovingly. 'I love american women!' he said. 'I want to marry one.' he looked at me pointedly. sam started her song again when it began to rain, diminutive drops at first but then sheets of water, sounding like nails hammering on the top of the taxi. our driver was unphased. water began to bubble up through the slats on the bottom of the car, and he locked all of the doors.

'if anyone tries to come in...' he said, frustrated by the language barrier, 'I will fight them -- I mean, I will MURDER them!' he checked to see if we were impressed with this statement. sam giggled. later, before the car was waterlogged completely and we had to drive with lenny, he compulsively grabbed my arm and stared at it.

'your arms have hair!' he announced, as if this was a complete surprise. sam said, 'doesn't every woman have hair on her arms?'

'NO,' he answered, dropping my limp arm. 'hairlessness is a quality in women I like VERY MUCH.' sam laughed but he ignored her. 'I will take you to drugstore to get hair removal cream. you will love. one time I buy for american girl, kim, she was staying in bombay one week and we lived like man and wife. you understand?' he raised his eyebrows at me and I reluctantly nodded. 'we lived as man and wife for one week and when she go I take her to airport and she cry. she cry so much water.'

I nodded, as sam and I sipped another cigarette.

'you know that the cigarette is bad for you? how many you smoking in one day? one? two?' he asked.

'five,' I answered. 'thousand,' sam added. we laughed and he furrowed his brow in confusion.

'five thousand is very bad for you. what religion are you? what music do you like? american music? I have american music.' he popped a cassette tape in and 'we wish you a merry christmas' started to play. naturally sam and I found this very entertaining as it was the middle of july, but he could not understand why we laughed as we heard every christmas song ever written and he seemed frustrated.

'what religion are you?' he asked me. 'christian, like your name?'

'I don't have a religion,' I said. he shook his head.

'everyone have religion. I'm a hindu!' he announced proudly, and then he proceeded to take off his shirt. the rain fell so thickly that we could hardly see outside. 'don't worry, I will protect you,' he said, grabbing my hand. 'are your legs having hair, too?' I didn't bother to answer this question. 'sam, what do you think?' he asked my sister.

'I think... I think I'm bored,' she said. we had been in the taxi for three and a half hours and the car merely moved inches. soon men were approaching our taxi, wading through knee-deep water, and they banged on our car with sticks. they didn't want us, they wanted a ride as all of the trains and busses to the slums and suburbs were completely submerged under water. sam had a frightened look in her eye and my heart raced madly.

'you no need worry!' our taxi driver exclaimed jovially. 'I will protect you with violence.' he looked at me in his rear-view mirror. 'BOTH of you,' he said. however, the water continued to rise through the slats at the bottom of the taxi and the motor stopped. he seemed regretful. lenny stopped his car and insisted that we get in with him, with all of our luggage too. we did and sam and I were so mashed together that we felt like one person. our taxi driver seemed quite upset with this arrangement, but there was nothing we could do, and we paid him, and proceeded with lenny, who listened to no music at all and seemed to delight in lecturing us on how foward and immoral american women are.

'cover yourselves,' he kept telling us, glaring at our sleaveless shirts. we had nothing with which to cover ourselves and eventually sam just started giving him the finger every time he turned around to issue an order. we were in the car with him for thirty hours. when darkness fell we decided to get out of the car to find a hotel.
'where are you going?' he asked rhetorically. 'you're not going anywhere. cover yourself--'
'you can go fuck yourself,' sam said, sixteen, cursing like a sailor. we waded through water waist-deep for an hour, every hotel packed with people sleeping on the floor and on tables and on chairs. a cow carcass gently glided past us, turning over like a planet. we returned to the car and lenny expressed his displeasure by eating in front of us and offering us nothing.

but I really must add that, in contrast to the flooding in new orleans which produced looting and lust and anger and violence, everyone in bombay was so kind, so caring, so generous. when I opened my eyes the next day to find that our car had not moved an inch, people were pouring out from their apartments, offering food and water, clambering onto busses and giving everything they had. we were offered more food than we could eat and we were invited into a flat where twin girls gazed at us with huge eyes and I slept on a carpet, curled. 'it will be fifteen more minutes,' lenny said for fifteen hours. I desperately wanted to hit him over the head with a rock.

a week later, when the waters had abated, we ate sushi in a hotel across the street from the gate of india. as we walked past it, we were followed by beggers and people with horrid deformities, and one woman put her baby right in my arms and tried to run away. I was horrified. I could not keep the wailing infant. and last week when I attended a seminar for the distribution of unused mill lands, a taxi driver told me that I looked like a movie star, 'I mean it,' and I was so touched.

but: celibacy. maslow's hierarchy of needs doesn't extend to this bursting place, this place that is bleeding and flowing with so many people that are hungry and that have to piss and shit on the buildings made of tin and cardboard, miles of shacks and tents and can you imagine these barefoot, naked kids giggly playing MASH? there is no mansion. there is no apartment. there are only shacks, pressing outwards against the boundaries of the stuffed city. sixty five percent of the people in india live in the slums that I pass every day on my way into town, and I am powerless, this helplessness is gutted and useless and I am useless. has the earth come loose from its galactic neck?

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. living, loosely, largely, lunging at anything and everything. trying to get a grip. on it. I take antidepressants, and since it's true and real and here and now I shouldn't try to deny it. but it seems that, since I have been wavering on and off lately, and flickering in and out, that the only difference between being medicated and sober and being okay and being depressed is my degree of apathy. when I am medicated I am apathetic (and, perhaps, empathetic) to a degree that I could never achieve in a sober state. for example, I want a life brimming and bursting with bright color and infinite intricate details.

I want something that is impossible, because human beings are inherently selfish, naturally selected -- it is the drive of self interest that keeps us alive, keeps us feeding ourselves and entertaining ourselves and swirling in a solipsistic self-referential wonderland, catapulted products of the survival of the fittest, forever competing, forever replicating our genes. and you can't see.

if you put two dogs in a room together, before long you will have a colorful cocaphany of prancing puppies, but if you put a man and a woman in a room together, this might not happen. this might not happen because, for better or for worse, human have evolved with the option of choice. we are still ruthless gene replicators, but we have the ability to choose who we will share our genes with. this is what separates us from 'animals', animals that fuck and fight and fight to fuck. for better or for worse, we can love, human hearts can thrill with the thought of a specific someone, someone we believe to be equal to our ego. someone that can complicate our choice, and I cannot explain love, or why our hearts surge for someone special, or why we pine for them and plan for them. no it doesn't make sense. and maybe this transforms us, transcends us, makes humans special and unique when the delicate web of fragile empathy and love ensnares us, and love is bright and beautiful. even if apparent acts of altruism actually help us propogate our species, it makes our hearts swirl and our hearts crumble, and we run and dance and sing of love while the creatures beneath our heels weave webs of entrapment and fight for the right to fuck and fight and fuck and fight. but this unique experience of being able to change changes nothing -- I think. I think it changes nothing. how can love -- a pure surge of sincerity -- compete in this world where everything is ripe for a wry smile? we're all in on the joke. love, a pulse of fragility, can hardly live in a place where we cover our souls with a cool, foreign exterior, where we beam out what we want to be, where nothing is real or serious or beautiful or kind. where nothing is sacred. where everything is flippantly chuckled at with a cruel gleam, when it's best to reach deep within our evolving ethos and maliciously satirize everything. love cannot live in the age of irony. when everything is ironic. when nothin is sacred. a society without boundaries or personal morals or personal ethics. when everything is funny. when we laugh at everything because it's so funny.

and so

I think love is quietly dissapearing. love cannot live in a land of irreverent duplicity, insincerety, hedonism. instead, there is lust (I used to think that lust was the most altruistic thing on the planet, that admiring another's body without any alterior motives was the only true, unselfish thing. then I watched 'the 40-year-old virgin' and I collapsed in sobs, in the car, sobs of someone on the outside, someone so dissapointed by the degradation experienced by everyone who lusts or is lusted after, everyone leaping in life. nothing is real). nothing is serious. hello, celibacy. like anyone is going to read this pretentious piece of shit, as if like totally. whatever-whatever.

without a universal law, there is no gravity

without no gravity there is no atmosphere

without no atmosphere there is no chance of life

I do not exist

*I would update with pictures but I've lost about 10,000 computer chords. that's right TEN THOUSAND

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