The Reykjavik Wanderlust.

[ghostsinthemist]

Picking a time.

My sense of timing has always been awry. To couple that with poorly picking hand patterns to do something very important to my sense of being, has surreptitiously pushed me off successively shorter hills.

Enough about me though.

There have been butterflies fluttering across the asphalt streams of roads - orange specks slow-moving on a canvas made of charcoal.

And a blue bird landing on the side of the road. As if life wanted to speak up, cry out, point towards it to say "hey look! there is more to me."

[ghostsinthemist]

Worth.

Not that I was ever sprightly but my functionality has surpassed the proportions of disuse reached by robots deemed useless.

[ghostsinthemist]

Obsession

When checking spam takes precedence over everything else.

[ghostsinthemist]

Warning Sign

I started looking for a warning sign When the truth is, I miss you Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so A warning sign It came back to haunt me, and I realised That you were an island and I passed you by And you were an island to discover

(Coldplay accompanies me on long runs)

[ghostsinthemist]

Popping Balloons.

For a few seconds for a few days now, in the normality of mechanistic living, my heart has been beating so hard.

I have no idea why.

[ghostsinthemist]

Fare.

Don't worry, I have enough for a ticket.

[kari-shma]

by: Irene Suchocki

[ghostsinthemist]

Lost in Translation

Hope is cruel. Unless you get your supplement from a film. 

I re-watched Lost in Translation today. I soaked up the desolation and the spatial absence of familiarity of the characters. 

I also soaked up the unspoken uncertainty, satisfied my absence is valuable.

[ghostsinthemist]

Snow+Light

Some days make you wonder where you are headed. Everything that you do, have done and are about to do seem so trivial in comparison to the largeness of a despondency that bubbles everything in bright lights, music and the passing by of the world.

[ghostsinthemist]

What do you call a jigsaw piece that doesn't belong?

Superfluity. 

[ghostsinthemist]

when days bleed into one another

I have a complicated relationship with time. It slows down, speeds up and then sometimes, it just ceases to exist. Then some days, I just navigate days and weeks and months and years by the simple compass of light; measuring waking hours by sunlight and hours of sleeplessness through moonlight.

I am not even sure what I am writing.

[makingsof]

“I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or nearby, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extend of the deserted countryside where the traveler hastens toward the nearest station; and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, to the imminent sweetness of his return.”

Proust, Swann’s way. (via visualblurb)

[julie911-deactivated20140702]

It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain. Damn, there’s nothing like that, is there? I’ve been there and you have too. You’re nodding your head.

Henry Rollins (via julie911)

[ghostsinthemist]

TUESDAYS AND THE DAYS OF THE WEEK

I began seeing this cardioid a few days ago; big plastic gelatin shape of geometry fluttering in the air opposite two monumental swords in a city used to licking the salts of the sea. A cardioid, I hear invisible voices asking? For the sake of honest disclosure, allow me to confess that mathematics and I have a thorny relationship.  In anti-Forrest-Gumpian tradition, we have been peas and carrots that never got along. But I know my cardioids, much like Dr. Faustus intimately knew about the world and its treasure trove of knowledge (my comprehension of cardioids probably arriving at the same mortal cost as the respected scholar’s). I even tragically know their parametric equations:

X= a(2cos t – cos 2t)

Y= a(2sin t – sin 2t)

If you have already googled cardioid or had the exquisitely nerdy adventure of reaching for a graph paper to plot out a rather blobby shape, you will know that the cardioid is basically just an overweight heart lying on its side, napping as it waits to explode in glorious passion.

This shape, ♥, the one we popularly call the heart seem to pop up like elves in Iceland (true international Colbert ‘myth’) in the month of February. Oh the ubiquity of love, they seem to sing, these little red smurfs of passion, gallivanting from window-displays to card greetings to the souls of balloons in the hands of young men at traffic lights. The pied piper that is the 14th of February lead these hearts (allow me to state here of course, that despite their no doubt verified effects on the seas, the mountains, the moon and the sun, the individual heart is just a pump) through our streets, our air-waves, our lungs, our vision of the world and possibly through the coursing veins of our bodies.

So as I passed this magnificently plastic-jelloed shrine at Do Talwaar (oh the sumptuous geographical conjugation of swords and hearts could be a great romantic metaphor of its own) on innocent errands, on apparently accompanied drives and on secret missions of secret wishes, the great cardioid hung there on a billboard, clinging on to dear raison d’être against the sun, the unusual Karachi cold and vainglory of tempestuous time.

Time.

We have so little of it and yet we spend so little of it. The physical, ostentatious cardioids and hearts and their buying and selling is something, my rather un-monied, echoing chest might not say much about because it understands that our extravagance and unbridled display of them, despite being garishly affected by currency signs, comes from a deeper place; like a Wonderland rabbit hole of humanity, where Alice is not the only one allowed to fall without crashing. But I do find a few words bubbling regarding time and the direction.

Everyone has an inkling about time. If Valentine’s day (or a Tuesday as I am calling it this year) is about love, why do we have only one day of it? Shouldn’t we love all the year round? Or does having one day make it so much more special? Opinions will use their lances to pierce each other on the issue so I shall not wade into the debate with my wooden bow and arrow (yes). All I ask is, we should all ponder whether the exhibition of our love should be consigned to a day somebody else chose for us. Or shall we let our passions trickle each day of year, little by little, on post-it notes, random text messages, in quiet words, surprise food and pieces of paper long hidden in books waiting to be discovered?

The ‘direction’ is something I have a few more opinions about. Why must our Valentine narratives revolve so untiringly around our beloved? (let me just admit, personally, it is the most important one for me) Why do we not use love in a broader, less passionate, more humane manner? I may not be a smart man but I know what love is. Gump said that. And I repeated it.

So after you get back from your dinner, your great day out, your planned surprise for the love of your life (totally do the Valentine thing by the way – preferably everyday of the year but definitely this day), take a few minutes to say a few choice affectionate words to someone else – your mother, your father, your pesky siblings (avoid this getting out of hand, lest your beloved has a few formerly banned SMS words to verbally brighten up your dull day of only affection). But do not stop there. Clichés should have taught us by now that the well of love only grows the more we spread it around (again, opportunists I am talking to you, allow not this to be a justification for sneaky shenanigans). So be imaginative. Be pleasant to your neighbour. Give a flower (as a ‘flowerist’ I urge you not to kill any – they have lives too) to someone old, a friend who has been there for you. Give that guy making the intersection turn a few seconds more, let him pass. Give a salute to a soldier or a policeman; despite the meta-narratives that surround us, it is pertinent to remember, there are humans there too. Be generous, smile (ladies, it goes without saying, this part should be done judiciously). Say something nice to a stranger. Say thank you and sorry enough. Say I love you to the person you love.

Not just on the cardioid festival of the 14th of February but on a Tuesday. And Wednesday. And Thursday. And Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. And Monday. And Tuesday. Until you lose count and you end up on a remote day of the week, in some desolate month of the year in the travelling city of your heart, celebrating Love.

An online, edited version of this can be found at: 

http://www.dawn.com/2012/02/14/love-tuesday-and-the-rest-of-the-week.html

Please visit and comment. It feels lonely. (and I am a struggling lazy artist, heh)

[kari-shma]

A Cathedral Made from 55,000 LED Lights

The Luminarie De Cagna is an imposing cathedral-like structure that was recently on display at the 2012 Light Festival in Ghent, Belgium.

[ghostsinthemist]

To a statement made today...

Yes, as a matter of fact I am.

[ghostsinthemist]

Eik Chirya Boli

I had only really seen parrots pick out fated letters for me before. Today though, a parakeet decided, what the contours of my future would look like. So, the white, zebra-ed parakeet skipped a few clawed steps, mused over the irony of its perfunctory action holding such visceral, significant meaning for the waiting human and finally picked an orange envelope:

(a rather generous translation)

"The weight of the world hangs heavy over your shoulders. Your mind is filled with overwhelming thoughts, their cumulative gravities crushing every other idea. Instead of accommodating your nights, your sleep has taken refuge in empty glazing stares littered across the day; your sleep subsists now only in how vacuously you look at the world. No peace of mind, no sleep, you must beware taking bad advice. Poisonous thoughts should be resisted for you must fall. There may be no statute of limitations but that shouldn't matter." 

Even parakeets are not exempt from being exemplars of the deception of appearances. I had always thought of those little avians as being more or less, cheerful. Never find yourself thinking these cute little things can be nothing more than adorable anymore. 

They may look huggable but boy, do they portend some heavy stuff.

I may not completely be sure what the bird's envelope meant but I do know I haven't slept in a couple of days now (insomnia is very tiring) and this blog post should actually attribute its existence to me being caught in a hamster wheel spun by a breeze which blows in opposite directions.  

I have collected a few empty bottles in my room (only half are stolen). I would fill them with myself but I have a feeling, like last year, I will fill them by someone else. Which is a good thing. Keeps me honest about how I have come to be where I am at.

I live in a snowglobe now; a sleepless man stuck in a glass world, collecting bottles so he may fill them with what he could never have. There should be a parakeet in that world too. 

It's funny, I can still see the chirya horizontally sliding over my envelope, looking at it, deciding "yeah, this is it." I can still see it holding my future in its tiny beak as it made its indirect way back to its cage.