The blue skies that graced our island these past few days have had a strange effect on me... in fact, it seems to occur every year around the same time as winter begins its slow retreat and the first glimpses of spring emerge. And I know that strange feeling is going to worsen to reach a peak around April/May.

There is something about the soft, mild warmth of early spring, its clear sunshine and diluted blue skie , that just seems to transport me back in time whether I like it or not. Suddenly, as I glance up towards the bright horizon, I see myself as a teenager, sitting in the sun outside school with friends. I can almost smell the air of then. I can close my eyes and be there all over again. The contrast between what the mind's eye can still see and the reality of now can be overwhelming. It's like Time itself is slapping you in the face, in a way.

When I'm not caught up reminiscing my teenage years, I find myself remembering last year... How things can change in the space of a year - but I should know better, really, for I saw first hand how everything can change overnight. It's hard for me to believe now that around the same time last year I was spending almost all my free time with a guy who would end up disappearing out of my life as abruptly as he'd entered it. What a contrast it is between spending most of your sunny days in someone's arms and being completely alone a year later as the sunny days return.

I guess they call it 'nostalgia'.

My diary writing has trickled down to an almost non-existent state these days. It's not like the constant thinking and musing have stopped, it's just that the weight of disillusionment in general feels like a massive boulder that has fallen on them... crushing them to a pulp, forcing them in rather than out, like a blocked drain, or a river whose flow has been cut short by an avalanche of rocks disrupting its bed.

The source of that disillusionment can be found right here. Ever since I started this Blog, I've been growing more and more disillusioned, and I just can't dismiss the fact that my 'thoughts' have ended up attracting the wrong people over and over again. In fact, that Blog has brought me only trouble from the moment it went 'live'... And I know now that when I finally leave it behind, the only regret I'll be left with is of ever starting it in the first place because, truly, if I could go back in time to the moment when I naively thought of 'writing a blog' I would have slapped myself in the face and moved on from the idea.

I just can't get away from the fact that my own thoughts have only served to connect me to all the wrong people in the end. Why do people always have to interfere? The internet is even worse in that respect, because you often don't even know these strangers who end up tempering with your perceptions or influencing your thoughts.

I always liked getting comments now and then, but I now realise how much I hate that some people should have had the need to contact me - deluding themselves that we had anything in common whatsoever or anything to share in the slightest beyond the words I felt the need to express here.

I guess the joke is on me.

Born to Die

I spent the day sitting at my desk, snowed under piles of transcripts, documents of all sorts and various papers scattered all around me. Markings and scribblings, attempts at sifting through the whole mess, trying hard to put some order to that mountain of information so my mind could finally synthesise the whole to spit out a version of some summary. That would be me attempting to write a descent feature.

Have you ever tried your hand at writing a feature? Back at university, I used to think I was rubbish at feature writing, mainly because I could never find anything to write about. My tutor would invariably say: "Find something to write about that no one else has thought of. It could be on a topic that everyone has been writing about, you just need to find a unique angle."

A good feature has you reading it from start to finish without once wondering how hard it must have been to write the whole thing - or how many days and hours were needed, how much information had to be taken in by the writer and then synthesised in such a way that it would allow for an enticing retelling of the story. As readers, we only feel the enticement to read the piece, and the better the piece flows, the less we are aware of just how much work and effort went into the few pages we're reading.

Good writing doesn't just require good writing skills. Oh no. It seems to require excellent memory as well as the capacity to not just take in information but sift through it to only retain the gems to be found in the deluge. And that's what feature writing has taught me about my own self, that I have that capacity to sift through a rather inhuman amount of information.

I love journalism, and I'm not sure why. It is everything that I am not in more ways than one. I remember being at my worse in my early 20s, deep in depression with only a desire to die. I had no interest in life, I had no goals left to achieve - nothing. Then I found this job in a cinema, where I got to watch movies for free. For some reason people in that place happened to be really nice and friendly, and for the first time, I seemed to fit in with a bunch of random people from all over the world.

I remember watching Blood Diamond, followed by the latest Superman movie, and suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. As cliché or insane as that may sound, the sole reason I decided to get into journalism was after watching these two movies. Yet that profession was nothing like me except for the writing element. I was shy and awkward with people, I had no self confidence left whatsoever, and I was about as competitive as an infant. But I remember something within me pushing me to go for it regardless... something within was telling me that it was exactly what I needed to build a bridge between the dream world I had immersed myself in from a young age and Reality. It was going to be tough, I could feel it from the start... because I knew I was about to go down a road that was opposite to my pre-dispositions.

But as I sit lost under a pile of transcripts and documents, and as I wonder who the hell 'I' is endlessly, I know at least one thing: I made the right choice then. No matter how opposite the job was to my person, it helped beyond words. It helped bridge a chasm between my own ivory tower and Reality - the world.

And as I was struggling away writing that darn feature, I remembered that we're all born to die anyway. How funny that we keep forgetting that especially when we keep ourselves busy. We're always so focused on reading a story from start to finish that we forget that it's the making of the story that matters.

Strange Shores

The exhaustion that weighs on me like a ton of rocks can hardly be described. I sit in front of the computer and words get stuck inside my head. One would say 'I need a holiday', but all that only serves to remind me of is the fakeness of life in general.

Everything about living in society seems contrived, artificial, and based on giving off a certain appearance or other. We're all playing roles with one another constantly, trying too hard sometimes to second guess hidden motives, condemned as we are to only ever be able to grasp one subjective perspective of reality at a time.Yet at the same time as I write this, I don't see how this could be avoided since that seems to be the way we're intrinsically wired.

Religion, for instance, is an incredibly powerful artifice. Its main strength resides in the way it is taught from the youngest age. Individuals barely get to realise that it only takes a seed planted within the mind at an early age for it to awake at some point later in life. Like a dormant seed, that of religion emerges in full force at least later down the line, when, for one reason or other, the weight of meaninglessness or pain and confusion in general become too much to bear. I almost feel like saying religion is like THE Joker or 'get out of jail' card that embodies Man's ultimate capitulation when it comes to logical thought and reasoning - the individual hits a wall at some point and for some reason can no longer see a way past that wall, so ends up falling back on religion as a better answer than none at all.

The counter argument of this would be the exact opposite perspective I followed in the previous paragraph, meaning that I chose to see this notion of a 'seed' as one planted by Man into his fellow Man's brain from early on, which then leads to a society full of people falling back on that seed at some point when they don't readily embrace it from the start. But the opposite argument could well be that we always had this 'seed' within, this... trace within that invariably leads Man back to seeking 'God'. Even though the argument is just as valid due to the unknown factor (ie. I can't prove that God exists, but I can't disprove his existence either kind of thing) the lunacy of religions and their manipulative aspects linked to the fact that Man himself is responsible for producing 'dogmas' in the first place is the one fact that prevails, at least to me. The notion of 'God' or higher power is the possibility, religion is a man-made fabrication that leads people to fight one another and shed blood never truly in the name of some higher entity as they would like to believe but to be proved right on an individual level.

I realised fairly recently that I've reached a stage in my life where most of my contemporaries are now either married or in long-term relationships. Not only that, but now the time has come for my contemporaries to start reproducing, too. The strange thing is that all the friends I actually made and kept in touch with over the years happen to fall outside that trend (meaning they are mostly single and childless, still), whereas all the people I once knew in the past but with whom I no longer interact with or have no real contact with have all proceeded to enter mainstream relationships and reproduce. If anything, it tends to show that we naturally stick to our 'own' kind, so to speak, and perhaps the universe has a way of dictating which passengers on the train of Life are better suited to sit next to you for longer before it's time to get off and part ways.

Another realisation was bestowed on me not long ago that also added to my growing cynicism when it comes to the ideal of Love. I was meeting with the one childhood friend I managed to stay in touch with all these years, and she was telling me about this common friend we used to have back in high school. I had heard that the girl had recently got married and just assumed she had been lucky enough to find her 'love'. My friend sneered at my naivety at once, telling me she had met with the girl shortly before the wedding and that she had told her that she didn't love the man, but she needed to settle down and the guy was nice enough and suitable. Fast forward a year later, and the couple has now produced their first child.

It seems to fit the pattern, doesn't it? We have youth to idealise and dream about unattainable things like love, but then as we mature we realise the cold and practical nature of reality, and we slowly learn to accept that life isn't so much about love, but about pairing up with a 'suitable' candidate, someone we can get used to, someone we can put up with, someone who shares the same goals etc... The practicalities of Life then keep piling up to the point where it often becomes too much of a hassle to try and change our condition, and in that light it no longer comes as a surprise that couples may remain together till old age. The counter argument to this would simply be that it is in fact what Love is all about in reality - the ability to stick around long enough to the point where what we first saw as 'suitable' has transformed into a deeper feeling. Or something. Still, there's another word for is - habit. And as it happens, we are creatures of habit.

It makes me wish sometimes that I wasn't able to see all these things so clearly and in such a cold, factual light, because I'm sure most people never dwell on these and just go with the flow instead - so yes, maybe the more oblivious and ignorant one is, the happier they can hope to be.

Perhaps this notion of happiness everyone seems so obsessed about comes at a price - the price of thought quality or even human intellect. Only a simpleton or a non-human entity could have a shot at 'happiness', it seems. Ironic, is it not? If that line of thought happens to be right, then we live in a society intent on making us strive for this cleverness that actually ends up removing us further away from that equally obsessive need for 'happiness'.

Interlude

Adieux a la Poésie

Allons, ange déchu, ferme ton aile rose

ta robe blanche et tes beaux rayons d'or

Il faut, du haut des cieux où tendait ton essor,

Filer comme une étoile, et tomber dans la prose.

Il faut que sur le sol ton pied d'oiseau se pose.

Marche au lieu de voler : il n'est pas temps encor;

Renferme dans ton coeur l'harmonieux trésor;

Que ta harpe un moment se détende et repose.

Ô pauvre enfant du ciel, tu chanterais en vain

Ils ne comprendraient pas ton langage divin;

À tes plus doux accords leur oreille est fermée!

Mais, avant de partir, mon bel ange à l'oeil bleu,

Va trouver de ma part ma pâle bien-aimée,

Et pose sur son front un long baiser d'adieu!

- By Théophile Gautier

Space-Time continuum dreaming

I once used to have a black cat I lost many years ago - over 10 years ago now - and the other night I had a strange dream of that cat I once used to have, except that in the dream he now looked much, much older, with whitened hairs all around its furry, delicate 'face'. I remember being taken by surprise at his appearance in the dream, and at once I found myself calculating how old he would be today - 19 years old.... that would be very old for a cat, indeed.

"You've found me! You've come back to me..." I whispered, but as soon as I tried to approach him, he jumped away, almost as though he was walking away from me. I ran after him, looking for him inside some vague room I can no longer recall, and kept coming across other cats looking just like the one I currently have. These 'copies' of my current pet didn't run away from me, on the contrary, they kept coming to me, but I was pushing them away - intent on finding the old cat I'd just seen appear before me. When I woke up from the dream and saw my real cat - the one that is actually alive - sleeping in a ball by my feet, I almost felt guilty for somehow 'rejecting' him in the dream in favour of the one lost so many years ago.

Talk about multi-layers in terms of meanings to be drawn from such a strange and unexpected dream...

The black cat was my childhood pet, and when we left the old country behind overnight, I was made to give him up to family friends who ended up beating him up when they weren't locking him inside a closet. We didn't know about the abuse, but after a few weeks spent in London, I started having dreams of my cat looking withdrawn and skeletal, which led me to convince my mother we needed to go back to check on him. Lo and behold, when we got there by surprise, my poor cat was missing a tooth and looked like he hadn't had a proper meal in days. I remember opening the cupboard in which he was kept and seeing him stare at me for a moment, uncertain. And then there was a flicker of recognition in his impenetrable, feline eyes, followed by a weak meowing whose tone was so disturbingly close to a question mark...

After much insisting on my part, I managed to convince my mother we had to take him with us - I was only 17, and he suddenly represented everything from my old life. After much hassle involved, we finally got him back with us. And this is where the happy ending should be... right?

A mere few months later, while I was away, my mother decided to let him out into the garden of the house we were sharing with a bunch of nasty young men who began to throw stones at him for 'fun'. The poor creature got so scared that he wouldn't come back inside the house... and by the time I came back, he'd been living outside for weeks. I remember sitting outside for hours, waiting to see a glimpse of him, and whenever I did, I'd try to entice him back to me... to no avail. I could see wounds on his body, dried up trickles of blood down his once shiny black fur... One night, right before I had to leave again, I caught a glimpse of him staring into the room I was in from the top of the high brick wall between our garden and that of the next door neighbour... So I went out into the night, and I remember the moon was shining in streaks of silver between the tree leaves dancing gently in the quiet wind. I approached him ever so slowly - and he stayed right there. He didn't move. I patted his wounded head softly and picked him up as slowly as I could, praying inside he wouldn't get spooked... but then I tripped. I fucking tripped on a loose stone... and the next moment he was fighting me, and I had to let go of my grip.

That was the last time I ever saw him. A few months went by, and I had another odd and unexpected dream of him out of the blue, and in that dream I was back in our old home, and there he was. It was as though he'd never left and had been waiting for me to come 'home'. I never dreamed of that old cat again until recently... I used to think that the reason I'd dreamed of him back in our old home was because he'd died, or something of the sort - a 'nicer' reason than the ones reality often ends up providing.

I know that my dreaming of the black cat is linked to deeper underlying 'psychological' reasons, of course. If anything, the animal became a symbol for my subconscious to use to relate certain themes to my conscious side. It's all about the theme of loss, and the hard lesson of letting go, or something of the sort.

The fact that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot go against something akin to 'fate'. As hard as you may try, sometimes you just have no power whatsoever to change the outcome. In the black cat allegory, I suppose I was bound to lose him, and no matter how much I fought against it I eventually did lose him sooner rather than later.

Same Prison, Different Cells

Looking at it in depth, it's always the same charade repeating itself over and over again, with only the detail of faces changing. Different characters, same play - over and over again. That would be 'Life'.

Even as we strive to change the detail in our daily lives, all we're really doing is swapping cells within the same prison.

Man was given reason, and then imagination was added so he wouldn't end up blowing his own brains out from the word go.

But then Man used both imagination and reason to feed his delusions of grandeur, and we created a prison within the main prison - society.