And now, a spectacle

In the words of me bloggo-starman, fakestevejobs, big namaste to those who sought to allay my old age/death fears. However, it was not a bad dream. I get to work and after banging at my laptop for an hour, I look up and everything beyond five feet is a blur. I kid you not. I did notice the past week that the Indian cricket team on the TV in my office, which is over 15 feet away, was looking a bit dodgy. Besides getting old and/or dying, I’m going to have to make a ‘spectacle’ of myself as well!

Death by old age... begins

I woke up today and looked at myself and froze. Surely, I had a fatal disease. My hairline had receded like the arctic coastline under global warming. My beard was littered with white hair, as if some rogue pixie had mistook it for a fairytale garden and spent the night studding the dark growth with white.
My head felt heavy and my body, like it was ready to cash in and return to ash. It had to be more than the Red Label I had chugged last night. Am I dying? Or is this what they call, old age?

Noveau yeesh!

The pace at which Dubai and Abu Dhabi are evolving on the economic, grandeur and lifestyle-on-offer scale are by any consideration, meteoric. One can only gape as the UAE moves from being the modern centre of the Arab the world, to being the Arab centre of the modern world.
Frankly, the ostentatious-ness that gilds pretty much every structure, plan and project in and by the UAE, intimidates me. I’m uncomfortable in overtly opulent surroundings. To the manor born, I was not. My middle-class upbringing may have numbed my sophist senses, forever dooming me to the backbenches of noveau riche-ness.

Flow

I’m big on flow. Compartmentalisation, deconstruction, planning and calculated risks all jar in my lexicon. Everything I do is all part of one big flow of life. Now this may sound grandly bohemian, but in the everyday nitty-gritty of existence, it does pose a few problems. If anything goes wrong anywhere, the whole flow gets interrupted. As against if you had little boxes for different parts of your life, if one got messed up the others would be still intact. A balance is good. But I’m not a balanced person. So, what are you, a flow-er or a box-er?

More irony

Ever been in an ICU in a hospital? If you have, and I’m hoping as a visitor and not as an inmate, you would have noticed the place is sanitised to perfection. No germs, dirt or life-threatening stuff of even the most miniscule nature is allowed in. Did you get the feeling it would be fun to live in such an environment? It should, after all, be enjoyable to exist in an atmosphere knowing the chances of infection are zero.
However, the feeling I get in an ICU is of an alien. It just does not feel normal. Ironic.

Move over, Byron

Well, how long did you reckon I’d go without trying to be upstage Lord Byron…

I don’t dare dream no more
Instead, I only do nightmares
I don’t dare sleep no more
Instead, I do nightshifts
Actually, I just don’t dare anymore…

Well, not entirely true

I do dare cry now though
Got a storehouse of tears to clear
I also dare to scream,
Mostly inside of my head
But it sounds quite loud, and often,
Resounds, over and over again
Like a sound track to the dead

Stop that damn noise!,
Can’t you see I’m trying to live!

Al Qaeda-ed out

I am willing to wager a fiver that Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman, thanks to cable TV now the world’s most famous bounty hunter, will be soon on a flight to Pakistan and from there, in local tribal disguise, be horse-backing it, if necessary, to the cave-ridden lawless terrain that makes for the North West Frontier Province border, that Pakistan shares with Afghanistan.
The latest bounty offered for main-man Osama bin Laden’s head by the US Senate is $50 million.
As a newsman and general citizen of the world I’m all Al Qaeda-ed-out. Man, talk about overkill (no pun intended).