Euphoria: Heaven or Las Vegas

 New year 2014 found me on the terrace of the place I was staying sipping a beer, and more importantly as lonely as a mirage in a desert. It had been only 10 days since I had moved to Bangalore and had not yet laid the foundations for any sort of companionship, superficial or otherwise. You might get the idea that I am not social, but I assure it was not so. I make friends quite easily and lose them easier still. This time around, it being a fresh start of sorts for me, I had decided to take things slower. So with what was like four beer cans for company and a packet of cigarettes to go with it, I settled on the parapets on the terrace of the building as the impending end of another year came ever so near.

 I had stumbled upon this heavenly music a couple of months before, the Cocteau Twins. As uplifting as it was melancholic and absolutely exquisite, Liz Fraser and co. gave me extended company to get through the loneliness. Loneliness induced by the visions of great merriment and the general to do that accompanied the festivities of the occasion. Heaven or Las Vegas washed over me like a tame drizzle on a warm afternoon, accentuating feelings of calmness through the general loneliness. Right from the opening track, Cherry Coloured Funk, the entire album flowed through. I watched as pretty girls being escorted by their male companions, people working their way through the great crowd that moved ever so slowly down below, without purpose but with what was essentially euphoria. End of another year and the start of a new one, resolutions and promises being made, being thought off; Inebriated consciousnesses.

 The songs and the mild alcohol brought contemplations. Sceneries of purposelessness in happiness unfolding in the chaotic night. Quiet and addressing multiple thought trains, I watched on as hundreds of bitter sweet stories were made down below. With the songs, drinks and burning smoke for company I watched on with eyes watering ever so slightly. And yet it was nothing but intense euphoria. 

Cigarettes are a luxury and so is beer. Food is all but a necessity I cannot bear.

Been broke for so long it's not true,
Wanted a good deal, though no, it's not new.
Lot's of people know me and all of them know,
My pocket's as empty as a fallen angel's soul.

Bangalore yet again proves to be a metaphorical black hole subjective to monetary resources. Month after month earnings disappear and no savings grace the bank account with its presence. When an inherent apathy for money and not for what it can buy makes you do nothing to earn the extra cash and at the same time buy all that you can manage in the available time, being insanely broke is just unavoidable. Stacked to the apathy just mentioned is a handicap, a latent inability to manage anything that reaches beyond the range of moving your limbs around. Thankfully time management skill are being inculcated on a regular basis due to current necessities. Jam! Damn! Jam it in the whole idea that managing money doesn't make you less of a hippy. A smart hippy, go on preaching all the wonderful snippets of information and philosophical ideologies that you have acquired through ages of living in the internet. But make sure you have a teeny bit of money left to feed yourself by the end of the month. It is indeed a good idea. Aah well let's see how eight more days of utter fasting fares in the plan. Already skinny as a rail; you did arrive in this place with a round belly. Now's it's more a right handed parabola with respect to the y and z axes.

The management skills ought to be developed before you forget the taste of good beer and the feeling of a smoke in a shelter from the rain. The coolness that envelopes the warmth from the cigarette. So many of your little big indulgences depend on the same cash that you deplore and denounce. Damn, the monologue sounds so freakishly pathetic from a third person's perspective. Who hates money? You have heard somewhere that, if you learn to love money it will come and stay with you, that makes it sound like a woman. So wonder what happens if you lie that you love it! Will it believe you? Trust you enough to move in with you? Make love to you? Well suppose that's exactly what you are doing right now! Making some money off some work you are apathetic about and hoping for hopes best that you will find the <fuck> Indian dream? Oh come on, not the Indian dream, that makes it sound more pathetic. For the want of a better idea, there is no dream. there's just some stupid fiction.

And at the end for all the hopes and dreams: My Bloody Valentine.