Livinghigh: An evening with Atlas
Monday, January 31, 2005
Livinghigh was here at 8:04 PM /



An evening with Atlas

Spinning yarns in the air and I listen to a conversation taking place behind me. It's a strange girl who looks like Shirley Temple talking about the vagaries of the universe, and however much I try I cannot picture her as anything else but this gnome Reverend Mother from a science fiction thriller. (Note to all watchers: read Frank Herbert's Dune, if you're into fantasy) But I love her for her oddities, because who else in the world can understand my own oddities... it's a chain, we're a chain, and we propagate this chain of battiness because that is the key to understanding whatever we do.

Ergo, I am.

Last night was a trip down a year back. Five friends sitting at a cushy sofa and sipping on hot chocolate. I like the hot chocolate this particular joint makes - thick and foamy, capped with swirling whipped cream, sprinked with Hershey's syrup. I have a chocolate fetish and that indulges me to no end. There was conversation then, sprinkled (like the syrup) with pauses in which, one by one, the latecomers strolled in and were assimilated into the giant organism of sloth on the sofa. There were laughs and memories and, two hours later, we departed from the store, one great big gigantic slug on the pavement, yakking and yapping about what to do next, where to go next, Chinese, Italian, Indian, expensive, cheap, middle-class, how big are our wallets, how big are the hearts of the pieople who will treat us... A chain of battiness. It was fun.

I reached home much, much later with my flatmate, and sat watching television for awhile after that. It seemed we had been 'talked out' by the evening. Conversation seemed inane - what did you think about that/ the panini was excellent/ shit, the biryani was crap/ I think there's something going on between the two of them/ and the rest was history. Yawns and goodnight, quiet smiles exchanged - I have to wake up five hours later and scramble to work. I have to stare down my editor and starve for eight hours before I eat lunch (I skip breakfast). I have to hold the earth up, like a neo Atlas.

I shrug, sometimes, too.

Mirror Mirror #3: I have read the entire Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, and the preceding Empire and Robot series as well. I have even attempted writing a thesis on Asimov's theory of Universal Evolution, from earth to Empire to Foundation to earth. But I gave that up after deciding I was too completely awed by the entire vision in my head, to ever care about putting it down in paper for anybody's benefit.




1 Comments:

helo chocolate lover,
nice blog u've go there..

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:37 PM  

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