Haystack

You lock in. Chekhov’s spirit flows in your nerves, it’s stream of consciousness. You roleplay Samurai Jack, trapped in the future with shapeshifting Aku. You turn into The Sadhu, but unlike him you are not a British soldier reborn as an Indian. You see the Dental chair, are female dentists in a parallel universe called Dentits? This joke is funny after two cans of beer, whether it is funny before that depends on your sense of humor. You prefer Cthulhu to Aku. Feudal Kerala doesn‘t seem as enticing after you have watched the movie Gangajal, same shit, diffrent language, better toilets. You pick up your Kindle. You have books in there that you are licensed to read. A gun license would have been better but license for books too does fine. Lovecraft’s mad Arab makes you inquisitive. You wonder whether the Arab was from before or after the seventh century. The magic of parallel realities is that they stop to matter if the stomach is empty. A lot of great artists and musicians died of hunger, poverty and depression. Poverty and depression are synonymous but one just can‘t find out what comes before. The art and music of these now dead greats are currency now, dead greats because they weren‘t great when they were alive. Did Einstein have a hand in the atom bomb? What if he had? And he did calculations because he was fed up of humanity, like Agent Smith says in the Matrix: humans are like viruses. Seems true, they deplete the host and thrive while the host depletes. Not All Humans though. Human Lives Matter. Steve Stifler and Barney Stinson are great while you are in college, after that you have to become Minecraft’s Steve to build yourself a house and Blueshift’s Barney to do a guard duty on your family. Predator’s abound, quiet place is a myth. Truth is spicy when the intent behind uncovering is malignant. Also, you haven‘t turned into an adult fully unless and until you realise that truth can be false too. It becomes important, then, to write a letter to your truth, every week. What remains? Ambassador cars, Premier Padmini, Bajaj Super, Bajaj Classic SL, they don’t remain. Snapchat filters do remain, and pizzas and croissants, and of course Kindle, and burgers and sammiches. Kafka was good or bad? It doesn’t matter, what matters that he felt, and felt deeply. He knew how a country doctor feels, he knew how is to be bug. He knew how is it to be the patty in the burger. The salami on a pizza that gets eaten first. While the country doctor is thrown out without clothes in the cold night by the villagers, the city doctor’s deductive reasoning doesn‘t save him from seeing spirits and fairies. The Sadhu tries to remember his past life, Samurai Jack is trapped in the future. A patty inside the burger buns wishes it was cutlet.