The Ladies Who Lunch: Prelude

"So, I've discovered that I cannot stand to listen to the super-trashy Bollywood songs that power my workout, outside of my workout!" I declaimed.

"That probably explains why you have them anyway..." my friend The Knight of Swords said pragmatically.

"It's more than that," I responded. "It's like, these women, they croon about swaying the hearts of men and things, and they do so using the worst and most diaphanous sort of innuendo, and it makes me run faster. As if, I want to be able to own that some day, y'know?"

The Knight of Swords shook his head with mock annoyance.

"No, I don't know!" The Queen of May blustered. "It's like you're trying to find poetry where there is none. Besides, aren't you afraid of people judging you if they go through your iPod?"

"I live in constant fear of this," I confessed, somewhat relieved that I wasn't alone in this paranoia.

"Are we being serious right now?" The Knight of Swords asked incredulously.

The Queen of May and I busied ourselves with our lattes. We were at Jitterz, a cafe we frequented after long days of being.

"You guys!" he cried.

"Think about it, good sir!" I said. "You're working out, and your earphones slip out of the jack, and the iPod jumps to speaker mode and everyone can hear what you're listening to."

"Or, you lose your iPod, and someone decides to go through it to figure out whose it is, and they discover that you're a closeted Gaga person." The Queen of May proposed.

"Okay, so we now know that GossipGuy has trashy, husky Bollywood sirens on his iPod to fuel his runs, and that Your Grace is secretly on The Edge of Glory..." The Knight of Swords began.

"I NEVER SAID THAT!" The Queen interrupted.

"Oh, please!" groaned I.

"Anyway," The Knight continued with a smile. "I have nothing to ashamed of, as far as my music goes."

I reached for his iPod, "Well, you wouldn't mind us going through it then!"

"Our worst fears are also our best schadenfreude," The Knight said grinning.

"THE DAVE MATTHEWS' BAND?!" exclaimed Her Grace. "You belong in both 'Stuff White People Like' and 'Sociopolitical Commentary for Stoners!"

"Seeing as I am both, I don't see why not!" The Knight rejoined.

"This whole Dave Matthews bit is as pretentious as you complaining about 'embarrassing' it was that you were on excellent terms with the bar-tenders around here." I said, laughing.

"Then it would follow that the call of the secret trashy Bollywood is why you're so strait-laced during the week, and really slut it up over the weekends..." was his riposte.

"What about the secret Gaga?" Her Grace asked.

"The fact that you'd bring it up shows an inherent need for attention," teased The Knight. "Or help."

"You awful people, why are you in my life?!" Her Grace wailed.

"Because nobody else can stand us?" I tried.

"Are you kidding? Everyone loves us!" The Knight cried.

"And we wouldn't have it any other way, would we?" I said quietly.

"Or can we not stand them?" Her Grace proposed yawning.

The Queen, The Knight and I decided that the time was nigh for more lattes. Calories be damned.

Until the next time,
GossipGuy. 

Too Many Mornings

There have been too many mornings when I wake up, not with a start or a with a spring in my step, but with a gradual opening of my eyes, my lids rising like curtains upon a stage, the slight hum in my hung-over head akin to the anticipation of an orchestra to fill in the silence with music. It's a pleasant, still place. The serenity of such mornings is a halcyon, memory-less place. It actually isn't so bad once the memories come rushing back. They may be somewhat agonising to confront, but at least they exist on a plane that is neither corporeal nor astral, but somewhere in the middle: this place that I like to call The Tip of the Pi Orbital. So, yes there may have been martini glasses, and the fact that someone may have launched into an initially mocking but ultimately naked (emotionally) rendition of 'Losing my Mind' while holding said martini; there may have been awkward confessions that seemed like sound ideas at the time but now have become the loss of yet another layer of your carefully plumed persona; there may have been merriment that has now become judgment; there may have been that long walk home where you and your friends reflected on the respective roads that you didn't (or, couldn't take); there may have been that ill-advised text that you shouldn't have answered; there may have been a long treatise on "shallow love" on a packed dance-floor that may have made you realise how empty your life truly is. None of that matters right now. None of that hurts as one lies curled up at The Tip of the Pi Orbital. At this point of time, you're not even reflecting: you're watching. You're watching yourself become a moment's ornament. You're watching yourself become someone's bon mot and someone else's rebuke. You're watching yourself go from effusive and witty to bitchy and broken. With every descending degree of the latter, you reveal more and more, slowly forgetting that sometimes, when all the wrappings fall, there's nothing underneath at all. When one wants to be in fashion while moulding oneself into what others expect, revealing too much is risky business. You promise yourself that the next time you'll be different: you'll be brittle, you'll be debonair, you'll only drink a little and then forswear. But yet, too many mornings...too many mornings...is this the cost of reinventing oneself? Have I been so vile for nothing?

I remain,

GossipGuy.

On Crazy, or, The Victor Belongs to the Spoils.

"Don't do it! I know what you're doing! Stop!"

"I am peeing!"

"You're bent over the toilet!"

"Hey! I want to pee! Privacy would be nice!"

"You are not peeing! I know exactly what you're doing and you need to stop!"

"What am I doing? How do you know?!"

"Really, GG! Who goes to the toilet with a fork?! Now get out of there!"

That is my trainer talking me down from a ledge that exists on the edge of a commode. It's not chronic, no, it's something I indulge in once in a while. And it's exhausting. And messy. It's a good fit, frankly, with the anxiety, the insecurity, the affectations, the acrid regrets...On my nights on the town, I feel like Zelda Sayre, "dreaming how much better I would be than I am if I were somebody else, or even myself, and feeling that my estate has been unexploited to the fullest!" See, a handy quote! This is a very well put-together production of Crazy. That word is so gauche, really! It conjures up images of wildness and immaturity. This Crazy (distinguished by its Capital 'C') is Compelling, Complex stuff. 

I am not Crazy because it's fashionable. I am fashionable because I can, with skinny ties and suspenders, also do Crazy. It's wonderful, really, to have an outward locus upon which to place my neuroses for a while. I cannot internalise them anymore. Gosh, I was so repressed when I was fourteen! I remember, Mother, Father, friends of the family and I, we took The Grand Tour when I was that age. It was in Paris that I, a Xanax sous'd carcass of a 1950's housewife, stuffed inside the awkward body of a fourteen-year-old boy, actively fought desire, fought back a sexual awakening. It was all too sordid, messy...and I had invested in a new wardrobe. Besides, it was Paris! I wanted languidness, elegance and grace that I was hard-pressed to find in that swathing body that I inhabited. I took to the Sex Shoppes one evening with my partner-in-crime and dear friend (who did not hold back, as far as his sexual awakening was concerned) by my side. I remember a lot of red. I remember pretending not to understand the French on the signs of certain, fairly intuitive devices. I remember going to these establishments just to stick my nose up to them. Mentally condemn those who came by to buy porn, cat o'nine tails...It was very satisfying, and I returned to the hotel bearing two seemingly innocent (yet enigmatically apropos) post-cards depicting The Mona Lisa. I think I knew that those patrons were freer than I ever would be. They didn't have to prove a thing to anyone, and neither did they have to derive sustenance by feeding upon someone else's alleged depravity.

Now. Now, I find myself walking the streets of my Spitsbergen: over the top and under the table; bitchy and sparkling; contentedly sad; inveterately single, measuring in shot glasses how much the heart can hold! A young thing with sad eyes...oh Crazy, Crazy! So Crazy! But not free. Never free. Always envying those who don't care, and never have. Always playing at Keeping Up Appearances. So interesting! But so fucking Crazy! But, just Crazy enough to be interesting! 

What is this blog post about? I had initially decided that I would delineate Crazy, but I really have entirely too much to say about it and most of it is in stream-of-consciousness which, those of us in the know know, is so three seasons ago! I'd talk about my relationship with food and how it is as dysfunctional as my relationship with certain exes and members of my extended family. Lots of hoarding and trippy guilt-trips...but even my sort-of eating disorder is so...disorderly given the lack of commitment. 

As I sit before Dick Diver V (yes, there have been five therapists! I feel like a slut of/in/under/atop analysis) and obsess about perfunctory comments that I have overanalysed to the point of implosion, forgotten pipettes,   the immunology of my non-existent "sex" life, my inadequacies, my Crack-Ups, the weird mix of repulsion and concupiscence I felt when a stranger groped me outside a bar...I feel like Zelda Sayre-Fitzgerald. I feel like I am not really Crazy, but very, very spoilt! All of these symptoms that I have mentioned seem to cohere together into a recherché tableau that is, at its very core, a misprized tantrum. A tantrum that I have been throwing for the longest time that it has become a gradual performance; a tantrum that I have thrown about something that I no longer remember or even care about. It's just...fun to live in a world defined by camp, tears, metaphor...like Richard II, like Hamlet. But, no, those aren't fair comparisons. They were committed! They put their deaths where there mouths were! 

Have I been so vile for nothing? I am not fishing for compliments, I am not looking for someone to hold my hand...I just want you to know that I know. It is hard to live with Knowing. It's hard to keep asking oneself: have I been so vile, so Crazy for nothing?

Indeed, it is with the loose ends that men hang themselves.

Excuse me, I am going to sedate myself now.

Until the next time,

GossipGuy. 

On Beauty

At some level I knew it all along that it was a falsehood, this idea that "inner beauty" is what actually counts and that no-one cares whether one is outwardly beautiful or not. I believed it because there was a plethora of quotes from eminent, respected people who claimed that beauty is this ineffable, untranslatable Light of some sort that dawns upon one and seizes one with a rapture that is ineffable, untranslatable...

Maybe that's why no one talks about in terms that are more concrete. I have never understood this idea of inner beauty, and I think that it is a pretty lie that has been propagated so that we may manage ourselves during times that are not so beautiful. 

I have just finished reading a novel by Iginio Tarchetti called Fosca. This nineteenth-century, quasi-Gothic Italian novel became the subject of Stephen Sondheim's haunting chamber opera Passion. The novel tells of handsome Giorgio who is having an affair with the equally beautiful (and very married) Clara when he, at an army outpost, meets the desperately ill and desperately ugly Fosca. The novel is an examination of the peculiar powers that are found in both beauty and ugliness. Fosca is sickly, hideous and vile. She milks her ugliness to create this aura of pity and self-concern that is, in a sense, a twisted Black Mass version of how someone may milk their good looks to get their way. One gets the sense that beauty is power, and indeed it is. It is a drug. All these hallucinatory ideas of wanting to die for someone because s/he is so beautiful, of being half-in-love with death, life and nature because they are Sublime...to me, these are symptoms of addiction. You may either be addicted to the effects of beauty, Sublime as they are, or you may be addicted to being the agent of that Sublimity. You either want the drug or want to BE the drug. Fosca creates permutations in which she addicts the drug to its antagonistic agonist. That frightens me, because it tells you how powerful beauty is, even in its absence. 

And how does this pertain to me? I feel this incredible sense of self-loathing every time I go to the gym, mainly because I know why I am doing it. For the shallowest of reasons: to be beautiful. Every time I go to the gym, I find what I once prized as my own exclusive and delicate sensibility to flow down my back as sweat. People go to the gym for various reasons: to be fit, to stay fit, to keep pathologies at bay, but I? I go there to punish myself for being shallow, while engendering a novel aesthetic of pretension! You see, I have begun to equate beauty with goodness, for good things happen to those who are beautiful. Hell, even if Bad things happen to the beautiful, they still appear Good because they feature such an agreeable cast of characters. The travails of the beautiful and the plain are the same: the former's are just so much more involving! I can't be Fosca, and believe me I have tried: she sickens me. She sickens me because she has very carefully crafted her "illness" her "deep melancholy" her "episodes". She reinforces the belief  that ugly is as ugly does. One doesn't need to be that...cerebral when one is beautiful! For what is beauty if not happiness?! Aren't these interchangeable? I have begun to believe that they are. 

IF:

I am beautiful, I shall be able to leave my Spitsbergen for an Eternal City somewhere.

The Eternal City will give me the Romance of opportunity and that of the heart.

I shall be poised, upright, aware, never fumbling and loved in that Eternal City, wherever it may be. 

Life will be...so beautiful, and do you know why? Because I am. Or shall be beautiful! 

It kills me to acknowledge that I, at some level, do truly believe this. I also know them to be libellous, ugly things but I cling to them anyway. I am respiring anaerobically again. I think it's because I am frightened. I think it's because I am foolish. Or, like Fosca, I am addicted to the trippier drug, man!  The selfsame that makes one want to be that phantasm with the hooded-eyes who waits in the tower, one who is hooked on longing. Longing for something ineffable, untranslatable, beautiful. Aren't these such noble ideas? The patience, the waiting, the refined aesthetic of it all? 

Am I being so vile for nothing? O God, God! Please let this mean something, let this amount to something in the end! Let me, in the end, finally see what is beautiful about all this! 

Until the next time,

Gossip Guy. 

The Debt One Owes The Living

He did it. He left a post on his Facebook wall that proclaimed, "So long, sinners!" and then he did it. He took his own life. The text that brought me the news asked, "Did you know him?" I winced at the incorrect use of the past tense. In my own passive-aggressive way of correction I responded with, "I do, yes, " only to be told that the simple past had not been used in error. As a tense, the simple past is rather ironically named. Jejunely, if you will. It gives you a sense that whatever happened unfolded as empirically and simplistically as it could, the details are pared away and stuffed in the crevices that lie between the simple past and the present perfect.

"He did it." That was my opening sentence, wasn't it? What did it tell you? What did you see?

"He took his own life"- what did you see then? An image of a boy, in his early twenties, but not quite...alive.

It's a vile tense.

This is what I did that afternoon when I found out. I refused to deal with it. I cleaned my room and focussed on packing things away for my big move. It was the perfect task, all my faculties were busy being structuralist so there was no room to breathe and breakdown. My mouth tasted of lead.

I then began to wonder about him, as I lay in bed. He and I had much in common: both raised away from our ethnic homes, both "Born this Way" and occasionally wondering why, both in competitive programmes...whenever we spoke we spoke profoundly. He had an echinulate wit that both chided one and made one laugh at the situation and at oneself. He was good for me. He felt like home because he reminded me of it. We were similar, but he was better. I don't just say this for the sake of propriety. What use is propriety now? Propriety belongs to the living, to the dead one only owes truth, and this is it: he was better, ballsier, sassier, more alive, less concerned...more alive.

My comparison of us is an ugly exercise that reeks of self-concern. Yes, we came from similar places and had tasted of similar experiences, but the truth is that I know nothing about what brought him to the precipice from which he decided to fly into the deep.

Weeping, tearing at my hair and proclaiming the loss of my best friend would be propriety and for the living. To the dead one owes only truth, and this is what it is: I know the face you wore behind that mask of sass, style and wit. I didn't see your weariness but I felt it. I did not know how weary you were. I did not know.

I am benumbed and my sentences are choppy. He is gone and it hasn't completely registered yet. Perhaps when the snow will fall on this Spitsbergen, my soul shall swoon too. Just like Joyce's confused, benumbed leading man. Maybe then I shall see you, fleshed out in fire, and "the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Bitch, Or 'Anaerobic Respiration: A Tragedy'

At first, I used to do it for fun. Because I could. Because I could afford the $20 and up lexical range. And those little quips just had the tiniest of stings, just piquant enough to spice up the conversational palate of my Spitsbergen in a slight shock of sophistication. As I said, it was fun. Recreational. Not occupational. You can't be a Bitch for a living; that would be the bitch of living.

It was never meant to be an occupational sort of thing. I didn't believe that accessing the darkness would be enabling it.

It all started, like all intersections with the carnivalesque and the grotesque do, at a prom. The romance was ill-advised but well-timed. For one, it confirmed that I wouldn't be going to the prom alone. There was no way I could not attend; I was on the executive board of the organisation who formulated and set up the event. I will admit right now that, aside from the purely clerical e-mail shuffle, I wasn't too involved with the planning process. Boycotting the event because of I was destitute, unloved of both graduate programmes and my fellow man, would be tacky. In my mind, I had already decided that I would channel the delightful Miss Woodhouse and be a gracious host. Maybe, once the guests found their niches, I would even allow myself a dance. But then, the ill-advised-well-timed romance happened. I say well-timed because I was still waiting on a string, still indulging in a rueful ritual of calling up the programmes I hadn't heard anything from and hanging up quickly when the pert and professional voices answered, "XXXX University! Biomedical Sciences!" The ritual attained new baleful lows as I would then, to the melancholy tunes of Stephen Sondheim's ballads, fix myself a cup of coffee, text my incredibly patient Dr. Transposon with something inane and depressing in its chipper emoticon'd tonality, answer my e-mail, reschedule with my therapist yet again, justify not going to economics and devise new modes of penance at Vespers in the gym.

Amidst all of these came a voice that teasingly called me handsome. This voice took the form of one who was born for the summer in terms of carriage, speech and the sun that shone in that voice when it sang of taking it "one day at a time". It was...amusing, I suppose. I amended make more time to text my new paramour, I even started going to econ. so that I could experience that prohibited thrill of surreptitious in-class texting.

Soon we were sipping coffee.

Soon we were going to the prom together.

Soon we were not texting.

Soon we were going to the prom together. As friends.

As we showed up to the prom, with my newly acquired friend taking elaborate pains to ignore me to the point of inviting an alternate date who, like an understudy, showed up in white as well, I realised the malaise that had begun to crust upon my crust. It cracked like something alive that had begun rotting for a living. This was bullshit. Propriety dictated that I pine and refuse all dances and amusement. The only problem? I didn't want to pine, I'd had a fucking trimester of pining! And, let me tell you, it may be all achingly beautiful and chiffon-swathed in Great Literature but in real life, it fucking sucks! Your dorm room is not a set of apartments in James's freaking Gardencourt where one can love, but without hope! Or masochistically enjoy the parallelism between one's fate and coffee cup with a hairline crack.

Dressed, ironically, in white, a coronet upon my head and, inexplicably, glitter on my chest. I began to reclaim...something by dancing with everyone and teasingly flirting with them too. The attention was wonderful!  I also took a vituperative moment to be verbally vicious to the understudy date. It turned out that he fit the role that my newly acquired friend had wanted to cast to the T. Evidently, no-one wants Ke$ha to play Ophelia.

As the evening began to wind down, and the slow dances began, I began to feel lamentable again. My friend and his date were inseparable, and I had no one to hold/be held by to the strains of a softly strummed guitar. As I entertained uncharitable thoughts, I searched around the room and grabbed a statuesque yet lonely being. We, without words, struck up a shallow bargain wherein we put up the "I can't believe I found you!" charade and I saved face.

Actually, I didn't. Janice knew exactly what was going on but she didn't say anything. I think, at some level, she understood what I was doing and why I was doing it, unpleasant as it was. Her silence was the equivalent of her holding my hair back as I voided my semi-digested frustrations. My newly acquired friend stiffly informed me that my behaviour was "unbecoming" and that I was "vain and shallow". There was nothing to justify, really. It had all worked out really well: I successfully managed to conceal "the face that [I] hid behind academic success" but my friend's eyes had been opened and none to soon! My vanity allows me to appreciate that, in a movie, the likes of me have been played by Rachel McAdams, Sarah Michelle Gellar and  Reese Witherspoon.

Hamlet was concerned about how I took the end of that affair and a subsequent affair too. And not just romances, but everything. I would say exactly what I was thinking and gone was the delicious piquancy of those comments, these were downright pungent. The kinds that cause hushed silences and eyes to water. I supplied my daily vitamins (a charming bottle with the legend 'Stress Formula' emblazoned across it) with acrimonious little tablets of cynicism.

It has been like that ever since. For Instant Bitch: wake him up. For Bitch-on-Wheels: just add coffee. For Raging Bitch: make it decaf!

I haven't been particularly nice to be around for the past few months, and the whispers had started to reach my ears. "Vain and shallow" is a popular one. "Eating disorder/ Borderline anorexic" scared me because I actually took it as a compliment at first. "Troubled" troubled me too, and "messed up" offended me greatly! But it was "Bitch" that seemed to...fit. It was in that one creaturely word that I saw myself as a yeast cell forced into a aphotic, apoxic place impelled to respire anaerobically. Self-destructively ooze out lactic acid and alcohol so as to stay alive, stay afloat.

I can write this now because I am in an infinitely better place and am slowly regaining my sanity and happiness, and also  because my therapist, Dick Diver V, upon the elucidation of my anaerobic respiration theory, trenchantly asked me this, "Did you really need the venom to survive or do you BELIEVE you do?"

"Have I been so vile all for nothing?"

Until the next time,
GossipGuy!

Tithonus in the Locker-Room: Prelude.

I need to a blog-post about my newfound love-hate romance with the gym. But I can only think in poetry right now! 

Today, I caught myself flexing.

It was most odd,

This slow flexing of fledgling muscle…

I flexed and I was Tithonus,

Not just because he’s Greek!

I flexed and I was Tithonus

Who, with the Mt. Locker-Room Gods, dare not speak.

Tithonus, granted immortal flexion because he generously paid,

Tithonus, immortal, ashenly half-beautiful, but also very staid.

Tithonus, who shied away from ambrosial sweat and pertly called it “Perspiration!”

Tithonus, who found himself denying his persuasion.

Tithonus, given immortality but not eternal youth,

Tithonus, who refused to reveal his imperfect, shirtless truth.

The Mt. Locker-Room Gods, they’ve never known spare flesh.

This Tithonus, mortal after all, is metal in earth enmeshed.

It’s this mortal coil’s self-deception

That leads from flexion to reflection.

Today, I caught myself flexing and hated myself.

Today, I caught myself flexing, so elevated myself

By over-analyzing it.