Grindhouse

Your number is up. Imagine a big roulette wheel and the dice gets spinned. It rolls not into the 'spectacular' section, to use my not very original vocabulary, since I never played roulette in my life. You land in 'work'. And life begins. Reminds me of aJamaa's brilliant post 'The Model Is Wrong'. You squirm through school, waking up at un-earthly hours to cram the incomprehensible 'Theory of Classification and Nomenclature' till you can sing it in your sleep. It works,...somehow. You ace the two Biology papers and can label internals from the picture of a fuzzy, mangled, red dissected rabbit. More abuse follows in the form of 'Integral Calculus'. There is a technique, Sam used to call it 'Photographing'. Amazing stuff. You look at a page and map out the location of all printed characters on a mental coordinate system. Then you pull the images during exams. Any disturbance in the stacking order and your mind goes blank. Great times.

School is over and the even more annoying business of living is at hand. You imagined your teachers were mean, until a boss rolls along. I don't have a grudge against my boss, he is a great guy; I am talking in the general vein. You work and work and work. Get a car. A sports car perhaps. You move around, gulping beer, having plenty of sex (I wish). Life is good. Nothing can go wrong. I heard somewhere that when you are young, if you make a bad turn, no worries, you can call it all part of research. Then fate calls your time on the fun scene and points in the direction of the exit door.

Marriage is here!

That can happen in any number of ways. To name one, buns are put into the oven to bake while you are looking the other way. I wonder how many men are nailed this way. I would like it if some mad social scientist did some study on it, with statistics, charts and all. Lets say that once a guy learns that breakfast is on its way, may be some rational part of the brain takes over. 'I guess I was going to have to do it sometime, why not now?' A bitter rationalisation of blokes who have been canned. Wily, that is nature for you. If this bizarre reasoning was not wired into people's brains, we would naturally run our course and go extinct, like the dinosaurs. It brings to mind something Matejivu said; - why do guys with great prospects end up with plain looking and ordinary women? - and that beautiful women sort of hold back to play the field, sample all the goods. The plain women take the men in their lives very seriously, knowing that men are very fickle and it is a minefield out there. They plan meticulously - then the rationalization kicks in - I digress. #2. May be a guy genuinely falls in love, closes his eyes and takes the steep skid road down the hill.

Whatever the case, living is no longer for just today. You look at the beloved gas guzzling car full of memories of trysts in the Bandari Plaza basement (that actually happens, not to me sadly but I can point at three guys I know). You pick out a van-ish sort of car, family mobile (Toyota Noah - chilling), as sweetie is expecting and well you will need space for all the bags of nappies - and bananas when you go to the country to see the parents and they insist that life is indeed hard in the city of bright lights and they need to ease the load by packing half the farm. Are you depressed yet? No? Let me drone on. You take the 'Noah' to the mechanic to choke the fuel system so that petrol consumption is reduced, at least during the traffic jam idling. You start shopping around for a house; That comes as a mortgage. Seven figure commitments for tiny accomodations in estates that are way removed from the up-market places you rented your apartment. The payment plan is a depressing spreadsheet that probably takes more than half your net pay and it runs to several pages cause you will be making those payments for close to quarter of a century. Stability and security are a bitch. Or are they security and stability? Because your freedom to experiment, change jobs, up and move at a moments notice are gone. You cannot stick it to the man anymore. Infact you have to kiss ass harder and act like you love it. Education is next. Have to setup funds for college, high school, primary school even. Public schools are shit these days, and they will only get worse.

Then your wife has you where she wants you and then there is no sex anymore. She lets go. She piles on the pounds. No more fuzzy make up. Or dinners with candles. No thongs. Just enormous underwear, or boxers even (are there boxers for women?). No doggy style, just missionary...and even then its obligatory, sort of like she knows if she doesn't allow you probably once say every four months, you will start looking elsewhere. Even then, she lies there, like a lump of clay.
'Are you done?' She starts wearing socks on her head when going to bed. May be some needy in-laws enter the picture. Your stretched resources get wiped out cause the sister's son,....has been chased from school. You cannot refuse. May be you cheat. Or she cheats. They usually do with the struggling, worse-off-than-you, pained artist types. I know, I have a relation who has screwed desperate, married types till their eyes go starry. You with a whore or some confused young girl who you have convinced that you can arrange a promotion for her. Trying to arrest a fast slipping youth. It all comes out eventually cause all stuff comes to light, eventually. You are staring at possible divorce. The rationalizing thing kicks in again and you figure that things would be better if you loathed and distrusted each other for the rest of your lives. Or you get divorced and the judge hands her the house, half of the remaining half of your salary and you start sleeping in trenches, trying to start from somewhere. Kids grow into irritating teenagers, sucking even more life out of you. Nature again. Programmed tons of resilience into your normal run-of-the mill folk, or the number of murdered teenagers would be unbelievable.

It is the script of life for people who fall under the normal distribution of the curve. I have a bleak outlook. I mostly see darkness and rain. Chin up. May be life is a series of bright spots and we all have those. Some guy whose name I forget (could have been on TV) was asked - what is your goal in life? And he said : - To be a lazy lay-about. That Adam guy really screwed things up. Plus its Sunday. The most depressing day of the week.