Quadropus

Following up on the echoes from ten years ago theme, and also since we're talking about Bombay banshees.

******

August 1997

Inside the museum infinity goes on trial
You shouldn’t take it too personal
Sooner or later one of us must know
Red paper blue checked bedsheet
Tomato salad
Didn’t realize how young you were

Take two. Fill it up again. The hammer of the rain on the window pane. Incessant unceasing insatiable driving blowing raging lusting rhythm of water flung in from Arabia to lash at my walls. And we sat with our backs to the wind, bodies fortified by concrete steel reinforcements minds wandering far and hither thrust by drunken propulsions of alcohol and recorded sound. Words phrases lines notes reached out to us by men who will never know that four such as us sat one night empathising with their thoughts their sentiments & the feelings that made them rich. I want you honey I want you so bad. And the dangling conversations, stagger sometimes, race at others, the music stops, we change the side, change the tape, get another bottle from the freezer half-half? Hang on a sec, I’ve to take a leak cool cool no problem – fuck these mosquitoes man how do you bastards manage to survive in this place remember the time when oh ya oh yes oh yes funny wasn’t it?

And we share our memories & contribute new ones to the one or two who maybe (why maybe actually definitely) had no idea what was being talked about & so the process of sharing of memories & transferring of incidents relives itself once more in its self-propagative viroid way. And we carried it on, & we know that it’ll be the same next time & every next time just as it has always been.

So I tell you a story, & he tells one, & she too chips in with a bit. All agog to tell of various little incidents that may have happened or perhaps just embellished just a little bit but what the heck it’s a good story anyhow & it fit in so well. And so I hear out your story & wait for the pause after the laughter & maybe sip my beer again & then deftly insert my did I tell you about the time when or perhaps two of us can share a little private joke & then should I tell them no you go ahead ok.

The music stops. Someone change the tape. Someone gets up. The wind rips its way through the crack in the window. We all have this lovely cozy feeling – each a million miles from home & context yet totally at ease for once in this lonely city with lonely circumstances lonely life funny isn’t it how you can rub shoulders & bodies & armpits with a hundred people every day & yet feel as if you’re all so alone turning the key to step into an empty shoebox flat. And it isn’t just you or me, is it? You and I live our lives over & over again in any number of other young people all over this city. Why this city? I’m sure, definite, they are everywhere yet in the smug consolidated comfort of my previous lives I never thought to turn the stones and look for them. But now I am one, and so, dear friend, are you.

And that is why we sit, four of us here tonight, sipping our beer fuck it’s good when chilled man & feeling good not about the beer (though putting it in the freezer was a studly idea) or the music (just perfect though if the speakers were bigger we could have played it softer) or the fact that we’re sheltered away from the wind & the water & the misery on the other side of that window there, it’s just that we feel good being with each other as in the whole is greater than the sum of the parts & we’re just building subconsciously on the very fact that we’re all there together & though we’re all different people just for one night we’re all one just like four limbs of a quadropus & we can share our experiences & laugh about our lives & superficially forget all about the pain & misery that I go through & so do you, though we all hide it so well so practiced are we at it, so good have we become.

But that superficiality is all that matters, you know, it is that that will see us through to the next occasion of bonding, be it with a totally different subset of tentacles, it is that which will recharge us till the next time whenever it is. You know, it is that very superficiality that will keep us alive when you go your way & I go mine.

Thanks, guys.

******

Simba, Random, and Tatoo, this one's for you.