Incoherent Bullshit
Incoherent Bullshit, is an old series from the blog, this fits in quite well. On the other hand, It may feel out of place, considering everything that’s going down back home, but then again, I am out of place. I’ll publish this when I get access to internet.
***
“How can we live without internet?” was my question 4 days ago. My internet (the word alone, is almost fantastical) was shut down a few days ago because I forgot to update my credit card information online.
I am 24, and in my own lifetime I’ve seen that last paragraph turn from the absurd, into the most banal of facts. Yet, reading it again now, and even though I know how true, and how real it is, it still sounds absurd. What bubbles we live in, is what I keep asking myself now.
***
Pierre suggested the other day that it may not be a great idea, for someone who’s hardly been leaving his room, to be reading Proust. I disagree. I think it may possibly be the best idea I’ve ever come up with. It may just be that he was writing for a certain breed, his own.
***
It’s absolutely insane. This life is insane. And I can not escape it. The days go by, and they go by, they add up to years, and my timeline in Japan keeps growing further. In a bed in a city in eastern Japan, I sit down and read Bo Ali Yassin, eat Belgian chocolates, speak with a woman half the way across the planet and read news of Syria. It’s insane, and I’m nowhere. The only place I could possibly be is Japan. But I’m not. I have little pieces of me scattered across the earth. Not even across the earth, but rather across the little optical fibers that transmit us as sequences of 1s and 0s. I’m nowhere, and I’m not stardust, I am 1s and 0s.
I’ve run out of Asahi, so here’s another Yebisu.
Five years on, and I feel more lost, homeless, and homesick than ever. I need no words of affirmation for the only words that matter, at least in this present state of mind, are my own, and I have none. I admire no one. The people I look up to, are dead. I am not sure whether I think too highly of myself, or too little of everybody else. It matters little, right now.
***
Imagination. Delusion. That great power we possess. I walk down the same streets everyday. I can hardly recognize any changes in scenery. Faces change, but the landscape, the photo, never does. I walk these streets and I suffocate inside my own mind. I think of school, of graduation, of plans, travels, memories and people, finances and work, of women and men. I suffocate and I keep on regurgitating all these thoughts. Placing myself in the world. Placing myself in my social, political, intellectual and cultural landscape. It crushes me. I feel a lump in my throat and I need to turn my mind off. I need to stop all these thoughts seeping into my brain. Only then, does it happen.
I find myself in another place, in another time, or to be more precise, in no specific place, in no specific time. With people that I know. But they’re not real, they’re how I believe they are. Reality is tricky matter, really. For I know they could not possibly be exactly how I believe them to be, but I also know no other way. So they are. I am with them, and we are having conversations we never had.
In the mind, you see, there’s no place for games, for the vain exploits of normal conversations. It is a place where all subtleties come with meaning, all subtleties have their corresponding body movements, where all words are heard and felt. Where a kiss is an orgasm and a knife is a scar.
The phone rings. A worried, and faint voice disturbs my flow of utter incoherence. But I need to write. I need to go back to that last paragraph. I need another sip of Yebisu. These times don’t come often enough, I need to savor them. Beer, and words being written, that is.
I can’t. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that these are times where I am truly happy. These are moments, fleeting ones, where I feel I’m real and not some character in an old woman’s dream.
***
I spent a week in China last March, did you not know? Well, I wouldn’t blame you. I, myself, only remembered it last week. Going through the photos on my camera, there were those of Zied and Maad, in China, of all places. We smoked, we drank, we laughed and we fought. Maad cut a piece of star fruit like you do in that fruit ninja iPhone game. We looked over the morning fog every dawn and then we slept until three in the afternoon. Then Maad left back for Latakia and I for Nagoya. It was the most absurd, and the most fitting, transition between Tohoku and Daraa.
***
What else is there to say? Between Godard and Proust, Foucault and Barthes, and between all the beautiful Francophiles that seem to surround and watch over my every step, I feel utterly and completely lost. Couldn’t someone sane put a bullet to my head and relieve me from this? For I, and they, obviously can’t.
Nagoya, 3 June 2011
June 6th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
You’re not lost Yazan. You’re temporarily disoriented.
But aren’t we all… and forever?
June 7th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Indeed, we all are. To have you back, Abu Fares, is one of the few genuine joys these past few months have brought.
December 24th, 2012 at 4:14 pm
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April 8th, 2013 at 9:44 pm
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