Nights of Pothead's inactivity

Nothing brings back memory like music. (Maybe smell does….but only vaguely….because smell itself is so subtle a sensation, that you never remember expressly with what you associate the said whiff). Or so thought Pothead. Is it kinda dangerous to have music associated with moments of intense feelings? ‘Cause you never know how and when years later those strums will come back to haunt you with the memories you had locked up in those by- stores of the mind. Pothead felt increasingly irritated with her desktop. The confounded cd-drive wouldn’t open. She banged and struck the cabinet left and right, but that darned tray limited its activities to making two trying sounds every time. From her half slumber Pothead had woken up to listen to a now hazy strain of music that kept humming in her head. It was close to half past three in the morning- the night air outside was cool, and mostly all seemed still, except the grumbling of her desktop and the sharp dull strokes of her keyboard. Pothead thought of those years gone by when she had sat still at nights getting lost in those rhythms. When she had wept out of a strange agony and felt her heart writhing. It was then that she had known for the first time (and last?...) in her life that the concluding expression of the previous sentence was no mere expression. It was real. You did feel a kind of twisting pain in that part of the anatomy. Damn that cd-rom. I want to hear it again. Screamed Pothead. But you wouldn’t hear it if you walked past her room along the corridor then. Maybe I want a nice juicy kabab, she felt after musing for a while. Pothead had spent a sufficient part of her life in figuring out how she would get a bucket transformed into a something where she would be able to roast marinated stuffs. She could picture and almost taste them in the very graphic memory she possessed. Added to that transformed bucket was a new fangled idea of a cookbook. Well, not exactly a traditional cookbook, she said to herself. But you know, one where she would add her travels and the “background” to the eating. For food is just not confined to the palate, it includes much more (It does, does it not?). An hour ago Pothead was perfecting her old recipe of making utensils out of coconut shells. It seemed kind of “o.k”. The only trouble was to find a carpenter to do the fine tunings (or the actual work really, she admitted). Pothead always delighted in her firm belief that she would get “them” all done someday. The “them” included more things than she could remember. Maybe the only reason she never detested her inability was the firm, almost religious belief that this inactivity was temporary. She had never thought of the execution of her ideas at the present times. It was all some distant future, which never seemed much too distant. They were all there, blueprint and all, down to the very details ready in the notebook which seemed visible only to Pothead. The only trouble was the unlikelihood of the fact that they would ever make themselves prominent before lesser mortals who were not skilled enough to see what was inside the storerooms of her head.

Never mind. She suddenly had a vague idea of fairy tales beginning with “Once upon a time, long long ago” surging in her thoughts. And so Pothead broke into a smile. But that damned cd-drive still wouldn’t open.

Shaw says there can be no new drama without a new philosophy. Pothead had been trying to divine the truth of this statement for sometime. She was always under the imminent danger of accepting G.B.S at face value and believing his maxims as truth itself. She was incredibly credulous when it came to G.B.S. Only none of his leading ladies were like her (As many of them as she knew). Pothead had been thrown back to reconsider her own standpoint on life by the Shavian heroines. They were so sure of their charms and so unscrupulous in exercising that power on men and making absolute asses of that species. And that was principally because Shaw always considered that women’s interest in men came secondary. Men were the tools they used to attain their more important ends in life. They waited like spiders waiting patiently for the fly, and slowly but swiftly ensnared the prey in their web. Hobbes had liked the allegory so much that he had associated the metaphor of the spider with Pothead (:-/). And Pothead had been increasingly making wry faces at the idea.

Pothead was actually happy. She knew it was so grossly improper to admit it under the circumstances. She devoutly worked herself up into a fit of indignation and anger to justify to herself and others that she wasn’t, that she was pissed off with her continuous inactivity and worried about the future. But in reality she wasn’t. The future seemed like it would take care of itself. The present seemed peaceful. She was out of contact with more than half her world. And Pothead did enjoy this sense of aloneness. Not loneliness, mind you. That made her wretched. But there was Hobbes and G.B.S and Blackboots. She had discovered the two essential ingredients to happiness in inactivity. You had to have a vivid imagination and a blissful love of food. G.B.S wasn’t so much off the mark when he realized that the only true love is the love of food. Of course she was acquainted with certain prosaic unimaginative characters who treated food as fuel for their engines. What a pity! Life gone waste, said Pothead to herself. There was something so soulful and fulfilling about taste. Something so subtle, she added after biting into the chocolate filled sandwich biscuit that was lying on her table. What she longed for was a tandoori. Those were the pains of life--- you mostly had to substitute lesser foods for the truly craved for ones. You never could tell, though. Blackboots had this very original habit of indulging in the sort of food that he hated. It was so unique a philosophy that Pothead never could make anything out of it. Blackboots persisted, for the greater part of his life, in delving into the most distasteful of all grubs, because everybody else was doing the opposite. Maybe there was a deeper reason for this uncanny practice, for Pothead always suspected Blackboots of acting a part in real life. Bb “wanted to be” many men in life. He caught on to one idea and then spent a considerable time in perfecting that idea of a man and living his life. In the process where the real life got lost Ph didn’t know. She wondered if Bb knew it himself.

For the first time, Pothead was listening uninterruptedly to Beethoven’s ninth symphony and actually breaking into a smile. She was anything but an experienced listener or a connoisseur of western classical music. Her music folder contained a paltry collection of such works from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Handel as she had been able to download from the dc hub a long time ago in an effort to start listening to western classical music, inspired by her faint recollections of having heard mostly unknown compositions on the radio of certain Tuesday nights, and more recently of the very unexpected “total”(as you would say colloquially) experience in a shuttle car, plying across the bridge, with an awesome audio system, that had left her dazed and unwilling to get down from the car at her intended stop. Except a few short pieces she had found the rest trying to her patience and abandoned them midway to return to mostly playback collections. She hadn’t admitted this because of course you know you don’t usually admit such things. And then she was reading the preface of Back to Methuselah on her desktop from a scanned copy of the 1921 published book that some benevolent site had had the thoughtfulness of uploading in full, instead of only “preview” pages that frustrated you to no end. As she was devouring the theology therein, there was a mention of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and Pothead suddenly felt like playing it. She had four files in that folder, of varying durations. Going by the thumb rule that the longest must be the whole, she clicked open the 11:47 minutes one. And there it was! She did not attempt to describe it for failing miserably.

Maybe Ph had never been in the mood to like it before. And now she liked it outrageously. Something in her seemed to be in sync with the music. All of a sudden she felt so inadequate in her expressions; so hindered and bound to express something that rhythmically shook her inside.