"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

"Someday, when our blood has cooled, and the wide open windy places are revealed to us, when our achievements have been crushed to dust by those who are younger, brighter, with the energy of our spent youth, we will meet at a tavern, we will raise our glasses to one another, we will collapse in helpless laughter all over again.

In the interim, we wait, not without impatience."

Love is Noise

I've been wondering what it would be like to make music videos for of a living. This is a thought I've played around with in my head ever since I was old enough to illegally download content off our departed friends like Kazaa, Morpheus, and many, many others. And David (Dave) Meyers used to be my favourite video director back in the day.

To me music, when accompanied with a strong enough visual input (doesn't have to be a video, could be just staring at a blank wall) takes on a different emotional dimension.

Case in point is The Verve's Love is Noise video. It consists of mash ups, shots of people in ultra slow motion, scenery, and abstract themes. All in all, a beautiful work of art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTzmIgRuQ0

Will those feet in modern times
Walk on soles that are made in China?
Feel the bright prosaic malls
In the corridors that go on and on and on

Are we blind - can we see?
We are one - incomplete
Are we blind - In the shade
Waiting for lightning - to be saved

Cause love is noise and love is pain
Love is these blues that I'm singing again
Love is noise and love is pain
Love is these blues that I'm singing again, again

Anno Domini

When the clock struck midnight on the last day of the last year of the first decade of the third millennium of the year of our Lord, I was out cavorting with four friends whom I’ve known for more than five years and one more whom I had just met.

When the two hands of the clock met to give the illusion of a single finger sticking straight out the middle, we were rolling into old watering holes we had not been in half a decade. Some of them had remained exactly the same while others had drastically changed for the worst. It wasn’t, in the eyes of many, what you would call a “cool” night, but it was, nonetheless, a whole lotta fun.

Ten hours later, I was standing on a platform where I had last been over five years earlier and where I’d said goodbye to it all, waiting to greet a friend I hadn’t met in three months to arrive from a town I’d never been to. We drove around Chowringhee and stopped at New Market and paid a visit to the Cathedral where I saw what I had seen every weekend for ten years of my life through new eyes and new wonder.

Nine hours later, I was standing in a room where I’d had my first sip of Heineken all those years ago with people who were screaming and singing into the air and firecrackers exploding into the eight storey sky outside as we tried to Save the Night, but – as always – would fail.

When Londoners and people along the Greenwich Meridian were doing the exact same thing, I was sending off notes to ghosts and, assailed by pangs of hunger, craving for cupcakes and a two week or two year (either would have suited me perfectly) rewind on life.

We celebrate the New Year's not to greet the one that comes, but to bid farewell to the one that has gone by. Whether it is with tears or with smiles, it does not matter, as long as it is one of either and not neither.