Drama on the Bus

The bus ride. The brief space in one's day where one is assured of comfy mundanity. It feels like a commuter's god-given right, that stretch of blankness inside that mobile, pocket-sized and fluid community. A bus is a place where as soon as you sit down, you assume the mental faculties of that grimy, hideously upholstered bus seat. You become one; you and the bus-seat. A joining of arse and fabric, welded together until the fatal departure, the ominous 'DING!' a falsely cheery funeral knell. It malevolently mocks that wrenching apart of a newly created organism. *DING!*
And then SNAP, your consciousness rushes in you like a poltergeist possession, and you're let loose once again into the stream of daily existence.

How many bus rides have i had over this year? How many bus rides will i have over the rest of my life? How many hours spent in such peachy vacuousness?
Well, i've had a few to date anyway. All non-descript, as you expect.

Until yesterday.

The bus was trundling down the street down the same predictable route. I was in my happy place. My fellow commuters were presumably in theirs. Then, at the corner of my eye, i saw a white flash. THe bus screeched to a halt, flinging an old biddy at the front right out of her seat. The white thing on my periphery had been a car reversing like a rocket out of a driveway across the road. I looked over the edge of the bus out the window. There was a hairs breadth between the two vehicles. After a stunned pause, the white vehicle drove away from the scene. Inside the bus, there was a stunned pause. THen two passengers leaped off their seats and rushed over to the dumped granny, who was lying on the floor, stupefied. One of the helpers took complete control of the situation, whipping out orders right and left as though she had been a sergeant in her former life. The rest of us might have been statues, staring tensely at the traumatised lady. Throughout the whole of it, the busdriver sat in his cabin. I wondered briefly whether the government had us fooled, and that they were trying to cut expenses by replacing human drivers with automatons.

I'm not too sure, but i think i overhead a mutter that the woman had broken her arm. A nosebleed at least. Poor old biddy! Luckily, we werent' far from Charles Gardner Hospital. For whatever reason, the bus didn't take her there direclty, and an ambulance was called. The passengers were directed to file off from the crisis scene and we migrated over the adjacent oval to the nearest bus stop.

For sure, poor old biddy! But the episode was- who could deny it?- exciting! Should i be whipped for finding it so?

I am so sick of wading through the molasses of perverse prose. I feel like i'm grinding through the words, having to call up every fibre of determination that is holding my being together just to make it through one bloody sentence. My eye sights a full stop, a blessed relief, a respite at the end of a laborious journey. My heart rejoices! My lips begin to peel back into a smile of epic proportion; - then they transform instead into an O of despair when i realise i haven't understood a single thing.

Why do they do it, these so-called 'academics', knighting themselves with the titles of Connoisseur's of Knowledge? Why do they insist on encrypting sometimes the most simple of messages into some obscure, esoteric package, where meanings swarm, cheek by jowel, jostling and crowding? WHy-hy-hyyyy? I get so sick of these scholarly words that are scraped off their dry tongues and pasted to the paper; words like 'intersect' and 'continuum' and 'fabric' and 'discourse'. Yes yes yes, all bloody important, all bloody useful in discussing topics 'laden with ideas'. But, just, you know, shut up. Shut so very up and go so very much away. I want to keep to my little, lovely nook of syntaxical simplicity. Is that so bad? Is that so sneer-worthy? And what's so wrong anyway with chucking in a word like 'chucking'? Is such a stoop to the vernacular beyond them?

Even polit-talk isn't so stodgy to digest as the academic article. However, i must say, if either Gillard or that moron Abbott says 'fair dinkum' again i will personally push them off a cliff.

animo-pomorphic

She pokes her head out from beneath the long-term cone of silence. Elongates her neck warily. Her lips compress and her eyes assume a shrewd, narrow expression until she looks like a constipated turtle. Tentatively, she beings to type.

Or continues, rather. Whatever man. Stop suffocating my poetic licence.

Is my long-term absence in order of an explanation? Probably not. Reasons:
a) i don't exactly have a swelling fan base
b) who gives a shit
c) unnecessary and tedious preamble
d) i am Kate, Lady of the 673th realm. I need explain my presence or absence to none!

But i nonetheless feel compelled to, in part anyway.
At first, like a debutante into society, i thrust myself into the blogosphere. Young, fresh and fervent, i gushed out text like the oil that gushed out of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. After a while though, i became suspicious, then horrified, then dismayed, then apathetic, then horrified again that, like the oil spill, it was all a horrid effluence and a gross mistake. The following posts became more and more self-referential, until they resounded with a pathetic plea of justification. Disgusted with my lack of topic expansion and imagination, my committment to my adolescent blog weakened. I grew disenchanted, and capped the spillage. And then forgot about it entirely.
...
Then it reappeared in my mind. I considered a reunion. But as the neglect deepended, i became more convinced that i was/am no longer up to the task. That over that long period of silence my cyber tongue has grown heavy and musty in my cyber mouth. That boorish seriousness has set in, etc.

But here i am! My pledge: to keep the tortuous tremor out of my voice.

Hem.

*finds amusement for a while in trying to squish a miniature surfboard across the computer screen and into the net. When venture fails, tries a spider.

That one failed too.

Wipes screen.*

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The world has transmogrified. Nothing is as it seems. I'm seeing strange creatures peering out behind the veil of humanity. Small mammals, actually. I'd idled into two separate lectures, slumped down on my seat, and looked up to see small marsupials wrapped in the deceptively pink and hairless skins of my lecturers.

I've decided against mentioning which units they teach. Some forms of paranoia are wise paranoias, i think.

One lecturer had an uncanny resemblance to a possum. A soft, brown and curly fuzz covered her head, and i found myself redesigning the drab screened background into a dark and leafy tree hollow within which she could tuck her round body. I didn't get so far as add a tail though.

Next, it was a mouse that blinked timidly up at me. He had a grey parcel of hair flopping neatly over a think face. Perched ona turned up nose were rectangular, metal rimed glasses, which he would push up with both hands at hte edges every now and again. A small mouth was drawn uder an enlongated upper lip, and on the sides two largish ears protruded with perfect semi-circular form. When he was speaking, his thin frame perched over the podium, he had an endearing pattern of looking down at his notes then dipping his head up and looking around at his audience imploringly.

Twas uncanny.

Anyhoo, such were my observational preliminaries to semester two.

In this time of trial, i find myself capitulating to every bizarre whim that doesn't compromise my study. I get very pernickety over the thickness of the paper i'm writing on, the colour and inkiness of the pens i'm using. It's this OCD fear that emerges during these times, where i get paranoid that if everything isn't just right, I won't, well, trust whatever it is i'm scribbling down. I'd instead get distracted by the unsuitableness of some trivial detail, and hence deflate the effectiveness of revision. So i give in to these weaknesses- perhaps also in compensation for the many other vices which i usually indulge that i am struggling to abstain from, i.e. staring into space for about half an hour a sponge for Crowded House, examining my finger nails, pondering what awaits me on the Other Side...of exams, not life that is.

Unfortunately, the TV in the lounge still manages to exert its gravity over me in the evenings.
Sunday: The Bourne Ultimatum
Monday: Good News Week
Tuesday: 20 to 1: Pranks and Practical Jokes

Eeeeuuughurgleurglesputsput

Trudges off dejectedly, arms trailing along the floor after her consiousness slaps her on the face to [quote] 'get a bloody move on'.

I find it rather provoking how nature can never let you down. Like the paragon student shining brightly in the face of all its struggling, sweating peers, there is not one occasion when it underwhelms. Oh, fine, just be perfect. Make me regret missing one second of you.
Annoying prat. Just lather me in your smugness why don't you?

Because it was a beautiful day today; just on the fragrant, fertile, fecund edge of Spring, the very cusp. And I holed myself in my room like a snivelling trogolodite. Not even for a good reason either. I was merely feeling sorry for myself, having had a day...a day...a day i don't want to talk about.

Well anyway, I did venture out at 5:30 for a walk (after much cajoling of my will) and the dusk just sunk into my bones. It's amazing how, well, one continues to be amazed at the elongated evening shadows, the whorls and patterns on trees, the intricacy of flowers and leaves.

This is no expression in pride in posting this literary revision, because there is only me here (and for some reason blogging is an environment where i will willingly write, whereas the cold MS word page repulses me). And if anyone is here, sod off, this is my territory (despite being theoretically a public domain).

Prufrock is the prototype of the modern man subject to the weighty predicaments manifest in contemporary urban existence. The first line sets up reader expectations of a journey and the ultimate attainment of an original purpose. By the end of this poem, this expectation is devestatingly left unfulfilled. Acutely aware of his impotency in a superficial and judgemental world, he stagnates upon his intention, probing his very motives for action and finding them weak and not even wholly of his own architecture.
The theme of artifice involved in everyday being is augured at the beginning of the poem in the fractured identity implicit in 'you and I'; half being the inert, sensitive psyche and the other constituting the pseudo personality or facade. Self is arrogated by culture, context and company; pre-determined by others through simplistic denomination. One is hence compelled to defer to that narrowly defined definition or "formulated phrase" to honour expectations and keep in line with inextricable social doctrine. Prufrock's cruel enlightenment to the fact his capacity to exist as an autonomous agent is inevitably curtailed is the source of his indecision to commit to any course of action. He senses the futility of embarking on the making of resolve; unable to invest his faith in anything, repeating the rhetorical question- "but would it have been worth it, after all?". With anguished honesty he remarks "in short, i was afraid". Fearful to follow through with his engagement to any kind of relationship and the destruction of his delusion that has manifested in his being so long for it to be shattered would be tantamount to the negation of self. He hence opts with despairing resignation to relinquish his quest for love and fruitfulness to preserve and safeguard his pride against a hollow society. In a somewhat disdainful tone he states he has 'known [women] known them all', characterising them in metonymic terms as 'eyes' or 'arms'; or pluralised, as in 'the women come and go'. This expansive generalisation signifies that Prufrock is not only a victim of society, but a representative of an impersonal social mentality that his sensibility is so inflicted by.

Styled as an intimate dramatic monologue, Prufrock remarks drily upon his superficial surroundings and inadequate self with a self-deprecating, ironic tone. The juxtaposition of issues of great gravity and trivialities (reinforced by child-like, buoyant rhyme) causes a descent into bathos. Abrupt anti-climaxes, such as from "be time for a hundred visions and revisions/before the taking of toast and tea" mockingly point towards the absurd proximity between the profound and the trite. They act also as a cynical tool examining Prufrock's individual paralysis and shortcomings. "Oh do not ask what is it" he says of the aforementioned "overwhelming question", "let us go and make our visit". He pointedly evades being pressed to articulate this question for the very reason that he cannot. Miserably he struggles to define meaning behind his mundane existence, but is unable to source any, and soon becomes overwhelmed by the ugliness of the urban civilisation to which he belongs. His mindset is mirrored in the description of the city surroundings; "the yellow fog which rubs its back against the window panes" is personified as cat-like and insidious; a claustrophobic presence.

Ultimately, Prufrock consigns himself to his fate in terms of sub-human alienation and withdrawal- "I shoud have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Despite being a highly cultivated and imaginative man, he cannot make the transition from potentonal into actual. Unlike the Hamlet he alludes to, he was not 'meant to be'; there need not be a dramatic culmination or finale; an eventual termination to procastination. His is a minor role in life; "deferential, glad to be of use, an easy tool...almost, at times, the Fool".

I is off now.

Once again, dear blog, i turn to you from my hollowed out, gloopy pit of despair for want of a better thing to do.
No, erase that, that's absolute poppycock. There are a quadmillion better things i could be doing right now. I could take the course of pleasure, and indulge in a little chapter of Hitchhiker's GUide to the Galaxy. I could paddle in the stimulating absurd and reconstruct the taj mahal entirely from disembowelled tissue boxes. I could- (although i would have to ruminate for at least half an hour on whether it was or wasn't beyond me)- resign myself to the absolutely essential and study for the 6 tests lurking about the corner of the weekend.

It's a very deceitful word, weekend. A weekend may begin when the week ends, but it then heralds the new week's start as well.

But the thing is, i just cannot contemplate for a milisecond the very idea of expending a fraction of my pitiful energy supply towards doing something remotely constructive. A resounding chorus of groans just strike up from my numerous personalities as soon as i brush against the periphery of the concept.

And so i tottered down this bloggy path (which has become rather overgrown and weed-strangled by now); and have hence proceeded my effusion of purposeless, dry, procrastination-borne self-pity.

Like old times.

Anyway, at the moment i am studying TS Eliot. The transmission of meaning (whatever that means) from this particular faculty of literature usually has the habit of oozing in in clumped molasses, and only through the desperately-sourced aid of study guides and teachers comments (although i have to say, they do seem one and the same). Eliot though- the bohemian prince of obscurity and abstruseness- i'm actually sensing something osmosing through! What a glorious, unprecedented sensation!

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

: an extract from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
Hah, i started just then to try and explain it. I was managing OK until the second word (the first was 'the'). If you want a worthwhile explanation, look it up yourself you lazy dog. You presume too much of me! Oh! I need to lay down for a while just at the strength of you presumption! someone, bring me a cool peppermint cider, quick! My ears are flapping, my tongue is licking my elbow and my eye is showing me the red gore of the inside of my socket!

*chews a cud moodily*

Do you actually know what a cud is? It's a globule of grass that has been eaten by the cow, passed through several stomachs (i think 2) and then smoothly regurgitated. It's so it can break down the tough cellulose cell wall of the plant (well, actually, so it can allow the cellulase bacteria in its stomach to break it down) and unlock maximum energy from its rather bland herbivore cuisine.
Cow = ruminant
Chew over= ruminate

'MAZING.

I wonder if the word 'amazing' has anything to do with maze.
I wonder where the word word came from.
I where from if do dum do daa do daa.

hurumph.

WISE WORDS:
"Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes."