× does not compute ×

you bite into your food and chew to squeeze the rich flavours out.  you chew some more to savour it. a few more to really crush it up and some more to really work it in. again, for good measure...?  and yet more? the food has lost all flavour and texture that you craved. its just mush now. mush. again some more. maybe you like the act of chewing more than anything you put in your mouth. Marco hit the cat. His cat. Well, it was pouring that morning. And hence, he felt off. Very off. Things were not right. It was one of those mornings where you wake up and life just feels like a defective jigsaw puzzle; where you have all the pieces in their right place, but it just refuses to slot in; made wrong from the factory just to insult you; made wrong. He tried laying in bed. “Just a little longer.” The clouds and the rain kept away the passage of time. But eventually, when all his attempts at submitting himself at the jaws of borrowed sleep had failed, the mattress regurgitated him ou...

 “It is not you that is the problem; neither is it drowning. You drowning; now that, is the problem.” As I was coming out of the big black building, texting an old colleague of mine, I set a man on fire. I know that you're thinking all the wrong things now. Stop. It's not about that. None of it matters. Just go with it; take it easy. It's just a man; he’s having a luminous day. So I look at this burning man, you see, and feel all these feelings. What do you mean? It's a human person, on fire! Don't you feel any sort of way you monster? Well, I do. I'm disturbed looking at this situation. I'm devastated. I don't feel like going home. So I say right there on the sidewalk. Since feeling this intense grief can't be good, I try thinking of something else. Something good; happy. There was this fantastic piece on youtube about the rotary vane engine and it's mechanical superiority over a reciprocating piston engine. But the screams just cut through like...

We are the stories that we tell  our children “Mom, why did you tell him that dad’s dead?” She knew that this day would come soon enough. The girl's in her teen years; you can’t shut her up with the story of her dad being lost at sea. Though, quite frankly, that’s the closest thing to the truth. “Don’t tell me that you still believe that he’ll be back all these years later, do you?” “It’s not about what I believe. You never lost hope; and now I’m thinking you’re…” “Not now” , she snapped. She didn’t mean to, but she did. A small price to pay for living in a house with an antsy teen. “We’ll discuss this later.” She said, more calmly. She knew that this pot was boiling for quite some time now; they both have been feeling the heat. It’s up to her to make sure that it doesn’t boil over. She made a mental note to do something about this situation. But going there was bad enough for her herself, that she did not linger on what exactly is that she’s gonna do about it. ‘Time will pass’, ...

the ringularity makes you dance, whether you want it or not.                  -kurzgesagt  Black holes, the great devourers of the universe from which even light cannot escape; and the favorite topic of passionate amateur discussion at my college dorm room. But what struck me most amazing is the one thing that they cannot do; being the all-powerful literal world destroyers that they are. Crossing the event horizon is the last thing your meat, bones, hopes, and dreams could do. But there may be one silver lining to this extremely eventful process that starts with you being pulled into a noodle, and ends in you being one with the ringularity at the center of the blackhole you decided to take a dip in; the fact that of all things, even a black hole could not destroy the information contained within you. We all are more than the sum of our parts; apart from every single fundamental particle that makes us up, we carry, in us, the infor...

The horror is neither in death nor in what happened. The horror is in the nature of infinite repetition of what is happening; The horror is in not knowing that you are in an infinite cycle of madness. When I woke up, with the sun and the sea salt in my eyes, I found myself in a lifeboat adrift on an eerily calm ocean. When my eyes adjusted to the blinding daylight, I looked around to find absolutely nothing in any direction as far as the eye can see. It was as If I was plucked out of space and time, and put here, surrounded by just the sea and the horizon. The fact that my thoughts were fragmented did not help either. My name is Captain Winslow; my own first name evades me. It is as if I was hit in the head. I knew the seas, I have grown up on them. Sailing and adventure were in my blood. I did know that I was a sailor, and a marine biologist; but couldn't remember much else.   Judging by the position of the sun, I made a guess that it must be somewhere around noon. My marine chron...

hope is the thing with feathers that perches on the soul and sings the tune without the words   and must be promptly killed with an adequately sized shotgun. - Emily Dickinson You ask of me what the matter is "why is there no word from you?" "what is there to do?" We shall fight the fight till the world end's night. But only so long as there's hope. And once it's gone there be little light neither a point to stay, I fright. What is done is done, now all there is left, is to lay it to rest; maybe stick a nice flower on top and call it a pretty little tomb to something we once held dear.

 That day, as I left, she pulled me aside, and slid a piece of wrinkled paper into my shaking hands. On it, was a ten digit number; not hers ofcourse. "When you feel that you have hit rock bottom, dial this. I can give you one out. Just the one. Use it wisely, and remember that once you use it, you can never dial it a second time", she said. And she left. To this day, I do not have any clue what she told me there and why. I burned the piece of paper long ago, but still have the number memorised. For some reason, I have this feeling that one day, I shall be up against a problem beyond any force of nature, and she shall give me the out; and that I will have no clue how she did it, or why.

May your sheer brilliance give meaning to this madness   Look up at the top, lies there a heading, like a decapitated head a curious thing, pretty at that. But missing the rest of everything to it. Shall I lay it to rest? Asked every voice of reason. But look at it, just lying there, writhing, squirming; a beautiful thing. Looking up at me, demanding to be let out. What are you, but a but a trinket, a toy, an ornament, with no purpose; A heading, with no idea to convey. A thought with no congruence, a glimmer in frozen time as the train of thought roars past, and through like a whirlwind blow. After all, I sit at the study, my page blank The brilliant bleach of the paper, though seemed dark as obsidian, in its blankness. And you are just a heading, with no context or cue. A random gem of an idea, that demands to be let out. So today, I shall get to work chiseling. In this candlelight, I shall shape this dark stone into a formless mass, and you Shall be the crowning gem. May your sh...

  Jo was the bottle of Pepsi, and the sad, almost empty bottle on the bedstand was Jo.    Jo Manson woke up to the blue and red logo of the Pepsi company, with the black liquid serving a good backdrop to paste Jo's eyes on the logo and nothing else. But that red, blue, and white ball has been seared permanently into the brains of every human and fish alive, that one might even question the point of existence of the black liquid at this point. But one does not. "Stop staring", Jo snapped at the Pepsi bottle, and came to a more vertical state of being. Jo was made of said black liquid at this point, from having too much (which is the exact right amount) of it. Jo was the bottle of Pepsi, and the sad, almost empty bottle on the bed stand was Jo. Once at the sink, Jo opened own mouth, and fizzed, like any good can of soda. Jo looked at the toilet in the far corner with five stacked toilet seats. Jo needed a toilet seat, and bought exactly one toilet seat. The tiny trackers (w...

Why can't this story end already? What's left? Aliens? -me. The aliens arrived. They went to great lengths to study our simplistic language, just to understand the mystery that we were never able to solve. The true nature of the universe. It was in search of answers to this mystery that we developed the best science, which allowed us to make this planet habitable for this long. It was research on this mystery that helped us solve fusion. It was the existence of this mystery that brought all the fighting social orders under one peaceful religion. The aliens were convinced. Even though humans were unable to solve this mystery, the progress they made helped them reach great heights. If we solve it, we shall be at the pinnacle of academic and social bliss. We have to dedicate our entire lives to solving the arboreal headphones now. This shall be the reason for our existence.

 What fools we were, to think that the story of the arboreal headphones ended the day it climbed the trees. -rightfully attributed to future historians. Time passed, without being significantly eventful. The banana peel with which the headphones were thrown away rotted, and soon did the people who ate and threw the banana. Time passed, and it soon became an absurd sight, a lone pair of headphones upon a tree. Who planted it there? For what convoluted purposes? Nobody cared to answer. Eventually, it became a joke, a meme. The monkey headphones were something a handful of people laughed about in their closed friends circle. But as things do, fame took off, and soon everyone was pondering the mystery of the arboreal headphones. In due time, the installation gained a level of reverence, that people dared not to touch or move the thing. Art students made sketches and discussed in great detail, the metaphorical resonance of two absolutely normal things coming together to form an absurd c...

It has been said that everything starts out just absurd. You repeat it enough times, and it becomes a joke. Keep on repeating it, and it shall become lore; Then history, Then religion. You believe in it long enough, it becomes science; ethos. - Wrongfully attributed to Mark Zuckerberg. There once, in a land with bananas and banana peels, lived a strange pair of headphones with an even stranger dream to live upto. Everyone thought, it's just a pair of headphones. What can it do? It was lost, in many weird and convoluted ways, drenched in the rain even, but it managed to come back, for its dream was to live up in the trees. It waited years, calculating, plotting, scheming, while everyone continued to live their silly little lives, oblivious of the evil rising. It lived for many years without anyone's notice. Everything was normal, or so they thought. One night, the headphones found a chance, a glimpse of hope to bring its dreams to fruition. It saw the trees. Now all that was lef...

 imagine getting to the sun and finding out that the whole freakshow is run by the ghosts of everything that died here on earth

  Now this is an extremely risky move. You've been warned.  Say that you have an ace in the hole; by which I mean that you have something big. Since I don't know the first thing about cards, I'm gonna switch over to fish analogies.  Imagine that you have a big fish; like, really big. So big a fish that people don't believe that such a big fish exists. Now you have to get through something that requires you to have a whale.  So what you do is, you put your fish flat on the table. The whole thing. And in the awe of the parties involved, claim that you have a whale.  What you've done here is prime leverage. You have something unbelievable actually with you; and you show it to the people. Now they have no choice but to believe the unreal. They've crossed the threshold. Now you use this inertia to push them into an even higher state of belief. But this time, you make them believe in something that actually doesn't exist.  You're literally taking people to the...

 Who are pumpkins? We love them at times; at times, we fear them. They've crept up on society like some wet intimidating slug that we're too apprehensive to confront. It's almost as if they decide what they wanna be to us, and we just comply. We've had these grumps for quite a while now, and apart from the occasional off season pumpkin pie or pudding, they mainly exist to serve the needs of a good halloween symbol. We know that they will be in demand, and when. So it's a fairly safe bet to farm them; in fact, most of the mass pumpkin production in the world revolves around this axis. The sole existence of pumpkins in today's world is fuelled by the fact that they can be carved and cooked for halloween. If not for the fact that once every year, the life from within them could be scourged out and replaced by a burning light inside their empty skull, they wouldn't be sticking around anymore. Their life's purpose is almost entirely to present themselves as p...

    I'm treading out of my usual waters here. But what must be said, must be said. And I feel like it's a necessity at this point.   Let's just imagine a town; a quiet, comfy, secluded town where there's enough resources and the residents are more or less well off. The only problem they have is a shortage of oxygen (welcome to the future). It's been centuries since the earth has started running low on oxygen. But since the people of our town are prosperous, almost all of them are able to afford the public oxygen concentration facilities. And there's this one guy, super rich, who finds joy in feeling the warmth of an open flame. So he has, in each of his rooms, a fireplace wth its own little oxygen supply. And he rallies the people to protest against the ever increasing price of such an essential commodity like oxygen.   Just think about how ludicrous it is; taxing oxygen, something you need every moment to just keep you alive , he said. And he was made leader. T...

What was the most ludicrous, the most over-the-top silly idea in the grand history of ideas? Shall I hazard a guess and say that it was something?... Anything?    There was nothing. No space; no time, no... thing. It was empty, nay, there wasn't even emptiness; no context nor purpose whatsoever. Stable, were everything, of the nothing that existed. No tendency to move forward, no reason to go back; not even time existed for decay to occur. The still, cold deadly silence of the cosmos, with nothing and nowhere in it.    Out in the absence of everything, a possibility was conjured; an attempt so insanely absurd that the very conception of the idea was twisted.  "What if there were something?"  Something to stand out from the ridiculous lack of anything; something to break up the omnipotent stability of 'nothing'? What if there were something, so that there is a directionality to the all-embracing monotone? A will to go forth, and a reson to head back; what if...

T hese silhouettes, oh what they shall be! Creatures birthed from the dim and the dark, they wringed the terrors out like sharks. The darkness souped to give them form and the rains and thunder did conform. Me? I'm alone amidst the storm when they confront me, my monsters, to inform. The monsters of night, of secrets kept; of all the dismal things you'd expect. Sinister, yes; but personal yet. the ghosts of pasts in vengeance wept; for there are monsters beneath our roads well set. They sleep beneath in detest the calm; before the tempest. They be my monsters, the revenants of the grave for my past I digged. Teeth and bone, for my being they crave. Here are the monsters of my own making but just or unjust; I shall do the raking. And thus charged at me the fears that haunted my waking scathed and sliced, bleeding, I barged The scent of blood did their frenzy fill; tearing mouths on their noggin did they move in for the kill My sanity cracked, and creatures let loose creatures so...