The Jelly Mould and Suicide Advice

Over the past few days I've been living inside a jelly mould. Moving involves an effort that I can't usually be bothered to take. Getting up off a bed is like fighting more than just gravity. Everything tastes the same uniform taste inside the jelly mould. Jelly. Conversations and personal interaction make it through some sort of viscous, colourless filter that strips everything down into a monotonous droning hum, sort of like carrying on a conversation after going 24 hours without sleep, but without the feverbright buzzing at the back of your head.


No I am not living inside a jelly mould called Daniel.


The tragic part is, this hellhole of a City has actually been beautiful over the past few days. Steady unseasonal rains for the past three days. Beautiful green streets and lovely weather.

It is sometimes possible for me to be unnaturally influenced by a recent piece of literature. Considering I've just finished reading The Bell Jar, I shouldn't be too surprised.



Not a jelly mould (but close).


Today I mildly pondered the possibility that I'm depressed. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that one of the symptoms of depression was ennui. I also remembered that another important symptom was contemplating methods of killing oneself. Not merely exploring the possibility, but analysing the options, based on predetermined criteria. I then realised that I had never really given serious thought to the methods by which I may choose to kill myself. I have considered earlier the manner in which I would like to die (in my sleep, peaceful-like), but I realised that reflecting on how one would like to die bears little or no connection to how one would like to kill oneself. For one thing, the motivations for killing oneself may vary greatly from the motivations for dying (it could be argued that there is no real motive for just dying, but I don't really agree). You could kill yourself

a) out of sheer boredom,
b) out of sheer despair,
c) out of self-hatred,
d) as a simple 'fuck you' to the world or someone in particular, or
e) in rare circumstances, out of consideration for other people.
f) Any permutation or combination of any or all of the above factors



A reasonable illustration of motives a) and c)


A reasonable illustration of motive e)

While there may be other motivations, these are the ones I could come up with. Having selected a suitable motive or a bouquet of motives, it is then important to choose the general tone with which you could choose to end it all. Of course, according to your motives and your general levels of squeamishness, there are a variety of methods you could choose. In fact, the list of ways you could think of to kill yourself is almost limitless. However, for the sake of brevity, we could limit ourselves to a few important highlights. You could decide to:

a) Have a big, messy ending (e.g. jumping off a building)
b) Have a quiet, non-messy ending (e.g. take sleeping pills and drift away or the Sylvia Plath special)
c) Have a macho sort of ending (e.g. commit seppuku or shooting yourself)
d) Have an absurd, ridiculous sort of ending (take sleeping pills while standing on the edge of a tall building with a samurai sword strategically placed on the ground below. And a chicken.)
e) Have a long, painful ending (you could drink yourself to death like that guy in Leaving Las Vegas)
f) Have a long, (relatively) painless ending (slit your wrists and blow bubbles in your bath tub till you die. Or you could read a book, if you don't own a bathtub)
g) Have a stupid, desperate, suffering, extremely messy ending (hang yourself and void your bowels)
h) Have a long, drawn out, dramatic ending (drown yourself.)
g) Have an extremely psychedelic ending (overdose on something lethal and interesting)




Seppuku: A cool way to die



Chicken = What were you thinking?


may= +
Note: Studies have shown that an attempt at suicide by psychedelic drugs may result in seppuku with a chicken.


The presence or absence of witnesses at any of these will depend upon a number of factors, including whether you want the world (or that special person) to whom you want to deliver that final 'fuck you' to notice. Of course, in these wonderfully networked times, it is quite possible for you to deliver your message to the entire world with little more than a webcam, a laptop and a decent internet connection. Just make sure the angles are right because you know there won't be any second attempts for this little stunt :-) .

If youre really serious about this whole thing and not some sort of emofreak who's just craving attention, it is suggested that you please stop bellyaching about it to all and sundry before youre going to do it.

Also, it is inconsiderate and sloppy to get someone to help you out, so try not to. Unless of course, you're too chicken to do it yourself and you're paying someone good money to do it or you, in which case, it is advised that you hire a professional with good references.


A professional with good references.

Now that I have effectively contemplated suicide in as many of its motivations and forms as have occurred to me, I can officially classify myself as depressed. Hooray.

The moral of the story, children, is Look both ways before crossing the Street. Or don't. It's up to you after all.

Wasp vs. Spider!

I've always been scared of wasps. We've had this little hate-hate thing going for a long long time, the wasps and I. Both of us have scored some pretty significant victories, though they drew first blood with an organised ambush in a dark, abandoned outhouse. Of course, with the advent of the electric mosquito bat, I managed to get in a few as well. So, we have history. Perhaps they sense the negative vibes, or perhaps I just get stuck in stupid situations with wasps, but they are the species responsible for the maximum number of physical attacks upon my person. Cows come second.
Having run out of imaginative ways to make my life miserable, I suppose the wasps decided to try the old classics out again and see how they worked out. I'm talking about Killer Wasp Attack at the Outhouse II. All I wanted was to sit comfortably in my loo, read a book and be left alone in peace. Suddenly, a familiar hideous buzzing noise assaults my ears. Memories of fiery burning pain and laughing schoolchildren assault my solace, as I look up and dive, just in time to miss a careening carrier of venomous malice. The little bastard must have flown in through the crack in the window. He settled on the mirror and proceeded to preen his antennae. The entire time, I watched him with bated breath, fingers slowly reaching for the matchbox and deodorant spray. Suddenly I realised that he had stopped preening, and a strange creeping, tingling feeling began to crawl up the base of my spine. I tried to identify the source of this feeling, and realised that it stemmed from the fact that the bastard was actually looking at me. I had the distinct impression that the beady little compound eyes were staring into mine, daring me to make a move. I dismissed the thought, and nonchalantly reached for the deodorant. Scarcely after my fingers closed over it, the horrible buzzing began anew and I was treated to the sight of a yellow buzzing blur hurtling in my general direction. At this point, I abandoned all propriety and wildly sprayed deodorant into the air, forgetting in my joyous abandon that this sort of thing only works if you have a match. Enfragranced and incensed, the yellow bastard circled around for a second run and froze in its tracks. Or at least that was how it looked at the time. Within a second, the wasp began to struggle furiously in what appeared to be the middle of the air against nothing. Nothing, on closer inspection, turned out to be the web of a daddy longlegs.
I must interrupt the narrative at this point to point out that spiders are one of my favourite creatures. Most people are repulsed by their freakishly fast, yet jerky movements but I have spent many an evening entranced by them, staring up at my cobwebbed ceiling, watching them build their webs, slowly but industriously, and ever so beautifully.
At any rate, the wasp was stuck, and stuck fast. It had landed itself in the web of one of the largest spiders that I had allowed to take up residence in my humble abode, and was going nowhere fast. The buzzing increased in volume and intensity, but resulted ultimately in the yellow bastard entwining itself deeper When I was sure that the yellow bastard was not, in fact, going to break through and continue to wreak havoc, I stepped up for a closer look. A spiderweb is constructed in such a manner that if any insect is trapped within it, no matter where our friend the spider is, (s)he feels the vibrations and comes running to investigate. My friend had already arrived by the time I stepped up, and was busy with the important work of securing her catch. This was a truly fascinating process, and by tilting my head at the right angle to the light, I was able to observe how she would squirt webbing out of the sac at the base of her abdomen, apply a rear leg to the webbing, and then stick it to the wasp, then proceeding by an intricate working of her legs, to wrap it further in its own doom. When the wasp continued to struggle, and by dint of its final efforts, strain at the very structure of the web itself, the spider calmly continued to attach webbing to the creature, and then crawl off up the web, mooring it to the walls of the bathroom. The wasp continued to struggle and the spider continued to build, always careful to avoid the vicious stinger that flickered in and out of view at the base of its abdomen. In the meantime, I managed to take some photographs. I felt faintly voyeuristic, somehow as if I were intruding on a ritual I had no part of. I continued anyway. The wasp finally ceased to struggle, as if in resignation to its fate. At this point, the spider attached itself to its defeated opponent and proceeded to consume it.


Now, in case you are wondering, many spiders do not actually eat their prey preferring instead to inject their venom into the innards of the unfortunate, wait for said innards to turn into a mass of mushy goo and then suck at said goo like a slurpee. I watched, fascinated, for some more time, then allowed the spider to feed in peace. The next morning, the wasp was little more than a dessicated husk. I decided to allow the spider to keep its trophy a little longer.

Something wicked this way comes.

The city is like a giant complex of smoke and facades, behind which a billion unspeakable things may happen in the course of a day. You may be living in an apartment block holding hundreds, but if your neighbours perform secret sacrifices to eldritch gods, you will never know. You will walk down a crowded street in the middle of the day, but if a hand should reach out and pluck the person walking next to you, you will never know. If all the members of your office are covertly engaging in organised mass sexual congress, you will never know. If you decide one night to go out into the dark and embrace your inner freak, whatever he may be, they need never know. In this sort of beautiful anarchic anonymity, strange things have the chance to lurk and grow. Strange, and perhaps even beautiful sometimes, but often merely macabre.
I love Delhi for its delicious urban legends. The flavour of the moment, for instance, is the Hammer Man. And before that, the even stranger story of the Monkey Man. This story is not about them. It is about the things you will never know about. Of course, if you're a sufficiently warped individual, there's nothing to prevent you from opening the manhole cover and taking a peek at what crawls beneath. And this is basically an effort in that direction. Witness:



I don't know what this is. In this crazy place, it could be anything, ranging from the mundane (some sort of MCD/DDA warning) to the misleading ( a bunch of students having fun) to the macabre (the symbol used to mark the spot where volunteers for blood sacrifices to Eldritch gods may assemble at precisely three fifty three in the morning, leaving no trace behind by three fifty six). It appears all over my part of South Delhi. On direction boards, on walls, on busstands. This particular specimen appeared on the wall of a flyover I was crossing. As you can see, its neither outrightly mundane or macabre. It's not your average skull and crossbones denoting danger. Rather, it is the sunken, emaciated image of someone's face, complete with eyes, a nose and a perfunctory sort of mouth. It's also not an overt image of threat or violence. The eyes hold no violence, instead, preferring to fix the observer with a baleful glance that seems to tread the line between bovineness and malevolence. There are bags under the eyes, perhaps to indicate some measure of malevolence, but more probably to convey suffering and depradation. The lines also seem to indicate that, while the person who created the stencil for this image (for I believe it is a stencil painted one, judging by the sharp, symmetrical outlines that accompany all the images, as well as the extra thick borders) inserted some of the features of a face, he clearly was aiming to portray a skull to the casual passerby. However, it is more than that. It is a portrait of a visage that is halfway between deteriorating from a human face into a vacant skull. Decay in its final stages before death. I would like to think of it as a message, but I am a little looney. I've asked my fellow Delhiites if they know what it is, but no one seems to have a clue. Very few others have even admitted to noticing it. Is it a desperate cry for help? A dire warning in the endtimes? A bloody marker for doings of unimaginable horror and depravity? You will never know.

Bollywood SWAT

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2974A bunch of Americans sitting around commenting on Bollywood and Lollywood (Lahore!) movie posters. The posters are incredible. The comments are moderately funny, but I can see something like them coming out of a conversation with a few of my more mentally traumatised friends. Must visit, at least for the posters. I want a poster of the lion killer guy framed in my bathroom. Anyone know where I can get one?

The sandman's journey to hell....the legions await. pay heed to the call. 

Khan Market, Delhi... I dont know ow this ultracool grafitti got there