With a lot of free time on my hands, I have been reading a lot of web comics lately. So I thought of doing a quick compilation of my favorites. Now, don't worry.. this isn't going to be a review of each of them. It's up to you to explore them and take your pick depending on your tastes and ahem.. your level of intellect.
xkcd obviously takes the prime spot and it seems sacrilegious to mention it in a list along with other earthly entities. Doing so would be a direct insult to the great man Randall Munroe himself.
Now, coming to the part for which I'm actually writing this post...
There's this one strip from smbc which I particularly liked. It features an artist, a scientist and a mathematician. But hey, why isn't an engineer's perspective there... So, I just added one last panel to the comic to complete the picture.
This exchange took place between Human 1 (abbreviated as H1) who is a believer, and Human 2 (abbreviated as.. yes you guessed it right, H2) who is an atheist, on an idle Thursday afternoon in the air-conditioned premises of an undisclosed location.
H1:
Listen to 'Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol'
Nirvana
awesome lyrics
H2:
dude!!! How the fuck are the lyrics awesome?
H1:
Because it doesn't need to make sense
It is just written the way the mind works
the GIT-GWC thing is funky
H2:
First up, it's not even a song. Obviously, he's in a drunk and drugged state. Its just a jam session they are having and he just keeps rambling and ranting on the go. Making up the words and just saying out what comes to mind (although you might say that shows his 'awesome' creativity and poetry that he can make up these impromptu lyrics)
H1:
Yea, agreed, maybe he is drugged, but we don't know for sure. And if you listen to it carefully, it does make sense on the whole. It succeeds in creating an effect without the words actually saying it. And if not his creativity, I admire his guts to actually turn this into an actual song with guys like me liking it.
H2:
Agreed, it makes sense, the same Cobain ideas are repeated here too.
First para: is about injecting drugs (use once, discard syringe, press down the injection).
Then again: no creativity left and his same suicide crap.
But seriously, what guts are you talkin about?! He didn't mean it to be a song... just recorded a jam session. Putting it in an album doesn't mean he's got guts.
Accept it, he was just a useless junkie like every other drugged bum on the streets.
H1:
Its not suicide crap, in this song.. its about just being stupid and vulnerable.. and speaking out what you are thinking without any pretence. I don't see any scope of creativity left to squeeze in when you're not pretending.
And maybe he was a junkie, maybe he was useless, but he had the courage to shout it out in front of everyone.. he wasn't just your regular junkie limited to the confines of his room, trying to fight his fears.. he accepted his fears and faults in front of millions.. that is guts.
H2:
Okay.. I can't help but grin now.. wanted to laugh out loud though
for the first time, LOL makes sense
H1:
That's one way of saying you find the argument futile now
H2:
Yes
H1:
Though I'm not so sure of the reason
H2:
Agreed, he might have had more talent in his foreskin than I have in my entire body. But definitely it was less than the amount so many other singers, guitarists, musicians, songwriters of his time have in theirs. So my only point is that I find him to be an average singer/songwriter/guitarist..
But that's just my view. I accept that you and others might like his music. But I find myself unable to appreciate it.
H1:
I never said he's the most talented, agreed on that. He might just be average. We are all intellectual men here striving to attain greater heights of pseudo-intelligence.. so whatever helps us.. all cool..
H2:
Okay.
Listen to 'Ziggy Stardust'
David Bowie
H1:
Ok
H2:
So we end the chat by rounding up a full circle.
Remember where this started..
and I look back on that day, when you first saw me
I think it was who I was with, yes that was the key
and I found it hard, I found it hard to breathe
I think it was the stare, yes that did it for me
and it was a weird night, an unusual place to be
'Love the place', said I, 'Totally', said she
and in that moment, it was all I could see
seemed like a scene, straight out of a movie
and so we sat, drinking my assam tea
you wanted black coffee, but I didn't agree
and we talked, we talked of bird and bee
surely the wrong time to put forth my plea
and I was a fool, in more ways than one
losing what I had, and ending up with none
should have kept shut, but I blocked out the sun
the man who knew too much, but felt like an empty gun
Earphones plugged in, The Sound of Silence playing, and the volume turned down to a level that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s voices were barely a whisper, he was all set. Pulling up the wooden chair, he cleared the desk top of all the usual clutter and set out just a scroll pad, carefully positioning it at the center of the table. This was supposedly the perfect setting to finally sit down and write his story. He picked up a pencil and touched the tip to the top left margin of the sheet in front of him.
It was at this moment that it struck him. Until now, he had always been very vague; so much so that even he had trouble deciphering his own obscure thoughts. And he also knew why. He needed a unifying theme... a motif. And not just for his story. Lucidity was something that had constantly eluded him. It was not that he didn’t have any ideas. But so muddled up they were that giving a pragmatic close to them was inconceivable. And with every single idea, came its posse of doubts, fear and incertitude; those floating nimbus clouds addling the otherwise clear blue skies of his subconscious.
A torrent of thoughts was flooding the streets of his head. He found himself digressing from the task at hand. Maybe it was the words of the song refraining him from focusing. Perhaps Ludwig van would have been a better pick for this setting. He reached for the pause button on his iPod. The music stopped, but he left the earphones where they were. He liked it that way.
The pencil started shaping letters precariously, giving way to words that he hoped would eventually turn into a story.
He never thought that this could ever happen to him. He had thought himself incapable of it. He had always assumed it to be the kind of stuff that one comes across only in fables. Hell, he had even scoffed at the thought of thinking about it.
But deep inside, there was still this little voice, which now he came to realize, seldom lied. The voice which he had always stifled. And he also knew that it would grow loud and strong one day, strong enough to stop him from ignoring it any further.
Now the time had finally arrived. Arriving in a manner which shattered all his notions, notions he had always known to be false. Notions he had willfully allowed to hoard up, never gathering the courage to face up to the truth and free his cluttered mind of them.
He knew reality was cruel. So he chose to escape.
And then it came, shaking him up from slumber, like a blast of ice cold water on a January morning. More cruel than he had thought it to be.
I snap back. Only to realize that I had long overslept. The window is no longer open, the moment is long gone. Evaporated is the half-chance. Things happen when you least expect them to. The real troubles in life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind: the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do all you can with what you have. Give it your hundred percent and never back out. If there's even a bleak chance... a glimmer of hope... if the door is just slightly ajar, go for it and push your way through. Do not just sit back assuming that it's all over and you can't do anything about it.
Do not assume that even after trying, you are going to end up failing. If you do have to assume, assume it to be positive. Do not be pessimistic about it. Do not cover up for your laziness by doing so. Anything and everything can be done if you want to do it. It’s not the laziness. It is fear. Do not hide it behind your facade of indifference. Instead, stop being afraid. The first step is the hardest to take. Stop coming up with excuses to avoid confronting challenges. You have the motivation. And you have whatever else it takes to do it. Do not let the fear overpower all of that. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take".
Stop playing the victim. It’s very easy to pass on the blame. Don’t say that it was destined to be that way. Take definitive action to correct whatever's wrong.
Don’t shit yourself into not believing in yourself. The course which your life takes is in your own hands. Stand up and take responsibility for it. Don’t just let it pass you by.
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.
I don’t know why I keep going back to it. Right after I do it, I promise to myself... never again. But then, as they say, the thing about promises is that they are meant to be broken (so clichéd isn’t it). But what if these promises have been made out to your own self? It’s easy lying to others, but what one should try to achieve, is to always be true to oneself.
wait a minute… what am I doing..? Why do I always start out to write something and then drift off to these vague philosophies of mine, thus ending up with something totally different from what I had set forth to write in the first place. Why can’t my mind just focus on the job at hand.. Actually, that’s one more problem that I need to address. There’s just so many of them. I can never seem to get ahead of them. Anyway, I should learn to rise above these trivialities.
I’m sounding too random now. Time to snap back... remember that thing I mentioned earlier. The one after which I promise myself that I’ll stay away…
I’ve realized that sadness or stress doesn’t make me give in to it. In fact, in such a state, I tend to be more of a fighter (or at least that’s what I’d like to believe) and put in that extra effort to see myself through the rough.
I guess I do it when I am bored. When I have nothing good to do and see everyone else around me buried in useful productive work, I flip (and that is one more thing about myself that I need to change). That is when I try to create this illusion of happiness and importance around me.
I’m sorry that this whole post has turned out to be so arbitrary that now even I can’t understand what I wanted to write (another thing that is wrong with me, and this is the biggest one – I don’t know what I want). So just to inject some semblance of sanity into all this gibberish, I’d just say that this “thing” I’ve been talking about… it could be anything. It can imply different meanings to different individuals. It’s anything you perceive to be negative in your life (yeah, more of my philosophical crap).
And as for me, my name is Kartik and I’ve been clean for a month now.
“what do you do when you feel stressed or sad?
I pretend I'm a little kid again and I'm sneaking through my childhood home. I try to remember how doors opened, how closets smelled, how floors squeaked.”
