I write this with sweat streaming down my face, having ridden Harry up and down the rolling roads that seem to characterize Atlanta. Harry by the way is what I call my bicycle, an antique road bike whose gears don't work and which is so battered that it adds to my general wino look. I like Harry though for I can pretty much go where ever I want to on it and like all things that with use absorb a certain part of the users personality, Harry too has some of my wildness now.

I consumed a lot of junk food today. A burger and french fries, how infectious are these cravings and habits!! I was craving french fries in a mix of mustard and ketchup since this morning. Burp! I guess a lot of things change when someone enters our lives in an intimate manner and mostly for good. It's as if the house, this space that we usually live in, is reconfigured one bit at a time. And just like erosion, caused by rain, wind, snow etc that keeps configuring the canyon walls into these strange and wonderful shapes, I think we do the same to one another. And when looked at after enough time has passed everything seems to have radically changed even though the whole process was much slower than that.

They were tearing up roads around the Tech Tower, apparently they are converting the core of the campus into a pedestrian only zone. But I didn’t see the point of why they have to tear up perfectly good asphalt road only to pave it later with brick!! What a colossal waste of material, effort and energy. But I guess the road construction folks, the pen pushers and the odd millionaire who would be giving the dough to name the brick paved park zone after him must all be somehow kept happy, fuck the waste of material and effort!!

But then given that I am still plugged in into the consumerist culture myself I guess I should not write polemics!! I should zealously guard my pieces of plastic, feed on Big Macs, participate in all these seasonal feel good(corporate) days that are carefully and strategically spaced apart: Father's Day, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, watch my cholesterol, pay big bucks towards health insurance and hospital bills, aspire to drive BMWs(or is it Porsche?), own a four car garage home, one for daddy, one for mommy, one for the sonny and one for the doggie who lives down in the air-conditioned kennel and goes to a pet barber(who exist in New York City) for his weekly haircut that costs fifty dollars, monthly salary of a factory worker in India!!

And if occasionally my soul bothers me I should go down to the bookstore and read rows upon rows of self help books, not that I have anything against this genre of publishing, we all need to absorb positive thoughts once in a while, I even own a few, but mainly because half of them are pure junk. Sample: Rule Book for Online Dating offers this rule to women, "Never offer your phone number first, you will make yourself appear too easy to get". Now no doubt the whole relationships scenario is so fucked up here, with so many external parameters already set up that it all becomes a huge mind trip. "Oh the dude did this, he is nice. Boy! why didn't the dude do this!! He is a piece of shit". The only folks who seem to benefit from all this of course are Columbian drug barons, Jack Daniels, shrinks and self proclaimed self help gurus who can publish more books like "Sexual Chemistry to Capture Your Martian."

Perhaps I don't get this well enough, fuck it all! Give me a wild place that's a changing canvas for the sun, a clear cold mountain creek sparkling like silver, snow flurries whirling and falling upon me like divine confetti and just a few simple folks, with clear hearts or at least those willing to make that trip to clear their windshields of accumulated junk of social programming to SEE, to associate with!

The rain is pounding away at the rusty eves Twirling, sliding bubbling foam well that's rain.

You too, and I should walk now as free as that on cloud, on air, the medow and the vapour roads.

Move around up there and here below like this liquid thing flowing into human life on rooftops and on shoes.

I read this poem in a study break and found it to be so beautiful that I had to write it down, the way he describes rain as this liquid thing that flows into human lives... beautiful!

Another rain laden evening, the trees outside still wet and sun going down in the horizon beyond them. I like the view of the trees and sky I have out of my window. E. O. Wilson, the ant man, calls this Biophilia, a natural affinity we all have for nature. If there are things I should be thankful for I am thankful for always having a tree or trees outside my window. It was a huge oak with a white swing before now it's a cove of trees full of birds in the evenings. Apparently the number of birds one might find in an urban landscape with enough trees or vegetation is much larger than one may find in any other ecosystem. Even though I have been meaning to take up ornithology as a hobby, I can't verify that statement for now. It doesn't manner anyway, I see enough birds to keep me happy. A few days ago I think I saw a monarch butterfly. Maybe it wasn't a monarch butterfly but it was pretty big and was colored blue, my favorite color. Also I know an interesting fact about monarch butterflies; apparently these butterflies fly to a certain forest in Mexico i.e. seasonally migrate to breed and at that time the whole forest is covered with butterflies. Imagine how crazy that would be, all these trees covered with butterflies and at the softest whisper all of them taking to air. Wow!

I was thinking as I was staring out of my window how Nature is the most subtle healer. There was a whole sequence of actions that went on before that, I was sitting in this room with my windows closed and a light on in the day! That means I was wasting energy along with not taking in the dance of the changing light and the trees. As an aside Joyce Kilmer wrote he saw nothing more lovely than a tree. Besides USA uses more energy per person in the world than any other country. I think the ratio of energy use between say a developing country like India and USA is around 1:15 or something like that! Now that is a shocking figure for me who grew up in India. But then things become clear when I see how I live here. First is the way I live here, half the buildings here have little or no source of natural light. I used to work in this monolithic building which had maybe 10% of it's surface area open to natural light. It's as if people here almost abhor sunlight, it's something to be kept away from!! So I was thinking boy when I get to build my own space it surely will have a hell lot of windows!

Anyway I see that this is boiling down into a rant so I will end this here. Yes switch off that light, open those windows, take a walk in the park and go hug a tree!