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!