Life Under the New Regime - 2: (It's been ages)

It has been ages since NF saw a film. Any film. (He did catch up on Kaminay (which he thought was fantastic), District 9 and Inglourious Basterds and some old Hitchcock numbers like the excellent Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and mandatory reruns of Andaz Apna Apna every fortnight or so but this is a far cry from his previous awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, ball-crushing bouts of movie-mania in which he would sit for hours and devour one film after another.)

It has also been ages since NF read. Anything. Either fiction or non-fiction. He's formed a habit of reading himself off to sleep for a long time now and that's about the only reading he's been doing for quite some time. (No prizes for guessing which book. It's the Infinite Jest tome. A couple of pages are heavy enough to induce sleep in even the most chronically insomnia-ravaged patients.) That and some light, fast David Foster Wallace short stories while traveling. Not much, given NF's formidable past reading record.

It has been ages since NF listened to some good music. Any genre. (The last major outing was his unexpected guest appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival with a mug of beer in hand. That and being witness to Blues legends Buddy Guy and BB King a month ago in concert.) He's been trying to appreciate a little Jazz (Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald in particular) but opines that Jazz's perhaps more of an acquired taste than Blues.

It had been ages since he worked. Hard. However, these days somehow grind themselves away at work rather than at other pursuits. Staring at blackboards full of arcane expressions, trying to make sense out of Mickey Mouse models and taking life a little more seriously seem to be the order of the day. (Not much to his liking, we say in his defense though.)

It has been ages since he's felt so creative. NF feels almost a sense of a natural high as he trudges along home late at night from work day after day. Lines from Maggie's Farm ("I've got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane") seem to take NF by the scruff of his scrawny neck and whisper secret words of wisdom in his ears. Sometimes their power is such that he has to go away somewhere alone, clutch his head hard and do two or three short, but intense pelvic thrusts and let off screams of "Ouu...Ouu-Ouu" to relieve the mind-boggling mental pressure that's crushing the poor little sod under its weight.

If you ask him seriously though, he'll shrug his shoulders a little, throw his goggles up in the air à la Rajnikant (where they'll joggle and somersault a little and give out classy "woosh-woosh" sounds and sit right atop his nose-bridge), give a corny thumbs up and say "I don't mind it at all."

Quote-Unquote⁰:

NF: <*slightly tipsy perhaps*> Fine. Life is meaningless. So you just proved the problem is NP hard. Now what are you going to do with it? Acting cool, jaded, blasé, superior and invoking the meaninglessness of life as a justification for the aforementioned behavior is the same as (read isomorphic to) feeling satisfied and smug about the helplessness that the intractability of the problem induces. You've gotta fucking come up with a provable, well functioning heuristic. That's what's non trivial. That's what a True Ninja would do.

Listener: Dude, you've had too much. You better sleep.

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0. Another one of those flashes that NF's been having so many of of late, good enough to be included in a separate "Nuggets of Wisdom" series.