Category: Writing

I’ve decided to say what my soul sings to me. Join me on this stream of consciousness ride. It’s like a boat wafting down a river. Try not to think as you read. It helps if you let the water take you without worrying about the direction or the color of the water.

Dear Angel Moth, I have a lot to ask for;

Save the whales. Save the dolphins. Save the polar bears save the chimpanzees and gorillas and starving people in Africa with round pot bellies and bones that show through their skin, small dots of braided hair and dry fat lips and swollen cheeks hovered by darting flies taking small bites of malnourished flesh. They live in muddy huts built with bamboo sticks walled by hay with a soot smear center where they roast the food and set the fire to keep warm. Save the polar ice caps save the poor save the hungry save the ones that love first and never hate the ones that love one another save the ones that don’t need toxins and pills to love one another to feel good about each other feel good about themselves feel good about the world they live in. Save the orangutans and the Guido tan and the man in the van with the black hand who does coke deals in shady alleys in van city and Gerrard street whenever he comes to Toronto on business deals. Save the technological innovators and computer programmers and celebrity bloggers and business starters. Save the college students and the dorm room doofus and his watermelon bong and the dude with the acoustic guitar who plays that creep song on campus during exam time. Save the anti-social who gets good grades and appears humble and brags about it in a Microsoft word document on his apple computer when he gets home from a day of avoiding well-mannered strangers with good intentions. Save the short story writer who does it for the art and the peace of mind it brings to his soul, who dreams of playing with people’s moods like a pianist with a well-tempered piano during a Beethoven symphony, who sees words as more than their definition and logical function, who sees words like musical notes placed together in close proximity to invoke a range of feelings and emotions in their readers that cannot be defined in any way but the way they’ve been placed. Save the scientist working in the university bunker who mixes chemicals to create chemicals to mix chemicals that helps save people inflicted with diseases caused by the imbalance of certain chemicals in their bodies. Save the doctors. Save the lawyers who defend the good and the bad and bend truth and create fictions that no matter how false cause a truth to happen the next day when the judgments are delivered. In India, in a slum somewhere not in Bombay or Delhi or any of the big cities is a young boy who will grandfather generations of some one just like him and eventually some element will change the line in the family and one of his future ancestors will ascend to another class and change the world. In that slum is a boy drinking chai, which he takes with milk and sugar and boils in a little hut not so different from the one that houses the malnourished starving African family described above. All these things are happening and all the time the world is moving because time doesn’t stop. Time is an organizational construct that we’ve gotten so used to that if something happened that couldn’t be explained within that organizational construct, we’d be dumb founded and confused to the point of our brains cracking. Hence time dilation and black holes. Whoops I digress, Whoopee Goldberg, whatever happened to her. I can never ever ever ever ever take her seriously after I watched Sister Act two. Anyways what was I talking about, I was letting my soul sing. All I can do is sit and ponder about the world. All the time the world is moving and there is nothing I can do but move with it. There are gross inequalities and there are GROSS inequalities but who says the world was meant to be fair? Let it be. Let it be.

And now I lapse into spiritual religious thinking and this is never good. Here goes OH GOD OH GOD OH OH OOH- God is a three-legged slum dog in Mexico City who watches little kids skip rocks across the stream in a gully, hoping to see crumbs of bread sticking out of their pockets he can steal. He creeps up and licks the bread out their pockets, and skitters away before they notice. Sometimes they notice and when they do, he realizes much too late when he hears the scampering of their bare feet in the dusty pavement. And then they throw the rocks that he must dodge but there are so many that some of them hit him, causing fresh bruises to swell over old ones. He runs under a rickshaw, sits beside its wheels and eats the piece of bread then licks at his new bruises and finally watches the street vendors to catch em off guard to steal an apple or some fruit off the open stalls. If GOD is humble and peaceful and never changing, then he’s probably been fucked over so many times he’s been driven down to the innocence of a dog trying to survive a street filed with street thugs and their rock throwing sons building experience for their future resumes in crime.

By Ashish Seth