6 Months in India

I guess this is the milestone month. This weekend marks six month's of working for Gameshastra in Hyderabad. I've spent 7 weeks back in the U.S. since this started. I feel more at home in India than I do in the myriad of changing homes Sinead has been bouncing to. I return to the U.S and its like it did after I lived in Washington State and Nevada, like a stranger in a known land, the perpetual tourist.

Well three days until I turn 30 years old. I am entering the decade of fast fading youth and slow slide into an uncomfortable, ill fitting middle age. Oh but the all the things I have to show for it! I guess its fair to say if was looking merely run up the score I am failing, a career in games and no high marks for how I have lived. Not that I am bitter, or at least half as bitter as I will be when I am 40.

I guess now that wine of my youth is turning to the vinegar of middle age I should look for the positive applications of my innate change in characteristics. One, I will make a salad taste better with out risking the friskiness of being tipsy. Two, my cutlery will be cleaner than ever. Three, I finally have an excuse for being worthless at parties, but no excuse for being worthless on a dirty bathroom.

Some days you just want to hear a record a player looping revolution #9 backwards and a pound a bottle of cheap merlot. You want to watch the shadow of the sun paint a dancing slit of yellow light across the room, the only illumination from the sun as peeks through the almost closed shutters. You want to see that thin strip of bleached light redden just as you pass into blackness of the Indian night.

Instead you will be lucky if you don't have to work 10 more hours in the Salt Mine with a cupcake and candle to commemorate your thirtieth round trip on Spaceship Earth. It will pass with all of the pomp and circumstance of a Ken and Barbie wedding as you drift through another day.

I have peered into the cold beating heart of space and time and heard only the flatulent convunlsions of the Space Child called God. What if the powers that created the Universe are infinitely dumber and less interesting than the creation itself? What if we peer deep into the mind of God and find only the abstract wonderings of a child-like dreamer? What if the Universe is so fundamentally retarded that every single Scientist is doomed to go mad when they realize that universe doesn't actually make sense? The bastard contraption has only one rule, it can change the rules so it doesn't fail. Every other piece of nonsense is the part and parcel of the code. Supreme inelegance.

The notches I tick past have a little more relevence these days, like the braids in the noose I will surely hang from, just as everyone else will in time. By most estimates I have lived over 40% of my life. I guess there is no time like the present to make these days count. Surely the braids of the noose will eventually tick along until there is no more rope left to run into. Nothing left my neck and the fleeting moments before the sharp drop and dull shock. One last time to look up and see the sky before the light fades into the final night.

In the meantime I look forward to making the most of the 60% I have left on a messed up, backwards rock spinning away in the backwoods of a forgotten galaxy. A moment in time, unique as a snowflake, and just as meaningless as one more ice crystal in Antarctica.