Behold

I finally had enough of computer speakers, headphones, graduate era discount stereo systems and movie-based home theater systems. It was time to move on. Time to splurge a bit and experience music as it should be. Behold the purveyor of aural bliss or as I call it, "He that comes in your ear and makes you come too".

(Native Indian warrior Chief Snorting Horse shown for scale, also coming in somebody's ear)

Fashion : You can't just walk it off.

You know, there are a number of things in this life that we take for granted. For example, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Let's consider life itself. What if you weren't alive? Have you ever considered that? Aren't you glad to be alive? You might not remember this, but a lot of stuff went into keeping you alive. When you were born, you had to be fed, clothed and kept from eating your own poop. It was a lot of work and goddamn did it suck. But someone did it and now you are alive. Treasure that fact. Do not take it for granted.

And liberty, how about that liberty? What if you were a caged bird? Can you imagine how much your life would suck? Or if you were water in a glass. Wouldn't you miss the time you went babbling through that brook until you were accosted by that dam and siphoned down those pipes?

Or the pursuit of Happiness. Have you considered how fortuitous it is that you are pursuing happiness and not the other way around? You can't run for shit and Happiness would catch up to you mighty quick. I hear she is into leather and spiked stuff.

So, along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I have stopped taking many other things for granted. I treasure most things. Most but not all. One thing I was still taking for granted was the ability to walk. You'd probably say to me, but gawker, what's the big deal about walking, I do it all the time with little or no trouble. And you would say that because you wouldn't have seen the Hindi movie "Fashion". This movie transformed my life. It changed my opinion about walking.

Fashion is about a girl who is a very talented walker. She walks like nobody's business. She is such a good walker that people routinely come up to her and exclaim my, oh my, where did you learn to walk like that? And she says, why, it came to me naturally when I was a baby. She was terrible at crawling. But boy, that baby girl could walk.

So this girl gets recruited by a modeling agency where she puts her walking abilities to good use on the fashion ramp and earns bunches of money. She turns into a supermodel. Her walking makes her famous. Her fame develops walking, nay running abilities of its own and spreads far and wide. People attempt to walk like her but they fail. You can't compete with the expert. No, it takes a tremendous amount of talent to put foot before foot without falling down. Trust me, I tried it myself and within two days, I was clutching at the walls trying to stay awake and upright.

But here's where the movie gets poignant. Here's the part that made me cry. This simple happy girl begins to get arrogant. Her walking goes to her head. She begins to feel she is the greatest walker the world has ever known. She spurns her family, her friends, her co-walkers. She even spurns walking itself and takes to driving. And to cap it all, drinks while she is doing it. Her walking career begins to falter. Her assignments begin to dry up and pretty soon, she turns into what each of us have nightmares about turning into. Just an ordinary person who can walk. This is disastrous to her psyche and she spirals into depression. To drown her sorrow, she starts doing all kinds of crazy stuff like black guys and cocaine until finally, one day, she wakes up, sees herself in the mirror, looks at her heavily mascaraed eyes and says to herself, Lord oh Lord, what have I become? Where are my eyes? No amount of tissue-rubbing can bring her eyes back. And then she realizes it's not just her eyes that she's lost, but her entire perspective on life. She decides to turn into a new leaf.

So she goes back to her family and her friends. The people she should not have discarded like a pair of worn-out socks in the first place. She loses her arrogance. She replaces it with compassion and a tremendous fear of walking. Her friends are extremely supportive. They try to rebuild her walking career by giving her ramp assignments. The very first day of her rejuvenated walking career, she is faced with a dilemma. Should she drown herself into the memory of her failed past or should she welcome the future and walk? Bright spotlights are shining on her. She can hear the audience in the crowd snicker. Too many doubters and too few well-wishers. Will she able to walk? Well, the movie is still a long way off from ending so you are guessing, no. And you are right. She fails in her attempt to walk. She has the pluck to walk, the will to walk, the bones, muscles, tendons and the primal instinct inherited from our hungry foraging ape-like ancestors to walk, but for this troubled woman, that is still not enough. She fails. And that's when you realize you should never take walking for granted.

But our girl, she will not give up. She is a survivor. She plugs on. She accepts another walking assignment and this time, she is going to be the star of the show, what they (supposedly) call in the business, a show-stopper. Expectations are even higher this time. Not only will she have to walk, but do an exceptional job of it. It is crunch time. And then, it is showtime.

It's her time to shine. She is up next. But she still has her doubts. "Can I walk?" she asks herself. After all, I did walk around all day today. And yesterday. And every day of the past twenty or so years. I walked to the grocery, to the laundry, to the bathroom. Once, I even ran, she muses with pride. It's not like I can't walk. But why can't I transfer my walking abilities onto this ramp? She is about to give it a try and then.... and then, disaster strikes. A telephone call. She is notified that one of her friends is dead of a drug overdose. Her legs go limp. And to add to that, it is now time for her to walk onto the ramp. Dimly, through her tears, she hears her friends, colleagues and gay philanthropic fashion designers exhort her to walk. How can they ask of her something so difficult at a traumatic time like this? Whoever's heard of such a thing? Time's running out. She needs to walk now or her walking career is over. She can almost see her legs in an ordinary salwar kameez instead of a micro-mini.

But it is darkest just before the dawn. Just before time runs out, she grits her teeth, pushes the sad away and walks out onstage. The crowd draws a sharp breath. This is the finest act of perambulation that they have ever been witness to. She turns to the camera, poses for it and smiles. She continues to pose and smile. She has walked this far. Now she has to walk back. Will she able to do it?

Of course she will. It's just walking, for fuck's sake. She turns and walks back, turns again, looks at the camera, re assumes her pose, smiles and waits for the other supermodels to join her onstage for the finale. She has done it. She has walked. Her life is finally back on track. She breaks down from exhaustion. She weeps and sways. Her fashion designer holds her close to keep her from falling. And the credits roll.

Walking. It's not just something people do when they have to go somewhere not far enough to use a vehicle. It is difficult and something not to be taken for granted. The next time someone asks you to just walk something off, just reply to them, why don't you just go fuck yourself?

What? II

The NY Post reports (via) that "A US citizen was booted from a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to New York after he complained there were "Arab types" on board".

Three questions spring to mind. Did this guy know that he was on a Turkish Airlines flight? Did he know that he was in Turkey? And did he travel to Turkey for a corneal transplant operation, receive his transplant in the Istanbul airport just before he boarded his plane and then realize, goshdarnit, Turkey was full of Arab types?

This reminds me of the time a friend of mine from India stepped off the plane in New York for the first time in his life and exclaimed, wow there are a lot of foreigners in this country. Actually he didn't really say that but this is a good way to illustrate my point. Also, if he had actually said that, I would probably not have divulged it in a public forum like this for fear of embarrassing him. So since he didn't actually say that, I am comfortable with saying that he did.

What?

God was certainly looking out for all of us.

Actually no, jackass. God's the asshole who convinced that goose to fly into your plane engine. It was the pilot who was looking out for all of you.

HNY

May your new year be filled with happiness and joy and most of it be triggered by good things that happened to you and not somebody else.
May your fridges overflow with and kitchen utensils be forever dipped in leftover food.
May the erroneous payment of a ten dollar bill instead of a dollar bill continue to not bother you all that much.
May your flexible health plan benefits go underutilized.
May your home dwindle in value due to the real estate bust and not because cardboard got cheaper.
May your indoor plants continue to prosper and grow in spite of your presence in their life.
May your doors continue to keep out visitors and windows continue to drown out their cries.
May you age only in body and not in mind if you're a man and do the exact opposite if you're a woman.
May your children continue to disappoint you only to the extent that you've disappointed your own parents.
May your unhealthy self loathing turn into a healthy loathing of another person.
May you continue to find copious amounts of evidence that you are the most important person to have ever dwelled upon this planet.
May your better half and significant other continue to be that in name only.
May your frowns turn upside down, yet your head stay attached to your torso.
May all your bullets find vital organs and your vital organs continue to elude bullets.
May all your friends continue to find the inner strength to suffer your interminable bitching and moaning in silence.
May your hair reverse its lifelong trend of southward migration.
May your hopes and dreams be sufficiently unrealistic for their dashing to cause too much heartache.
May you finally discover your soulmate or at the very least, a credible, constantly refreshed password hack site.

HNY.