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Tales from the Down Under: #7- Life is a Slice of Lemon in a Cup of Coffee

It seems needless to elaborate our horror more when seeing the dreadful calamity on telly the past two days, and it is always at the likewise moment that we have the inclination of closing our eyes and rattling off profuse gratifications like how wonderful it is that we are here at this time/ at this moment, and how the incident gives us a lesson of seizing every moment we breathe. And how life is more worthwhile than to be frittered away in front of a computer

I’ve got a bitter lick of techno-misfortune (that is literally how I like to term it!) for days, and the situation seems hopeless to look up even for the much-exploited weekends. I reckon it a sort of backlash of what I’d been fatuously prophesying on a few past posts: of how I lamented about several mishaps in my life which truthfully after hindsight were hardly hassles; of how I thoughtlessly expressed my ideal of living as a recluse, hemmed in by trees in the middle of nowhere, living in some place with wall-to-wall books, reading to a hoary old lady everyday as my sole occupation which is also evocative of that morbid scene in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

Therefore, the extreme inconvenience of using the internet dragoons me into such idealized activities: reading, writing, listening to music which is limited to my portable record collection and appreciating the subtlety of life. By ‘idealized,’ I mean so, literally. It’s hard to imagine how pathetically bookish I am. A random bump into a corner bookstore can set my heart to a halt, and it is often the place that I can more or less call home. The bookstore I sought out today even had a dodgy staircase leading down to a stock-room which was still full of, books! Picturing one living there; living on books, chewing on bones.

But while you’re evidently not living in a remote place, and every thing you see on the streets is buzzing with uncultivated urbanness, it is truly grating that you should be deliberately excluded from them. Nor would I want to be included but it is a prerequisite in order to be superior. So excuse me if after reading so many wholesome books and steeling myself on stoical lifestyle, I still harbour a greedy wish of having the internet fixed sooner the better.

Every time I find it difficult to come to terms with my anxieties, I have an impulse of listening to Syd Barrett over and over again, ‘till the lyrics stuck in my head and I am convinced that I am communicating in his words. Isn’t it funny if it’s true? You lost generation.

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