No Rest For The Weird Kid

It's a mystery, really it is.

The last five months have felt like a million years. They've crawled by with mineral stealth. Have I been living each millisecond so fully that time, from my perspective at least, has been stretched almost to breaking point?
It seems so but, then again, I haven't slept or eaten properly for about a month and I've had not any sleep at all for the last three days. I mean it. I haven't slept one wink and that kind of thing can play funny tricks on an otherwise healthy and sane mind.
For instance: This morning the sky scrapers that loom over my hotel seemed to take on a gentle, rubbery, pastel coloured appearance, swaying softly as I lay on my disheveled bed staring at them with my dry bloodshot eyes.
It seemed like there was a world war going on out there. Choppers and construction equipment firing off in a staccato artillery attack. It sounded like "democracy" was coming or the Venusians had arrived in their huge plasma ships, emitting sub-sonic sound waves that would level the city in one final orgasmic pulse.
I was almost ready to dash to the subway and assume an heroic posture, but I took a cold shower and slapped myself in the face a couple of times instead.
God! Was I still really here? Had it only been eleven days? I felt as though I'd been here since the eleventh century or that I'd been smuggled into Kowloon inside an oil drum to be hidden away in this hotel room for collection later.
What was I? Was I on the run? Was I in hiding? Was this a reality TV show or was I a collectors item, a lost relic of some kind?...questions..questions...

And then the Jehovah's witnesses arrived.

I'd gone out you see. The stench of my own sin had gotten too much for me, so I'd staggered down to the Star Ferry Pier to look into the polluted water for signs of intelligent, but soft bodied life.
That's when Gupta appeared with his burgundy tank-top, stay pressed trousers, plaid shirt and black leather satchel.
I knew immediately what was coming. He had those tremulous orange flames of religion flickering in the depths of his zealots eyes.
But when he saw my eager face he backed off slightly. However, I wasn't going to let him get away that easily.
I opened the conversation with: "What do you think happens when we die?"
The roles had been reversed and he was thrown off guard. I could see him reaching into his heavy bag for a bible but I pulled out my notepad first and read him "The Miracle Of The Midnight Child," which he seemed to like...we're all looking for the truth the light and the way, aren't we?
In exchange he gave me some of those thin pamphlets that they hand out. You know the ones. The ones that have those awful, sickly illustrations of paradise, where heaven looks like a golf course in Palm Springs or a safari park. But he went away happy...I think.
About five minutes went by and then the Hare Krishna's turned up, two of them: Praveen and GoptiKantdas.
I like the Krishna's. They don't give a fuck. They just dance around and sing and you don't find them knocking on peoples doors at all hours trying to catch converts. They're party people, a real cymbal jingling caravan of love.
The food is great as well. None of those dry and dreary wafers or that watered down cooking sherry that the Catholics fob you off with. No. It's honest, wholesome soul filling food, served with a smile and a song.
It's not a religion. It's a conga-dance of consciousness..a cluster of karmic clowns.
And God does, after all, have a sense of humour...a wicked one it seems.

Hare Krishna.