Nothing Special or Something Else...

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

- SoulBlighter

“Beautiful, Simply beautiful…,” he said to himself as he wiped the tears from his eyes. “Such honest emotions, what an artist, his soul was so exposed by his music!” he felt, with this weird emotional fracas in himself. He wondered what had gone wrong with Kurt Cobain. Cobain had come out of a broken family, lived a broken childhood, dropped out and was a janitor in his town’s school; a place he should have been studying in, instead of cleaning its hallways. He formed Nirvana with one of his friends and from there they went on to create a musical legacy that was unmatched by anything else in the history of music. Their music was honest, full of pain and it was easy to see that these were the experiences of Cobain as he went through with his life. However the pressure got too much for Cobain, he despised the mass appeal, the popularity and the fakers that come along with any movement that becomes to big for itself. He tried to commit suicide once and then finally died in his house with R.E.M. playing and his suicide note saying “…it’s better to burn out than fade away…” …A quote from Neil Young.

“Weird, but then who isn’t?” he thought to himself as he got up from the bed and turned off the computer. He’d just finished watching this Documentary on Cobain followed by Nirvana’s last performance ever at the studios of MTV Unplugged. It was really a good combination and one of those rare things that happen in life that makes one feel glad to be alive.

As he light a cigarette, he stared at it and wondered how much these had contributed to the demise of Cobain. After all despite all the emotions Cobain was going through, it was probably his addiction to these death sticks and his mind altering substances that may have finally pushed him over the edge. He felt a shudder down his spine as he took a long drag and then jammed the cigarette butt into the ash tray.

He headed out to the lavatory to get ready to take on the world. Another day of misery, patients who had no idea what their complaints were, nurses who were more concerned about their 8 hours shifts than the patients, and medical students who thought they were there on a picnic. It was weird, everyone knew there was something wrong with this system and this didn’t work, but like the Indian democracy no one wanted to get up and make a change. Hell, even he didn’t want to make the effort to make the change, he could go on rambling treatises about what could be done and should be done, but, when it came down to getting down and dirty he knew he’d be the first person to take out his handkerchief and walk away. Was he a hypocrite? Maybe he was, but it was easier to be that than to make the change. After all isn’t that what life is all about, making it easier for us?

He reminisced. Since the day we are born we look to make life easier to live. Clothes, Houses, Cars, Electricity; all creations of man in an attempt to make living on this planet an easier experience. Society had only re-enforced and force fed every child ever born on a regular dose of the need for comforts, the need to grab as much money as you could from the moment you could till the day your soul left your body. It was a rat race; yeah that was the right term.

Have you ever seen a huge gang of rats running between walls? They all run in the same direction, they flow like a river, till you can’t see the individuals that make up the flow. The characters of the individual are lost, and the whole mass appears as one dark moving flurry of desensitized units. Any rat who dares to stop or change his direction has no option, but to get swept away in the flow. So the rats that were best off were the one who ran the fastest or the ones who could run consistently, there was no place in this mass for the rats looking to run any other direction or those rats who couldn’t run consistently. There wasn’t even place for any rat who wanted to walk there instead of running. They all ended up the same, trampled, demolished, and left out.

He breathed down a heavy sigh as he finished shaving and entered the shower. The shower had always had a magical effect on him; it calmed him down and cleared his head out. Since he had been a kid, the shower always had that sort of effect on him, it felt like it was his place in the world, he felt protected and pure. It washed away his dirt, frustration, and pain; it made him feel like it was good to be alive if only for a short time. Maybe it had to do with his Sun Sign being Aquarius, the water carrier. But he didn’t care as he let the cold, crisp water flow from head to toe, making him feel like a god.

As he stepped out all relaxed and relieved he got ready in his stereotyped pants and white shirt. This was one thing that irritated him to no end, some stupid sod decided one day that doctors look professional only in pants and shirts and this led to such an assault on our frail human psyche that now people started believing that the smarter your doctor looks, the better he can manage your ailments. What if they’d all worn anti-fit jeans and t shirts, would that mean that they cared any lesser. It was one of those issues which didn’t really matter to anybody, but he refused to understand why it bugged him so much, maybe inside him the punk was still alive after so many years of being oppressed and locked away. Or maybe because it was easier to make noise about problems that didn’t exist and affected no one, than to worry about real issues and do something about. Or just make an issue out of everything because you’re lost yourself. Like Marlon Brando once said in one of his movies when someone asked him “What’re you rebelling against?” and he turned around, cocked his eyebrow and replied, “What’ve you got?”

As he looked at the watch he realized he was running a bit behind schedule. He was always preaching to people to be on time. So he decided to give breakfast a skip and grabbed some chocolate milk from the fridge and poured it out into a long glass. He realized that thanks to his addictive personality he had recently become addicted to chocolate milk himself. Anything with warm milk in it, coffee or tea it always upset his gut. But somehow defying all medical knowledge he’d come to the conclusion that he was only hot lactose intolerant.

He thought that maybe if Kurt Cobain had known of the vastly addictive properties of chocolate milk, could things have been different, every time he got bugged of the world he’d turn to coffee instead of heroin. It would have been his comforter and the only effect of an overdose would’ve been a stomach ache or obesity in the long run. How things would’ve been different then, grunge would be very much alive and the Foo Fighters would’ve never existed. But those were one of those things that always seem better in hindsight; such was the power of hindsight, it made everything else seem like it could’ve been better.

And then he heard his carpool pull up and honk twice for him. He shut the lights, locked the door and went on to the car, and said the pleasantries, which was nothing more than a ritual. As he tried to read the morning newspaper he tapped into the conversation going on around him. “Thousands dead in famine” the paper shouted on the front page as he heard some burping contently in the backseat. While someone complained how his boss wouldn’t let him take the Saturday afternoon off, he read “Bring our troops home, cry Americans”. Another cursed her cold and sniffed away; he read “No drugs available for HIV patients in Africa”. Yes this was the real world was it not, or was it just him being overly critical of everything. He brushed away his mind as he geared up to get ready to face this day at the workplace.

His workplace was a successful hospital. Being a doctor was on his list of possible professions right from the start. But as he grew the list got smaller and smaller and eventually it was the only survivor on the list. He loved his profession, he loved helping people out, and he loved the fact that he had the power to help them. But he also hated the system, and the way people behaved in it. Sometimes he wondered whether he really liked his profession, maybe his mind just kept telling him he did because otherwise he’d go insane. It was one of life’s mysteries that could never be solved and sometimes a dilemma of such a persuasion was best left untouched.

It was a relatively peaceful day, nothing much to push his boundaries. In a hospital, it’s very important to have your boundaries, because the place deals so much emotion each day that if it all got through to you, you wouldn’t last too long there. In fact he was constantly taught as a student to stay human and feel the emotions of the patient, but once you reached higher up in the hierarchy you realized that it was just another teaching, like the value of truth or the power of justice.

He headed back to the carpool and he didn’t say much till it dropped him off at home, when the social pleasantries were exchanged. As he dragged himself home, he saw that the maid had been by and cleaned the place, in his mind he made a mental note to thank her the next time they met, probably over the weekend. He saw that there were some messages on his answering machine, he’d got disgusted of his cell phone and threw it away. It was like a GPS tracker, a privacy and intimacy killer. He didn’t feel like knowing who the messages were from. He didn’t care. He didn’t like anyone anymore anyway.

As he turned on the water in the bath to take a warm soak he wondered, how did things get so messed up? In college he had always been the fun guy and liked to be with people, hell, they liked having him around. He was like pure energy, bubbling, happy; he had the power to cheer up anyone. Now he didn’t even feel like talking to his closest friends from college. He hated talking to his family now. It was really weird and he didn’t want to think about it.

As he lay down in the hot water relaxing his muscles, he lowered his ears below the water level to cut off all the noise from the world. His eyes fell upon his razor lying on the shelf and a weird but creepy feeling went down his spine. He smiled and drifted off under again. He realized he finally knew what was going on in Cobain’s head when……

Labels: Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Seven Ages Of Rock, Short Story