Grey Matter

Blacky don’t bark at me.
I ain’t no stranger.
I live just 3 blocks away.

I happen to go my home late into night most of the days. My neighborhood is a fairly calm place, where not many are on the road after 8 pm. This leaves me as the lone person walking on the road most of the times.

There is always some  song that keeps running in the back of my mind like a distant radio. And when I am alone these songs come out of my mouth, that is I sing that to myself.

Here is a situation song from Green Day that comes to my mind :

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
and I’m the only one and I walk alone

Well I would be wrong if I say I walk alone. There are quite a few street dogs that walk,  run,  <censored> , and fight  at that time.

And like any other gangs, this ‘gang of dogs’ (GOD, as I call it) has a gang leader. He is small, He is black, And He is mad as hell, as Lynda Barry will put it. I think the other dogs think he belongs to a occult society, otherwise there is no reason why they allowed him to be the self proclaimed leader that he is.

This Chief of GOD, for some reasons best known to him, doesn’t like the sight of me singing to myself and walking.

He barks, barks as loud as a trumpet on a Bose speaker, when ever he sees me. Then all his accomplices come running from all over the place barking and supporting his cause(Which I am totally unaware of)

What’s worse is that the dogs inside the houses too join this GOD and bark, howl and do what not.

One day I stopped while the Chief of GOD was barking at me. He came running, barking and making gestures at me. And some how he got an intuition that its better not to come near me, so he applied breaks, skidded of the road and stopped, but still he didn’t stop his barking.

There I saw in his eyes — deepest contempt. Then the next instant it was as if he is asking me something. May be I was imagining things. But I could see in his eyes. May be he wanted me to stop singing GD (Green Day) and start singing for GOD. Like all those Maharajas of olden days, may be he wanted  me to write a song on him and sing it for him.

And if you haven’t  figured it out yet, yes, the first three lines of this post are of the song I am writing for him.