XIV The Good life

He was back at the rehab. In a way he was glad, rehabs are great places to go to once a while. You’re back to being treated like you were at School. Bobby gave the slip, smart that he was, he knew it the moment he saw the blue lights hitting out at us from a distance must be probably heading towards the Mojave, that’s what he said he was planning. He had also said he might try testing death sometime soon at Sierra Leone where his marines where to infiltrate two rebel factions and trigger a fresh bout of civil war, someone did not want peace in Sierra Leone.

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies” Nietzsche had once said, Dan often wondered how they managed this, these Nietzsches, Sartres, Descartes and et al squeezing something profound everytime they rent the air with their voice, his other favourite quote was by a contemporary Physicist Frederik Kerling “ Perhaps we even need to look behind consciousness itself, to find what is the foundation of reality” this one blew Dan out because this study of Annie’s life along with Dans' and others is exactly that, a sustained , relentless,  attempt to scourge beyond the consciousness, not just the here and the now but something deeper beyond even conscious past for those dark bits and pieces like the carbon in your chillum hidden somewhere, someplace that make us what we make of the world around us.

How we act, react , reply, respond – how we perceive ourselves and others when we’re drowned to the gills taking hallucinatory drugs or when we're punch drunk - yes, that's when you need to know, that's when you want to catch yourself doing things and seeking answers. 

Those were the questions, the whispers inside Dan, they kept asking ‘ is there ? Something there beyond consciousness? No it was not about god or divinity those had become too prosaic, too lame even archaic, his queries were more to do with his own self, his own dislocation. Are there things inside you that you don’t know? But yet things that surface? even without your volition? and make you do things? Questions that floated somewhere between his legs and his head even as he sat comfortably lounged on a deck chair watching and soaking in a clutch of noire stuff more as a distraction from his collective basket of insomnia , de addiction and guilt laden introspection;

He had started with Majid Majidi and Abbas Kiarostami, moved on to Godard and Fellini, Dan finally lost appetite by the time he reached Kieslowski – that’s the beauty of a rehab, good life, good cinema, great food, good ambience - lots of pine and a little bird who walked all over him too.

Given a chance Dan would want to report into a rehab every weekend, having lost faith since years, his unspiritual emptiness found resonance in the desodomised halls of a rehab.