Do you ever want some deadly 'adventure' to happen to you in the mundane?
All these airlines give you safety instructions. When you are sitting on the emergency seats, you are given additional instructions. They are dead serious. The hostess or the steward goes through all the procedures: they ask if you can handle a load of fifteen kilos; of how you should turn the lever in a direction and then push the door and step aside. You listen, or at least, go through the motions of listening. Does this thought ever cross your mind that there is only a very small chance that you'll ever have to use this instruction? Does your mind sometimes imagine yourself opening the emergency hatch and surviving the emergency? Do you ever feel this strange urge to tickle a fire breathing dragon in its nose?
Do you ever peer down from the top of a staircase, or a balcony, realize that it is very, very steep and that there is little chance of any survival? You know that your bones would smash and splatter when you hit the ground and it would be almost certain death depending on the height. And yet, the thought still lingers with a thrill. This is not bungee jumping or jumping out of an airplane. They are the same experience in a different setting. Here, there are no strings attached. No, you are not suicidal, you are just tickling the fire bearing dragon in its nose.
Do you ever pass an armed security guard with that double-barrel gun, or a jawan with his carbine, or some modern rifle and recount the scene from the movie 'fight club' where the protagonist fakes death to his hallucinating counterpart by shooting himself through the mouth, but sideways? You can feel the cringe, the creep of a gaping hole in your cheek, and also realize how risky it is. Yet, you entertain the thought every time you pass that gun-wielding man. You are not a deranged psychopath or someone bent on self-destruction. Just a tickler, tickling the fire breathing dragon.
Walking down the road, maybe when returning home, do you ever imagine stubbing your toe? Like smacking it really, really hard on the shrapnel-like stone that you just see lying ahead of you, or stubbing it at the door's side frame? Do you feel how you consciously withdraw your toes in revulsion when someone else is describing their stub-story? You almost feel the pain, and yet, you don't. You implicitly focus on the pain, shudder, and then turn away. It passes.
Do you imagine everything in vivid and gory detail and move on? You are okay, you are normal, you don't intend to do anything of this sort, but you imagine escapes from the mundane by tickling this fire breathing dragon.
Oh, you don't do this? These thoughts don't rally across your mind? It's okay if it is just me. That too is fine. On a mountainous hillside road, when the bus swerves on a curb, do you ever look down the gorge and imagine, one wrong manoeuver and you'd be there, down down down. How placidly people place their trust in the hands of these... strangers? Mad people! Unknowingly courting the devil. Mad, mad people. Look at me carrying this pack of feathers just up my sleeves, I'm madder, ha ha ha ha ha!
But, tell me, do you ever tickle a fire breathing dragon?
Step inside my mind. I will show you what is inside the nose and the throat of a fire breathing dragon.