itsy bitsy

mother chanced upon me once - this while i was still a sulky, pimply teener - furiously writing down something (ponderous and grandiloquent, i'm sure) in my journal. never relinquishing her right to always have the last word, she left me in peace only after warning me of the apparent danger (which, to her, was abject misery)of the contemplative life (though not in this exact nomenclature).

had she been more sufficiently literary and tolerant of faiths other than her own, she would have quoted the american trappist monk and author thomas merton who wrote "there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues."

a boyfriend, an easily forgotten ex despite his impossible appetites, once complained about the inordinate (his reckoning) time i pour into my diary entries. this is how i remember him telling me how i got all my coordinates wrong. "life is out there, not in there (while unsubtly pointing at my ratty journal)." profound, eh?

i've been diddling, so far, with my life. i've backpacked once to europe and have exhaustively cruised all the lush itsy-bitsy barrios of manila. and through all these, i've met a whole lot of itsy-bitsy people, a lot more than i would have really wanted to.

since then, i've been living it up (and sometimes down) in the city of new york and, thankfully, at a lot of times, left it for the wilderness of my silence. and somehow, because of this, i've met more and more of myself, although still a whole lot less than i really cared to.

 

sleeping among the clouds

(to a friend who emailed me this two-liner after reading yesterday's post: "give it up, bitch. when will you ever be happy, again?")

sure, i remember the story you told me once. (or was it twice, thrice, a million times?)

once a fabled bird was born legless. (or was it that someone diabolical sawed off its feet?) and thus, the blighted bird could never alight. it napped amid the meddlesome clouds and was only seen on its death plunge, its wingspan longer than that of a condor's, folded and craped into one tiny ball a mere mortal could slickly cram into his palm.

i guess, you would have to wait, patiently, without murmuring, without protestation, to see how happy i am right now somewhere your leaden eyes will never be able to soar.

(i love you, beyotch.)

 

and the winner is...

2:42 p.m.
2 train, pelham parkway station

i waited for my train under the implacable sun and i just thought of you.

the heft of remembrance suddenly weighed down upon the world. pounds upon pounds, it saddled the weak, round back of the bone dry air, buckled it ever downwards toward the hissing, steaming canvas floor of the earth. there was no relief, no whistles, no bells. only thing i could offer it was a specious, survivalist counsel, "breathe, fool, breathe."

you, breathing well, i have to admit, without me wearing you down (that's what you said) in your smoggy roped corner of manila.






 

art appreciation 101

6:45 a.m.
18th and arthur avenue

once again they lazed there with their slit cleavage. in the dappled morning light, their hearth crust like hurriedly put rouge and the flecked out sesame seeds, errant dusting powder. the day's fresh batch of italian bread topped with sesame seeds have just been dumped willy-nilly by the bakery maid in the shelves, forcing the lips of some to kiss the now sweating glass. hunched like a beggar in a bruegel painting, a shabby old man, dragging a grocery cart filled with jangling empty cans, stopped by. the man, like a sultan checking on his odalisques, then ran his eyes along the glazed, nubile loaves.

 

pride and prejudice

as the gay pride march showboated on, a kinky haired squealer, probably two or three years old, was whooping it out in the surprisingly not so crowded and shaded curbside.

my not-so-kid-friendly friend, annoyed at this sideshow, asked me loudly where this kid's mother was. the mother, as if on cue, broke out of the ranks of the onlookers closest the parade route rail guards and tried to cajole the kid to come see the parade back with her. but this headstrong stumbler insisted on shrieking, at the same time stomping with his wobbly legs, a sunblazed patch reflected, perhaps, from an opened window pane of the tall building across.

despite all the garish costumes, the yet to be recognized colors, all the strikingly different faces and bodies parading on the main street, it's light that delighted this little boy.

but not for long, sadly. in a blink of an eye, this light investigator would be old and all he would care to see are the petty blindnesses the world had taught him to watch. soon, he'll just see that his skin glowing like caramel is not light enough for most anybody else and that the honest, sunny love between two men is better left a deep, dark secret that should never see the light of day.

 

nothing happening

a literary type from manila - a charlatan, really - wheedled me into talking poetry in one of these mindless new york gay pride weekend parties, of all places.

"poetry is my passion," he said, "but sex, great sex, is really what i need."

it took me a while to shake off the crudity of his advances. and in a hot summer night such as this, i, as my wont when i was the slothful and easily creeped out kid in the island i grew up in, crept up to a cool, breezy spot. tonight, it was the one near the dj's dais, where an industrial fan was asserting its own rhythms. watching this heaving mass of sweaty bodies, i hardly moved a single sinew. i just stood there, and stood, and stood, and stood.

the poet w.h. auden once immodestly dismissed poetry as that which "makes nothing happen." what a showoff, this auden guy was. (just like these impossibly cut cute boys dancing.) for after all, all good stuff comes from nothing, really.

as i stood there amid all this stir, this heat, my pause, my absolutely doing nothing, could be a mark, a line in a blistering summer sand. one from where, as always the island boy that i am, i, wearing nothing at all, could jump off into the refreshing, the tonic sea, away from the roil of all this dissembling. and perhaps, to come out of the water later wet with a sparkling emotional wisdom, ready to make an honest thing happen.

 

3 haikus (going home from a wasted night)

on the 4 train as it surfaces to a blinding morning

mindless, the train sprints.
a fleet, unwieldy sentence
on a clear, blank page.


"85-year old grannie shots dead 90-year old beau" - tabloid headline

"no new thing under
the sun," the big book avers.
and that's great comfort?

tossing the tabloid, the half emptied coffee cup into the festering rear mouth of a garbage truck

walt whitman is wrong.
every damn thing collapses.
watch or wince: your call.

 

frustrated witness

the lean trunk of this beautiful man hamming it up on the sparsely peopled dance floor, it glisters, snaring in his core the available light. and that slays me.

his abs, still with graceless charm unharmed by the prodding of steroids and obsessive gymming, throbs, spasms, trilling to the tired techno beat because this motion, this ritual in the heat of a summer night protects him, just maybe, from the startling coldness of the early dawn later.

most of the times, i just think beauty is a hoax. but tonight, this man again surprises me with a beauty, real, unimagined.

it's criminal that i seem to ignore most of the times all this grace just wafting around me. my blindness, my short sightedness, perhaps, probably because i am crippled, lamed by my language, vestigial and undeveloped. you just don't know how frustrating it is at how my limited life vocabulary thwarts, in language, what all this beauty does. to me.

as the music winds down, this beautiful man does something breathtaking with his torso, his entire carriage that i just don't know how to describe. how doubly disenchanting it is to experience beauty and not be able later to bear witness to the wonder of it all.

 

a giant melting popsicle that makes sense

deep inside, all writers - would be or established - are chronic ocd (obsessive compulsive disorder) cases. or to put it euphemistically kind, neat freaks. nothing, it seems, dampens (or inspires, on the obverse) the writerly urge more than the intractable messiness of the quotidian.

here's a struggle, a daily one, i always end up losing, anyways. i confess, i'm an unapologetic slob in all other aspects of my life. dishes pile up in my mildewed sink, clean and not so clean boxers, well, you get the picture.

but there is also this raging senseless impulse in me to make sense of all the disparate whatsis of my daily existence. i have this unfulfillable want to order all this randomness. this is, maybe, why i did closeted journal obsessively before i discovered this naked blogging.

take a day like yesterday. i got off at union square and a giant popsicle (some 35,000 pounds by police estimates), the color of strawberry, was literally melting, juicing red the busy street across the new york film academy. it was a failed stunt-a stab to set a guinness world record- by a beverage manufacturer about to launch its new line of frozen treats in time for the sweltering summer.

on my ride home, i overheard this scintillating conversation between two old men, one more washed up than the other. old man 1: "i need a wife." old man 2: "no problem, take mine."

and just before i dozed off, i caught the tail end of an interview of a manila based politician on my pinoy satellite tv. i don't remember what he was being interviewed specifically but suddenly the pontificating politician, who was without any hint of any chinese gene in his mien, suddenly quoted an ancient taoist philosopher on how to treat the grumblings of an agitated populace. he said, "treat them as you would fry a small fish. just medium heat and no unnecessary turning."

now there. how in the world can i fossick for some sense, some order, at least in my writing - in my journal or in my blog post - in a day with disparate highlights such as those? or should i even bother to?

i guess, in our post-post-postmodern ethos, this should be a non issue, after all. unfortunately - and here, i guess, lies my problem - i am doomed forever to be a conventional, if not hickish, reader. deep inside, i'm still a mark twain kind of reader, one who still firmly believes that the difference between truth and fiction is that the latter has to make sense.

in a way, my kind of story of a day like yesterday would be one where firefighters hurriedly arrived to the giant melting popsicle scene and the sirens of their trucks drowned out all other unnecessary chatter i could probably overhear. and after they hosed out all the red sticky goo, they left the scene with the street still glistening pink.
 

what's wrong with me

it's not beautiful at all. realizing that i am irremediably stuck with who i am and that there's absolutely nothing i could do about it.

now, chill. no ponderous post (again!) here. (for there has got to be a finite amount of dullness in my system, i pray.)

it's just that most of the times, it has become really lumbering just trying to get past my very cynical self. case in point: weeks ago, a friend decided to move to what i instantaneously believed and openly labeled as a seedy neighborhood. my friend cavalierly disregarded my comments, saying he belonged in such a scruffy sector of the city, anyway. and although this looked like that was that, it took me quite a number of days to browbeat myself for my needlessly callous remark.

but today, oh, happy day. it seems - for want of some really incisive phrase - i got freed from any question of all that residual guilt.

i paid my friend a visit today in his new neighborhood which, at cursory look, appears not unlike mine. a spattering of section 8 tenements here and there, the discount food shop that accepts all types of welfare cards, a mexican fruit stall, a laundromat that could easily be run by a korean couple, and the most indispensable chinese take out.

only that my friend's neighborhood chinese take out is kind of peculiar, to put it mildly. a hand scrawled sign was posted on its frosted glass door under a gaudy cut out figure of a well fed, somewhat effeminate, boy playing with red and gold silk ribbons. the sign advertised its apparently one of a kind service "free devilry."

when i got to his place, my friend immediately noticed my smug smile. "what's wrong with you?" he asked. "what's wrong with me?" i asked him back, very satisfied with my cynical self.


 

summer, afternoon, dream

the trouble with summer is that too much guilt floats around. in winter, there's no point ruing over a day lost. the day has been forfeited already. in summer, losing just one faultless day, by giving in, say, to seasonal sloth or to a petty carping over humidity completely bearable, ah, what remorse.

in this afternoon of summer, sounds of guilt seep through my window: little girls, shrieking as piercingly as their mothers, while they perfect their double dutch maneuvers in the curbside. the gush of water celebrating its release from the hellishly hot emergency hydrant, its flange illegally tinkered with by a bored father wishing to humor his daughters. the pied piper song of the mobile ice cream vendor is like a cool bead of sweat running down the small of my back.

from my neighbor upstairs, the hum, no the clack, of their decade old air conditioning unit sings plaintively of passions unrecoverable. and somewhere between the rattle of my neighbor's ac and the swish of the water flooding the curbside, floats in the oafish cooing of a heat stricken pigeon fraying further the selvage of the flimsy veil of a soon to be forgotten afternoon dream.



 

receiving an email from a friend vacationing back home

one summer afternoon, i now remember, a friend and i went to this cliff carved crassly by a sudden storm. the shaley cliff now abutted excitedly far into the green shoal. and we took this sweet and piercing pleasure at ourselves hovering over the water, our restless heels kicking up the loose under lip of the cliff. the wild plonk, plonk, plonk of the pieces of sedimentary coral and sand free falling into the water, i now remember so clearly.

another friend of mine, the one who is now vacationing back home, emailed me the other day just to tell me that he chanced upon my old time buddy, the one i spent that summer afternoon with on the cliff, and that he said hi. i couldn't remember now, much as i tried, to distinguish in my mind how this friend looked like. was he the one with the really bad broken elbow or the one whose palms sweated?

i've always been a bad friend, one who cavalierly quits memories for the convenience of the current. and yet, what a happy, comforting thought -- such an undeserved gift -- that somehow, friendships, good deeds i've somehow miraculously done before, before all this irreversible hardening of my core ever commenced, have this persistence, this tenacity to run on, to circulate in the universe in one form or another. this unremembered friendship somehow lives on like a closed book on a forgotten shelf insistent on telling itself its unending story.
 

missing the takashi murakami exhibit at the japan society

we knew the museum closes at five and yet, we insisted on having that last cocktail-dry and dirty--at half past four in this open air cafe'. sprigs of afternoon summer light punching the yet lightly clouded sky. we reasoned, all this light was "as good"-that's how we said it-as, perhaps, the exhibit. and surely we missed it. all we saw, as we peered through the locked glass door, was this young museum guard freeing from the confines of his banded mesh cap, his young crop of locks, its tips tincted in intimations of gold or the yellow of virgin corn hair. the tedium of his job was just a memory. already. every time he brazenly stared at the moon face of his watch, it felt like any moment now, godzilla would spring out of the radioactive ocean it had been estivating in. but no worry there, the young man was ready. the dark blue folding chair he was about to part his ass from, without a hitch, would transform as slickly as a superamped anime robot into one supersonic jet flying him out of this nuclear holocaust of ennui, its fuselage spitting out cute, trippy, joyful, but never horrifying, mushroom clouds.

 

riding a very slow elevator in a bronx tenement

a boy, perhaps, of thirteen or fourteen, looking crossed, wearing a 4xl white t-shirt and a pair of shorts just inches shy of being officially considered long pants by old timer haberdashers, cornrows furrowing his unbandannaed head. a young mother, perhaps, pregnant again with her second -- or is it third? -- child, her love handles just minutes shy of bursting out from her torso skimming mauve camisole. a grandmother with an ill-fitting brunette wig, insisting, at this time of the year, to wear a light aubergine cardigan and a sweltry support hose. and i.

we all faced front, nobody dared talking to each other. just there, keeping still, and feigning being rapt at the blinking numbers. all looked incredulous, though, and totally loathed to admit the grotesque report of our appearances by the shiny metal elevator doors. all had that unreconciled look in mug shots of people on their unwilling way to the pokey.

oh, this constant whir of coming and going, this arriving, this departing, this dance, this life. i still don't get it. i thought i had it all pat. i thought it was simply about starting street by intersection, avenue by junction. and then you either come up or go down. but if this is all, how come we all look stunned, so unamenable, when our numbers came flashing up and it was time for us to get out?
 

some fortune

this morning, it was my fortune to read a help wanted ad in a local tabloid left just begging to be riffed through atop a safety orange d train bucket seat polished gleaming by a wide ass of a harried commuter.

a writing job, actually. writing fortunes for a fortune cookie company. i couldn't remember now the name of the chinatown based company. something that bore a random set of numerals and boldly employed the word harmony, although it didn't sound harmonious, at all, the name, that is. something like harmony 976 fortune cookie company, or something sounding discordant like that.

all i remember is this breezy rush in my head as i tried to come up with my own fortune portfolio, carefully avoiding those vague motherhoods, like, today, avoid taking unnecessary gambles, then racked my brain up just trying to resist the urge--if there is such a thing--to enumerate, along with each of my fortunes, a set of lucky numbers, something like 4,6,9,22,36,42. (which actually won a second tier lotto draw somewhere midwest, mind you!)

in my mind, i was trying to carefully give my fortunes a nice, personal, really personal touch, you know, include a very particular idea. no set of lucky lotto numbers. only something a fiction writing professor, perhaps, would be proud of, notwithstanding my use of the very unexceptional adjectives nice and personal in the previous sentence.

something that would behoove the fortune cookie eater/reader to take one's fortune into one's own hands, be creative and not just sit it out while this blithe universe blows all our puny asses into the thin, unconcerned air.

something like, today, be more like the portuguese mares that pliny, the elder, the first ever naturalist the world ever knew, got all worked up. i would tell the fortune cookie reader to just raise your tail to the wind "and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed."

and should i get the job, i would demand only a pittance for all my juices, for i would be gratified already to know that the fortune i just wrote would be this wriggly, motile, harum-scarum of a sperm that would fertilize that seed in the reader just waiting to conceive and give birth to something fast and fleet-footed, something, i do hope, to help one outdistance the illest of one's stars, all what is unfortunate in one's stuck life.
 

race of angels

my island people, so our laundrywoman used to tell me, once belonged to the race of angels. and i believed her.

our people were so serene, so beautiful then, so manang soling said, that they felt no need for sunrises as the light that emanated from each of our ancestors' haloes would out-iridesce the most effulgent of all daylight. and at dusk, no one would notice the end of day, as the whiteness, this extreme color of greatest lightness of our ancestors' wings would illuminate even the deepest of coral beds under the pacific lagoons.

but when i asked her what happened to them, manang soling would lave our clothes ferociously as if intending to tear them asunder and sighed "they all stopped dreaming."

last night, i awoke up from a bad dream i couldn't recall now. all I remember was waking up to this curious urge to call a not so close friend who was currently vacationing back in the country. i asked him if everything was alright and he, after expressing surprise over my unexpected call, said, "nothing is ever alright around here." no two ways about it, he was harping about the current political turmoil in the country, the rumors of another impending coup d'etat, a harbinger of more harrowing losses to our already moribund economy.

these days, i've been watching a lot of ugly, but quite compelling, images on my philippine cable tv. mostly about personalities full of themselves, tearing each other down, each respectively claiming to be talking from the higher moral ground. and often, i despair.

but sometimes, like today, i just found the courage to just turn off the tv and dream. dream of those sweet days when manang soling, our loquacious lavandera, would regale me unendingly with stories that required the strongest of faiths from me.

the story of a gallant man who, by the pureness of his spirit, grappled open the jaws of a vicious alligator and gloriously retrieved an untainted grey pearl that the larcenous reptile had appropriated for itself. and that of a flying-horse-riding woman who, by sheer pluck, outdistanced the invading sea pirates thus warning beforehand the coastal residents to take shelter on higher grounds.

and once more, i hear myself, egging manang soling to tell me more, more, more. and loudly, i hear myself uncontrollably clapping, my eager hands beating together like angel wings flapping freely in a pure sky.

______________

ipod shuffle

irony seems to be trope of/for my life. (duh, just like everyone else’s, i suppose, in this modern/post-modern/post-post modern world…, but you know what i mean already.)

when i was young, it felt like the world, the universe shimmering in front of me proffered me with infinite possibilities. but then, my psyche was completely shut in, impervious to the crackling capabilities of things.

but now, my mind unshackled from paralyzing parochial concerns from living, i am, to a completely horrifying degree, benumbed to the possibleness of things. it seems that at times, my greatest worry is nothing more than shuffling the same finite number of songs in my ipod.









 

new york summer

it's my day off and outside, it's like march, or even deep april, the mindless, sweltering april of my childhood island. it's yet three hours from lunch time and already, i've got this parched throat and this burning desire to go call a friend, who i know is sweating right now at his cubicle in a pre-war manhattan building, so he can drive me, on his hour long break, to a nearby beach - orchard beach, perhaps -so we can go for a cool swim, with this blues guitar riff of a mos def track on our head, and then to break after for a hurried lunch of take out pastrami sandwich smothered in spicy mustard, a potato knish and a sour, garlicky dill pickle on the side and some really, really cold beer. unlike the beer we had the other weekend, when we went to surf city in jersey, and while he had gone to the water, i stayed behind in our mat, guarding our assorted treasures: unbroken flip-flops, paperbacks still plastered with discount price stickers, dark, smoky glasses and an ipod with sand sheltering inside its neoprene case. then, when it became really too hot for me, thankfully, a man went by, lugging a chagall blue coleman excursion cooler that clanked like a librarian's bell. "ice cold beer," he yelled, as he footslogged barefooted in the sand. i beckoned him and bought two, and off he scurried away after i paid him, screaming to the top of his lungs again, "ice cold beer." i yelled out to my friend and waved the bottle of beer, and then, without waiting for him to come out of the water, i chugged my beer and it was hot and so i yelled after the vendor, "dude, this beer is hot," and he yelled back, without looking back at me, "so, drink it fast, dude."

_________

changeling

at seven or six, perhaps, i remember thinking i must have been a changeling. in my mind, my true self ran away and hid under the mossy rainwater cistern behind our open air kitchen, not to be found again by my mother too taken by a striking dress cut in the latest issue of her preferred ladies magazine. then, a giggly pack of imps put me in place of my runaway me.

until now, i could not recall anybody introducing me, ushering me to the tall tale world of malevolent spirits wont to baby switching. but there i was surmising that my true self had been held hostage by a ring of baby snatching trolls. for what i was then — rangy and so hard to make friends with my neighbors — i thought wasn’t the real me. i was certain my authentic self was a sparkly golden boy, so easy to love by the gaggle of foul mouthed neighborhood boys and especially by my remote mother.






 

honor among thieves

i was so poor growing up...if I wasn't a boy, i'd have nothing to play with. x's poems are like one's parents' clothes - always out of fashion. ...the time when trees get restless.

these are just some of the lines that were still legible from a fraying notebook page i found inscrutably sleeping under my mattress today. you see, my spring cleaning, well, it came a season too late. and while i was about to turn over my mattress - a seasonal must, so a domestic diva once adumbrated - i found this page footling around in my bed spine together with some four dull pennies, two heavily scratched quarters and a well thumbed skin magazine.

except the line about those hick poems (by a giant in british literary reviewing), i couldn't remember - although, i should say, i didn't try hard enough - the provenance of the other two. the fact of which frightened me on many levels, my impending senility, being the least of them.

the thing was, the lines were striking enough for me then to copy. and they still wow me now. its unabashed humorous vulgarity, its masterly picture making. (no faux modesty here, but it never struck my mind, once i found this loose leaf, that all what was written in there were all mine, all flora of my so-called scintillating hothouse of a creative mind. ha!)

so here's my quandary. i am just dying to use those lines in any of my posts. but whom to ascribe them? or should i even bother using quotation marks when i would crib them later? and trust me, i would.

a british (again) fictionist better known for her grown-up children's novels (what a sweet oxymoron!) wrote "all writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade." fair enough. but how about honor among thieves?
 

elizabeth quinones

this was the weekend, i knew that. and people need their space. and yet, i hesitated not to drop in at my friend's apartment to post in his computer. this intrusion, i'll probably insist on doing while my computer is still being detoxified by my very fastidious computer repair guy.

and this afternoon, while waiting for my friend to gloriously finish a computer game that involved digging for some garishly colored gems - he couldn't possibly stop the moment i barged in for he was then in the penultimate stage to ultimate score land - his paternal grandfather, the one from batangas, without any preamble, just talked to me about his first love.

her name was elizabeth quinones. and he told me of a wet monsoon day in june when he was sixteen or almost sixteen. he, along with his already ailing father, drove all the way to manila to deliver two of their sufficiently fattened cattle to the abattoir. and how everything went out smoothly until one of the truck's tires blew up somewhere in laguna - binan, or los banos, i wasn't paying attention.

as he was jacking up the truck - my friend's grandfather continued his story as i feigned being interested in a lady's golf tournament on tv - a young lady, wearing a purple pant suit passed him by. "oh, she smelled like she just bathed in a spring hidden under a thick sampaguita bush," he said.

then he told me how he was dead worried if he smelled like a bull's fart to her. this when another car tried to pass by his stalled vehicle and she was forced to lean closer to his incapacitated truck.

my friend, looking pissed, came out of his room and announced i could have his computer then. as i got to his room, i heard him berate his grandfather for telling again his love story to another stranger.

"lolo, people don't care," i heard my friend said.

later, as my friend crashed back in to his room, he apologized for his grandfather. "demented," he described him.

then my friend told me how his lolo always tells this same "tired" story to any stranger who comes to their house. and that, he splashes himself with his cologne copiously after he was done with his story, the scent of the musky cologne pervading their cramped apartment for days.


 

bored blogger seeks thrill seeking inmate

good writing need not be signified. and since apparently i don't do that - good writing, that is - let me denote as unambiguously as i could how you may read this post right from the very beginning.

do me a favor, hear the edge in my voice when i say this: i am pissed. now you see how sophomoric that was. and very dissembling, too. but having said that, let me also say, i'm sorry for not posting this past week. actually, i'm saying this more for myself than for anyone else's sake. happy with my candor, now?

anyway, back to the not posting thing. not slacking, but utter, pull-my-hair helplessness. that's why. or so, i say. crazed now with my run-ons? bear with me more. my computer just flat out crashed wednesday. major adware/spyware attack, so my computer guy said. and if i give him the benefit of the doubt further, i can only retrieve my detoxed cpu by middle of next week. hence, this incoherent, mad dash post from a friend's computer.

so what to do now? well, nothing really except bitch and kvetch. i don't live in new york - borough of the baddest bellyachers - for nothing. but here's the more ignominious part. i just found out that whining suits perfectly my constitution than most other stuff i do during my boring free time, say reading, perhaps.

and talking about free time, or the lack, thereof, i am reminded of a story a journalist friend filed for his paper back in manila years ago. he went to this penal colony in southern philippines - where was it now? in palawan? davao, perhaps? - and came back with quite a grisly account of how penal officers - to defuse the inmates' rising frustration level? or just pure sadistic fun? - invented this weekend gladiatorial, sort of, contest.

a raging adolescent bull was let loose in a pit. tied in its whetted horns was a piddling one hundred peso bill, approximately two dollars. the object of the game, obviously, was for willing inmates to snatch the prize money without being gored. no safety gears there, just plain pluck.

but the raging bull's not the story. it's the inmates. my friend's account showed how there was no dearth of inmates, most of them looking at a life with hardly the possibility of a parole, jumping on with glee at this opportunity to be gored by a rattled bull.

what this bull crap of a story has got to do with my snuffed out computer and my subsequent whining, i wish i know. all i definitely know now is that i couldn't come up with a killer end paragraph for this post that would claim unequivocally i prefer the freedom to post, to write regimentally daily over and above the sweet amorphous, unstructured life i had so far this week. because - i know this is apostasy for someone professing to love the craft of writing - like a true traveler, as alduos huxley wrote, i find boredom rather agreeable than painful. i accepted my boredom - unlike those thrill seeking inmates - when it came this week, "not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."

 

arthur avenue, the bronx, new york

i don't know anything about amherst, massachusetts and the constitution of a certain singular poetess who hailed from there, but i'll tell you that the sun in the bronx, new york never rose a ribbon at a time. and contrary to conventional wisdom, it ruptured into the firmament a virgin saint's silver halo spoke at a time, never with the jarring orange of a 9mm gun flare. then the news, like blase'subway rodents, scampered on just because there's just nothing better else to do. arthur avenue, as a habit, put on its month old unwashed black and grey bathrobe, never cinching it around the waist. the tick infested pigeons started shitting sickly white dumps wherever they felt like it, and i, cursing from my musty but sweet bed, muttered to myself, "fuck, when can i ever win the powerball mega lotto?" but like the poetess, i also know not how the sun set. it seemed there is a grey, and not purple, stile, no, a vestibule, that big for their age and potty mouthed saffron boys in their low sagging jeans and girls in their d cup sports bras were adamantly refusing to pass through. it's only when finally they heard someone overhead screaming something like train doors are closing when they all whipped out their orange metro cards and grudgingly trudged inside like unbroken pitbulls and terriers and mutts yanked back by their owners into their one bedroom apartments.
 

tea neck, new jersey

i drew the gnarly curtains and they felt weighed down, it seemed, with- what's the word? - persistent pessimism in this ill lit room at this motorists' hotel in tea neck, new jersey. i looked out and this summer light was making me believe i could see the end of this turnpike now choked with weekend traffic. he was still in the bathroom, reading, i suppose, the new yorker he insisted on lugging along. "am i not interesting enough?" he was the one who suggested we avoid the gridlock getting back to the city from a curt afternoon at the beach by getting us a room in this motel. i told him it didn't matter, it would still be hell, the drive back to the city later in the evening. on the tv was a woman - wasn't she on mtv before? - hawking some breakthrough invention, a rubbery thing that braids hair in a jiffy. i kept on looking outside although there was a spot on the window that insisted on reflecting, albeit shabbily, what was going on tv. as the woman continued to ham it up in the infomercial, on the window, it looked like she was directing overhead the groaning traffic in the turnpike. "you, the new range rover, bear left. you, that's right, the green solara, not there, you don't have an e-z pass." but the weekend snarl continued to get knottier, a mess of unbraidable tresses. a woman with flabby arms, the one in a white sedan, threw up her arms in the air, a child, a terrible two -- he should be -- was throwing a tantrum in the back seat of a coral green saab suv. i called out to him, if everything's alright. he yelled back something like everything's fine. i am awed by this man, he who, it seemed, has boundless faith in everything. and yet, i couldn't stop myself from wanting to ask him back, "is it really?"
 

bantayan island, cebu, the philippines

the pain in my left flank, the one that my fall the other day racked me with, it's still there, throbbing like a persistent, taunting tick of a mangy dog. i've since chucked those sanity altering narcotics in favor of the less innocuous non-steroidal anti-inflammatory analgesics. and maybe, that's why. but the persistence of the pain, albeit less stinging, still gives my, what is getting to be more apparent, one track mind something to obsess, like an itch unscratched. who was it anyway-was it mother? or my fourth grade science teacher?-who said that what is an itch but a slight pain. but that's neither here nor there. the once obscure japanese fictionist kenji miyazama wrote "we must embrace our pains and burn it as fuel for our journey." in that case, my life should be on warp speed now. lately, i've been trading, furiously, it seems, at times, on the currencies of all my past pains that i have insisted on not forgetting. i know, it's hardly life-furthering. regressive, in fact, as most life coaches describe it, but i resolutely recall all of them as vividly as that little house i grew up in, that crouching bungalow under an adolescent kamachile tree, that house which was painted yellow on its front wall one summer afternoon, its insubstantial windows, curtained with flimsy, floral printed, unhemmed swatches of imitation chiffon that my first ever dog, happy, would yelp after as they fluttered wayward to the streets every time the slightest of island breezes blew.
 

the grumeti river, the serengeti plains

waiting for my train, i am overtaken by this light, this summer light, on this not so early june morning. there is a trueness in course, a directness, of light in summer that always rattles me. maybe, it's my asianness, or just my being a son of a mother who takes refuge in silences than in answers. this morning, from where i usually wait on the platform, the light showed me the farthest train track i could possibly see in the entire year. the wooden tracks, still muggy from an early morning showers, writhed under the unequivocating sun. and then the light, without asking for my permission, showed me the dead and putrefying flesh of an inconsequential new york pigeon. what is more cruel than cruel? one that is marked by deep ill will? what morals does this creator have? to allow, to not care, at all, that one of its creations misses all this gloriousness? all this intensity? all this light? all of this summer? can't it wait until winter, perhaps? it had been ten minutes already and the weekend train was still taking its sweet time on some other tracks more damp, slicker than ours, i'd imagine. a cloud, a flimsy one, flew overhead, like a circus distraction while another ring is being peopled with new freaks and tired animals. and the light seemed to report away. where does it go? this vicious light? to serengeti plains in africa? to the grumeti river, perhaps? where the rapacious alligators await the parched, migrating wildebeests?

what fools these mortals be

i'm not supposed to, but i swear to god, i have an uncanny knack of jinxing myself.

just a day after rhapsodizing about my uneventful day, i fell, as in a body slamming, flap down fall.

we, two of my friends and i, were horseplaying over who gets to first peruse this dissy magazine with a famous but doltish looking hunk on its cover when i just lost footing. some really goosey fairy thing to do, i know. the well waxed wooden parquetry of my friend's apartment was just too much for my unwebbed feet and now i'm in lala land.

my friend, our host, thought of calling 911 after it took me a couple of minutes to get up. and when i started moaning like an evil hag who finally had her comeuppance, he started bellylaughing before rushing to his medicine cabinet to spare me some of his narcotics trove.

and now, aside from groaning every time this crick cranks up from my left flank that, again, i swear to god, spasms like clockwork every quarter of an hour, i am contemplating of how best to bring about world peace, the geopolitical impact of paris hilton's engagement to a shipping heir, how to harness kris aquino's annoying ateneo slang into a pan-asian marketing phenomenon, and conjuring up the most foolproof way of preventing chocolate souffle' from falling flat in my guests' laps.

nothing like a strong narcotic pain reliever to churn in my mind the sweetest mishmash of the high and lowbrow, the colloquial and mandarin, wisecracks and aphorisms. and i should be ecstatic, right? with narcotics, i'm going, perhaps, to be the next big thing in literature, right? perhaps the next jack kerouac, right?

yet, the trip, this trip, wasn't that electric for me. and yet, i always thought i'm a soft target - just a casual nudge, i used to say - to be the next substance abuser. what gives?

well, for one, i don't like this incontinence of words, of ideas. mostly, i don't care so much, i am greatly surprised to find out, for this dissoluteness, this indiscipline with which i enjoy this abundance. it's too profligate for my taste. horrors, but i'm indeed a priggish puritan. i need to savor, to taste appreciatively every idea, no matter how picayune they are, every crisp turn of phrase, every flash gift of a sentence and not just throw them together into some psychedelic hogwash with the other detritus that my drug addled brain can produce.

okay, at this point, no matter how late it is, i should post this disclaimer. i am, in no way, entirely responsible for all that has been written before. nor the stuff that has yet to be typed hereafter. that if i can still remain awake for this almost autonomic skill of just typing whatever comes to my mind.

all i can vouch for now is that percocet packs a meaner punch than vicodin and that ella fitgerald, by a lightyear, swings sicker than billie holliday, do wop, do wop, do wop, do wop, wop, wop, wop, and that shakespeare invented the witless george bush, the mean queen of england, george bush's bitch tony blair, oh, i mean, condi, my mother, your mother, and her gardener lover, you and possibly me, lord, what fools these mortals be!

a boring story

this had been a day when nothing happened. all my patients last night were sedated by the extra narcotics they've been haranguing the doctors for the other day. no one had temperature spikes, no one vomited, not one seized.

i went home and all the tv shows i had expected my tivo would have recorded were all saved. breakfast bled into lunchtime then naptime. and soon, i am certain, i was dreaming of insignificant things i could not remember now.

later, i took calls from people i wanted to talk to although a telemarketer or two fooled me with their non-1-800-numbers. i thought of changing my now ratty roman shades with crisp paper curtains and decided against it.

i think i caught myself grinning as i watched the calamari blossoming their tails into black mums inside the microwave oven.

listlessly eating, i watched the news on tv. the 13-year old peruvian mermaid girl had finally emerged from her corrective surgery. she looked like she finally got what ariel, disney's little mermaid, couldn't instantly recognize - legs, two of them.

i don't know, but i was just vaguely reminded of reading - was it in my survey world lit class or was it just one of those serendipitous reads in the university library on a rainy june afternoon? - anton checkov's a boring story.

without qualms, i decided after eating to immediately wash my plate now zebra striped with squid ink. the temperature of the tap was just right, spraying my hands like a warm benediction.

this was a day of grace, a not so showy gift that disdains fancy wrapping. i looked up to the clock overlooking my sink and its steady hands soldier on behind the spiral of thin fog now rising from the gurgling warm water below.

hurt

today, i almost had the most legit of excuses not to post. my internet service, well, for some sublime reason, it failed to connect to wherever it should. and for a while, it felt truly emancipating.

but then, just as i whiled away my downtime scrubbing my mildewed (just slightly, you neat freaks!) tub, i felt really rotten. not the tub scrubbing part but the gnawing feeling that i was not writing.

here's a tall tale. there's an ogre that rages within me. actually, two, duking it out for my undivided affection. one, although inarticulate, needs to be fed without ceasing with whatever writing i can muster-a rush email, about nothing really, to a friend, a doggerel scribbled on a magazine white space while straphanging on a local train, a tedious journal entry, this before i discovered blogging.

and then, there's the other grendel, the slacker that abhors the regimentation, the discipline that all these writing impose: the strenuous physicality of sitting down, the monumental task of stilling my otherwise fretful mind. and this one growls "what's the point" everytime i'm about to sit down and endeavor to come up with anything not akin to gibberish.

my first boyfriend in college, a science major, gifted me with ranier maria rilke's letters to a young poet in just our first week of going out. well, not really out, for we were two incorrigible closet cases going for our degrees earnestly in quite a conservative protestant university in southern philippines. he gave me this after i, a business major that time, intimated that had i been a trust fund baby, i would have read literature in school.

in rilke's first letter, my boyfriend highlighted the following: "ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must i write?...if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'i must,'then build your life in accordance with this necessity."

au courant with my so called necessities - my poor relations back home, my paycheck to paycheck existence here - i've long since made peace with my answer to herr rilke's stringent question. to answer that i must is an exorbitant luxury i simply couldn't afford.

and yet, deep inside i know that writing is my bliss. and deep inside, i know as well, that i'm just craven and unheroic enough not to follow it.

the great physicist albert einstein had this fascinating dichotomy of living. he said "there are only two ways to live your life. one is as though nothing is a miracle. the other is as though everything is a miracle."

i live a life of a stunned blind man miraculously afforded vision. i open my eyes to all the throbbing, trembling shafts of light bursting out from every objects around me. and i stagger. and i feel faint. from all these illumination, from all these beauty.

but i decide, pussilanimously, perhaps, that i must close my eyes again and get back to groping my way around. this i do knowing that all the wonder, all the beauty is all for my taking if i just open my eyes again. but god, does it ever hurt.