December 1999

This is the last month in a thousand years, and there’s four more days before the new millennia. I haven’t caught the infection of that “millennium fever,” of which people had made a big ballyhoo about. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always thought of time as irrelevant, and I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I am alive. Even more, I know that one day, I will just die and people will keep on awaiting balls of fire to fall from the sky and the seven angels to blow the trumpets of the apocalypse – wasting their time instead of living. A few days back, some high school friends and I traveled to Pampanga to visit another friend, his kid and his wife. We decided that because the night before, we chanced upon talking about him in between beer and a bottle of Lambanog. Seeing him with a three week old baby cradled in his arms, we received a lucid indication that we all were less younger. There’s no longer anything flabbergasting about it. He asked us if we wanted to go fishing or if we wanted to see the sunset. This made us all laugh because fishing and watching the sunset was apart from ordinary human affairs as we know it. But after shoveling wet clods for worms, we found ourselves fishing. We caught nothing but he made us take home what caretakers of the pond just caught. We went to D.N.’s home at Alabang to have them grilled in the lawn. Each of us must have drank eight to ten bottles of beer. The moon which bathe us that night was the first full moon in a winter solstice for one hundred years. It was almost something like a ritual, in the company of my most wonderful friends, with another friend having us fancied as, “mandirigma.”

Malate, My Malate. For the past year or two, Malate’s popularity increased and spread like an electric jolt. It moves so fast, even strangely, like an organic movement, that something else seems to decay or completely disappear. There are new bars popping up like mushrooms. The lines at convenience stores selling beer getting longer in every street and the price is beginning to hit the ceiling. Something seems to be lost every time an old house is transformed into an establishment. No one is there to live and breathe and appreciate the life of the place during the day. I just don’t want the place to become to a completely commercial area. That would kill the real thrill, the identity of the place before it’s completely lost. It is still the place for my long late afternoon walks, along arched trees and houses, falling leaves, tall lamp posts, their orange lamps, the last embers of sunlight and the first moon beams.

The last time I was in Malate, with Malate as the gimmick venue - the crowd was unbelievably thick. There’s a street party at every street. This meant live bands playing the conventional nauseating repertoire and charging three hundred bucks per head for entrance. Somewhere along Mabini, there’s another fashion show starring homosexuals, sponsored by some cigarette or beer brand. There is a reigning perception that the homosexuals in Malate is a featured attraction, and I’m not sure whether that would contribute anything to the gay movement or if this is what they really want. Also along Mabini, there’s a foreign DJ spining jungle, acid and house music. On the other side of street, there’s another beauty pageant. Finally, in another corner is a strip of decent restaurants where there’s good food, well-thought-of bar concepts with a crowd mainly composed of couples in their post-dinner dates playing cat and mouse, determining blindly, and asking meandering versions of whether they are having sex or not. The only common denominator of all the streets is how difficult it is to find a parking space. The real jewels of these streets though – are places where they perform live jazz of the Davis/Coltrane persuasion, ska and reggae. The bonus is when you get free cigarettes from the mini-skirted Mild Seven promo girls.

Near the circle, in front of the church, youngish looking prostitutes are for pick-up. Art galleries and bars frequented by artists are another area of interest. Malate is also supposed to be a bastion for artists. I hope, no matter how pretentious some of them are, that Malate stays as this bastion. Tonight, there’s an ongoing art performance. There was a blend of international and local artists. Most of the performances provided decipherable metaphors, delving into sexuality, the collapse of humanity, imperialism and what seems like this never-ending psuedo-intellectualism. In one of the performances, I was a participant. A Japanese young female artist performs. She’s charming in a long, black chiffon dress. Her eyes are almond, her skin porcelain, her lips red as cherries. We saw her eating cherries in a previous performance. In her performance art, she raises a box to a pole. The box would reveal an infant with a penis and pubic hair. She takes out a sign, “Can anybody kiss me?” The girl approaches the spot where we stand and my brother, my cousin E, and my friend O. gives me a nudge. The girl offers her hand to me and I go up to the stage. In front of an estimated crowd of 100 as an audience, the Japanese girl and I make out to the “Unchained Melody” which was playing on the background. It was the first time I kissed a foreigner. I’m touching the breasts of a person who probably doesn’t speak a language we’d both understand. That fascinated me, how we were both complete strangers and we delivered a message: how stereotypical and libidinal the male specie is: perhaps how they even exploit and wrong women, and how they should be hanged for it. At the same time, the performance shows how easily men succumb to women: to the lure of this kiss in particular. Tonight, I happen to be an object for Feminst Criticism. I look back to that kiss and it’s not something lurid, and all of it is not just some parody. Anyone can argue with that, but

I could always assert that this is a simple, public kiss to a beautiful Japanese girl. Hopefully, she’d say a similar thing.

The next morning I attend Literary Criticism class, Feminist Criticism serving as topic, Ichampion the cause of Feminism.

Before I completely go off-tangent, I go back to Nakpil. I guess we’ll always go back to where the beer is cheap, and where grilled tuna belly is delicious. It’s this company, this shared experience, this belongingness and sense of home. It makes Malate our bastion and no one else’s. It’s the reason why you never shy away from a drink.

Every night is young and seductive.

November 1999

Malraux’s Man’s Fate Irony. Upon reading something like Man’s Fate people undergo something similar to a mystical feeling or a religious experience. There is an enlightenment or awareness of sorts, of death, of human suffering and it roots. This gives birth to idealism. In my case, it just might’ve signaled the end of it: as if to say that our fate is fate of suffering. I wouldn’t want to say that I’ve outgrown myself, but I can never obsess myself with immaturity of wanting to be the world’s savior. I know I can’t be the next Ninoy Aquino, another Marx or Jesus of Nazareth. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything about it. At least the very least, I know I wouldn’t just despair, even if our fate is a fate of suffering.

This is perhaps my most favorite image: Sunday afternoons with damp and gentle November winds, ashen clouds occasionally allowing the sun to flash a smile, coffee, my desk, the fountain pen, a pink flush of light in the dimly lit living room where music is played. Last night, in celebration of SP’s birthday, I had wonderful drink with friends in Katipunan. It was our usual rowdy male crowd who dribbled ridicule, mockery and drunken banter. Pale Pilsen is still seeping out of my pores. It relaxes me from the difficult (although the job rarely is) duty last Friday. Now is the time I could collect myself, when I have the house of my own and everything falls into place. I feel solitude and found in this, a fraction of its meaning.

Life is so swell.

One of the days during the past week, my cousin E. bought me a drink. We passed by Nakpil and we both noticed how silent the deserted street was. I have often seen it lying there, flatly, in its silence, during long walks before sunset, amidst absence of nice-smelling tube-clad, devastatingly beautiful women, their balloonhead boyfriends and members of the male specie (such as me) with their eyes whirling and spinning. Everybod’s standing there in a “street party” parading themselves, probably wanting to get laid before the ice caps melt. But right now all the bars are closed and not populated, acid jazz, groove and dance music unheard and replaced by quiet steps and the hum of passing vehicles.
So much has transpired in Nakpil that had made many nights glitter. The beer flowing on the streets, the crowd looked good and the music was good. Everybody’s heads bounced like molecules to acid jazz. So much less have wondered how it appears when the lavish neon lights and bulbs are off, when there were no waves of mirth splashed across the place. So much less have wondered about how this looked liked in 1930, or how the moon glows on it, and how it slumbers in silence.

How are you bored? Is boredom what you go through when you do not use your senses, or are you bored because you have your senses used your senses excessively, to a certain dysfunction, that you are no longer thrilled by any expectation?

I have often wondered --- despite the richness, or more often the disparity of the experience, why I refused to take into account my little adventures and misadventures with women. I have decided against delving into the details, the graphics of it. It would make me look amateur, weak. It would make me look like the child that I am. But I am an eighteen year old anatomy of stereotypical male hormones, and I am not someone archetypal like Panday the Invulnerable or Drop-dead Prince Charming. You don’t see Helen of Troy or Aphrodite fall for my silly shots. I am amateur, I am weak and I am a child. Until that time arrives, as Coupland puts it, when you go “beyond a certain age and sincerity becomes less pornographic.”
What do I have to be sincere about then, about women? I have not written about women, partly because, I somehow wronged them. True, I have somehow tailored this journal handsomely, but I never lied to it, I treat it as an audience. When I felt fear and self-consciousness the clarity of my thought had obviously been veered away, though I have not been dishonest enough to betray myself. Pretentious as it sounds, I want to have a proud set of principles which will not allow women to be objectified, falsely perceived and wrongly treated. Women are to be admired, treated equally, and loved.
I consider myself fortunate for having known what it is like to love as a young man, to love a young woman who, blossoms like a flower sweetly after summer. I loved her, and I have soared in that ecstasy. Now I consider myself honestly and see that all that love was crap.

The Room. This was of course, the crummiest spot in the house. The curtains breathes a cocktail of alcohol, cigarette smoke, dust. The pillows have seeped sweat and saliva. This was our venue for soda and gin twists. This is where the booze seemed bottomless. There was chaos, but it seemed like the chaos was an acceptable-enough order. It was home after all, where I have read, and slept.
My father told me that the room was a pisshole. And I grew woozy over my mom telling me to dispose of the overflowing ashtrays every morning.
I decided to rearrange things a bit, to realign my perceptions of what this room should be. It is only now that I was afforded active participation in what it might look like, at least in a minimum. We painted everything on gray scale, which complemented the blinds. We relocated things to create space. We bought a touch lamp designed with waves, and a chair which could be called decent. I’m still banking on the idea of a small candle collection, completing the carpet, and art for the bare wall.
The lamp is lit, its soft tone radiance glimmering on the liquor bottles, the chair, and it the room glowed. It still isn’t cutting edge interior design and it pales in comparison to the furniture of the filthy rich. But I’m hearing Ella Fitzgerald singing in the background, I’m having a drink, the candle scent air freshener has dissipated the foul in the air, and I could sleep well, I could feel calm like a Hindu cow.

October 1999

Death by Pivots and Pirouettes. Ballet, in common understanding, is an art of graceful posture and dance. In another light, ballet is the expensive non-school activity of bourgeoisie’s female children. We see the bourgeoisie parade themselves in the theater during the recital gala. Their jewels glitter with the bulbs, crystals and capiz of the chandelier. They are usually unduly influenced by the idea that only people like them could really appreciate and have a good grasp of shows like Giselle, Carmen. So much for Marxist convictions and pretensions. So much for me and my pseudo-intellectualism.
What I’m really impelled to say is that I don't have an exact notion of what ballet is as artform. I’ve experienced it while I was on duty, and I’ve frequently saw glimpses of performances by schools and companies such as the Philippine Ballet Theater and Ballet Philippines. While it's not precise, I've somehow I’ve fermented my own uneducated notion. It like a moving language, conveying emotions made more real, literally made physical as toes tipped in the platform. It's art and fiction performed skillfully by bodies. It conveys grace, elegance, magnificence through the most powerful, the most difficult and yet the most frail gestures: from a slight curve of the forearm to legs spread wide apart, one hundred and eighty degrees of human limbs in the air. You hear the bourgeoisie and the culturati applaud the seemingly difficult pivots, pirouettes and poses.
Just a few hours back I’ve seen Giselle, the story of a peasant girl who fell in love with a prince-in-disguise named Albrech. Albrech also falls in love with Giselle. Through Hilarion who had been suspicious of Loys (Alberch in disguise) Giselle finds out that he’s really a prince --- and that he’s engaged to this bigshot princess. Giselle goes daft, dances in a deranged fit, and dies out of depression. That makes up the first part of the play. I thought that was pretty dumb.
The juice is in the second part. There’s a new set after the intermission. We’re in Giselle’s grave within the Irish forests during midnight. The entire stage beams blue, the forest and the full moon looming in the background. Then the Wilis appear. They are fairies who were jilted, who died before their wedding day. They appear in white costumes, with veils then crowned with green flowers. Like ghosts in rhythmic movement they slowly appear. Their veils and their immaculate white outfits, float into the blue stage. The specter’s appearance was spectacular. They remove their veils and dance on the stage, in a large group, in the chorus of the beautiful language of ballet. They freeze in the most graceful and elegant stance, they dance in the most skillful, both the most powerful and frail gestures.
These beautiful Willis enchant souls into a dance-to-the-death marathon. This was the fate of the Hilarion dude. And through some kind of ritual, they claim the soul of Giselle. The ballet performance of this ritual was all too fantastic: the synchronized, difficult ballet movements of the Wilis (noted by the applause of the culturati), their white costumes and their pretty faces, the disconsolateness their characters portray in the beautifully lighted stage that speaks how both somber and magical the scene is.
Albrech visits Giselle’s grave and Giselle’s souls makes an apparition. Albrech was supposed to die through the dance spell of Wilis, but he doesn’t. Their love transcends death and Giselle forgives him. The sun’s golden glow drives the Willis away. The stage changes to brighter hues and Albrech lives. My favorite part is: Giselle and Albrech doesn’t end up together. Giselle's soul has been liberated from becoming one of the Wilis. And Albrech lives on.
I saw Liza Macuja Elizalde, a Filipina prima ballerina, play Giselle. I couldn’t get the second part of the ballet out of my mind. It is as if the Wilis had made me dance on a blue stage, and I will dance, though never with the grace, skill, beauty and elegance of a ballet dancer, I will dance until I die.


Alibis in the absence of something clever to say. I often wonder why I can’t get myself to say anything about the shows and exhibits during the duties at ___. Now I can almost find out that they reduce me to wordlessness, realizing that truth of the awe in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic contemplation.

September 1999

Along the lines of my Statistics 101 notebook, I wrote between the mean and the measure of central location/tendency : “I cannot settle for mathematical truths. They might produce an accurate picture of reality’s parts (which is still questionable and problematic), but accuracy is not adequacy. Math is an abstract science that cannot accommodate or quantify life’s many abstractions. Math can only make reality, or parts of reality - abstract. I only attended the class for 7 days and didn’t even bother to drop out. I remember Dr. E___ saying something like, ‘statistics has produced so much damage in our judgment.’ Statistics brings us biases, not only figures.

And yes, I despised the class.

It was the first subject I flunked, flushing myself down the drain without even taking any of the long tests, the midterm or final exams. I clearly could’ve made it to the dean’s list again (an exact 3.0 GPA this term, without that 0.0) and keep up my odds for honorable mention. But what is a 3.0 or 0.0 but statistics themselves? It should not say anything royal about my wisdom or my folly.

I spent a night watching a marathon of six films in J.V.’s room. Included in the lineup was “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The People vs Larry Flynt,” “Something About Mary,” “Basketball Diaries” along with a few smut films. They were all spectacular. They were such a spectacle that for a few seconds, all I’ve seen and heard from the flickering TV screen was a blend of beautiful noise and a torrent of colors in a flit, filling a dark room, a spot in my eye and a cavernous passage in my ear.

The downside to this marathon was that I dropped my old habit of really reading through a film, listening to it carefully and even writing words from dialogue which was worth writing. Somehow, I’ve always allowed films, through dissecting them, to enter my mind to explore, embrace and challenge its cherished ideas. Now I merely watched it.

“Farewell my Concubine” saddens everything in me, even my toes. However, I still thought that films like these along with highly-rated films (including “Life is Beautiful” or “Saving Private Ryan”) has a propaganda for America, or American ideology. Farewell, for instance, seems to rant on heavily but quietly, about Communism’s setbacks. It seems that highly rated films must be pro-America. Undeniably, to describe these films as “fantastic” or “wonderful” would be an outright understatement. What I loved most about Farewell is how it showed China’s history through the story of two actors --- coinciding with a country’s rich tradition, culture, success, downfall, revolution, deceit, survival and desperation. And it really showed it, so as to make you know what China was with both warts and glamour. It made you feel what it was like, almost putting yourself in the character’s shoes. The drama has an Asian flair to it that made all the despair seem familiar. Unlike Filipino actors who are annoying to watch, the actors just move you. They don’t just scream and crying exaggeratedly, beg, or appear kawawa (pitiable) as Filipino actors do.

Today, I was on duty at the Eiga Sai Japanese film festival, which gave me a glimpse of a 1950’s film “Early Summer.” It was slow paced, blurred, and black and white that seemed strange and uninviting. Unlike Kurosawa black-and-white films, this one's just intolerable. I’ve also seen “A Sandcastle Model Family Home” which is no different from most Japanese films I’ve seen with its emphasis on their work ethic, and the nearly-generic yet fascinating character of Japanese people. It was much like “My Sons,” and I’m making that comparison because both movies probably run on the same festival theme. A Sandcastle has a good story, showing the family as a dying institution corrupted by mundane corporations.

We wanted to watch “The Red Violin” but it was in French, without subtitles. J.K. treated us to a Hollywood flick, “Deep Blue Sea.” The scares were well-effected on THX surround sound, and the 360 degree screen made the entire thing seem tangible.

All these films. Spectacles are flickering from a screen that blended beautiful noise and a torrent of colors in a flit, filling a dark room, a spot in my eye and a cavernous passage in my ear.

An almost-perfect dream. A volcano in a city by the beach was about to erupt. Its mouth started, abruptly, to emit smoke, like the radiator of an overheating car. Then it began spewing and spitting ash, lava and the volcanic grains that came with quakes and gigantic explosions from the core of a mad earth, making its nature nude. The nimbus of the noon sky took a completely gray scale.

Havoc was wreaked in the city. In this catastrophic event, people in all their craziness and impulsive panic rushed toward nonexistent exits.

I was standing by the beach, my feet buried in the damp sand. I just wanted to dance. I was almost happy, despite, or perhaps because of the chaos around me.

A woman with long hair flowing on her back approached me. She got herself undressed heedless of all the people running amuck and the danger about to devour everyone. She asked me to get undressed too. I did, without hesitation. I noticed that she was much taller than I am. This wouldn’t be awful, and would rather be the most beautiful, last testament in life. We kissed, though in all this haste I seemed not to feel anything in her lips. As some passion grew, I felt that kiss as the last poem, as the last romance, the last moment of existence. The volcano continued to erupt and made everyone bear its heavy grudge.

As we kissed, fire crackers lit up the sky. It’s a happy new year. On one part the sky was gray with ash, on another part, the many hues of the fire crackers sparkled and sprinkled like many Saturns and Venuses and Milky Ways in a pitch black midnight. We kissed while people were having their heads blown off, and their bodies consumed by tongues of cruel fire. Somewhere, someone was singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

We held our hands, and she started running toward the sea with me. Then she swam. I couldn’t swim and I couldn’t tell her. She just went on and dived in to cold, green waters. While we swam, I felt my arms swish swiftly against the sea, and I kept on looking for her hand. When we found each others hands, we laced them and swam together. She carried me on. We reached the coast of an island, which had a rich, green rainforest. We walked, with our bodies bare, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

As we searched through the jungles, we found another naked man. He was handsome and had a powerful built. I was surprised that the woman knew him, and a second later they were wrapped in embrace. I knew the man said something to me, but I vaguely remember, maybe because I didn’t want to remember. I knew they were old lovers. They walked away.

I wanted to swim to where there were no shores, swim to the end of the world.

In the surreal world of sleep, there is no time, and no gravity. But it turns out there’s still romantic tragedy. All this dream-imagery makes me want to vomit.

August 1999

I woke up with my head heavy as a cloud about to burst. When my head hits the ground, I have an early morning enlightenment: what the hell was I doing last night drinking too much and dancing with office girls in their uniform? I hit the shower, and REM’s “It’s the end of the world…” is booming on the background. I felt relieved the minute cold water splashed on my head and body. I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My face is pale and my pupils and brows are black, all of my skin beaded with water. Maybe last night wasn’t meaningless. Maybe the past exists and I had a swell time.

Last July, __, __, __, __, and I have been hanging around a lot. We have our work at ___ as a big alibi to meet each other. Seen in some vague angle, “adaptations become habits.” That sounds like our friendship. Tonight, after duty, __ treats us dinner. I’ve never had so much dimsum in my life. What I loved even more was the way these people laughed with each other. After a long walk, we laugh some more and call it a night.

Never have I seen so much dignity in death as the characters who died in Malraux’s Man’s Fate. It also reaffirms that drugs (opium in this case) can give an almost authentic meaning of life, as with the protagonist, Gisors.

There are times when you lose touch with the splendor of solitude. During these times, the weekends come to me as a spectacle. I was content with spending evenings alone reading and writing. Now the weekends oblige me to have fun in its shallow sense (drinking too much and watching people dance.) The weekends returned to me now like a part of me which I lost, like the prodigal happy to be home again.

Be in danger, but do not be defeated. Rather, be dared. And when you fail and fall down, you can always laugh like mad. Laugh all you can, or laugh while it lasts.

Time alone is time well spent.

Absurdity attacks. Its ingredients: a dumbly written poem, a failed attempt at writing my Philosophical Problems paper, the rush of sugar from huge quantities of strawberry jam in bread. I suddenly felt awful for having to look for excuses for my failures. I felt awful for wanting something tremendously tragic to happen in my life. Then I wanted to remind myself of the fundamental questions: what do I want out of life? What do I live for? What is it that I really put my life into? Nothing is real right now. Nothing is real, except perhaps my disappointment over the fact that I should’ve paid more attention to writing my paper.

Re-reading The Catcher in the Rye in the empty room upstairs. I felt, for the past past month, a genuine relief. I was in the company of life’s greatest book, a window overlooking trees, a wet road, while the afternoon’s pale light spreads without any of my gloom into the room, swimming like a liquid into me.

I think the TV finally broke down, and I would eagerly want to thank whomever it was who shot for me. I’ve been looking at that idiot box too much.

The will wills its will. Philosophical Problems class this morning tells us something about the will willing its will. Nietzsche tells us that man would rather will nothing than not will. Man wills. The will to power must be expended, it cannot remain stable. In the same light, the will of Spinozas’s connatus is to persevere. And for Descartes, or for Christianity, it is follow their god’s will. For Schopenhauer, the will is but suffering. Among all wills, one thing can be found in the end zone: that there is something that moves us. The difference lies in how we affirm this movement. Nietzsche affirms with power, change and overcoming, Christianity by dwelling on pity, Schopenhauer with aesthetic contemplation and ascetic living, and Spinoza with perseverance. But how do I affirm it?

Sunday night while working on my Mabini paper. I write, “Somewhere in his young life, Mabini took lonely, long walks (while everybody else was out for party and amusement) during Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons with a kerchief about his head, his feet bare. Somewhere in his young life, practiced dancing with a stupid chair.”
I could’ve quoted something political and something intelligent about him. But this is the only part of my paper that isn’t political or intelligent about Mabini. For in his politics, in the revolution, in the struggle for freedom, Mabini only saw failure. In the only considerable private experience I knew about him, there were lonely walks and dancing with chairs. I could only imagine the kick, the ecstasy he derived from drinking carabao milk. That killed him.
Kills me.

July 1999

I needed a calendar because I can no longer remember what day it is. Strangely enough, the bookstores don't sell calendars in the middle of the year.

Nostradamus predicts that the will world end this July. I thought it was too bonkers to be entertained. Now it’s on the cover of Time fucking Magazine. An insightful historian can probably make accurate predictions at how the human race, at a given time, would just long for the end and believe it. All the same, I wouldn’t whine when the world ends tomorrow. It’s even strangely comforting, for we can finally be nothing. Finally, something quite eventful happens. If the world still stands in August, death is always just around the corner, whistling or smelling something.

I had a wonderful lunch last Sunday --- grilled tuna, grilled pork chops, enjoyed with my whole family. When I eat that well, and I just had an equally wonderful drink the night before, I wish I could die tomorrow.

A brief pause in a bleak world, that is all. How sad. Fucking sentimental. Ad misericordiam rubbish.

All of life is an offshoot to boredom. How true. Sounds better.

I don’t feel guilty about my parents. It’s just that I owe it to them, and I want to make it up somehow. And what I’m doing - certainly isn’t the way to do so.

If there are three thing I miss, it’s being alone all the time, reading good literature for my leisure, and studying. Everything bores me, or everything will eventually bore me.

With the help of G_____, I understood what Nietzsche was trying to say on “Involuntary death.” Make a plan. Set a goal. Achieve it. And at the pinnacle, practice the art of dying. Perhaps it could even be made tragic. Don’t just be another tombstone in the cemetery.

I went to two museums – Casa Manila and the San San Agustin Museum, and visited the sepulchers of a dead God – in Manila Cathedral and San Agustin. I took a long walks in Intramuros.

Tuesday, an hour past midnight. I haven’t collected enough determination to prevent myself from drinking. I have been drinking in unlikely places such as empty parking lots in military-bases-turned-urban-zones. I ask myself, why have I been drinking. I have no victory to celebrate, I have no loss to be consoled.
I couldn’t even relax myself through booze anymore. There are people to meet when you drink but they’re mostly just talking vaginas and men ruled by their penises. I pardon my poor judgement and vanity. There are of course, interesting ones, and those who are aesthetically dignified and nice-smelling. And there are chances which are just not worth taking. And so I go on to drinking and to courting my own disasters. I’ve been drinking too much. I’ve been drinking in the wrong places. I’m consuming all my dough for drinking. I’m disappointed with my academics. I’m not learning as much as I am supposed to be and I surrendered my chances for honorable fucking mention. I’m not saying that I could stop drinking, that would be too ambitious. I’ll have another one tomorrow, for whatever reason. There’s just one thing that pulls me back: it only lasted for three seconds but that was enough, if not too much. It was because my father looked at me tonight, and I wasn’t afraid of him, I didn’t fear him. I just knew I should look up to him with respect. And every morning my mother asks me to clean up the overflowing ashtrays.

June 1999

June arrives again with clouds of gloom. There is a typhoon declaring openly: the earth is bleak. I picture people in their romantic idiocies: gawking at their windowpanes overlooking Manila’s heavy traffic during the stormy late afternoon, their mouths open and their chin resting in their palms. People pricking themselves with self-pity for their lovelessness and are bleeding profusely. I could be one of them and fuck that.

June’s clouds are gloomy and the earth is bleak. But I shouldn't be unhappy.

I have another class with G____ and he never ceases to amaze me. He asked us to write a paper for the course and I was thinking something about the problem of language or the needlessness of morality. I wasn’t sure whether he penetrated or read through my mind but he raised the latter in the discussion. We cannot be held morally accountable for what we do since we came from nothing. I asked him if life would be better without morality. He said yes.

Without morality, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we would go ahead and bite each other’s head off and blast ourselves back to a primitive age. Truly, other species in this universe had survived without morality. And whatever morality is, wo/man has made it a dogma and institutionalized it. And I don’t think he would disagree that morality only limits our freedom because like laws and systems, it limits us to given propensities, or to a certain nature. What N. has to say about this is that morality is ridiculous and we should be judged as individuals --- i.e., not in universal moral standards. This is partly what he thought and partly my understanding.

Without morality, we would still grow, our intelligence would probably improve and catapult us to a higher state of being. If this wouldn’t happen instinctively, then it would happen spontaneously, just as in G____’s analogy: young birds simply flap their wings and eventually learn to fly.


In another one of his smart metaphors, he tells us the life and the classroom. Life is when you sit down in class for one whole hour, and at the end of that hour he raises his hand, and says conclusively, “This is absurd.”


I’ve been drinking like a flower vase and never has alcohol been so relieving --- after a day at school, or night at work. Perhaps alcohol is just a mere inanity to stuff my emptiness and boredom, since my impetus to read or study had suddenly gone on vacation. For one thing, Blue Ice is cheap at this Malate beer garden where we hang out, and their grilled tuna belly is fantastic. I can’t shy away from anybody who invites me for a drink.

I’ve always thought that the booze had brought the best out of me, made me think and do things. It helped, however artificially, banish my fear and heighten my consciousness. It was also an experience I’ve often shared with my friends. Now it’s just something I crave for. Now it’s just a habit can’t avoid.


Where there is no fear, there is boredom. All life is an offshoot to boredom. If we stop breathing, we just might stop getting bored to tears as well.


I finally found the copy of Sartre’s Nausea in the library. I finally found something that would make me feel normal. In each of the first sixty pages I’ve read so far, there is a flood of ideas (though not necessarily philosophical) to contemplate, an image to be imagined with increasing delight. I didn’t hear or read about the novel’s ideas and the images for the first time, but what so strikes me this time is that it makes me feel how solitude, sadness et cetera can easily be neglected because the grass isn't greener on the other side. Togetherness and happiness can be equally boring. There is only everydayness and then there is nothingness.


I take a pause from reading nausea and last line goes: “A man is always a teller of his tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the sotries of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live life as if he were recounting it… But you have to choose: to live or to recount.” I’m almost obsessed by stories and by thoughts, even my fantasies, especially creative ones, that I have almost forgotten how to live. But what is it to live? I quote a line from the same page: “When you are living, nothing happens.”


I discovered another danger of keeping a journal, or perhaps re-discovered it as I ran through Nausea. You take account of the events, incidents and adventures of a lifetime only to find that all of them happen repeatedly, and repeated again, like the rhythm of your walk, that they could only be insignificant. On the other hand, when you try to re-live an exact moment, you can only try to ruin the moment’s authenticity --- for they can never be extended.

Where does eternal recurrence come in?


I have so far enjoyed Sartre’s Nausea not so much for the philosophical insight, but for the character of the protagonist. The protagonist has a fascinating fondness for picking up paper and chestnuts. His characater transcends philosophical insights and tells it through the details of his experience. His very gestures, his words, and whatever pink bricks or bubbles of light that he notes, his entire experience collectively, conveys existentialism.


Walking while the early evening’s winds whisper the sadness of its final faint song, the violins weeping their last teardrop quietly in the drizzle that passed by, the loneliness you brought left me and I found Solitude. Under a tall lamp post, where the orange bulb the late embers of sunset and the thin, coming crescent moonlight looms over dull shadows lying flat on the wet streets where you and me once walked --- our tongues teasing, our hands laced --- I now found Boredom. But unlike you, boredom and solitude has never left me. (This could be a horrible, ad misericordiam poem.)


Will there ever come a time, perhaps when even the life of my bone marrow have been seized and sucked dry, that I will tell myself, Nothing fascinates me anymore.


Friday, 8:00 p.m. The night is dry, and I am supposed to finish a difficult Analytic Philosophy read about belief, inquiry and meaning. That is until I listen to a program called Groove Garden and serve myself good, flavorful bottles of cold Pale Pilsen and baked mussels. It blends well with acid jazz. All the lights in the house are turned off, except for the light at my desk whose beams are almost blue. My only company was a few more pages of Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. I can almost taste the novel together with the beer. God it’s good. The texture of the book’s paper is a crisp yellow. It's Friday night and this feels like a party.

“I must let my pen run on, without searching for words.”

A phone call to someone else ruins a rather perfect Friday night.

But the past, however recent it is, collapses when the present arrives. I’m not happy about this drink anymore, and this HBO movie is lousy.

While having a cigarette, I heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow in its classical version at 98.7. I remember the 15th floor window with Taft’s thousands bulbs exploding in small glitters, the rising carbon monoxide, conversation, and dim lighting --- clouded my head.


Late at night, mom and dad brings me Kowloon Siopao. And I thank them with all my heart for satisfying my craving. I had a serving of chicken pao, pork pao and a jumbo pao. I want to vomit.

I have the house by myself again, and it’s the Saturday afternoon to start the hard industry of reading Analytic Philosophy. After a few pages I decided to have lunch: rice, tereyaki, chicken nuggets in barbecue sauce, and softdrinks on top of all that.

On 98.7 with Schopan, Bach, and Mozart in the background, I sit on the sofa facing the curtains. They filter the sun’s light in an opaque and heavy pink or old rose. Everything in the living room is calm and motionless, except for the unseen movement of sound waves and my hand reaching a glass of water to my mouth. I feel too mild for coffee, which I could have later with H. over a long overdue good conversation. Maybe I should clean the room, do some push ups and sit ups before going out.

May 1999

Pity should only be a device for a good sarcasm; i.e., pity should always be sarcastic.

I am nothing. Never have I been so glad to say that I know nothing.

Upon reading Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises, you feel that life is all a long, dark, rotten night. But we shouldn’t be sore. We should make life (or the night) sparkle, spectacular and lovely through drinking tons of wine, partying wildly, living as best as we can, and having a swell time.
I almost wished I lived in a period in between two wars and a great depression. The 1920’s. I could legitimately belong to a generation that is lost, hopeless, aimless, and thus had chosen to be spontaneous and hedonistic. I would in the company of people who find themselves in the same shoes, or perhaps be someone like Jake, or even Gatsby.

No other writer or philosopher can encourage me to have an overpowering sense of strength, power and will; especially when I have often stayed on the losing end. No other philosopher can be as acquainted as N. is to poetry and truth, violence and virtue, loneliness and solitude, silence and the wisdom of speaking --- the very same things that have once made me feel as if I were powerful.
I just feel so good reading N. And what is good? “…everything that heightens thee feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.”
Although sometimes, or on some parts of the book, I really have no idea what the guy is talking about --- the riddles can be too tangled or the metaphors or implications can be too difficult for me.

After an untiring, effortless duty at ___, [and theater shows are of course, often delightful to see, given the opportunity to do so] I wash my oil-sodden face with hypo-allerginic Tender Care soap and fold my barong. I take the fantastically architectured staircase to the lobby, passing by the unlighted capiz chandeliers, and the art showcases at the now dimly lit hallways. Outside the LT lobby, I have a smoke and my lungs breathe with tar finally. A beautifully shaped half-moon looms with a speck of stars.
I go home, usually having a late dinner, but not tonight because the first free food I tasted in this job had made me excessively full. Surely, I go home to my chums --- boredom, booze, solitude, and the idiot box. And as only true friends do, boredom, booze, and solitude never leaves me.
I realize that it’s Saturday and this HBO series which breeds bourgeoisie values and absolutely makes too much of a hype of sex and relationships is on. I watch it, and it’s arousing and funny.
I have a few bottles.
At the end of the night, I can only find that the hardest act to do among all these is to fall asleep.

Something that is full of spirit glitters in me whenever I see both my parents smile or laugh --- especially the charming way my mother does it. Maybe because they don’t really smile and laugh a lot. Whenever they do, it must really be an honest-to-goodness laugh. The thing is, my parents are never phony when they smile and laugh.

April 1999

I had given my muscles a reason to rejoice by doing stretching, jogging and exercising almost daily. After what seemed like an eternity of choosing to be bed-ridden, I never had such fondness for making sweat ooze out of my pores, and burning the accumulating slabs of fat in every inch of my body.
Even though it’s only in a machine, I really liked running. Running made me feel active, free and functioning. I’m running and I’m running away.

After watching a so-so movie, “Meet Joe Black,” I wonder how it could’ve been all-too-fantastic if everybody would think that you'd would die tomorrow or the day after or in such proximity that you would always be kind. You would always be grateful to everyone, and you would always try to maximize life to its limits.

Only by accident and not by deliberate intelligence did I receive a 3.6 GPA. Or is ‘deliberate intelligence’ merely, if there ever is such, just an accident?

Fear is contemptible.

Appeal to fear. Fear makes you see peril where there is none. It obstructs the clarity of thought, and prevents one from doing commendable acts of strength and wisdom of mind. Fear makes all actions contemptible, and would eventually lead to an absolute cowardice.
Fear of God, for instance.

Another “for instance….” - my fears when I'm taking the car out without permission. That permission carries with it respect and honor. What is honor anyway, according to N., but self-superiority made public.

Perhaps it is what N. really meant to “live dangerously,” i.e., to be never insecure about the insecurity of insecurities --- death.
To not think of death means to at least be able to live freely, to be able to live the now, to think, and therefore to be able to seek the truth and its greatness.

I just turned eighteen.

Most of the time, I’d merely want to be fascinated. To say, “that’s fascinating.”
As N. thought (without deserved respect, esteem or perhaps truth) about women, something or someone is profound only because we never tried to fathom their depths. They might not even be shallow, so N. says. Let the cliché go, “familiarity breeds contempt.” And the knowledge of weaknesses denotes the exploitation of it.

Dumb people try to hide their dumbness in intelligent language and technical jargon.

Why should wo/man be a social being? By that I mean, why should people always share their sympathies and common experience, if they can have their own ways with the world? Have your own way with the world, instead of ascribing to what everybody else (not that I am discrediting it, for something could be learned from them) has already done or accomplished.

N. had once more given me a reason to enter the churches again, and that is, to visit the beautiful, all-too-glamorous tombs and sepulchers of a dead God. God just might still be worthy of paying respect to, like some deceased relative we came to remember on grow occasionally sentimental about.

March 1999

Dr. R___ was telling us about the Jungian shadow --- comprising our weakness, hatred, fear or desire. The shadow should be tolerated to a certain degree before it manifests violently, before objectifying it, or seeing it outside of ourselves.

We should never let other people have knowledge of our weakness, fears, or desires. The knowledge of weaknesses, fears and desires --- denotes its exploitation.
“We are all parasites.” ____ once told me. Whatever she meant by that. It appealed to me as a profoundly philosophical insight. In that metaphor she captured the very essence of human relationships: our selfish need for each other. We cling to each other because we suck juices off our host, until the host gets all scoobied up and we find new ones to be parasitic on. The sentence was just so beautiful. Have I corrupted her drift? Have I pseudo-intellectualized it?

Because I can never tell them, I love my parents, and my brothers.

Confidence often ends up in conceit.

People are optimistic for you not because they are genuinely optimistic for you. They are merely kind. Optimism is often a failed sweetener in a bitter life. What I meant to say is, optimism is often false.

Walking along Julio Nakpil at late afternoons, probably after drizzles or a downpour, I smell the peculiarity of asphalt and rain water, and the bay. Along the bathed street I walk and watch the bars prepare for a night’s party and its pretension. The clouds are orange, chromatically transforming to pink, blue and violet then black. The sun is sleeping in the east. I saw it last near the Church after coffee and croissant. I wonder how this appeared in 1930.
From Strange Days, “Paranoia is the highest scale of reality.” So true.
From watching a one of the Japanese films in this year’s Eiga Sai, My Sons:
- Old people are being discarded to make them realize how screwed up life really is. Then they let them die.
- Japanese people are so generic, they all look like action figures or dolls.
- Substantial and honorable economic principle: “I want to work hard, have a good bath, and work again tomorrow.” This moistened my fucking eyeballs real well and I nearly burst into tears when I heard it uttered in all the actor’s dumb sincerity.
- “The first gulp is always the best.”
- Touchy, but not nauseatingly touchy.
- Japs can be so touchy and so funny in their exaggerated gestures.
- Can we really blame people who climb the corporate ladder and are workaholics? Are they merely eccentric? Apathetic?

From Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut: “Policemen protect property rights, but not human rights.” “Vacancies had suddenly become extinct as dodo birds.”

Heaven flushes its acid teardrops on summer. Times like these, nature tries to sympathize with life’s dryness. But I cannot help but loathe Sunday afternoons when it rains, there nothing listenable and I don’t have the drive to study.

I really shouldn’t intellectualize things, and I concede that I never did so at all.

It left more than stunned or flabbergasted when Dr. A____ once mentioned, “On what grounds can we ask, Why?!” Why do people have all sorts of claims to intelligence?


Spontaneously enough, H. and I went for a drink to discuss his libel suit. We’re barely eighteen, and here he is in National TV and AM radio with a libel suit. All the while I thought I’d see him with beads of sweat streaming down his brows, his jaws clacking. With all the adrenaline shot up in his life, he managed to stay nonchalant.

It just popped out of my mind, what H. mentioned to me, that post-structuralists believe, or perhaps some them, that language is causing the destruction of society.


During the bus ride, I sat beside a young mother, roughly aged around 19 or 20, who cradled an infant in dark brown, weary arms. The baby was lying flat on his/her stomach. The edge his/her tiny feet tickled the bone of my knee. The mother looked panicked and asked me if I could reach her umbrella for her. I did most gladly.
The tot started crying, faintly, to increasing loudness. On that cue, the young mom beside me began to unbutton a portion of her white, sleeveless blouse and slipped a breast out. I looked away but she’s already bared her nipple --- the color of soil. It was an interesting, non-pornographic public image… until one begins to wonder if she was a slut who got pregnant, or a provincial girl who got banged by some nutty farm boy who brushed her off. So it goes for our socio-cultural stereotypes.
As I hope, I see her as young woman celebrating her motherhood.

January 1999

The Holden Caulfield Effect. I remember how waiters or bartenders refused to serve an under aged Holden Caulfield a scotch and soda. Resigning on this refusal, he would quip, “Give me a coke.” And then I remembered how I explored bars by myself, having my own twist of this scare that I wouldn’t be served alcohol, being asked for an ID, getting my face pale and my hands chilling and forehead sweating coldly. With a cigarette in hand, I would snap, “Give me a coke.” Since I reached college I blotted all those scares away. I summoned waiters and bartenders with the assurance that they will serve me what I ask for. I’ve seen myself grow a little, not that it had done me any good.
I called this into mind as I jog the memory of what M., L____ and I divulged last night over Blue Ice at the Verve Room and Jazz Rhythms. (Prior to that was a fantastic dinner with other friends in celebration of H.’s 18th birthday.) Somewhere in the long strands of our conversation we spoke once more of The Catcher in the Rye’s impact on our lives, as we watch a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual crowd party in Julio Nakpil.
And now I should I get to the point that should be pondered, the reality check that somehow left me stunned. This calls for a re-examination of premises. When I read Catcher a few years back I had more than a gist of a world that is phony, boring and moronic. And I think this is how it all began: the shaping of a rather peculiar character. Now, though, as I examine my intentions and thoughts, it seems that I am somehow losing a grip of Holden Caulfield’s perception of reality. I’m almost pretentious. And more than that I am abruptly losing that idealism I have fired up in my youth, along with the passion, angst and eccentricity I thought I had. Now, all I can think of is my apathy and my indifference. If I ever did learn anything, it would only prove what Schopenhauer suggested --- an increase in intellect is an increase of loneliness.
To put it more concretely, for instance: I once wanted to study Law. I didn’t want to be the pro-bono type, who advocated human rights and championed equality. I wanted to be wealthy and mediocre. I thought I would be able to buy the groceries and pay the bills, live a comfortable life, maybe even please my parents. The idea that of all that nationalism, self-righteousness, integrity, is merely novelty and patronage - is becoming so tempting. What is even more tempting is just to make the dough and collect objects. I am being absorbed by the world of them yuppie cheeseballs who would rather eat their own liposuction fat. Despite philosophy, I am often becoming mundane. But of course, by saying this and doing something about it, I would no longer allowing it to happen. I still want to be someone who catches children falling of the rye, falling off the cliff. I would still wonder where the fishes go during a freezing winter.
Funny how when you grow old, so much of the ugliness in world gets in to you --- golf, recent model cars, country club memberships and huge houses --- that you almost feel as if you grow up backwards. There was a time in my young life when I wanted none of those. I wanted something else, something that no one else could lay hands on.
But if the day comes and I take or surrender to what this phony, boring and moronic world has to offer, sucked up by a sordid social system, I should look back to what I have once thought. When that day comes, I should puke. I should die choking on my own puke.


A Joint Tale. The joint had spun my heartbeat to a lively percussion that skipped and swayed to the music that she played. The music was as beautiful as she is. She is music and infinitely more.
And then I heard her laugh. I heard her spout her tales on tripping, the clarity and cleverness of her thoughts and responses. She was patching sunsets, oceans and islands… and I imagined that I have journeyed there, as I look at her with eyes stricken a concealed longing.
Until I come down: from that world of weed with her patched postcards and her beautiful music, from the building’s rooftop where Manila’s lights scatter in my eyes… I come down gradually, in search of her.

The night is shattered as I knock the door at three in the morning and my father awakes from a much needed sleep. He asks me where I have been. He looks at with heavy eyes, penetratingly, through my conscience. A heavy boulder of guilt falls on me.

Pablo Neruda redeems what is left of the hours before this morning’s class.
“And I, infinitesimal being…. felt myself a pure part of the abyss…”