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.