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.