Is it strange, how my days unfold? My life has mostly been nocturnal nowadays, and I spend most of the time at home, my nights alone, writing my thesis (with half the time consumed by watching TV, rummaging for food, letting my mind wander aimlessly to the most staggering ideas and fantasies.) It’s not the first time this happened to me, having my waking habits being out of order. Perhaps I have my time in my hands, and I’m having a terrible time handling it. I don’t want to begin thinking about how other people’s days unfold. I am in this moment to examine a fate that is solely mine. I feel like Mersault, sometimes, now that I’m with him in Camus’ A Happy Death. Existential materials always give me a depressive effect, and rakes up the existential angst I thought I have overcome already. “A man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, and you don’t like the sentence.”
I’m drinking alone in the room again, One a.m. on a Friday night. Someday, I will genuinely be no longer terrified of solitude. I bought Andok’s liempo and prepared five San Miguel bottles, negotiable of course, depending on how the booze hits me. Pirated cd playlist prepared beside me.
Drinking perhaps, allows my mind to be lose and to be bounded by the constraints making every word seem beautiful and putting much more thought to thought. With booze, everything just comes out candidly. The higher the state of drunken euphoria --- the more candid it gets.
I open the TV, watch a film called the Swing Kids. It’s almost a good film. It's that kid from Dead Poet's Society. but it There's a lot of music and dancing, and occasionally touching or ponderous moments --- but the last scene was so horrible I wish I didn't watch the it at all. After that I watch The Practice, giving me what probably was my fourth serving of the Susan Robbins episode. And then there’s Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place which gives me genuine laughs. When the laughs are silenced and the TV is off, the agony returns. I feel that agony in my body. I feel it the very veins of my heart, arteries that could’ve exploded if it was not for my still healthy youth. I could barely imagine how my lungs and liver look like, its pores occupied by human rust.
It’s five in the morning. I went out to buy a cigarette. The moon glows opaque through the clouds and the orange fog of 5 a.m. in Malate.
What danger does a needle face, when it does nothing, when it is insignificantly swept by the careless waves of the sea? Aloneness, maybe. I could not tell whether the danger of my being alone is real or imagined.
The House Above the World. There are no other late afternoons more beautiful than this, as it is real. The beautiful late afternoons have found me again. A flush of natural, gray-scale light cast from the window of the room, to the sheets of the bed where my back rests, to the crispy yellow of the pages of the book I’m reading. When the sky clears and the sun is at its highest point, the yellow gleams deep, almost like saffron. I hear the strings of the violins weep, and the somber, grave cry of the cello. As the cake is sweet, the coffee is strong and spirited, leaving you its heavy fragrance.
Despite the many attempts of displeasure, it does not have me seized. I have lived in pleasure. I have almost felt as though I’m with Mersault, Claire, Rose and Catherine on the House above the World, where the World is shut down because the world becomes you, both its judge and justification. Everyone is clever, beautiful, affectionate, and happy as possible. I like Catherine well, as she stands in the terrace watching the sky change, naked, with all her sensual pride. Their fabric of laughter is a luxuriant one, their appetite is splendid, the day is warm and the night is studded and overflowing with stars, the view is majestic, with red tile roofs and white sheets, glittering with a cape of jewels and seashells as the sea smiles.
I want to be in that house, where the world is shut down, where pleasure never seems to be fleeting or mindless, where there is nothing to conquer but the joy of each day.
After a Saturday night, 3:40 in the morning. I’m back. I'm here in the limbo were you never really get drunk, not yet drunk to bid drunkenness goodbye and sleep it off. I wish I was too drunk to sleep it off.
Friday night. Friday night is fantastic after watching a movie alone (The Family Man). Saturday night was at ___'s celebrating another ___’s birthday. I couldn’t drink too much because I was driving. I ended up asking someone out.
