Everyday there is everydayness. Everyday ho-hum. Everyday humdrum. Every fucking day.
Summer and a stream of consciousness. Maybe I was too lazy to even put my thoughts into focus, to establish these words into a more telling order. Someone once told me the writing in the form of stream of consciousness is superlatively effective. Everyday there is everydayness. Everyday ho-hum. Everyday humdrum. Every fucking day. What is it? What is it that I would I live passionately for? What death would make it all justified, and not everybody dies like a hero or a martyr or remembered after a few years except when someone throws a death anniversary ad in the Obituaries with masses heard for even in the most unheard of parishes in provinces? Only death is forever. What is my creative output? My meaningful pursuit? My happy remembrance? Who would be there to embrace while remembering the remembrance. To embrace in my bed while watching my DVDs. This stuff is simply more effective when you’re all boozed up and you are not too conscious in writing in a stream of consciousness. But not too drunk last time with D.N. when my drunkenness ended up asking for the number of the mini-skirted waitress. Bastard. Only to never even call. I love to juggle words and be redundant and the sound of an assonance. I have not done free association for a long time. Perhaps I am afraid and I’d censor myself. Keep it all bottled up and until it explodes nuclear. All these for the sake of having an entry this month. To whittle the worthlessness of it all. To cease time, and encapsulate it. To flow liquid and non-linear through time and just slide through the past and the future and the now and maybe emit all that boredom. To throw this away, and hope to find the formerly barren land but now you have found all the things you’ve lost, like a lost umbrella. All that you have lost that is still part of you somehow. Never look back. Never look back to what you have written and think too much to ruin it. You will regret some of it later on, but would you rather not regret? What is my Truth? I’ve asked myself that like twenty seven thousand times and twenty-four more. Regret Nothing. You can never regret nothing. God knew it all. I’ve always wanted to write that God is the omniscient, cosmic encyclopedia Britannica. I stole that from the Alchemist. A book I hated because it became just too popular although it reminded me so much of basic philosophical themes and sounded like a Little Prince for adults. Although The Little Prince was anti-adult. And Holden Fucking Caulfield never grew to be twenty-one.Now I eat too much again and I love fried chicken and the nuts with roasted garlic that would’ve been honeyed in sweetness went dry and salty. I feel all right. Mozart plays again with quick classical music with the many notes. I am surprised how Microsoft Word finds my sentence construction grammatically correct and coherent. I lack more adjectives, and I do not draw much from the wellspring of images. More similes and figures of speech. More clouds in the sky, and some images that would’ve taken time to think of. Like, I would’ve written something like -- Mozart plays again with music with the many notes sprayed like gunfire in the hands of a killing madman --- only less aimlessly – as a matter of fact, dead accurate on hitting the keys, the piano played like magic in the hands of the supreme sorcerer. I could do that. Maybe I could write a collection of poems, and my or stories enriched by reading so many of those finely thought-of plots and fascinating images. But why have I not? Was I too busy rationalizing myself --- and me me me --- this “morbid self-attention” I have devoted myself to? “morbid self-attention” like I heard it in Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Is it true that so many things are happening in life and they also deserve to be cradled into literature: like how I take the cab at night and ride the bus every morning. Are all those for me? Would someone else take the time to appreciate it anyway? Weaving all these words into a beautiful fabric --- blinding your eyes with a wide sea of shooting stars or big round sequins from which it gently sparkles during these summer nights. Enriched with images carefully placed from raw abstraction into absolute sense, delivering a real sensation and a ponderous effect. How will the story end? Maybe cite something profoundly philosophical or, always smart to deconstruct something in what was done. Not obvious deconstruction, but one that takes figuring out and one that is delivered with a unique literary metaphor and an allusion --- to something like the book of Job in the bible, or incorporating the song of songs into a sexual act and deconstructing it, to answer the question – What are hierarchies do they reverse? I saw this recently in a good-enough Mexican film called “El Crimen de Padre Amaro.” “Summer and a stream of consciousness” sounds nice. I am tired of writing about the summer heat and the memory it brings, often delicious, rarely dismal, or the many sensations I could describe when summer arrives like someone’s lips scattering itself on my skin. Wow. I filled a page. This must be what it feels like to be a cigarette burned to ashes and butted out – with a thin white mist vanishing into thin air --- and feel its emptiness.
This month is the month of Mars, the god of war. This month came with war. It is as though history and mythology and this symbolism is something that is truly alive and organic manifesting itself, like the way stars seal our fate. On the first night of yet another gulf war, the US fired 72 satellite-guided tomahawk missiles on Baghdad. Skies lit up with missiles and anti-aircraft missiles, Apache Helicopters and Jets fly by like the modern day Angel of Death. With fired up oil wells, Iraq burns like Sodom and you can watch it live on CNN, BBC, CNBC and Fox --- preferably with a bowlful of popcorn and Coca Cola as they show the progress in this war. Real life is really a stage. People don’t need to act. History, life, death and conquest unfold live on TV nowadays. News is delivered on a real-time basis. Iraqi TV shows how America makes victims out of the people they promised to liberate, while. Sadam Hussein throwing his speech on how God is on their side in cutting the American aggressor’s throats. Young soldiers struggle in desert sandstorms. Young children in Iraq die or don’t have to go to school since there’s a war. Young people in the world protest this war, or maybe just watch everything on TV. It’s my second serving of a Gulf War in one lifetime. I guess we’ll keeping on having due to the United States’ delinquent defense contracts. Or maybe its all about the oil. At this time, Colaition forces have progressed from Southern Iraq moving towards Baghdad, paratroopers land from the North, jets and missiles fly from the Persian Gulf. All these rockets and their skies, and bombs flanked on their city. Admittedly, little does it impact my life, aside from the many calls that flanked our office since these Americans felt guilty about their vacation packages or felt afraid about traveling. The calls at work became more fucking complicated due to the directives and procedures and policies we have because of the war. H. went to Iraq a few days before the war to advocate peace, to take the stance of these people, form his own wise opinion and have them published on the highly regarded opinion pages of Today. When he arrived, he didn’t even have to tell me stories since I’ve already read them on the daily. As for me, I take no affirmative action. Although I often sympathize with the neighbor who has a more sorry lot, I have no war of my own. And even if I had a war of my own, I feel that I would’ve lost by default.
I’ve recently been asked to give a historical person I’d be interested to have lunch with. It would be Arthur Schopenhauer. Perhaps I could verify if the father of pessimism does have a jolly personality and a splendid appetite. I heard he died shortly after having breakfast.
Room with a view, on a Sunday morning.. The balimbing tree my brothers and friends used to climb when we were children is blooming with small red flowers. I wish I knew the scientific name so I can sound, well, clever. Atis which grew on the tree beside it dries up from the dust, sun and pollution. It has evolved into something which looks like an acorn. Maya birds chirp in a chorus, and the neighbor’s dog barks. Jeeps start to pass by. A cab drives by. Someone is sweeping and I can hear the wooden broom scratching against the pavement. The Benitez side of the house is at least, lined with trees. The summer Sunday sun once again, writes poetry through the gleams and shadows it casts on the green of the trees and the black of the asphalt. Inside the room the air conditioner hums. I light up the oil burner to dispel the alcohol, yosi and the Saturday night gimmick cocktail smell that the clothes still carry. I should buy a new fragrance for the new oil burner. I can’t decide on which film to watch again this morning, or continue reading, or re-read a story. I ate too much again and I’m not happy and am convinced that Chowking is terrible fast food. I wonder how I’d look like in an Amorsolo portrait. I’ve been addicted to looking at the wedding portrait of Mariano Garchitorena and Cardidad Pamintuan. The colors exude the richness of their era and the lavish elegance of the gown. The girl seems to be thinking of someone else and a contemplative silence is seen beaming on those still eyes. The guy looks like an old, true blue coño kid. I wonder how their marriage turned out. At least there was art which became its offspring. I know that people do love one another in great depths and deep magnitude and incredible emotion rare as ghost orchid flowers and filled with profound meaning as voluminous dictionaries. And maybe I am just, truly, incapable of loving someone now. Work is the long agony of wanting, waiting to resign. I’m thinking about a pension plan again. What an encouraging premise to promulgate. It should be the new company statement.
The next day, I went to work thinking it was my last day, savoring every detail of it: from the cab ride and the sodium vapor lamps of south superhighway, to the blue neon lights lining the edges of the RCBC plaza, the yellow edges of the GT tower and the lights at the Enterprise. To all the characters at work.To each and every e-mail, to each furnishing in the office, and the laughs with officemates. To walking to the loading zone. And finally to the bus ride home.
