“This is where grandiose dreams are drained, disappearing as it dusts quietly like forgotten job orders or resumes filed neatly in folders and file boxes.”“This is where, despite how furiously the sun may shine… casting its golden gleams every morning, despite the breath-taking heights of skyscrapers, being here is like being enclosed in a dark cave, where all you see are shadows.”
A Writing Exercise/Warm-Up. Tired of what? I’m too tired; even to think of why I’m keeping this journal, why I string these words together. Somehow it has just become essentially who I am. It’s become difficult to become who I am, even by my own standards.
I’m thinking; why am I so drawn to writing this, why do I have to present myself to myself in a proper package? Why I feel inadequate if I do not write, if I write with less insight, if I no longer write with peculiar interest. I tend to lose interest in life – which is a most natural tendency, when your days are quick and redundant.
“Ultimately we all sound like broken records glossing over the same wounds and the same bouts of giddy happiness.” Yet I continue to write, and take some of it to account. I write, even if the only line I can say is: What the fuck anyway? Living requires metaphors, the production of phrases both to abstract my reality and just make my reality – mine. Writing is when I take possession of this reality.
I can almost see now, how this puzzle is pieced. A small ray of sunlight enters the room, and lands on a bookmark in my desk, highlighting the yellow in Carl Spizweg’s “The Bookworm.” This old man is on top of a ladder cataloging books on a high shelf. Then it’s gone in a jiffy, and the sun just burns for every other atom and dreg in the world. Everything else that becomes altered into insignificant little specks in an infinite cosmos. Then it shows itself again, the 4:47 pm sunlight of the setting Sunday sun dapples the yellow sheets of my scribble pad, the old wood of the desk, and glints on the spilled fountain pen ink. I’m hearing a perfect sunset song, something out of the Calm 6-track chillout sampler, which 5 or 6 years ago, after buying a few chillout albums, was given to me as a freebie by the pretty-looking Chinese merchant who appeared to own the pirated-CD store in the left wing of UM.
The sun sets in the west, and none of its last setting rays would’ve made it to the room, if not for the tinted glass panels of the building windows across the street. At this time of the day, towards dusk, sunshine is literally mirrored to the room. I see it on my arm and it glares on my pores, against the fan-blown hair which came out of it. Now sunlight is cast on the Escolta Circa 1880 postcard. Sunlight mirrored on a painted sky, on a postcard’s faded sepia tones. And I think of how my life is as repetitious as the rhythm of my own breathing. But even if a lot of it is the same, I just must write, the way our lungs breathe air, hands must push pens.
For January weekdays, morose Mondays and all, I’m slumped into working life’s routine. Without much motivation, interest, or any grappling with reasons why I should go to work, I mindlessly manage to wake up at 7:30 pm to prepare for work, sluggishly entering the bathroom door for a shower at 8:30 pm. I just have to appreciate the fact that work is less excruciating now. I can’t complain as much. I even have time to snatch some lines and write haikus (if you can call it that) in Filipino between office hours. When I arrive home in the morning, I often manage to read two or three stories from the Palanca Anthology of Winning Works in the 80’s. So far, my winner amongst winners is Eli Ang Barroso’s “Our Lady of Arts & Letters.” This story has such a powerful, dramatic plot and a hair-rising climax. The elements of the short story as I learned it in lit class – is put in such excellent use. Awed by his characters, you can almost feel the writer showing-off his mastery through the sheer brilliance of having the development of his characters point reference to popular characters in literature. I’m awed even by the character’s own thoughts.
“I will say only this – you don’t generate but rather recycle ideas. Given enough time, I can trace your ideas to all the books you have read. Your mind is shamelessly derivative. It is a collector of clichés. And your life is nothing but a cheap imitation of art. Intellectual parrotings don’t impress me.”
It’s probably done before, of course, but execution is crucial and this one stands out exceptionally. I’m thinking of how he thought about all of it, and it just humbled me. The artful use of language and clever phrasing of his own figures of speech is almost just a given. This ranks up to one of the best locally-written short stories I’ve read in my entire life. It kept me up all day.
I also started on reading a little Philosophy again. I selected to review Kierkegaard. I’m reminded of how he trashes Hegelian Idealism, and emphasizes individualism, or focuses on individual existence. “He was the gadfly who stings you until you perform the essential act of introspective self-knowledge.” I related with how he acknowledges anxiety and dread, since I was an angsty, zit-ridden teenager who chanced upon contemplating the meaning of life when I first read him. I’ve always wondered whether I was in the aesthetic, moral, or religious stage. But I wouldn’t really be an advocate of these stages. I dislike how he holds religion, Christian religion at that, as the highest level of consciousness. He jumps seventy thousand fathoms and remains deep in the water, blinded by faith. How he loved irony.
The past few weeks, most of what I’ve been listening to would be Eggstone and PurpleChickens. They’re both classified as Indie. What it probably takes to be indie is that it’s really good music that not a lot of idiots listen to. Eggstone doesn’t differ much from Blur in having that general character of European bands, in terms of sound. They’re probably the European counterpart of Weezer. But what I especially love about them is how their rather sadness-ridden lyrics become strangely relieving when accompanied by cold, passionate vocals: “And in my eye, something is telling me that I have to rest for a while…. Supermeaningfectyless.” I hope they play this song in my wake or eulogy. In a song called Birds in Cages, “Maybe it will rain tomorrow… Maybe I’m insane tomorrow... One thing is for sure, I’m not happy anymore.” And in “Neil,” “I need Sundays… I need Highways… More than I know, when I die, I will be gone forever… More than I wonder, why on earth do I try to be so clever…” What I also would adore most about PurpleChickens is the lyrics. And I wouldn’t even say this with any bias on judgment because I know Aldus Santos, its vocalist and writer. Offhand, I’d say that this is one of the best feats local music has ever achieved in years. I can hear traces of what influenced him in music back in high school: The Beatles, Grunge and REM. If I didn’t hear about them, I’d mistake this album for a foreign act. Aldus sings in Dream Systems, “If I smile the smile of the forgetful… run from me run from me… If I smile the smile of the forgetful… stay away stay away stay away.” Or in Eyelash Envy, “I was saltwater… that you wiped off from your brow.”
On weekends, there’s still time to troop to the mall. Last week I saw the Lord of the Rings III on a date with myself. The previous week, I was with ___, D. and ___ at Rockwell, just having some laughs at the expense of other people, merely by looking at them. Then we spent all night drinking at Marie’s. Two weeks ago, I was right smack in the middle of Greenbelt III with ___, ____ and ____. ___ just came from Quiapo and she brought candles and penis rings. Each of us was assigned with, and lighted a candle, holding it while sitting on a bench. We received a few curious glances, as though we were having a happy, yet solemn ceremony.
I juggle the days and nights, watching them slip off my hands as someone who is unskillful in this pursuit. Every morning, as the end of the shift nears, I see how time melts through the 41st floor window. The Makati morning skyline is nothing that ranks as awe-inspiring, if it is not a downright horrible sight. The whole city is covered with obvious dirt and smog, divided by a clear horizontal line from the whiter clouds up above that industrial sludge has not reached and harmed. If this were an era in life, what must have been a period of "career development" has been a period of intellectual recession. At night, no stars are seen from the 41st floor window. The lights of the city look like an unmapped constellation with tiny galaxies of street lampposts, tail lights at the rear end of cars, lights from the airport runway, neon signage and the distinctive green and blue light emanating from Greenbelt. This galaxy is a galaxy which has lost its glamour. Its stars are old and tired, dying to become a supernova. They await their gigantic explosion, that second wave of the big bang which the lifeless occupants of these stoned edifices that will breathe life on their humdrum lives. We beg for something enormously stirring to happen, to perk the guts out of us. An explosion to shake us out of out of all our cherished beliefs. Like the last scene in Fight Club.
This is probably why when I ride the cab at night, I've always suspected that something is about to explode in this city, something that the bomb-sniffing trained dogs have not found.
And this is why this city has begun to look like a city of ruin from the 41st floor. This is why smog douses its skyline every morning, its whole radius covered in black cloud. It is because this is where everyone's passions begin to wane, in the long huddle of their laboring. This is where grandiose dreams are drained, disappearing as it dusts quietly like forgotten job orders or resumes filed neatly in folders and file boxes. This is where, despite how furiously the sun may shine and stretch its rays, casting its golden gleams every morning, despite the breath-taking heights of skyscrapers, being here is like being enclosed in a dark cave, where all you see are shadows.
