How to Lose, Gracefully

With the right frame of mind, luck, logic, position, you turn your deuce-sevens to pocket rockets. You gain the discernment and humility to fold a good hand when it’s not the strongest. You know that a chip stack can be a tool, a fortress or a strap, and you fight out yours until another large stack is born. You play above the rail. You plan the man, not just the cards. You show respect, you commend your opponent when you’ve been well outplayed. You shift gears right when you need to get up to speed. You learn to live with a bad beat, but never be hampered by defeat – thereby comprehending what it means to move forward. You put method to madness, logic to luck. You gain the temperance of never going on tilt. You value the company of friends you play with. You win. Most importantly, you learn how to lose, gracefully.

My Sad Republic

My Sad Republic festoons your life with words and phrases which were so intricately selected, as though it had nature’s help when its processes opens the petals of a flower. It naturally and intricately story-tells what is beautiful. It rewards your life with a narrative that summons so much history, nostalgia, fascination, humor, and a mastery of the literary craft that makes you want to worship the writer the way people worship the saints who wrote the bible.

The only downside is it reminds you too much of the images, characters, and even the structure of “100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It whittles the originality, but somehow My Sad Republic still manages to leave a uniqueness that leaves you awed. You felt the unforgiving heat he described, the loneliness of what seemed like a hundred years of rain, the power of each ritual and each amulet, you saw how the moon was a bright silver wafer as they made love by that beach, and you will eternally be entranced by the idea of poetry attacking the most unlikely places.

Remembering June

The inherent infirmity of human memory is that it makes last month’s memories appear like a constellation away. Out of 43,000 minutes I would be fortunate enough to re-stage an hour in my mind. My perfunctory toiling during the nights of work has been condensed into a shadow slipping into a slim spot. The fifteen to twenty minute drive to work starts to feel like five.

The masterful quality of human memory is that it can be selective. It can choose to retain parcels of how we felt happy. For example:

Of all the Monday mornings of June, I boarded two light rail transits to get to Ortigas. I felt like I’m traveling on a weekend in another country with my gear - backpack strapped on my shoulder, a pair of ¾-trousers on my legs, rubber slippers, iPod and sunglasses. Eric Gamalinda’s “My Sad Republic” keeps me company as I leisure the entire morning away at the Coffee Bean in Ortigas Park. The iPod is packed with freshly downloaded music courtesy of D. Serenity settles in as I sip the powdery mocha latte. And to cap the glorious morning with a climax, I have lunch with D. at simple restaurants like Kitaro or Reyes Barbeque. We visit the St. Francis Square (may he bless those pirates) for some pirated DVDs we will be watching the next week.

And then human memory makes everything else, all the boredom and loneliness, easily forgettable.