Pop Sensibility

It is small change compared to a real concert, but it’s more personal and intimate. Besides, my heart is always so easily content. Stripped down, we see the skills, and not just the fireworks. Even without the communal experience or that mass concert hysteria, watching a Tiny Desk concert on your desk brings you to a captivating  front-row view of the stage.

My Top 6:

Anderson Paak and The Free Nationals  Yall niggaz got me hot. You drink all my liquor, come on, what am I supposed to do now?

Jorja Smith Agreed with "the drummer kills it." Her voice is still on my mind years later.

Monsieur Periné Oh, they're not French? They got horns. They do that dip during the doo doop doo doop. Bueno bueno bueno bueno bueno bueno bueno. Damas y caballeros... spectacular... banda... de Colombia.. Monsieur Perine!

The Roots feat. Bilal The tuba player, yo.

BTS Add Dynamite to a running playlist and your pace will almost certainly explode.

Six The Musical With beats so sick they'll give you gout.

 

Fluids

 

 

The air was crisp at at 5:45am. Around this time, it's still refreshing. It's Sunday and the streets are empty, having and giving us rest. I'm minding the road but I've zoned out the rest of the world. It's quiet, save for the faint hum of 25c wheels rolling on the asphalt, the snap of shifters, chains rotating through the 8-speed sprocket. The wind's on my face, my heart's pacing to a faster beat. The city is sleepy. There's a dew of sweat on my forearms. I rode a short loop with small climbs around Rockwell Bridge and Ayala Triangle, dropping by D.'s house in Mandaluyong, with a short coffee break for a flat white at the cafe near Legaspi Park.  

I'm back home early enough for pan de sal and Sunday morning with my family.

In the evening, the beer is naturally cloudy with notes of coriander and orange peel. 500ml with a few pages of non-fiction.

It's a very short ride, relatively a smaller quantity of alcohol and an even shorter time to read, but my heart is full and content.

Morning Walk

 If the streets could express themselves, they would would have spoke of their anxiety. In terrible traffic, every inch of space is fought for. The noise of engines are incessant. The cars are getting bigger, motorcycles are whizzing in between, and lines of even bigger trucks are still catching-up on their backlogs (due to a global supply chain crisis) on the way to and from the pier.  The good old jeeps still stop in the middle of the street, at their own whim, and unloading anytime, anywhere along our potholed pavements, around smelly sewers and we can't walk on pedestrian lanes because the vendors are there.

If the streets could speak they would spoke of their nostalgia for days when our society shut itself out, when everybody was holed up at their homes. The streets were quiet, the air (in the meantime) was more breathable, and the streets were not stinking of sewage, a cocktail of human sweat and colognes, gas burning from combustion engines, all of which you can smell through face masks. The streets were not spilled with everyone's anxiety, marching on to their daily hustle.

The streets must be sick of all of us. 

The Powerful and Pivotal Slouching

 

The highest hurdle that a recreational reader falls upon is describing a piece of work that's as powerful and pivotal as Joan Didion's. Starting with that impactful title, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A Yeats poem (another thing a recreational reader would struggle with fully understanding). You read it and a vibe draws you in like a Miles Davis or John Coltrane song. You keep reading, perceiving, until you can arrive at your own conclusions and that is --- Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Not that it means anything, because I am only, well, nothing. Realistically, not self-pityingly. More so, I will not even be able to write like her. But we keep reading her and  peeled layer after layer, discovering truths, embellished with her beautiful writing voice as she tells these stories. Delicious, tasteful details. She puts her skin in the game, so to speak, so it stands even if it's unbelievable. At some point, you concede to altering your previously held perceptions. Having read Joan Didion makes me grateful for being alive.  

With compliments to the reading of Diane Keaton, who performed the audiobook. Listening simultaneously while reading breathes more life into the books.