February 2002

The beer tastes better as the afternoon sun fell heavy on us, mirroring its light on glittering waves, disturbed by passing jet skis.

Nothingness – the determining finality of it all. Before that, there is a straight line… of days that simply drag you along like the currents of the sea.

Though you can never rid yourself of uncertainties, though you can never efface boredom, deny your emptiness or the nothingness which is the determining finality of it all, you can still get yourself to say that happiness in manageable. I cannot refuse this bone of optimism that’s growing within my skeleton.
Like most things, happiness is fleeting. But why not savor it while it lasts, why not insist on making it linger a moment longer?
We went back to the beach, and I found belongingness. I found an affinity with the sand and the scenery. To have your feet buried in the continually crumbling sand, flood your eyes with the magnificence of an earthen sunset, let the booze snake down your throat, and listen to the waves as the water ripples, and listen to my chill out CDs. We took a lot of photos of ourselves, as though to make the memory accessible. We had lunch and dinners at grills and steakhouses in Subic and had drink on a dive-shop-slash-bars by the beach. The beer tastes better as the afternoon sun fell heavy on us, mirroring its light on glittering waves, disturbed by passing jet skis. At night, the lamps hung on the trees, and the lights from the ships on the silent sea glowed with the stars. We checked in one of those cheap motels.
I understand the difficulty of not being able to spell out the bliss I’ve been hanging on to. I have been groping for more words that would decorate it profusely, that would explain the eminent richness of experience, but they escape me. It’s probably my job that led me into the lack of finding the intellectually stimulating. Not to mention that this job has added so many of my imagined fears. It increases my insecurities of the future, even to the point of keeping the job itself. But then, it gives me the money I need to squander during weekends, and probably respect required by everyone. I believe that my paranoia has increased tenfold, and yes, paranoia is just the highest scale of reality. My job makes me represent a lot of things which is beyond my control. Irate callers somehow give me the idea that the dreadful anger exhumed in human nature is somehow justifiable, because Corporate America has its glitches. More importantly, it has its greed. And now I have my own. I think it was back October when I said, my own cliché: “that there are certain things we have to do, to keep on doing the things we want to do. Even your own pleasure has its prerequisites.” I got a 25% salary increase since I was regularized last month.
Perhaps my muse is frowning at me. She seeing a coldness, growing like a tumor in my brain. She is thinking that I’m slowly becoming a person I dreaded. Sometimes, it becomes less and less important to put things into writing. Maybe I’m merely losing it, watching myself ebb away from me. But then, why let it?
As I’ve said, everything’s still manageable. I’m fetched on a far, better position that most people. Rarely would you think that the grass is greener on your side. This is me and my low-profile happiness. Perhaps there is happiness lurching in the night, when I stare at the unfeeling buildings erected on Ayala Avenue. I see them everyday, and never seem to see them get tired. They would always have some lights up, no matter ho occupies those desks, when the former gives up on the job. Maybe I should always feel like the eager newcomer who is determined to rise up on the challenge. I’ve always tried to stare so closely to the people who go to work during the morning, when I’m about to go home after the shift. I wonder what their lives are like. Do they live like zombies alienated by their jobs? Can they afford to catch the day’s snatch of happiness, or maybe light a sincere passion? What are their certainties and what do they live for? What is it that helps them get through a difficult day? I don’t think they think of it that much.
There is a moment, in each passing day, when you think of your own afflictions. Between that summation of my low-profile happiness, I have the terrors of my own solitude and my own vague aspirations. It’s not that all apparent for now. Somehow, I think they are still is easy to get over. Someday, perhaps things will be more difficult. The future’s not far, with the way I hurry the days. I will be alone long enough, and be alone in the end zone. But why think of it now, when its less difficult to design legitimate alibis, and any affliction is not an urgent, but rather an invented concern.
It’s strange how I’ve gotten to enjoy Monday afternoons such as this one. I woke up early today, and went biking when the sun wasn’t even up. It was so fucking cold I didn’t even sweat. I went up to that spot, on the side of the CCP main theater lobby, after you go up that high ramp. On one side, there is Napoleon Abueva’s Magkasintahan sa Buhay at Sayaw, one of the sculptures I’m most fond of. I wrote an essay about that sculpture once. On the other side, you get the view of Roxas and the buildings of Makati blocked heavy with the city’s carbon monoxide. After that I went home and slept again. I spent the afternoon writing and reading and sleeping again. During the evening, you are served with a comedy marathon on Star World: Third Rock from the Sun, That 70’s show, Everybody Loves Raymond, Dharma and Greg, and Frasier. Oh, and I almost failed to mention that I’m almost drunk now. A rightful celebration to a glorious day, to muster enough confidence to say that the week is going to be easy.


An emotion switches and swings so quickly from one mood to another. One minute you are a five year old in Disneyland, the next minute you are the oppressed protagonist in appalling 2 pm soap operas. We’ve always believed that Sisyphus has ordained life its meaning when he said fuck you to the gods and took meaning in pushing his boulder to the mountaintop. Sisyphus represented my ideals, somehow. He was my hero, my high school thesis.
He represented my drive towards facing the nakedness of reality, my impulse to the truth, to pursue what is passionate and principled.
But now, becoming Sisyphus won’t be too laid-back, it won’t be too hedonistic. It is as though I have found a new struggle. It is the struggle of I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to complain. I don’t want to be too compulsive, or too naïve. I don’t want to be filled with fear, with the ignorance of why I live, or why I have lost my ideals. I want to ask myself why I sound like a self-help book, or why I write so bad? Why do I feel complete, yet sometimes completely empty?
My answer is to press your mouth to the loving, relieving lips of a beer bottle. The answer is to write, to matter how vaguely, or how ugly. The answer is to find your story, to tell the uniqueness of your story. It does not matter what the ending comes to. The answer is uncertainty. Life has not endowed us the favor of certainty.
Have you not gone tired of your struggle? Have we not all gone weary even of our own happiness, struggles, uncertainties, absurdity, faith in God, faith in Nothingness, which is all merely faith in something unknown.
Did you not want to feel nothing? Have you not wondered what nothing feels?
Have we failed to catch the drift of what Sisyphus meant had when he found his meaning? What was it like to love that piece of fate?
We make this absurdity thrive for each day of our lives, with our demeaning occupations. I’m working again tonight, and you’re working again tomorrow, pushing that stupid rock… only to push that stupid rock again. I spur my brilliant excuses to our customers, and once again psur my brilliant excuses to our customers.
Of course, there are always benefits. Somebody always gets richer when the dice is thrown in the craps table. We can have our share of the pot. We should have a job for more salary-dissipating activities for our selfish vanity, and fulfilling not just the needs but the importuning of gastronomic fantasies, or working your whole life for a two week vacation.
Here I am trying to write and be sublime and all. Pretty pathetic attempt, I guess. But then, as you may have noticed, I only write the same thing. I have no new message, no specific event, no new story to tell. “We are all in one boat… and that boat is going nowhere.”
Nothingness – the determining finality of it all. Before that, there is a straight line… of days that simply drag you along like the currents of the sea.


Everyday at twelve noon, the highpoint of the house arrives. I think you can only call it half a house, since half of the place is devoted to our family business. Twelve noon is the busiest time of the day, since a large volume of people come over to have lunch. A thick whiff of sizzled squid, lamb chops, and tenderloin would cloud the air. Utensils would continually be clacking, against the cacophony of 12 PM traffic in the street, the loud and heated hiss of fire on sizzling plates, my parents and our servers moving in a hurried tension.
At this time of the day, the room downstairs would be most rowdy, as it usually is. The room upstairs would make you feel like leftover food being nuked in the microwave oven. It is the most difficult time of the day, especially to find solace. I usually have a beer or two at this time, during regular working days, bum around with my cousin (who would be on his lunch break from school) or watch the telly in my parent’s room.
I miss the sala I’ve always spoken of, and the revelry it brought me during afternoons with its poetry of light and shadows, chillout/classical music, the rich blend of coffee, good reads, and a type of solace more rare than blue diamonds.
I spend maybe half an hour talking to my mom and dad every afternoon while they eat, after most of the customers finished eating. It’s amazing how they always make it a point to have lunch or dinner together. Nothing fancy, but together. And all of a sudden, I am most glad I have them.



I made an effort to read and re-read effort my journal for the past couple of months, and even the entries for the last five years. It was like taking my life in my hands, and clutching it firmly again, listening to my story from my own voice, and noticing how this voice has changed.
I also took it as a point of comparison for the entries I’m writing now. Maybe I’ve grown less eloquent, or maybe just more forward, honest, and less decorative on my choice of words and had lesser things to conceal.
My frustration about the most recent journal entries (since I started working) is that they have been railing against the same things and plugging the same fucking fare to the point that it’s become sickening to talk about it. Undeniably, there has been sameness in my life. However, I failed to dwell into the very details of events that taken place that would probably spell at least a little difference.
In this Friday afternoon, between buttered garlic toast, hazelnut coffee and bossa nova, I resolve to engage more profoundly into the moment and spell out that difference to whittle the worthlessness of writing about the sameness of my life.
Call it as some sort of mild escapism, but I have to lessen all that redundant crap about my job… or even the happiness I managed to assemble.

Pixel Juice by Jeff Noon. This is one of the titles that I got off the rack after a lot of browsing at PowerBooks. I never heard of Jeff Noon, I never heard any reviews for the book, nor received any recommendation. But I guess I just followed my intimations and instincts. I remember buying a lot of books this manner, titles such as Sophie’s World (yes, before everybody started reading it), Zen: Freedom of the Mind, or a poetry book by Luisa Cariño. I initially liked Jeff Noon because it looked like a fusion of Coupland, Hornby and Welsh, and because it had an interesting cover and binding.
Pixel Juice is a collection of fifty stories. The stories range from product recalls for factory-defective celebrity-looking fucking dolls, to instructions for the use of mad gadgets archived from the museum of fragments. There are stories about magic-realist drugs which feed robots their dreams and hallucinations to feed them their humanity. Noon also based some his fiction on the club scene in Manchester to produce stories about eternal groves on jellied-up moments. There’s this story of a DJ that can make echoes of the beat last for six weeks, rapid-fire fingertronics, etch-plate aesthetics and fractal scratches out of human edit --- because her one hand is pliant and the other hand is made of butterflies.
Noon mostly writes about the future, about AI’s that he fondly calls autogens. I think he’s trying to give at least a faint glimpse of how screwed up the future could be, with all the buzzing technology that humans hatched. The language he uses sounds unique because he usually invents words for himself, like names for drugs, drinks, or artificially intelligent beings. I don’t know where he draws it from, video games, porn flicks or classic sci-fi books. Sometimes it’s annoying because it sounds pseudo-scientific, and sometimes it’s downright amusing. Take these definitions for instance:
BABY n. The outcome of unprotected sex between a human male and female.
BORBI DOLL n. the most sophisticated doll of the 21st century. The girlfriend of RoboKen, with whom she produced the baby-data called Borble.
The stories from Pixel Juice always seem to attempt a disturbing effect that runs on an occasional dark humor, or would lead you to an interesting insight. With most of the stories dwelling on the future, what seems to be stressed is that whatever is the result of evolution, desire remains undiminished. Desire only becomes more and more obscure.
Some stories, however, lack detail and are therefore difficult to imagine. And all those stories about robots and AI’s and autogens and chromosofts and magic mirrors become terrifically annoying after you read one or two stories of that kind. It’s really annoying to the point of vomiting. The best stories are the ones which aren’t about that. The most fascinating one would be “The Cabinet of the night Unlocked.” It tells a story of a ritual discovered by a mute monk back in the 1400’s. The ritual consists of activating a “switch” in your body that turns it off painlessly, to give you a pleasurable death. It was most fascinating. I also enjoyed “Junior Pimp” the story of an eleven-year old pimp, “Fetish Booth #7” was quite fascinating as well, although the reason why the character wanted to die was not established, only the “how.”
Out of fifty, perhaps the book provides 10 noteworthy stories, 20 brief and would-pass-off-as-amusing-and-readable stories, and 20 that are annoying and crappy.

January 2002

I have more meaning, more memory, to help me propel my way through life. It will be like a new story, a new poem to tell.

Happiness is simply the management of your desires. You take one simple joy, dream small, and
conquer the joy quite effortlessly – almost with just sheer luck. It’s easier to make simple dreams come true. It gives you the veracity that to dream is not the hope of the absurd.
Sometime after Christmas I told myself that I wanted to go to the beach. I imagined it already --- this clear portrait in my head. And I had everything: the sunset, the beer, the cigarette by the sea, the sand on my feet, and the sound of waves washing their hands. The only thing I failed to mention was the saltiness of the water and the dampness of the air at night. And yes, everything else was there, everything was my moment. I don’t want to write much about it. It still seems too real to me.
This experience affirms once more that life becomes rewarding sometimes. We arrived before sunset, driving along the road that leads to the shoreline, with trees on the road side and a mountain beneath. We even went jet skiing.
Before this hype wears out, I’ll be more often, writing more beautifully and sinking more into the experience.
It’s Monday again, four hours away from work. I’m listening to some more chillout, lamp in the room, and the memory of the weekend just stamps a big smile on my face. It gives the music more images, lets the smile on your mouth widen. Yes, the music and images are more meaningful now. It has more experience attached to it. I have more meaning, more memory, to help me propel my way through life.
It will be like a new story, a new poem to tell.

December 2001

(Day after Christmas, 2001)

It becomes easier to let happiness rub on you, whether it is hollow, profound, feigned or real. December is the least cruel month. Perhaps this is the month I mostly enjoyed this year.
I’ve caught that rhythm I needed to acquire for work. Although it will become tedious and demeaning (which is the natural tendency for all occupations,) work has been quite pleasant. Being in the chat support has made the task less stressful. I can listen to my growing chill out play list, and thousands of MP3s from the company’s shared drives. I’ve adjusted to this less conventional routine of working at night. What makes December more rewarding is getting greener pastures --- bonuses and premium holiday pays (since we have to work even on holidays.) I’ve bought myself my whims and caprices, and I am wary of my attachment to money and material things.
And of course it is not wealth that makes thing wondrous --- it just meets a primary necessity to afford certain comforts.
It is something else that gives this month a more mirthful tinge. it is a delight to the senses: to feel the delicate, cool breeze of December nights, to see the city glow with lanterns, and bulbs dancing on each house and each street. Even the tall buildings of Ayala seemed less mundane, more compassionate to its dwellers. It makes your walks along high rises more alive, less redundant. It seemed that even these cold, unfeeling stones may be bestowed with spirit. A child would look up, point a small finger and watch this dazzle with entranced eyes. And of course there are smells of gift wrappers, ham, baked chicken, newly open gifts, the perpetually delicious food that comes from treats. As always, life comes with a soundtrack. Only Christmas carols never get gasgas.
Moreover, everybody (at least temporarily,) is kind and festive. Everybody boards the auto-pilot flight of kindness and festivity.
I didn’t get to spend Christmas with my family but I just didn’t sulk. I had my time for myself, of course, during Christmas day, listening to Schopann, lighting candles, burning oils, reading and watching the thin branches of the trees sway with graceful gait against the purple sky. I wish the weather can always be like this – when its more conducive to have coffee because its strong aroma rises in the air.
Despite the fact that I can’t go out during weeknights, I usually make it point to suck the marrow out of the weekends. It’s the time to get all boozed up, and live out your life during a Saturday night. Beautiful women clad in less and less clothing is a site you’ll never grow weary of.
Friends and cousins met a group of girls and they all fancy going to this club in Libis. Dancing for me though, remains out of the question. Nonetheless, it’s always fantastic to drink and watch. It’s a little like sitting down in Classmate: the most cozy, comfy and most classy dancing show I’ve ever been. You get to sit in huge couches and be served by waitresses in micro-mini school uniforms, watch under-or-barely18 dancers who really look like your classmates.
Another activity I look forward to during weekends is biking during late afternoons during sunset or early mornings during sunrise. I go biking along the streets of Malate, Roxas, and around CCP. I make stops at the Film Center, the Trellis, to watch boats sailing, the sunset, the sunrise, and smell the sea. It brings a relieving comfort, to think that you are flexing muscles. It’s amazing to find the uniqueness of images in those places, watching shadows move under the trees, and staring at the open horizon of the bay.
And of course, I still find time to date myself to fancy dinners or cater to my cravings.
What a month this has been. I barely noticed how I conquered such joy, to begin to dream again… to start off with simple dreams. I’d like to travel to go to fantastic beaches, drink beer by the beach, listening to something from Café del Mar. I’d like to go around bars and dinner places and yacht clubs and strip joints. I’d like to take a long trip that would in effect be soothing. I can already hear the waves crashing and washing their hands. I can see the aureate gleam of the sunset and feel the sand on my feet.
This year’s Christmas greeting goes: “I’d just like to remind you that after the yuletide celebrations, life reverts to normal. Merry Christmas anyway. Whether feigned or real, let the happiness rub on you.” I let the happiness rub on me. Nothing lasts, I know. But I’m happy while it lasts, just before it all inevitably decays into sentimental rubbish.

October 2001

My life, more or less, is in a convenient drone. Work is not always so pleasant, but I’ve managed to decorate it with my own cliché: that there are certain things we have to do, to keep on doing the things we want to do. Even your own pleasure has its prerequisites. I’ve got to work so that I can maintain my preferred lifestyle, to enjoy my books, to cater to my appetite, to buy my drinks, and even afford the habits brought about by consumerism. Call it a compromise that I cannot refuse. Until one day you realize, like in Death of Salesman, that you worked fifty years of your life, to have a five week vacation.
I miss poetry, and being poetic. I miss juicing out the poetry written over things. I miss the shows in CCP and drinking at bars at night.
But why would I complain about working, since I will admit that I’ve dreamed of this. I didn’t think however, that it comes with certain complications. I sometimes don’t feel secure about my job. More importantly, I’m not really doing something I enjoy, knowing that I can probably just do something else. I never realized how much I wanted much more time. Sometimes I’m commended at work, and it feels superficially rewarding. I’ll probably stay in this job of another year or two. I’ve got better work than a lot of people and I love the neat office. I love having my own money to buy my pirated chillout CD’s, serviced for pleasure, watch movies, buy books, clothes and shoes.
I realized that I have so much fear in me, as though I never read Nietzsche, and never spouted that line from Russell, saying that fear is contemptible. So young, yet so spent I am. I am afraid of so many things. And I have no dreams, or I have no dreams anymore. Maybe, I have dreams, but I don’t think I could reach out and achieve them. If ever I have dreams, my dreams remain a dream.
And right now, I’m drunk on a Saturday afternoon, and I’m dancing a little.
This ever crummy room is beautiful. I have never imagined that everything would be beautiful when I’m drunk on a late afternoon, set in gray scale, the room and the clouds in chillout music, clouds of yosi smoke, closed eyes, and fingers snapping the keyboard. The fan is blowing lightly on the blinds.

Everything… is… all… right…

September 2001

I don’t know hot to put it without the triteness. I don’t know how to pick up from where I left off. But I remember having to put with all the unnecessary drama whenever I let the months just snap without having a single sentence written. I try to compel myself on what a waste it was, with me not having to tell the tales that transpire in my life, or the thoughts I think. What were those sordid tales of debauchery, what unique shape does can my thoughts bear, how delightful, how hurtful could feelings be? Of course, these questions themselves are vague, shapeless, and insurmountable. I’m looking for something concrete, although not something which is tangible, I want something that I could describe, something that I could determine.

How long will this last? Today, I declare that my life is beautiful. Amazingly enough, the formula comes off from simple ingredients: delicious food, decent reads and decent coffee, images and thoughts to feed my soul, errands to help my family’s business, the company of my friends and family, my work to keep me level and give me money to sustain my lifestyle, and music to give it all of it a suitable soundtrack.
I don’t know what urged me to proclaims this sort of declaration, the nice weekend the came after a difficult week at work. I spent Saturday morning reading a few chapters of Michel Houellebecq’s “Atomised,” and the afternoon burning mp3’s to CD audio. I had great titles, alternative music from High School (e.g., Better than Ezra, Oasis), film themes, and even club. The next Monday I bought the new Café del Mar release, and a mainstream compilation. I think I’m beginning to develop a considerable collection, although I lack a few essentials to suit my taste: jazz albums (of the Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, etc. persuasion) because they are not available in pirated versions. I spent Saturday night, despite the fatigue from thirty-six hours of sleeplessness, getting drunk with ___ at his girlfriend’s place. Sunday morning to fix my drawer, Sunday afternoon to watch a La Salle game and drink a few beers. Sunday evening was a fantastic dinner with my family at Suko Thai courtesy of my brother and I.
What I truly miss are evenings, because it’s more conducive to listen to chillout, or drink coffee. But then I’m beginning to have this love affair with the noon, because it’s the time before I sleep, and then wake up watching something like The Simpsons or That 70’s show. Early afternoons glimmer with the most natural give the most natural renditions of light and poetry of shadows --- on windows, blinds, and pages of books. Undeniably, my office in Makati and the streets of Ayala is a sight and soon, with some more experience, I will be able to place it into words.
Obviously, I can’t box this happiness or put it on record, but this feeling is happiness nonetheless. This is a feeling that makes me less frightened of the future.

June 2001

I have become an official bum. I have been removed from that life of complacency called College.
My name is Jairus Jason, Slacker Incarnate.

Two weeks ago they let me wear a toga and attend a ceremony to bid an end to what is by far, the golden age of my history. Wearing a toga was wearing a cloak of high expectations. It was the day that I felt no confidence, no eagerness to accept the promise of a bright future offered by a meaningless occupation. My ceremonies reminded me of the kid who, by closing time, reluctantly leaves the toy section of some department store. It was a sad remembrance, a somber reflection of a world I’m required to leave behind.

All the disappointment in the world didn’t stop me from enjoying the delightful dinner with my family. I am eternally grateful to my parents for affording my education. I’d like to thank my parents for the priceless, love and kindness to pay for my tuition and support my allowance throughout college. Overpriced as it may seem, I did buy a lot of ideas to chew. I learned things that, seemingly, would help me propel my way through life. I gained the gladdest of experience of being college: reading the books, having a booze binge, lighting a light, listening to records, gong places, making out and scoring with, becoming one of the diligent students --- and getting everything at my parent’s expense. I was so genuinely delighted at dinner, I was practically a glutton. I think I had a subliminal inclination to die of bangungot that night. I waited for it to arrive. I could’ve called it quits with life. Twenty years would’ve been a fair deal if I looked back to how fucking content was I during College: which is now only a memory that glows so brightly as if it were a diamond cut by brazen fire. Both my brothers asked me for a drink, but I just had to sleep this off.

The painful irony was that everybody was congratulating me.