Selfishness to Selflessness

Regaining Weight

I’ve been regaining weight and I’m regaining a sense of who I was when I was obese. Strangely enough, it’s easier to be confident when your mind and heart is clogged with butter from bagels. The saturated fat does the talking for you.

On other parts of my life, I feel the lightness of being, the longing for repetition.

Worries, Errands, Bills, and other forms of Whining

I forgive who I once was, the emotionally immature who documented my useless ranting. I ask forgiveness from my wife, who years before (and maybe occasionally), had to endure all that I was.

From Selfishness to Selflessness

If I ended now, I would have been a good story to tell. I know. I know because I long to repeat every moment of my life.

Family is a blissful selflessness.

The Highest Highs

I.'s laughter. Mouth opening and eyes chinked in a smile. I. falling asleep on my shoulders. The nasal high of sniffing his scalp. Hearing him say the first few words of his life: mama, dada, banana, fish (he must’ve have read JD Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish in a previous life). Having family. Having my own family. Having I. Having D.

Having these highs and wanting almost nothing more.

(Pictures by D.)

2012

Let's not hurry and let's not worry about end of the world. Trust in the beautiful process of the universe. We will persist. We will perish. It will be sorrowful. It will be joyful. It never really ends.

Love all around in 2012.

Hemingways

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Odeon. On a cold windwept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p.35

Whether it was chaos, repetition, or a pre-destined natural order I am thankful that the world brought me to a moment when a mint-condition copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast fell on my hands. I am thankful for having bought it in a glorious bargain from a second-hand bookstore, and how it brought me back to an even more glorious time.

Around the time he was writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald cruised in a Rolls Royce with his Zelda and hung out in Paris cafes getting black-out-drunk with “expatriate luminaries” like Hemingway. Gertrude Stein invites people over for tea at her 27 rue de Fleurus apartment. James Joyce, Ezra Pound can be spotted at Shakespeare and Co., the bookstore of Sylvia Beach.

Hemingway wrote his work in the nearby Closerie des Lilas, ordering café au lait or café crème or beer or wine. He wrote this posthumously published book in Cuba, and he still had Paris in him. I will not be foolish to even attempt to say anything scholarly about this book, so I account for how I take it with me when I can barely remember. I thought autobiographical books like these give you the right to judge the author’s character and reinforces your own. He revealed his complexities, compassion, weaknesses, brilliance and gentlemanliness without self-praise, pretension or the malady of blogs and biographies nowadays – sissiness and whining.

There's a recent Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris" that took several references from this book. Salvador Dali was also in appearance. We never became expatriate luminaries (maybe except for H.) but a few High/Grade School friends urged me to see that Woody Allen film. I am glad we stay in touch in one way or another. And thanks to the advanced methods of piracy, I've seen the movie a few months before, probably even before it was released in other countries I told my friends: "All-star cast:Hemingway, TS Eliot, Fitzgerald et al. Most of who you read in high school to find out how to get girls. Paris in the 20s is our Manila in the late 90s. A moveable feast."

A Musical Plurality

I am going to generalize and say that nobody ever understood what the hell "indie" meant.

How many times have we repeated that the internet created this new space? I have to stop asking and enjoy the plurality by plucking out the music deliberately from this big, beautiful field of budding flowers.

In the advent of sharing links for downloading torrents, CDs may have been obsolete, too. So rarely do we burn them. There are always new ways of consuming media.

In the year 2011, I am three decades old but I listened to, for example, 20-somethings from France who called their group “Teenagers.” The music is sardonic, not always witty, but mostly libidinal and funny in a sex-typed humor. I’d like to think it’s an algorithmic result of my tastes that I ended up listening to the Bombay Bicycle Club or the Perishers – which did sound like music for organic soy, high Omega-3 tofu-eating crowd or College folk who look at the rain or autumn leaves on their windows while studying in some Boston campus.

I hear some of the latest pop from our maid and try to produce a balance it out by coercing her to listen to classical music whenever she’s nannying little I.

In this plurality, there are always the things I like. My late-nineties alternative/grunge nostalgia just won’t give in to amnesia. It all boils down to the final 30GB you saved on your iPod.

I remember a tweet from a November evening while listening to Jazz with my 17-month old son. It’s old, but it never sounds like a broken record. The tweet goes: Coltrane & Davis sounds better in warm white light, in a late November evening breeze where I can’t tell what’s random from what’s precise.

If I were 19 and read Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees

I have been more ambitious in dreaming about other topics which crossed my mind before. I thought of doing something on the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature, which will of course be post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-modernist and even deconstructive in discussion. When does a “text” become Philosophy, and when does it become Literature? This demarcation, this dividing of the line, will of course give birth to a web of implications and complications such as the politics of speech over writing. I planned to apply it on a certain text, something existential by Camus or Sartre, or even Nietzsche. I’m looking at Nausea, The Stranger or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Well, I’ve decided to abandon this idea because I couldn’t handle it, of course. I am not too proud of my little intellect.

Yours truly, July 2000

What blabber! Now that I take myself less seriously, I laugh.

I was 19 when I wrote that bit. Whether what I wrote was stupid or brilliant, I could hardly tell and quite frankly, should hardly care. Perhaps it's a relief that nowadays my list of worries no longer include the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature. If I entered into a conversation about it now, I'll have very little to contribute. But relievingly, I would feel more eloquent about my silence.

If I were still 19, I would have read books differently that how I would now. Nowadays, I take a more recreational approach. I'm happy enough to figure out what it makes me think, not even what it is trying to say - I enjoy reading without falling into the trap of false profundity. But I don't think I miss out on the key points - if I do, I can be redeemed by Google or Wikipedia. Other than the knowledge in web-based sources, I am also only a thesis shy of a Master's Degree in Philosophy - from an overpriced University.

If I were still 19, I would would go an exposition about the book I've recently read - Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees." I'd go on saying - this work is described as Philosophical Fiction, the kind that both tells a story and outlines a philosophical treatise. The Utopian Concepts that run on the philosophy side surface easily enough. The story makes itself believable with historical conjunctions to milestones such as the French Revolution, ornamented with a level of detail devoted to the botany of trees. The real and the imaginative exists in this gentle juxtaposition which makes for the simple and therefore masterful storytelling.

At Thirty, I am a loving husband, and devoted father to a charming 1-year old. I picked up the book not as assignment, or something I want my friends to see me reading, but because I saw it like a glittering gem among the bargains in BookSale. I go to coffee shops, not with the intention of reading, but to keep myself from getting sleepy while driving. When I get home, I read while my little I. sleeps, until I myself fall asleep. Somewhere between the time we sleep, I tell him about the book I was reading. This 12-year old boy climbed a tree and never descended. Up in the trees, he fell in love, became a baron, wrote, and shaped societies. I couldn't stop reading it, like I didn't believe that this idea of Utopia in the trees would have been impossible.

Society is a Wall

“There are enough social commentators with low-level brain power now. Why should I add my high-level snarl?”
- from "The Big Pot Game", in Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski.

Because these are tales of the ordinary, Bukowski only makes it seem easy. Not all storytellers succeed in putting a high entertainment value along with philosophical depth via a distinctive literary style in the triumph of drunks, exhausted workers, slackers, race-horse gamblers, rapists, robbers or so-called "degenrates." There is an effortless, out-of-this-world and unsociable genius this makes this collection distinguish itself. They say it's called "transgressive fiction." It's a compelling fiction that sees society as a wall that we need to leap over. This is how green the grass is on the other side.

He sometimes spoke in the tone of a spiritual incarnate of Carlos Castaneda (Don Juan: A Yaqui Way to Knowledge) and Robert Prisig (Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I've only read two of his works (The first being Post Office), but my personal take is that while Bukowski's work is not Beat Literature, it beats the hell out of the Beat Literature of Kerouac and Burroughs. And I say that because it has a lot less of a pretentious appeal.

Bukowski had that knowing, that maturity, that freedom in his willingness to be unembarrassed. His is a drunkenness that deserved following. Like his characers,I'd like to see him finally get the Nobel Prize.

The truth that the text reveals is that he got drunk and saw through drunkenness. This is an enlightenment that cannot be blurred by the bevy. What’s between the lines is a counter-punch to alcohol. Each time he gets knocked out, the writing is a beautiful bounce back. The insights remain sharp and relevant up until now.

All the other drunk or high writers never wrote like him because they barely saw through the drunkenness. If anyone else wrote this, it may have just come out as annoying.


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At some point in life drinking has brought me to many low points. My confidence builds, and it oversizes inevitably to arrogance, and it leads me to the eventual regret.

I look at my face and the lines have gone deep. There are wrinkles in my eyebrows and my hair has begun the protracted process of thinning out. While I am growing the ambitious goals of lessening my drinking, I’ve also grown the natural humility after these thirty years, and drinking since my teens. I still drink as though I have not picked up anything after these years, six bottles on an empty stomach, or mixing dark/clear liquor, outpacing myself. And all that arrogant talk.

So maybe I’ll get drink alone, and in secret. Alone do we battle the devils that are bottled up inside us. Alone should we drink.

So from now on.

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And it was true. The workers were hardly human. Their eyes were glazed, stricken, insane. They laughed at anything and mocked each other continually. Their insides were stamped out. They had been murdered.
p.88, The Stupid Christs

We are putting a lot of priests’ robes on some of these revolutionaries and some of them are very sick fellows bothered with acne, deserted from by their wives…
p.131, A Quiet Conversation Piece

’Hell I worked hard all my life!’ (they think this is virtue, but it only proves a man is a damned fool.)
p. 223, The Big Pot Game

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My "best" picks:


Animal Crackers in my Soup
My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage
Would you Suggest Writing as a Career?
The Great Zen Wedding
Rape! Rape!
A Quiet Conversation Piece
The Big Pot Game
Purple As an Iris
A .45 to Pay the Rent

The Good and The Greed

A few months ago in this not-so-quaint global village, the remains of oil-rich Libya’s four-decade ruler is displayed in a grocery’s onion and vegetable compartment. Before his end, he begged mercy for his life, and he was killed with his son (one among many of his family who got killed by NATO airstrikes). Weeks ago, he commanded his loyalists to fight to the death. He was an eccentric fashion icon, and more importantly he overthrew a monarchy in his younger days as a revolutionary.

The wind has blown us to a season of Arab Springs. In the West, there is a new ideological space being created in the Occupy Movements. That space will be there, even if the Corporations try to crush them or respond by censoring social media or the internet.

Our own country, hungry for a share of righteousness, stops our 9-year President and incumbent Congresswoman from leaving the country to face charges of plunder, electoral fraud, extrajudicial killings, among others. She was in a wheelchair, face covered in a surgical mask, her neck & back supported by an iron brace, looking stripped of leftover dignity. She didn’t get to leave in the many flights she booked that day. After bouts of TROs and Warrants, the drama leads to a Hospital Arrest and a new national soap opera begins in the history of a forgetful country. Her mug shots should be in the front pages of dailies as of this writing. She was the same president who succeeded a preceding president who got pardoned on a plunder case.

Tired, middle-class workers like me will open these pages in Starbucks branches that’s peppered all over the city. Every cup of coffee earns a sticker. They are collecting these stickers, spending their hard-earned two grand on coffee to get a journal that’s supposed to represent their prestige. This is under the guise, of course, of making a charitable donation through a very small portion of the earnings. The earnings should have belonged to those who worked for it in the first place: the third-world farmers who grew the beans, the supply-chain laborers who transported it, and the contractual servers who took the orders and put them in red cups.

If you go to the counter clutching a book, the barista will ask you about the book you’re reading. So much goodness turns into so much greed in this little global village. I show the Barista my book. He mispronounces Bukowski. And then upsells for pastry. Somewhere in the world, a low-level manager tasks his team to gather observations and feedback. He draws some charts, writes his analysis and recommendations. Behind that feigned interest in my book was a module, a script that’s supposed to make me feel engaged as a consumer. It’s supposed to make me feel good and return to this store, or any other branch. There’s another manager who oversees this practice as a standard is set to all stores. That is even taken to another level, because satisfaction is not only measured by desire to return to the store, but to have me recommend and promote the store to my friends. Superficial Corporate politeness will eat out what’s left of genuine human interest and sincerity.

There’s good, and there’s greed. I imagine, looking out to the bay, drinking imported Arabica coffee thinking about the world and its leaders and its springs and movements. How peaceful the water can look, as excrement underneath it mixes in and invisibly seeps.