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.

To compensate for my lack of ambition

I am inventing, or I am claiming myself as the discoverer of the Lack of Ambition Syndrome. 

  

Still imagining how I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes

Dubliners again. Paper book with the audio companion, the stories come alive with the accents, spirited voices of readers, auditory pleasures that make it more immersive. It's harder to get lost in thought. The equivalent of turning on subtitles when you're watching a movie. 

There's an almost embarrassing element to re-reading stories, especially with the classics. One, you can't remember everything. Two, you just now figure out those epiphanies that you can't believe you missed before, how good the book is at all. And you still won't catch all of them. Three, your own insights will make you laugh at insights you previously held, and your life as a whole. Partly embarrassed by your own epiphany, partly just glad. 

I would have turned out as Duffy in A Painful Case. 

His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity’s sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk.

But in my life, love was possible. I live with this great fortune. 

He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Re-reading. Bouts of joy and perfectly silent loneliness all over again, with some embarrassment, but with a much better heuristic. It's all good. Nobody will even figure out the name of Mangan's sister.

Marcus Aurelius must be cringing on his grave

We expose ourselves to the dangers of algorithms. Our attention spans are being trimmed down to reels. We are inevitably exposed to influencers who for the sake of producing content, compromise expertise. Marcus Aurelius says that your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in your thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions (Meditations, 5.16 quoted in the Daily Stoic, p. 103). Especially if we hold these thoughts uncritically.

Liberica coffee today. Freshly roasted, dark roasted (maybe burning some of the flavor) but brings out more bitterness and lessens the acidity. It keeps its fruity identity. We trace its origins only a hundred or so kilometers from the earth where we come from. We can be so lucky.

Now it’s time to play with V. Jenga and then the dolls. She'll be Rainbow and I'll be Curly. We'll make them read Dr. Seuss. 

When you don't get to run or ride, get anxious or upset about wasting time, you must learn to forgive yourself. Your body needed that rest as much as you needed to get moving. Your mind can wait to zone itself out. Don't worry about the lost time now, just get ready to get back on track.