August 1999

I woke up with my head heavy as a cloud about to burst. When my head hits the ground, I have an early morning enlightenment: what the hell was I doing last night drinking too much and dancing with office girls in their uniform? I hit the shower, and REM’s “It’s the end of the world…” is booming on the background. I felt relieved the minute cold water splashed on my head and body. I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My face is pale and my pupils and brows are black, all of my skin beaded with water. Maybe last night wasn’t meaningless. Maybe the past exists and I had a swell time.

Last July, __, __, __, __, and I have been hanging around a lot. We have our work at ___ as a big alibi to meet each other. Seen in some vague angle, “adaptations become habits.” That sounds like our friendship. Tonight, after duty, __ treats us dinner. I’ve never had so much dimsum in my life. What I loved even more was the way these people laughed with each other. After a long walk, we laugh some more and call it a night.

Never have I seen so much dignity in death as the characters who died in Malraux’s Man’s Fate. It also reaffirms that drugs (opium in this case) can give an almost authentic meaning of life, as with the protagonist, Gisors.

There are times when you lose touch with the splendor of solitude. During these times, the weekends come to me as a spectacle. I was content with spending evenings alone reading and writing. Now the weekends oblige me to have fun in its shallow sense (drinking too much and watching people dance.) The weekends returned to me now like a part of me which I lost, like the prodigal happy to be home again.

Be in danger, but do not be defeated. Rather, be dared. And when you fail and fall down, you can always laugh like mad. Laugh all you can, or laugh while it lasts.

Time alone is time well spent.

Absurdity attacks. Its ingredients: a dumbly written poem, a failed attempt at writing my Philosophical Problems paper, the rush of sugar from huge quantities of strawberry jam in bread. I suddenly felt awful for having to look for excuses for my failures. I felt awful for wanting something tremendously tragic to happen in my life. Then I wanted to remind myself of the fundamental questions: what do I want out of life? What do I live for? What is it that I really put my life into? Nothing is real right now. Nothing is real, except perhaps my disappointment over the fact that I should’ve paid more attention to writing my paper.

Re-reading The Catcher in the Rye in the empty room upstairs. I felt, for the past past month, a genuine relief. I was in the company of life’s greatest book, a window overlooking trees, a wet road, while the afternoon’s pale light spreads without any of my gloom into the room, swimming like a liquid into me.

I think the TV finally broke down, and I would eagerly want to thank whomever it was who shot for me. I’ve been looking at that idiot box too much.

The will wills its will. Philosophical Problems class this morning tells us something about the will willing its will. Nietzsche tells us that man would rather will nothing than not will. Man wills. The will to power must be expended, it cannot remain stable. In the same light, the will of Spinozas’s connatus is to persevere. And for Descartes, or for Christianity, it is follow their god’s will. For Schopenhauer, the will is but suffering. Among all wills, one thing can be found in the end zone: that there is something that moves us. The difference lies in how we affirm this movement. Nietzsche affirms with power, change and overcoming, Christianity by dwelling on pity, Schopenhauer with aesthetic contemplation and ascetic living, and Spinoza with perseverance. But how do I affirm it?

Sunday night while working on my Mabini paper. I write, “Somewhere in his young life, Mabini took lonely, long walks (while everybody else was out for party and amusement) during Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons with a kerchief about his head, his feet bare. Somewhere in his young life, practiced dancing with a stupid chair.”
I could’ve quoted something political and something intelligent about him. But this is the only part of my paper that isn’t political or intelligent about Mabini. For in his politics, in the revolution, in the struggle for freedom, Mabini only saw failure. In the only considerable private experience I knew about him, there were lonely walks and dancing with chairs. I could only imagine the kick, the ecstasy he derived from drinking carabao milk. That killed him.
Kills me.

July 1999

I needed a calendar because I can no longer remember what day it is. Strangely enough, the bookstores don't sell calendars in the middle of the year.

Nostradamus predicts that the will world end this July. I thought it was too bonkers to be entertained. Now it’s on the cover of Time fucking Magazine. An insightful historian can probably make accurate predictions at how the human race, at a given time, would just long for the end and believe it. All the same, I wouldn’t whine when the world ends tomorrow. It’s even strangely comforting, for we can finally be nothing. Finally, something quite eventful happens. If the world still stands in August, death is always just around the corner, whistling or smelling something.

I had a wonderful lunch last Sunday --- grilled tuna, grilled pork chops, enjoyed with my whole family. When I eat that well, and I just had an equally wonderful drink the night before, I wish I could die tomorrow.

A brief pause in a bleak world, that is all. How sad. Fucking sentimental. Ad misericordiam rubbish.

All of life is an offshoot to boredom. How true. Sounds better.

I don’t feel guilty about my parents. It’s just that I owe it to them, and I want to make it up somehow. And what I’m doing - certainly isn’t the way to do so.

If there are three thing I miss, it’s being alone all the time, reading good literature for my leisure, and studying. Everything bores me, or everything will eventually bore me.

With the help of G_____, I understood what Nietzsche was trying to say on “Involuntary death.” Make a plan. Set a goal. Achieve it. And at the pinnacle, practice the art of dying. Perhaps it could even be made tragic. Don’t just be another tombstone in the cemetery.

I went to two museums – Casa Manila and the San San Agustin Museum, and visited the sepulchers of a dead God – in Manila Cathedral and San Agustin. I took a long walks in Intramuros.

Tuesday, an hour past midnight. I haven’t collected enough determination to prevent myself from drinking. I have been drinking in unlikely places such as empty parking lots in military-bases-turned-urban-zones. I ask myself, why have I been drinking. I have no victory to celebrate, I have no loss to be consoled.
I couldn’t even relax myself through booze anymore. There are people to meet when you drink but they’re mostly just talking vaginas and men ruled by their penises. I pardon my poor judgement and vanity. There are of course, interesting ones, and those who are aesthetically dignified and nice-smelling. And there are chances which are just not worth taking. And so I go on to drinking and to courting my own disasters. I’ve been drinking too much. I’ve been drinking in the wrong places. I’m consuming all my dough for drinking. I’m disappointed with my academics. I’m not learning as much as I am supposed to be and I surrendered my chances for honorable fucking mention. I’m not saying that I could stop drinking, that would be too ambitious. I’ll have another one tomorrow, for whatever reason. There’s just one thing that pulls me back: it only lasted for three seconds but that was enough, if not too much. It was because my father looked at me tonight, and I wasn’t afraid of him, I didn’t fear him. I just knew I should look up to him with respect. And every morning my mother asks me to clean up the overflowing ashtrays.

June 1999

June arrives again with clouds of gloom. There is a typhoon declaring openly: the earth is bleak. I picture people in their romantic idiocies: gawking at their windowpanes overlooking Manila’s heavy traffic during the stormy late afternoon, their mouths open and their chin resting in their palms. People pricking themselves with self-pity for their lovelessness and are bleeding profusely. I could be one of them and fuck that.

June’s clouds are gloomy and the earth is bleak. But I shouldn't be unhappy.

I have another class with G____ and he never ceases to amaze me. He asked us to write a paper for the course and I was thinking something about the problem of language or the needlessness of morality. I wasn’t sure whether he penetrated or read through my mind but he raised the latter in the discussion. We cannot be held morally accountable for what we do since we came from nothing. I asked him if life would be better without morality. He said yes.

Without morality, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we would go ahead and bite each other’s head off and blast ourselves back to a primitive age. Truly, other species in this universe had survived without morality. And whatever morality is, wo/man has made it a dogma and institutionalized it. And I don’t think he would disagree that morality only limits our freedom because like laws and systems, it limits us to given propensities, or to a certain nature. What N. has to say about this is that morality is ridiculous and we should be judged as individuals --- i.e., not in universal moral standards. This is partly what he thought and partly my understanding.

Without morality, we would still grow, our intelligence would probably improve and catapult us to a higher state of being. If this wouldn’t happen instinctively, then it would happen spontaneously, just as in G____’s analogy: young birds simply flap their wings and eventually learn to fly.


In another one of his smart metaphors, he tells us the life and the classroom. Life is when you sit down in class for one whole hour, and at the end of that hour he raises his hand, and says conclusively, “This is absurd.”


I’ve been drinking like a flower vase and never has alcohol been so relieving --- after a day at school, or night at work. Perhaps alcohol is just a mere inanity to stuff my emptiness and boredom, since my impetus to read or study had suddenly gone on vacation. For one thing, Blue Ice is cheap at this Malate beer garden where we hang out, and their grilled tuna belly is fantastic. I can’t shy away from anybody who invites me for a drink.

I’ve always thought that the booze had brought the best out of me, made me think and do things. It helped, however artificially, banish my fear and heighten my consciousness. It was also an experience I’ve often shared with my friends. Now it’s just something I crave for. Now it’s just a habit can’t avoid.


Where there is no fear, there is boredom. All life is an offshoot to boredom. If we stop breathing, we just might stop getting bored to tears as well.


I finally found the copy of Sartre’s Nausea in the library. I finally found something that would make me feel normal. In each of the first sixty pages I’ve read so far, there is a flood of ideas (though not necessarily philosophical) to contemplate, an image to be imagined with increasing delight. I didn’t hear or read about the novel’s ideas and the images for the first time, but what so strikes me this time is that it makes me feel how solitude, sadness et cetera can easily be neglected because the grass isn't greener on the other side. Togetherness and happiness can be equally boring. There is only everydayness and then there is nothingness.


I take a pause from reading nausea and last line goes: “A man is always a teller of his tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the sotries of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live life as if he were recounting it… But you have to choose: to live or to recount.” I’m almost obsessed by stories and by thoughts, even my fantasies, especially creative ones, that I have almost forgotten how to live. But what is it to live? I quote a line from the same page: “When you are living, nothing happens.”


I discovered another danger of keeping a journal, or perhaps re-discovered it as I ran through Nausea. You take account of the events, incidents and adventures of a lifetime only to find that all of them happen repeatedly, and repeated again, like the rhythm of your walk, that they could only be insignificant. On the other hand, when you try to re-live an exact moment, you can only try to ruin the moment’s authenticity --- for they can never be extended.

Where does eternal recurrence come in?


I have so far enjoyed Sartre’s Nausea not so much for the philosophical insight, but for the character of the protagonist. The protagonist has a fascinating fondness for picking up paper and chestnuts. His characater transcends philosophical insights and tells it through the details of his experience. His very gestures, his words, and whatever pink bricks or bubbles of light that he notes, his entire experience collectively, conveys existentialism.


Walking while the early evening’s winds whisper the sadness of its final faint song, the violins weeping their last teardrop quietly in the drizzle that passed by, the loneliness you brought left me and I found Solitude. Under a tall lamp post, where the orange bulb the late embers of sunset and the thin, coming crescent moonlight looms over dull shadows lying flat on the wet streets where you and me once walked --- our tongues teasing, our hands laced --- I now found Boredom. But unlike you, boredom and solitude has never left me. (This could be a horrible, ad misericordiam poem.)


Will there ever come a time, perhaps when even the life of my bone marrow have been seized and sucked dry, that I will tell myself, Nothing fascinates me anymore.


Friday, 8:00 p.m. The night is dry, and I am supposed to finish a difficult Analytic Philosophy read about belief, inquiry and meaning. That is until I listen to a program called Groove Garden and serve myself good, flavorful bottles of cold Pale Pilsen and baked mussels. It blends well with acid jazz. All the lights in the house are turned off, except for the light at my desk whose beams are almost blue. My only company was a few more pages of Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. I can almost taste the novel together with the beer. God it’s good. The texture of the book’s paper is a crisp yellow. It's Friday night and this feels like a party.

“I must let my pen run on, without searching for words.”

A phone call to someone else ruins a rather perfect Friday night.

But the past, however recent it is, collapses when the present arrives. I’m not happy about this drink anymore, and this HBO movie is lousy.

While having a cigarette, I heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow in its classical version at 98.7. I remember the 15th floor window with Taft’s thousands bulbs exploding in small glitters, the rising carbon monoxide, conversation, and dim lighting --- clouded my head.


Late at night, mom and dad brings me Kowloon Siopao. And I thank them with all my heart for satisfying my craving. I had a serving of chicken pao, pork pao and a jumbo pao. I want to vomit.

I have the house by myself again, and it’s the Saturday afternoon to start the hard industry of reading Analytic Philosophy. After a few pages I decided to have lunch: rice, tereyaki, chicken nuggets in barbecue sauce, and softdrinks on top of all that.

On 98.7 with Schopan, Bach, and Mozart in the background, I sit on the sofa facing the curtains. They filter the sun’s light in an opaque and heavy pink or old rose. Everything in the living room is calm and motionless, except for the unseen movement of sound waves and my hand reaching a glass of water to my mouth. I feel too mild for coffee, which I could have later with H. over a long overdue good conversation. Maybe I should clean the room, do some push ups and sit ups before going out.

May 1999

Pity should only be a device for a good sarcasm; i.e., pity should always be sarcastic.

I am nothing. Never have I been so glad to say that I know nothing.

Upon reading Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises, you feel that life is all a long, dark, rotten night. But we shouldn’t be sore. We should make life (or the night) sparkle, spectacular and lovely through drinking tons of wine, partying wildly, living as best as we can, and having a swell time.
I almost wished I lived in a period in between two wars and a great depression. The 1920’s. I could legitimately belong to a generation that is lost, hopeless, aimless, and thus had chosen to be spontaneous and hedonistic. I would in the company of people who find themselves in the same shoes, or perhaps be someone like Jake, or even Gatsby.

No other writer or philosopher can encourage me to have an overpowering sense of strength, power and will; especially when I have often stayed on the losing end. No other philosopher can be as acquainted as N. is to poetry and truth, violence and virtue, loneliness and solitude, silence and the wisdom of speaking --- the very same things that have once made me feel as if I were powerful.
I just feel so good reading N. And what is good? “…everything that heightens thee feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.”
Although sometimes, or on some parts of the book, I really have no idea what the guy is talking about --- the riddles can be too tangled or the metaphors or implications can be too difficult for me.

After an untiring, effortless duty at ___, [and theater shows are of course, often delightful to see, given the opportunity to do so] I wash my oil-sodden face with hypo-allerginic Tender Care soap and fold my barong. I take the fantastically architectured staircase to the lobby, passing by the unlighted capiz chandeliers, and the art showcases at the now dimly lit hallways. Outside the LT lobby, I have a smoke and my lungs breathe with tar finally. A beautifully shaped half-moon looms with a speck of stars.
I go home, usually having a late dinner, but not tonight because the first free food I tasted in this job had made me excessively full. Surely, I go home to my chums --- boredom, booze, solitude, and the idiot box. And as only true friends do, boredom, booze, and solitude never leaves me.
I realize that it’s Saturday and this HBO series which breeds bourgeoisie values and absolutely makes too much of a hype of sex and relationships is on. I watch it, and it’s arousing and funny.
I have a few bottles.
At the end of the night, I can only find that the hardest act to do among all these is to fall asleep.

Something that is full of spirit glitters in me whenever I see both my parents smile or laugh --- especially the charming way my mother does it. Maybe because they don’t really smile and laugh a lot. Whenever they do, it must really be an honest-to-goodness laugh. The thing is, my parents are never phony when they smile and laugh.

April 1999

I had given my muscles a reason to rejoice by doing stretching, jogging and exercising almost daily. After what seemed like an eternity of choosing to be bed-ridden, I never had such fondness for making sweat ooze out of my pores, and burning the accumulating slabs of fat in every inch of my body.
Even though it’s only in a machine, I really liked running. Running made me feel active, free and functioning. I’m running and I’m running away.

After watching a so-so movie, “Meet Joe Black,” I wonder how it could’ve been all-too-fantastic if everybody would think that you'd would die tomorrow or the day after or in such proximity that you would always be kind. You would always be grateful to everyone, and you would always try to maximize life to its limits.

Only by accident and not by deliberate intelligence did I receive a 3.6 GPA. Or is ‘deliberate intelligence’ merely, if there ever is such, just an accident?

Fear is contemptible.

Appeal to fear. Fear makes you see peril where there is none. It obstructs the clarity of thought, and prevents one from doing commendable acts of strength and wisdom of mind. Fear makes all actions contemptible, and would eventually lead to an absolute cowardice.
Fear of God, for instance.

Another “for instance….” - my fears when I'm taking the car out without permission. That permission carries with it respect and honor. What is honor anyway, according to N., but self-superiority made public.

Perhaps it is what N. really meant to “live dangerously,” i.e., to be never insecure about the insecurity of insecurities --- death.
To not think of death means to at least be able to live freely, to be able to live the now, to think, and therefore to be able to seek the truth and its greatness.

I just turned eighteen.

Most of the time, I’d merely want to be fascinated. To say, “that’s fascinating.”
As N. thought (without deserved respect, esteem or perhaps truth) about women, something or someone is profound only because we never tried to fathom their depths. They might not even be shallow, so N. says. Let the cliché go, “familiarity breeds contempt.” And the knowledge of weaknesses denotes the exploitation of it.

Dumb people try to hide their dumbness in intelligent language and technical jargon.

Why should wo/man be a social being? By that I mean, why should people always share their sympathies and common experience, if they can have their own ways with the world? Have your own way with the world, instead of ascribing to what everybody else (not that I am discrediting it, for something could be learned from them) has already done or accomplished.

N. had once more given me a reason to enter the churches again, and that is, to visit the beautiful, all-too-glamorous tombs and sepulchers of a dead God. God just might still be worthy of paying respect to, like some deceased relative we came to remember on grow occasionally sentimental about.

March 1999

Dr. R___ was telling us about the Jungian shadow --- comprising our weakness, hatred, fear or desire. The shadow should be tolerated to a certain degree before it manifests violently, before objectifying it, or seeing it outside of ourselves.

We should never let other people have knowledge of our weakness, fears, or desires. The knowledge of weaknesses, fears and desires --- denotes its exploitation.
“We are all parasites.” ____ once told me. Whatever she meant by that. It appealed to me as a profoundly philosophical insight. In that metaphor she captured the very essence of human relationships: our selfish need for each other. We cling to each other because we suck juices off our host, until the host gets all scoobied up and we find new ones to be parasitic on. The sentence was just so beautiful. Have I corrupted her drift? Have I pseudo-intellectualized it?

Because I can never tell them, I love my parents, and my brothers.

Confidence often ends up in conceit.

People are optimistic for you not because they are genuinely optimistic for you. They are merely kind. Optimism is often a failed sweetener in a bitter life. What I meant to say is, optimism is often false.

Walking along Julio Nakpil at late afternoons, probably after drizzles or a downpour, I smell the peculiarity of asphalt and rain water, and the bay. Along the bathed street I walk and watch the bars prepare for a night’s party and its pretension. The clouds are orange, chromatically transforming to pink, blue and violet then black. The sun is sleeping in the east. I saw it last near the Church after coffee and croissant. I wonder how this appeared in 1930.
From Strange Days, “Paranoia is the highest scale of reality.” So true.
From watching a one of the Japanese films in this year’s Eiga Sai, My Sons:
- Old people are being discarded to make them realize how screwed up life really is. Then they let them die.
- Japanese people are so generic, they all look like action figures or dolls.
- Substantial and honorable economic principle: “I want to work hard, have a good bath, and work again tomorrow.” This moistened my fucking eyeballs real well and I nearly burst into tears when I heard it uttered in all the actor’s dumb sincerity.
- “The first gulp is always the best.”
- Touchy, but not nauseatingly touchy.
- Japs can be so touchy and so funny in their exaggerated gestures.
- Can we really blame people who climb the corporate ladder and are workaholics? Are they merely eccentric? Apathetic?

From Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut: “Policemen protect property rights, but not human rights.” “Vacancies had suddenly become extinct as dodo birds.”

Heaven flushes its acid teardrops on summer. Times like these, nature tries to sympathize with life’s dryness. But I cannot help but loathe Sunday afternoons when it rains, there nothing listenable and I don’t have the drive to study.

I really shouldn’t intellectualize things, and I concede that I never did so at all.

It left more than stunned or flabbergasted when Dr. A____ once mentioned, “On what grounds can we ask, Why?!” Why do people have all sorts of claims to intelligence?


Spontaneously enough, H. and I went for a drink to discuss his libel suit. We’re barely eighteen, and here he is in National TV and AM radio with a libel suit. All the while I thought I’d see him with beads of sweat streaming down his brows, his jaws clacking. With all the adrenaline shot up in his life, he managed to stay nonchalant.

It just popped out of my mind, what H. mentioned to me, that post-structuralists believe, or perhaps some them, that language is causing the destruction of society.


During the bus ride, I sat beside a young mother, roughly aged around 19 or 20, who cradled an infant in dark brown, weary arms. The baby was lying flat on his/her stomach. The edge his/her tiny feet tickled the bone of my knee. The mother looked panicked and asked me if I could reach her umbrella for her. I did most gladly.
The tot started crying, faintly, to increasing loudness. On that cue, the young mom beside me began to unbutton a portion of her white, sleeveless blouse and slipped a breast out. I looked away but she’s already bared her nipple --- the color of soil. It was an interesting, non-pornographic public image… until one begins to wonder if she was a slut who got pregnant, or a provincial girl who got banged by some nutty farm boy who brushed her off. So it goes for our socio-cultural stereotypes.
As I hope, I see her as young woman celebrating her motherhood.