nasty old stuff #2

not so nasty, now that i think about it. just more blather. i remember scribbling fragments of what became the entry below of little scraps of paper, most of which got lost. it was the baguio arts festival 1999. we were mostly drunk or stoned or both. don't try this at home. or anywhere else. makes me wonder just how many lifetimes we're allowed to screw up.


still 27 november 1999

i dropped acid yesterday, the best of all days. not because of the acid which was a disappointment. the performances were good and i liked having fingers growing out of my forehead and later from my left hand. baby powder, beer and strawberries tell you if you can't take it anymore, try giving a little. [sairo circa 2005: something to do with the performanace art at the festival, i'm guessing] but i took a lot yesterday. never has substance abuse felt so good; it is only now that i realize the actual validity of addiction. or why people are afraid of being in such a state. (i missed having people around just now so i moved up into the dining room to sit with people i don't really know who chatter about things i don't really care about. But just the same, it is nice feeling alive and part of a group of humans. but as always when among others, i lose track of stuff and the ability to think inside my head. i have to get out.)

anyway. i am not sure if these chimes are annoying me. they are ringing in my head, scattering notes like hard bubbles that stick--shaking slightly--into the dark inner hollows of my skull. i can't stop drumming, even on the thin metal arms of my chair. it gets to me, all this percussion. the hide-covered hollow instruments seem to be extreme cruelty but they make such beautiful music. (digression: got a taste of tobacco from thailand, a cigar. the wrapping leaves are green and leaves a fresher taste in the mouth, less burnt. the singaporean artist guy says they come from the northern part of what used to siam. i am wondering if it is cold there now.)

on acid, everything becomes knife-sharp. sound solidifies into a solid force that can push at you in waves or jab you like jets of dry water. the drums again, the drums. last night they played endlessly, the hard notes falling lightly on me, bouncing off my skin like invisible rain, and my bones hollow, filling lightly with air. dancing becomes so much easier when you're high. i was dancing in circles but it felt like i wasn't moving at all. i've never felt this recreative. even the configuration of limbs seem essential and must be precise. oh but there are costs. my insides are sour. the cocktail of hash, acid, tapuey and betel brought about most interesting effects. and the cigarettes, all kinds it seems. menthols, kreteks, bidis, reds, local, lights. all of them taste somewhat nasty but leave me pleasant with a head full of smoky bubbles.

(i don't feel like writing about C and the breakup yet. it feels right, right now, to push him from my mind. under K's huge bamboo installation [someone told me he did it but i didn't bother to verify that], a sparse shelter more for the spirit or the mind than for the body, the quality of light changes the way things appear. C's baby pictures, the happy one where he wrinkles his nose, took on reddish tones that made him look either feirce or edible or both. i find it a conscious effort to think about him objectively, not as one who is [or was?] an integral part of my life.)

K looked beautiful last night, like a young white messiah. i wonder about the quality of salt i might taste if i licked his bony chest. i imagine it might taste of thin communion wafers, the flat roundness registering as shape, disappearing before i can identify a specific flavor. it might be the taste of shadows, only paler and frail as his bird-bones. under the installation--woven grass and green bamboo stretched high overhead--the outline of a man has been cut shallow into the earth. i feel i am sitting beside an invisible dead guy, or perhaps someone who had been asleep for so long, he blurred and faded away, leaving only the shape in the dirt to warn poeple walking in the park not to talk too loudly.

just a while ago. a family man pointed out to his son the importance of people working together, seeing overhead in the bunches and tufts of dry grass people describing a circle with their arms. i didn't notice that. all i saw were heads of grass, silent like the dead.

(there is a lot of order put into these gardens. they prepare the soil in grids, like an ice cube tray with dirt wells. some have small mounds of ash. here, they feed the earth in a rough geometric method. efficient too: the gardeners' huts or sheds have walls of packed dirt and what looks to be sawdust.) the sunlight reveals where shadows are supposed to fall. i must move again after a while. i've been sitting here for a while now, moving occasionally among the different swells of these gardens as noise and sunlight dictate.

so i am here again. people pass by and exclaim at the dead man beside me. to some, he is not here, only a physical imprint on the ground as lasting as the memory of something compelling or profound. to young boys, he is just a figure to measure themselves against, to see how much more they have to grow. one of them lay down, like many have before him in the past few days, looking at the patch of blinding blue within the circle of grassheads, the boy's thin arms extending only up to the man's elbows.

nasty old stuff #1

took a peek at Ye Olde Gatula message archives and found some blather i wrote a lifetime ago. judging from the date, this was right after my very first breakup (yeh), a couple of days after i turned 23. i only half-remember what all this was about. which is probably a good thing. probably the most embarassing thing i'll ever post here. have fun! (or not, heh.)


22 november 1999
monday
10:12 pm

the entire day i've been with a desperation i had not felt in months. there was despair as well since each attempt proves futile. every approach i tried seemed wrong, with me trying not to think of all the rules i've been breaking. wrong images, disjunct words, inconsistent strategy, unable to even focus on one piece, to picture in my head a complete image/vision. it was like putting together a puzzle where all the pieces are from the wrong boxes.

living with stacks and stacks of books, i am painfully aware of all i have to live up to. these writers, dead or alive, did not simply write (an activity i already find difficult to do) -- they also wrote exceedingly well. well enough for their work to be found worthy of publication, inclusion in some canon or another, and as such, worthy enough to have reached my shelves. these writings have travelled a long way from the writers' desks. these works outlived or will outlive their creators and have gone farther geographically than the writers could ever hope to go.

i believe this in a sense is true greatness. at the rate i'm going, it's something i feel i can't possibly achieve. even filling this small space with writing has been far from easy for me. it is impossible to compare the blankness of these pages with the consistent march of words in theirs, line by measured line. like ants following a single trail of thought, sure that there is a definite destination that will make following the trail worthwhile.

this obsession with worthiness. what the heck for? the expanse of white space i must fill, i have yet to fill, i must fill adequately or well, taunts me. this yellow pad's lines have been washed off by months of cleaning my contact lenses. the saline drops hitting the page morning and night like tears, soaking into the pad several sheets deep. the result is an uneven rippled writing surface that provides more freedom, not a set number of lines that run eastward like some reverse sunset. or the earth's revolution. and try as i might, i cannot seem to meet the challenge.

i want to break something. the glass jar half-filled with salted water and whatever undesirable elements that seeped from C's crystals. i imagine myself an ant picking my way through glass shards, the salt water seeping into paper like a disappearing ocean, bringing with it these words and the memory of lines running eastward. if i were an ant, i'd follow these lines right to the very edge until i fall off. other ants may will themselves to sprout wings and fly towards what they imagine to be the sun. ant-like, i might knowingly step off the edge, antennae twitching wildly, the momentary sensation of flight like gravity in my chest.

the kindness of strangers

went to school today with a killer hangover and i had to teach frickin grammar at 830 in the morning. augh. what i thought was going to be a nice healthy evening of wall climbing with a guy who M says liked me way back when i could scale 5-storey monsters without breaking a sweat turned out to be a 5-hour boozefest that stretched from 7pm to well past midnight.

the company was interesting: the young hirsute musician, friends M and B, the wall climber, the righteous babe, the geologist with a phd earned in france. if i would ask them for an appropriate label for myself, i'm pretty sure they'd all say something along the lines of secondary virginity. for some reason they found that idea extremely funny. as in funny strange.

anyway. i didn't plan to get drunk. i never do. but those nice gentlemen just kept buying round after round of beer, i actually lost track of just how much i had. M told me she counted five. FIVE! never had that much before. (and i see that 5 seems to be the number for that night)

at some point this new guy showed up and was introduced to everyone. by then, i was so pickled i promptly forgot his name. so let's call him the stranger. all i can remember is that he was from sports science and is now studying to be a nurse.

alcohol makes me garrulous. the understatement of the year. i don't remember everything i said or did last night, and i think that's a really good thing. at some point M was already telling me to either shut up or lower my voice. i couldn't seem to do either so they decided it was time for me to go home and think of my various transgressions.

somehow the stranger ended up taking me home. really nice guy, whatever his name was, never mind the poor guy actually wants to become a nars. as far as i can remember, he behaved appropriately. was really nice, especially when i started bawling about the guy who keeps breaking my heart. egads. talk about embarrassing.

lemme just end this with the two really freaky-frightening things about last night:

1) in the cab, he very nicely asked if he could kiss me. and i very politely said i couldn't let him do that because i had only met him 2 hours before and that i knew absolutely zero about him. and he very nicely backed off. good boy.

2) when i saw M at the office, she told me she had never seen the guy before. that he really was an absolute stranger to her. she thought that I knew HIM, which was the only reason she let the guy take me home.

sticky note to self: must never do anything remotely similar to last night ever again.

another sticky note to self: lots of luck on that. ha ha. ha.

sad sad songs: the soundtrack

it seems appropriate to make a CD for this. kinda like The Happy CD for that pretty-boy-gone-to-seed incident. haven't really figured out the right order for the tracks but it seems okay so far. seems to end on the appropriate note. anyway, the songs:

Le Voyage de Penelope (Air)
Fuck and Run (Liz Phair)
Homeward (The Sundays)
Slimcea Girl (Mono)
No Myth (Michael Penn)
Sad, Sad Song (M. Ward)
Happy Sad (Pizzicato Five)
Go On Ahead (Liz Phair)
Losing Hand (LHOOQ)
Goodbye Baby Goodnight (Brownman Revival)
Na Rua, Na Chuva, Ha Fazenda (City of God)
Always See Your Face (Love)
Flying Away (Smoke City)
When I'm Thinking About You (The Sundays)
Adios Ayer (Jose Padilla)
Ce Matin La (Air)

a week later

what surprises me now is that i didn't do as much crying as i thought i would. and that i broke a lot of my old patterns, doing none of the wacko destructive stuff i used to do when that sort of thing happens to me. prayed harder than i had ever prayed, this being more painful than all my breakups combined. which is strange, because it wasn't a breakup. there was nothing to break up. at all. anyway.

i also found myself singing all these songs in my head. a most surprising soundtrack, with some song lyrics having more fidelity than others. some lyrics no fidelity at all, the songs just sounded right. i like that word. fidelity. in translation studies, it has to do with accuracy (a dry, bloodless word) but i like to relate it to closeness. there's also the idea of truth somewhere in there. or maybe "true-ness" sounds better. anyway, none of this really matters much.

still hurts though. still love him. very very much. and i know this is different from the way i had loved all those other guys because this time it isn't wacko-obsessive. and it was never about wanting any reciprocation. i can honestly say that for the first time it wasn't about me and what the guy could give me or how he made me feel. with this, i think i'm starting to understand a tiny little bit of what richelle meant when she says real love is selfless. maybe one day i'll get to know what that's like.

it's his birthday next week. same day as allan's book launch. i'm so tired. i want this to get fixed but i don't know how. i already said everything that night. i'm just afraid that if i see him, i might start bawling again. don't want that to happen. at all.

the bad smells

i've always wondered why lots of people (in certain situations) don't even acknowledge they exist. the bad smells, i mean. to illustrate, let's look at three situations:

I. you walk into an enclosed space (eg, an airconditioned room, an elevator, a closet) with only one other person in it and you get hit by the huge ripe smell of Fart. what do you do?

a) make horrible strangling noises in your throat then stagger out
b) close your mouth, hold your breath for as long as you can, and do what you have to do FAST and LEAVE before you pass out from oxygen deprivation
c) light a stick of lavender incense and wave it around the other person while mumbling incantations in pig latin

II. you're on a jeep, stuck in traffic near a particular triangular island somewhere between philcoa and UP diliman. it's almost noon and the blazing sun overhead has caused volatile molecules to detach from mounds of brown stuff deposited there earlier that morning by people who live in boxes with zero plumbing. said brown stuff has been baking under the sun for almost six hours now. you remember that in order for you to smell this particular Bad Smell, said volatile molecules must waft through the air and make their dainty way up your nasal passage this fine lovely morning. what do you do?

a) look accusingly at the conyo colegiala currently slumming her way into the UP campus by sitting next to you on the jeep. when she feels adequately creeped out, you take out a fork you had tucked into your baunan for a vegan pasta lunch prepared by your sister and proceed to methodically stab your left eyeball with the tines
b) you hold your breath and die of asphyxiation while waiting for the jeep to crawl away from the island heaped with mounds of brown stuff
c) take out a your handy dandy bottle of pagoda cold wave lotion and hold it under your nose. you know the harsh chemical-y smell can cut through any yucky organic smell anytime. you keep a tissue on hand for the inevitable nosebleed. you dab gently at your right nostril

III. it's a rainy sunday night, almost 10 pm and you have no umbrella. you've been waiting two (2!!!) frickin hours outside frickin robinson's galleria after church for a taxi driven by a driver willing to leave the ortigas business district for the boondocks known as quezon city. you ignore the beat up geminis and the tiny clunkers that are kia prides because you're not THAT desperate to get home. finally a nice shiny new taxi with mag wheels and a spoiler glides to stop in front of you and yes, the old gentleman behind the wheel does not haggle or do any of the heinous things most cabbies in this country tend to inflict on innocent commuters. however, the fuzzy upholstery positively reeks like something had died on it and you realize the smell is coming from the guy behind the wheel. you know the smell will stick to your clothes, your hair, even the lining of your three-thousand-peso leather handbag from fino. the radio is tuned in to a popular religious program vilifying protestants and their quote fear of suffering unquote and The Smelly One gently touches the crucifix of the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror and he makes the sign of the cross as the cab exits to EDSA in recognition of the shrine set up in recognition of the miracle that happened 19 years previous called people power. what do you do?

a) you say, "mamâ, stop! ang kiyoho niyo naman!" and then you get off and take the bus home
b) you take out a tin of green tea solid perfume by l'occitane and you hold it under your nose from galle to the tiny street called misamis perpendicular to edsa between the main building of sm north and annex right before the pedestrian overpass. you make agreeing noises the whole time when the cabbie tries to draw you into the tired old spiritual debate of catholicism versus everyone else. you give him a twenty peso tip after you get off and breathe in a fresh lungful of air heavy with carbon monoxide, lead particulates, and tar
c) you pray to whatever higher power you believe in to either strike you dead or make you lose your ability to smell anything during the cab ride to your house

note that this whole exercise has no educational value whatsoever. i mean, i couldn't even be bothered to capitalize! but it was kinda sorta fun, no? heh heh. yeh.

the last time i went to church

...was two days ago. before that, it was too long ago to remember. circa late high school probably was the last time i went to church regularly. and since then, it's been the occasional wedding or funeral that has driven me into such hallowed sometimes-quiet spaces.

funnily enough, it was a disastrous fling with a liar that once again got me into a church. i had tried almost everything to get over this hairy chunky balding pretty-boy-gone-to-seed and his 80,000 kilowatt smile -- hours-long talks with a whole battalion of extremely patient friends, a sleepless night spent putting together a mix CD of happy songs, some misguided and very inaccurate tarot readings (both professional and self-inflicted), bottles and bottles of light beer (all i can afford lately), chainsmoking packets and packets of marlboro lights, a visit to the spa, several facials, long walks in the moor (metaphor!), weeks of wallowing, the baking of random muffins, cakes, puddings and cookies, etc.

i've even tried demonizing the guy in my head! you know how that works: calling him names, recalling him at his weakest and ugliest moments, etc. but i just couldn't. because no matter his three weeks of witholding that crucial bit of information (i.e., he has a girlfriend), the whole time we were...ahem, seeing each other (and said period being characterized by so giddy and obvious a transformation that colleagues stopped me in the corridors and asked whence such glow came from), i knew in my occasional moments of 97.8% lucid honesty that happy as i was being with him (e.g., boozing, hanging out, talking, etc.) , i could never let myself be with him on a permanent basis. as in no commitments, cannot be anything more than a very enthusiastic (haha) playmate. (i won't go into details, just that it involves diametrically opposed value systems, among other things.)

and so although it was great and it seemed like we were good together and wanted the same things, there was that gigantic BUT involved. so if i were a better person, this was when i should have stopped the fling. because if i must be perfectly honest, i was kinda playing him. the good person in me didn't want to hurt him or anyone (least of all myself) but i was enjoying said self and his company too much to actually stop. i didn't want to be accused of leading him on, etc. etc. that vamp-demon-in-a-skirt-other-woman role got old a long time ago. i wanted to come clean and i tried to (cf. that talk in that coffee shop).

BUT. despite all my reservations w/r/t playing him, i went on. (i can imagine my friends giving me a bitch slap at this point and hearing them say that i have nothing at all to be guilty about because he lied to me when i was being totally honest.) and that's the crux: i wasn't being totally honest. and so you can just imagine my annoyance (even anger?) when i found out that this guy that i was sorta playing had been lying through his beautiful teeth all along! haha. ha. my first semi-conscious, half-guilty attempt at playing the let's-just-have-fun-without-commitments game and i got effing played.

and so even if the fling lasted only three weeks and that i took the high moral ground and actually walked away (that is one noir-ish scene i will never forget: very filmic, with rain and the occasional yelling, and walking away in high heels and a tight skirt) from something i still wanted but was clearly wrong for me -- i still felt awful. i'm of course a little better now but i still have occasional flashes of what christians like to call backsliding. you know what that's like: those unexpected moments when your arms feel curiously empty, when you can actually feel the absence of the other.

so i tried doing all those things that i would do post-breakup. but. nothing. worked. so i started reading these two apologetics books by c.s. lewis because with them, you have to have almost superhuman abilities of concentration. it's not just a matter of understanding or comprehending in a rational or intellectual way the basic concepts of morality, religion, belief in a higher being, and what the heck all that means to someone going through real everyday problems like me. no, it also involves pausing every couple of sentences and, with at least 97.8% honesty, see how this or that idea/action/truth/etc. really truly applies to the way i choose to live my life, the small nitty gritty details and decisions that somehow add up to what we like to label with impressive tags: "Life" (note the capital L), "worldview", "lifestyle", "philosophy" or whatever.

and so that's how i got back to church. of course, my cousin A had a hand in it also, as she was the one who suggested which particular church we could attend last sunday. and i must admit here, since i am aiming for honesty, that it felt extremely uncomfortable attending worship service. i felt like a faker. i couldn't bring myself to sing along to their songs, mainly because i don't like that kind of worship music (watered down synth pop; i grew up singing along to 19th century church classics found in old hymnals). and after reading screwtape, i felt like the world's biggest sinner, a certifiable diabolical feast that would keep old slubgob belly up and belching for a while. but it got better after a while because the sermon (more like a scholarly lecture, which pleased me much) was very good.

i'm hoping i can get over my church-related quibbles and pretensions enough to actually go to church on a regular basis. but the whole communal worship thing is going to be really difficult for me. it's nasty but the word "pharisee" keeps popping into my head whenever i see eyes closed in prayerly delirium and hands waving in the air. i don't mean to be judgmental but i don't want church or worship to be a spectacular spectacular (cf. moulin rouge) but that's how most churches do things these days (haha, fallacy of the golden past!). so there. my snootiness and my "tastes" are what basically keep me from being the good christian that i want to be. awful awful awful.

and so i hope (and yes, pray) that i have it in me to do the right thing.

and that i can figure out whatever that is.

here and now.

apocalypse meow

it's the end of the sem and i have nothing to do. actually, i have tons of work waiting for me but i like to pretend that i can afford to lounge around the house watching pirated DVDs and reading the piles of books that keep appearing around my pillow.

i wasn't able to read much this last semester because MA classes forced me to read a bunch of other stuff (e.g., Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Rimbaud's Rainbow, Death in the Afternoon, A Moveable Feast, The Great Gatsby). talk about canon fodder. wahaha, i can't believe i wrote that.

and so the kick ass books i bought the past year are still on the shelf or teetering on the edge of pillow piles, threatening to kill me in my sleep. imagine coming to my funeral and seeing all my protestant relatives wailing over the fact that the combined hardbound weight of david foster wallace's behemoth Infinite Jest, ballard's Empire of the Sun, duras' The War and boyle's Drop City had bashed in the front of my skull during an unfortunate 3:00 am earthquake. tsk tsk. what a waste that would be.

that would also be the end of my dog. who would feed her and give the tummy rubs necessary for her survival? she's a lovely little lhasa apso who hates baths and who everyone hates in turn. my friend M calls her the devildog and my friend R feels this urge to kick her whenever she's in the vicinity. i think it's wonderful that this small handful of dirty white fur is actually able to sink her teeth with deadly accuracy into her choice target, usually my hand or my nose. her last attack involved an attempt to rip open my upper lip while i was kissing her between the eyes.

yes, kitty's her name and i love her.

riding shotgun

The guy who drives me home is always a friend of sorts and I’m always one of the guys. From the passenger's seat, some things always get cleared away: the girlfriend's pink sweater, the wife's hairbrush, a book he says I should be reading. Only then do I get to say shotgun, if only in my head. Because in most of these rides, it's just him and me.

Where I am, it's always past midnight and he's always driving me home. After a party, a book launch, a poetry reading, an ill-advised post-breakup meet with his ex-girlfriend. Always I’m there to keep him awake, to keep us alive. Each intersection we approach could become an explosion of crumpled metal and glass shards flying in glittering parabolas under the streetlights. We're both drunk and the air between us becomes thick with beer fumes and something else we both pretend isn't there. The slightest thing can set it off.

And this is where I have to be careful. Keep my eyes on the road and the lights flashing by. Try not to watch how the rain on the windshield is casting shadows on his face. The way he bites his lip when turning a corner. The shape of his mouth when he says my name. Those eyelashes. Things weren't always like this. Used to be that a car seat is just a car seat is just a car seat.

My first kiss happened in what I think was a Toyota Corolla. I'm probably wrong because I don't know cars, really. Red car, green car, new car, old. They're just things that people use to get from point A to point B, or in my case, from first base to second.

Anyway, I was nineteen, in a car with my best friend, after a night of hearing him play his new songs on my sister’s guitar, his voice scratchy from the cheap rum we’d been drinking. We’d spent the last couple of hours looking up at the moon, the clouds drifting across the sky. Some stars brighter than others. The sunken garden's clipped grass prickly against my back through the thin cotton of my shirt. One of the roving guards had come over and asked if that car over there under the tree was ours and could we please park it somewhere else. So we got up and parked somewhere else. It didn’t really matter where. We were both grinning like mad, couldn't contain ourselves. In the dark, we started giggling. We knew what was going to happen next.

My friend told me to take off my glasses, as he had: we were likely to fog them up. Then we exploded, laughing, the loud kind where you take deep gulps of air in between the hahas, and our brash young voices seemed even louder in that small cramped space and then his face was an inch from mine, big as the moon, and I had to close my eyes to keep from laughing into his mouth. I felt the gentlest of tugs, a small fluttering movement: young butterflies trying out their wet wings, flashing their colors for the very first time. It’s been the longest kiss of my life. Some days I can still feel it warming the corner of my mouth, the pulling away and the swooping back, never really letting go.

Which is exactly how my last boyfriend described the way I kiss. That story started in a car, too, with me saying shotgun in my head until all our friends got used to the idea of me sitting up front. I actually remember the rides more than the relationship. Those comfortable companionable silences we always had as the lampposts whizzed by. It didn’t last long, just a few weeks, and it ended exactly the way it should have: in the car, in a long awful silence, with the rain streaming down the windshield. Just like what happens in those old black and white movies.

Some nights when a guy is driving me home, we see bridges that aren't really there. Just early morning mist lending possibilities to a mall's grey pavement. The car slows and glides to a halt in front of my building. Then: A deep breath. A sideways glance. A hand coming to rest on my knee. In those charged moments before the door swings open, anything can happen. But I’m learning to do things differently now: a kiss on the cheek, a pat on the arm. Still, the hardest way to say goodnight is to grope for my keys, step away from the car, and walk up the dark staircase into my apartment, alone.

what now?

people keep telling me i should keep a blog. for three whole years i resisted, and i'm not really sure why. so here i am with my first blog ever. and nothing to say. what a great start.