Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

I've checked my rage and found it wasn't really mine. If anything my haunts have been largely imaginary, self-absorbed, and transient. But I'm a failure that keeps trying anyway. I'm happy with that. I've got freedoms people my age sometimes no longer have. I've got an okay sense of humor and a pretty good way with words. The heat in the Philippines will be the death of me, but I think everything's going to work out fine. Everything is working out fine. You just have to ask. :)

For Now, Rage

There are no words today that I have not said before, and this kills me a little every day. The battle in your mind, it leaves casualties. Ironically, not holograms of seasons past but real, actual people, and circumstances, and unborn universes. You have no idea how real an unborn universe is. And what happens when things don't happen because you didn't have the balls.

My name is X. They did not call me this for nothing. My years here have been normal, humdrum, unremarkable, the stuff of personal blogs and status updates that make your eyes bleed, or freeze, choose your metaphor, we're all adults here. And yet there is this: the thing that makes us the same. Inaction.

Flowers, now, for fellow soldiers. There is no dignity in thought. Certain triggers spur us unlike anything else, and each motivation is as individual as the marks on our skin. Positivity sounds fake to me, at least at this point, and despondency accomplishes nothing but that heart-wrenching muddle of forgotten plans and unspoken hurts.

And so now there is nothing left but the blinding, all-consuming, all-destroying storm of anger. Come in, old friend, we have centuries to talk about. It has been a while.

Three Things Right

Christopher Pike novels.

Taxi cab drivers who are not sleazy or evil.

Writing about crazy worlds.

Run and Write

Reserving juice for the the next few hours. We're gonna write a new world now, tucked in the sidelines and dark as hell, but you would recognize it if you saw it in a crowd of train passengers.

Perhaps this is all I am and that's okay. I spent the entire massage session yesterday wide awake, thinking about my life, and somewhere in the middle of it grew tired, spontaneously, like my life was not something of monumental importance.

That's one clue.

The truth is you can't give anything to the world that you're not generating inside yourself. And so perhaps our real work is finding in ourselves that which will make us happy. And then we have the slightest chance.

Take the Power Back

Here we are now. I turned thirty. I'm losing my powers. One of my office mates noticed. It's been bothering me.

Yes, I really do mean powers. When I was still quite happy and self-confident, I could often command both the weather and the convenient arrival of taxi cabs to wherever I happened to be standing. Soon after certain realities dawned, all I had was the flimsy ability to zap people with static at the office. And I don't even attribute that to my charming, guileless mess of a person but to my long, unmanaged but manageable hair.

It reflected much.

But yesterday, something snapped. The rains, which only reminded me too well of tragedies that were not really tragedies but spirit-toughening exercises, grew too strong for comfort yesterday. Going home in the cab, in paths that were once alien and hostile during those days of extreme grief, made me hate the fear that would well up inside me when I'd see the raging waters of the hometown river. There now, close to 18.

The thing is, I am a person of faith. Faith in something, that's for sure, faith in the collective desire of people to assert their sovereignty over all forces in the known universe in the face of growing terror. In the end, it is the misplaced arrogance of being the only thinking entities on this planet. But what the hell, I am human. I like being alive.

So when I think back at it now, here's what I recall. I pass by the river, too close for safety, as four wide lanes are now a single passable road, overpowered by the river spilling over onto the concrete. People with umbrellas are actually watching the water rise. Watching for the water level to reach 18 meters, which tells them all hell is about to break loose. Only hell in the form of water, and we all know what that means.

It is 6PM, the water had just hit 17 meters. In the AM radios they say the other dams have started giving out.

When I reach home everything is up at shelves my father made for precisely this purpose. My mother is slicing a hand across her chest, indicating that's how far it went up before, and so we should try and salvage what we could. Ironically, the double deck, my tiny personal space, would probably be the safest place to put important stuff. I try to make light of things. Surely a storm that strong would not happen again in the next ten, twenty years.

Time passes by slowly and quickly, we don't know anymore. We were waiting for we don't know what, really. We analyzed how things felt like the first time, and what should be our signal to evacuate. The rains get stronger. The sound is louder because my father had removed some patches of ceiling for a re-roofing project. There is water inside the house but because of leaks. I wish I could move us to a better-feeling place.

Forced to a standstill, my brother invents good vibes by ordering crispy pata. They would not deliver. I volunteer to get the food with him. We go out to fetch the food and try to ease myself by thinking hey the roads aren't flooded, there's nothing to worry about. But then I remember what flash floods mean and grow somber throughout the trip to the restaurant.

People were singing inside. Some ballad, I don't remember anymore. I happily shell out money the equivalent of three modest meals for a family of five. We return and eat and my brother and I have a laugh about this being very much like our last supper. In any case, we ravaged the poor things.

By 9PM the water was a little past 17.5m. I did a rough calculation and thought, at the rate the water was climbing, it would be at 18m by midnight. And I was growing sleepy. I could not be too sleepy for my impending demise. I struggle to stay awake. The rain grows stronger.

And then there it was, an invitation to pray.

Remember I was no longer doing the things that felt so natural to me a decade ago. I still had the books but more to remind myself that I could go back to it whenever I wanted to. But that they were vestiges of the past, too, and that none of these beliefs had been sturdy enough to sustain me. But I did, mostly because I believed my mother had a secret passcode to the heart of the universe whenever it was crunch time.

And so there, at what could only be at this point a little less than half a metre towards the 18 meter mark, the rain stopped.

Not completely, no, it was still raining intermittently this morning. But it was enough to buy us some reassurance that while we were all going to die some day, it was not going to be this night.

I slept on the sofa just in case.

In the morning, I thought about a lot of things but of one thing in particular. That we do belittle the power we have over this universe. And it is certainly appalling. I finished reading the book I read yesterday and made plans for the future. Stupid plans, really, but goals are at the core of getting anywhere in this world.

Adventures in Theoretical Physics

You would not believe the things that make me happy. Not the least of which is the brother telling me maybe you should start a blog. I am humbled. Truly blogs are the landmark of arrival.

King said something about size before that never really left my mind. Listening to Greene's Hidden Realities (and perhaps the inappropriate amount of time I spend watching and re-watching Fringe) sometimes brings tears to my eyes. I'm not sure why. There's something majestic about the laws of the universe when seen in the scope of human experience--and by that I don't mean the empirical.

For instance, I believe that pain and joy both summon energy, and therefore mass, not from nowhere, not really, but somewhere, and it doesn't matter where, only that they exist when we say they do. And by "say," I don't mean "say" inasmuch as I mean to "think up," or "give attention to," or "summon from the cosmos."

What of implications? I have them all somewhere inside me, but if forced, I might say that love does breathe life into everything, and that love is space, the space within space, the great animator. And that there is good in pain and in fear, because you know you are creator, you are not here simply to take up precious space. You can feel, you can inspire alternative realities, you can choose to be where you want to be.

It does make me cringe, sometimes. Emotions have no place in the sciences, but I'm the kind of girl who doesn't believe in walls, and separation and division and in not using the principles of one to apply to another.

I can't help writing about myself. I made a deal before I slept last night, to take away someone's pain in exchange for my life. I don't know what it means that I'm alive today, that we're both alive. The truth is you can say both there is no God and that there is a merciful God. And both apply, really and truly, and this makes being here all the more fascinating.

Today I will do secular, domestic things, but that doesn't mean my head's not in the clouds.

I Swear This Is Positive

I just got off of a long, debilitating train ride, the kind that sucks people in. In this tiny train, life was slow, but it never stood still, and the piped-in music from the other cars were jarring and overly loquacious, a hundred different angry people speaking at the same time. In this tiny train, you ever really only have one thought. No one loves you, even if they say they do.

They make you wear shades in there, so that everything you can see outside radiates with a blood-red sheen, so that everything's depressing and unfair. The air is dry inside, and you feel eternally dirty, and there are books scattered all over the place, but they are books without endings, page sixty-fours through page one-eightys.

But this post is really about the trip back. If the slow train brought you to a wrong place, the sad truth is you can't just get off and then get on the fast one. Things happen to you, and the things that happen to you don't really go away. The shades for instance. Trade that in too fast for a new one and your eyes will bleed. Understand your eyes, they haven't been seeing the light for some time.

But that's okay. The point is you are making that trip. The point is there are hundreds of you. The point is there are thousands now, who are already there.

So relax. You'll get there. We can run. Let me join you.

Bawal Daw Huminga

Don't know who's making the rules around here. Things, quite suddenly, feel right.

First Month Down

Well, everything worth saying has been written down anyways, so no point rewording reworded recipes for success from self-help books.

But this, what it means to me, one month down and the amazing thing is things have been going great at work and while I am frightfully honored at being part of this circus I still feel strangely inadequate.

I feel like Zohan. You should get that.

This is my landscape now: hands buried in the brown, murky waters and clean pebbles, looking out at the endless horizon knowing the way is hard but that my feet can take it.

I feel better now, whole. And red-hot unstoppable.

Six-Month Countdown Begins

You have no idea how hard I'm trying. I take pills to keep me happy, I jog, I run like crazy, I blast my ears with upbeat songs. But really all it takes is a blank and we're back where we started. I tried running away from it while jogging, pretending it were a monster chasing me to get me back to hell, but there it was just the same.

I really do want to be happy now. But not here. Not like this. Being boss-less is a sacred family tradition I'm all too willing to uphold. And I've invested so much, too much, to still be fucking sad at the end of the day.

And fuck you all hypocritical people who know too much, who say everything you feel is your own fault. I know it's my fault, stupid, I'm the one doing the feeling! But I hope to God you get ten times what it feels like to be sad. Because when someone is sad, you don't tell that person to shut it. You sit beside her and tell her everything's going to be okay.

Because we all know it is. And frankly it's just nice to be kind to each other along the way.

Sober Assessments

You can't beat the bell curve if you don't know where you are in it, so. It's not that we care, or should care, or that any other place is better than the other, but the point is in being somewhere, and then in the future being somewhere else. Progress is creation.

I'm working at a security company (not a securities company) as, essentially, a writer. I am turning thirty this year. I have not had a real dyadic/romantic relationship since birth, and people often wonder why that is so. I wonder, too, but it is what is, and there's no denying it. I am the younger of two, little sister to Bartender Extraordinaire, and we are both smart in different ways which is why B.E. lives for teaching, businesses and projects, and I live the sheltered life of 9-to-6ers.

We share the garage with a dog named Barack, who is one part Spitz, one part Chow-chow. I am tall, slightly overweight by my standards (although several people can still attest to my beguiling slenderness), and I have shoulders suggesting latent masculinity. I had my appendix removed in third year high school, and I am very allergic to dust.

Like you, I have dreams. These dreams don't matter in my sober assessment of myself, because, really, unless they're out there, they're not out there, but this only speaks of my lack of faith in my ability to follow through. In the end this is all that matters, not my skin color or my height, not my friends or my family or the people I work with and see everyday. Faith in the universe, but I am getting ahead of myself: I am a statistic, located in Marikina, breathing the same polluted air.

What makes me different from you is the illusion that I am not you. That I am separate, that we are separate, that we are different inside. I don't know whether it's true or not, I'm just calling it as I see it. I am left-handed, I write like a madman, I sometimes start stories I never end. To date I have published stories somewhere out there, but not in literary journals or in places where it would matter: a poem about my mother, a short story about an awkward proposal.

It's the ones I like that haven't seen the light of day: a story about a secret race of Watchers and a dormitory situated on top of an ancient house of evil, a story about a boy who falls into a river and acquires the power to recognize nodes: decision points in people's lives where new alternative realities are created, a story about a teenage boy in the middle of a lawless desert community who tries to solve the murder of a waitress found skewered in the outskirts of town.

My parents support this. I like unlined notebooks. I started liking metal ballpoint pens. I like bacon and SPAM and raw fish. I like computers and trees and wide open skies. I am you and I am not you. Like you, my ultimate dream is to be loved unconditionally, but like you I could not help myself when I instead look for love in pain, in situations I've called impossible, in needing and wanting and wanting so bad. We are human like that. But we are also wrong.

I do not know why we are wrong, only that we must be wrong because loving wrongly hurts. And we only hurt when we're in a bad place. Why stay in a bad place? We are as capable as the others to not be in a bad place: stories have told us, facts have told us. People overcome the strangest obstacles in the strangest ways.

We are ID numbers, names on lists, a nationality, a citizen, a patient, a customer, a face on a bus. But we are also energy fields, objects of affection, reasons for living, reasons for dying. We are the greatest entities in the known universe. Why must we feel so sad?

Hello, Fellow Prisoners

We are at war with ourselves everyday. We stare at these walls like they will eat us alive, like they are eating us alive, gnawing at our flesh and feasting on our blood. We feel compelled to fight--how else do you get rid of that almost suffocating restlessness? Move, keep moving, keep punching the walls.

Me and some of the guys, we crept near a corner, the one with a tiny hole. We're not sure how we found the place, you never really look back and check why you are where you are unless you have time or you're bleeding or you're lost. Beyond the hole there were moving creatures, creatures made of light, creatures moving so fast so we couldn't keep up with them, creatures making sounds, sprightly, tinkling sounds, like tiny bells. They were saying, or singing, something, but not one of us understood their language.

You grow tired, sometimes, of clawing out. So sometimes you close your eyes and think of nothing. And in those tiny moments, nothing more than milliseconds, really, the walls disappear.

They do. They become like cotton candy, and then cigarette smoke, and then they disappear. Sometimes when I feel they've disappeared I'd jump from where I was standing and make a break for it, but then the wall is still there and it hurts when you've launched yourself bodily into anything.

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's what the creatures have been saying all along. So I listen to them. I become older, and edgier, and my skin is drier than the prison floor.

When you listen real hard you can figure them out. Really simple things that can rock your world. "The universe is at your side," they say. Or, "Love is the point," and such. I say this to my fellow prisoners and they look at me with pity. I began to feel alienated here. Our main business, to escape from these walls, has become a thing that became less convincing the more time I spend noticing other things.

Like the smell of unwashed hair: unbecoming and old, but human. Like tiny tongues of moss colored green and black, ugly, yes, but so bare-facedly biological you just have to have some respect for them--organisms from a million years back, still alive here in our tiny hell holes. Or my fellow prisoners' light banters suggesting hints of a friendship, a kinship, we are here together and we will keep trying to break free.

And every day, since I started noticing things, the walls start to waver. Not for everyone though, which is why I sometimes think I am making this all up. The walls waver and become pliable, a billion little vertical strings you can part somewhere and climb into and out of.

There was one day, in the middle of a specially difficult day, when I actually broke free. It was beautiful.

Hyperreality

I've seen it done, so. But someone asked whether there was some other reason I didn't say yes to a viable option. I've always thought I knew the answer to that. But when it was asked I found myself speechless.

The truth is, and you know this, I am tired of being sad. I can tell you I know all about fate and destiny and how sometimes people are meant to be melancholy, that sometimes people enjoy being despondent. But I'll be the first to tell you that it's not a nice place to be in.

Which is why, despite full knowledge of tendencies to keep running into walls and jumping unprotected into bottomless gorges, I will keep trying. And the past may remain hanging in the background, and I might not be able to completely eliminate the effects of whatever happened in the past and what it did to who and what I've become, but I've found it pays to stop the addicting, debilitating kind of rumination I sometimes think my cortexes were made for.

I'm going to run my answers down until I can punch them in the face and call them all manner of bad things. Especially for keeping me waiting.

Plan B

It took us days, days, to assemble the road spikes. We had neutrino bombs waiting at the sidelines, Trojan horses ready with their toothy smiles and sincere crinkles at the edges of their eyes, we rehearsed everything from the approximate blood pressure of the caravan driver at the time of assault to the point-blank plunging of the spear into said driver's chest. Everything.

Everything worth thinking about and planning for, we did. Shobashi Wayne, the slit-eyed guy with skin like porcelain, kept coming up with stupid ideas to anticipate: a sudden sandstorm, the president driving, even the spear-bearer developing a brain aneurysm at the last minute.

I obliged, every step of the way, because this day was unlike any other. If this day pans out the way it should, I would have single-handedly brought this entire town to its knees. It was an important milestone, too crucial to leave to chance. I have the patience of a vulture waiting on a lion to finally die. I circle, invisibly, unceasingly, until a clear shot is made available.

It was all going to be beautiful. Except for one thing. The one thing we didn't even have to consider. The one thing we assumed would behave according to plan given the annual recurrence of the caravan arriving on the 20th of January at 3 in the afternoon.

It is this: that the caravan would be a caravan.

When I first heard the helicopter's rotor blades, I simply wanted to die.

Before Step One

My third night in a row thinks it should never really have happened but is thankful it did. Everything feels wrong and right and deadly.

What makes sense now? I don't know what to expect from work, from the family, from dreams sketched hastily at the back of unlined notebooks. And yet none of that matters. There is only asphalt and feet and a simple decision that should do wonders for a soul that had lost faith in itself and in the world.

Pure and full and black and white. Here in this world there is no try, there is do and not do. A curse, a blessing, that thin line that is actually a universe—three universes, even!—apart, the porous, scalable, absolute-ness of actually doing something versus just thinking about it.

How close we are to utter destruction every time we fail to try.

So It Goes, Also, To Be Made Stupid for Your Own Good

Things happen. Nights happen. Conversations happen.

The most unlikely things: someone eventually bashed my dearest beliefs about the world. There was nothing to it, really, because it was I who was sad. It was I who could not let go.

I won't idealize that moment anymore than it needs to be idealized. The long and short is that happiness is a thing you have to learn to generate inside of yourself, because any other kind is fleeting, illusory, and sometimes insane.

The realization could not have come at a better time, i.e., just when I've skidded over a metaphorical existential rock-bottom. The past few weeks, you still see me walking around but I'm really just the shadow of my former care-free self.

It is a sad thing to be dead before you're really dead. It's even sadder when it's your own beliefs that are killing you. Whether or not these beliefs are idealistic balls of magma that have become your very core. It is very sobering to see that you do have to live outside of your head to get that sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, often intoxicating taste of the real world.

And so I must, again, go out and do stuff. See you around.

Neurotic Alt+Tabbing

It's a sad thing when being in the world around supposedly the worldly wise actually roughs up the idealist in you to a point where you become convinced they're right, that the world is all about who can be useful for you, that the world will take advantage of you and suck you dry if you don't build defenses around yourself, that the universe is a wild and random thing you need to invent principles for so you won't go insane.

I'VE BECOME A VERY SAD PERSON, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

It was prettier before I met you, people of the world. Everyday I regret ever having opened my heart and mind to you. I had a way easier time believing the world loved me when I had the guts to just keep on offering myself like a fucking doormat. But why is it that that had to be a bad thing? Giving is good. Giving is supreme. But now I will forever carry with me the stigma of knowing. You become old and sad after that. None of it is your fault, people of the world. I just wish I'd been warned. So at least the sting would not have been as acidic.

The risk is pain. Mind-whirling, gut-wrenching, life-destroying pain. But what else is out there in that void of utter suffering? That blank between moments of weakness and moments of actual living it out in the world. Sometimes that's all I live for now. Alt (breathe) Tab. Alt (huff) Tab. Alt ( --- ) Tab. Switching madly from work to family to why the fuck need I be in this universe to love and hopeless hoping and falling in love with an ideal to why did I not shampoo my hair today to wow no more mannequins in the front lobby to dear Lord, take me now, I did not come here to feel such torment.

We Either Fight or Die

The meanings derived from everyday things continue to pale.

Enter Revenge

Some notes on revenge: I'm not a big fan, but I prefer anger to soul-shaking depression, so while it's here, I'll let it drive me.

The final friends said it best: get yourself out of there, and do that one thing you know will save you from utter destruction. Write, damn it.

But first, work.

I already told my mother about it, and she says, should I feel so inclined, it might be time to move on. Where will I find myself next? Will I settle again? Will I savor new-found freedom only to have to go back to the comfort of a steady job again?

A steady job is so tempting. So bloody necessary, so unnaturally liberating I can only guess I probably have no idea what I'm talking about while money and purchasing power fly in my face in sweeping, flowing pas de chats.

Anger, anger, why must you be a better ally than apathy? I was never a belligerent person, and I don't suppose I will begin snapping at random people, only that I will start respecting myself a little more.

We know this shameless self-centeredness should end soon, but let me live it out here, it's fine. I'm old but I'm stupid and I don't really care what you think.

Write Something Happy

I'm your fucking rock star.

I'm fucking your rock, star.

I'm fucking rock, your star.

I'm your rock-fucking star.

I'm your star rock-fucking.

Dirty, dirty words all over the place and I do not give a brown-eyed hoot. These daaaays I love when they're gone.