A Horror Story

We are back.

If you foolishly believed that the summer breeze swept us away, that talking and good humor killed us, that your every waking moment is no longer our territory, you are wrong.

We are a force that cannot be silenced by optimism. We are the bottled up frustrations that pop on every instance of second-guessing. We are the reality denied by your so-called friends and family, the very people that push you over the ledge.

We are the ashes of every cigarette stick, the remaining spirit in every discarded alcohol bottle, the shapeless dark entities in every chemical high.

We are the monsters hiding under the beds in your every childhood memory, the noise on the other side of the door, the embrace that  never came after a nightmare chill.

We are the stranger lurking in the dark alley, the knife longing to rape your genitals, the barbed wires racing to entangle your throat.

We are the ghosts of your murdered hopes and dreams, the poltergeists of your failures.

Don't look back, we are right behind you.

A red cup with nothing in it

Maybe it's the sea of interestingness constantly flowing. Never unidirectional, never simple. Never just a flow but a flux - an upwelling, a circulation, an advection.

Maybe it's the wishing for a restart on everything, but also the somber presence of the eternal fear. Never really acting, never reacting.

Or maybe it's the diversion and convergence of both; the presence and the looming disappearance.

I can't grasp anything, but I'm holding on to everything. Maybe I'd be eating wonder and frustration again for breakfast tomorrow.

Cheers to the metaphysical

I was told that people from Baguio are poetic after my friend Kenneth and I talked about the metaphysical during a particularly rainy afternoon somewhere in Diliman. I wouldn't call it talking, in so much as it is an involuntary reaction of our systems, manifested by sudden laughs after split-second soul breakdowns. It's a dark and twisted comedy Kenneth and I consume on a daily basis. Sometimes it actually consumes us.

In other news, I have been splurging on books the past few weeks. Here's my July reading list:

I think Immanuel Kant and I would be friends. Excuse me while I introduce him to Murakami and Fulghum. We're having beer.

Brick roads, stubbles, smoke and booze and blinking lights, and of course, biology

I think my brain is already suffering from alcohol-induced memory loss. Either that or I never really had sharp thinking faculties to begin with. What a sad after thought. But I guess there's more sadness out in the world than what my pathetic excuse for a thinker's brain can accommodate.

It's funny to think about inspiration and positivity, when one's grasp of the self is slipping during every quarter life-crisis-influenced second.

Power and possibility? My tattoo is laughing darkly in my face.

Maybe those colored birds with clipped wings being bombarded by camera flashes and unmindful tourists are having a better time than me.

To be, and to never become. What a sad afterthought.

The Art of Getting By -- not a review, but a review

I hated it when Murakami penned the summation of my existence thru his overcoat wearing, train riding, smoking character (at least that's how I imagined him) in one of his stories from The Elephant Vanishes. Something about fear and not knowing and hurting people during the process. I think this existentialist shit is getting old (after someone made it look like hipster emo).

I hated The Art of Getting By, too. Because the same overcoat wearing, train riding, smoking character was there, only this time he draws cute monsters for party invites and wears a t-shirt for graduation.

Maybe there's something about hate that I need to wind my mind around. I also like the word draw.

In bottles of beer and stolen glances

More than trying to get better, the attachment of one's self to the substrate of life is one of the greatest endeavors of mankind. Attempts on betterment is a usual force of age, or of continued existence, for that matter. But developing a certain form of holdfast to the steady rhythm of dynamism is never as simple as survival. Life would always be a challenge in itself, more than just a dimension of being.

So. I stare into the impossibility instead.

Black on plum and a mention of vanity and social rehabilitation

It's a working Saturday, and I can't start working. Maybe it's the uneasiness I feel about how my nails consume the microscopic amounts of vanity I painstakingly inhaled from various sources, some questionable. I can't produce a clean slate just yet, hence the black on plum. The mess is a shame for someone who has an eye for detail, and I know he has eyes not only for detail but for beauty. There it goes again, another mention of my hopeless fixation. Which just got hopeful. Or not. Black on plum. It would be a nice color for sketching his hands. Not that this information is for public consumption. It just came out of an abundance. Which is still running, as you can see. Get scared. Cringe. Now.

I am finding it easier and easier to be with the Y-chromosome bearing species, just like when I was a ten year-old tomboy in grade school. The DOST team is almost complete, and I almost didn't notice that the only one with ovaries is me. Which is a good thing. I don't feel like extracting more vanity for social purposes.

Murakami is great. No, scratch that. Murakami is relatable. For my dark and twisties-infested head, at least. Dance, Dance, Dance is a dimension of being I was once at. Or am still at. It's too dark to know anyway. The skies are the color of my nails. Black on plum.

I'm gonna go get another cup of that white instant coffee.

Kaleidoscope eyes

I guess the limbo effect is not yet over. My toilet time reflections are getting weirder, but my thoughts are getting more and more silent. Maybe it's still the overwhelming sensation of adulthood or some other form of the same shit. Either that, or the reality is I am entering a new dimension of being altogether.

Not that it's impossible. Yesterdays always seem burdensome, and the newness would emancipate another wave of newness, I believe. But the abandonment of a nurtured past, all of the colors I could no longer wear... it's a little melodramatic. And I like drama. It's beautiful.

So maybe the melodrama cultivates the limbo effect. 

Ubiquity of insignificance

You wish to matter. But the world is in color, and you are black and white. It was never simply black or white. Even greyness requires force, requires resistance, requires balance, requires stability. Sanity levels fluctuate every ten seconds; emotions eat off every microscopic morsel that gets left behind.

Then the rain falls. The flood is no longer physical. The cold is no longer physiological. Downpour and darkness; the struggle to stay standing. You are wet. You are perspiring, you are foggy, you are aimless, falling, merging, escaping. You are a million pieces of diamonds, yet you become shattered upon impact. Still, the lightning and thunders are scared of you.

Finally, the warmth. Which never comes.

Action and reaction fail

Maybe it's the overthinking. It could be the previously-sedentary-but-now-overworked thinking faculties. Or perhaps it's the sacred need to be away.

You can say that a clean slate is a gift, but I say it's merely a concept, the realization of which only belongs to the hopefulness of optimism. I look at pimple marks and I am reminded of how devastatingly real the dirt of Manila air is. I look at my wallet and ponder upon the nullness of owning. I look at the pebbles outside our laboratory and am struck by the awesome power of time, space, and memory. Maybe I am consuming alarmingly high levels of MSG.

Ahh, the sea. I know the waters will be murky. I've seen the sausages of sea urchins lurking beneath pockets of  smelly basins. The water does not flow. The water does not like illumination. The water is embracing a rocky stretch of waste and remains, of death and survival. I wonder if I could see life in the water. Or if survival would be everything there is.

My flash drive is a whore. But not as much as my shoes. I hope it's not too late to buy a condom for my sanity.

The scariest type of monsters are the ones that disguise themselves as people.

I have stared at frustration in the face. Along with defeat, failure, and rejection. Senselessness is also an inevitable presence, carrying along loneliness and misery. And you think, maybe someone couldn't go lower than that. Maybe.

Being aware about people claiming that they are lost, I couldn't help but imagine if we are in the same plane of existence. But then again, the realization that you are already too far gone is something entirely different from merely not knowing - what to do, where to go, which to believe - because essentially, being too far gone is knowing. Suddenly that Bible phrase professing "the more you know, the more it hurts," makes perfect sense.

Suddenly, an aching heartbroken teenager claiming that he is stuck in the moment fails monumentally in comparison.

Then, the human nature of finding someone to blame urges the soul to search for meaning in the dynamics, but utterly failing in all of its glorious futility. When something as grand and fundamental as existence is in question, pain becomes a sorry joke.

And trying becomes a daily effort. In the absence of philosophy's victory, science asserts control. The self becomes an object of evolution, of physics, of chemistry, desperately finding a single successful pathway of being. But even then, the tiniest molecules have surrendered to forces far greater, darker, stronger.

Finally looking in the mirror, you understand how evil is born.

The search for profound wisdom in a David Sedaris book and a Beatles song

I just realized that I am nowhere near brutal honesty, and that perhaps I could never be hardcore enough to live up to that title unless I grow an African American skin. The way I curse and profess my angst is a sorry fart in comparison to their glorious shits. Maybe my childhood was not crappy enough, my life not pointless enough, my existence not useless enough. For the nth time, my struggle towards the superlatives have failed me.

The horizon is still too far away for my reach, and since I couldn't smuggle alcohol in the room that I share with my brothers, I wake up most mornings and sleep most nights uncompensated for my brilliance. It's the kind of brain food that I let my sad but once dominant pride choke upon. One can only stare at the clouds for too long before coming to the realization that having constricted pupils in this dark and twisted world is not a trait that will ensure survival. I pray dearly for a genetic mutation or a change in the dynamics of natural selection. Maybe Darwin was just drunk when he wrote that book.

I remember Sheldon saying that yellow is the color of fear. And Rajesh suggesting that they name orange as the color of loneliness.

I looked down at my shirt and was struck by the fact that I couldn't make out whether I was wearing yellow or orange. Maybe both.

Essence

photo source

Biology teaches us that the central, most important part of a cell is its nucleus. It is where DNA is stored, and DNA is kind of what makes a cell function, as it is a set of rules, a history of activity and identity passed on and carried out for many generations. A cell, being the basic unit of life, is mastered over by the DNA in its nucleus.

And then you meet red blood cells. RBCs carry oxygen, and since they have to pass the tiniest blood vessels in our lungs, they have to be small enough, yet at the same time efficient. Hence in order to carry as much oxygen as it could while being able to squeeze through the tightest alveoli, a red blood cell loses its nuclues upon maturity.

I guess sometimes, we need to lose ourselves so that we could do what we are meant to do.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist - is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era (source)

 A few days ago, my friend Kim and I were having a conversation regarding existentialism borne of our individual bouts with depression - mine because of life not turning out the way I've planned, and hers because of medical school. She mentioned something about Zeitgeist: The Movie during our discussion on religion; told me that I should be careful if I decide to watch the film because it's seriously persuasive.

I checked it out and apparently, it's multi-awarded. Peter Joseph, Zeitgeist's creator describes the film as "not [actually] a 'film', but a performance piece, which consisted of a vaudevillian style multi-media event using recorded music, live instruments and video...The work was never designed as a film or even a documentary in a traditional sense - it was designed as a creative, provoking, emotionally driven expression, full of artistic extremity and heavily stylized gestures." (source)

These past few months, I've been developing an interest in German Philosophy after Kenneth told me about Arthur Schopenhauer, an apprentice of Immanuel Kant. It's peculiar that a lot of profound words we have today are rooted upon German terms that actually don't have English equivalents; take angst for example. And yes, zeitgeist is one too.

Should you be interested in watching, here's a copy of Zeitgeist: The Movie online (I have yet to watch it; the dark and twisted air due to the typhoon days ago did not help my attempts):

Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.

Dark circles

I learned to drink coffee during my sophomore year in high school. I had an incredibly boring teacher, and she administers quizzes everyday. Naturally, I wouldn't know a single thing about our lessons because I slept during her classes (though I would like to argue that those periods do not meet academic standards enough to be called classes). When I get home around five pm, I am already sleepy, so I started drinking coffee to get through Asian History.

And there I was, a thirteen year old substance abuser, loaded up on so much caffeine that I couldn't sleep at night (back then I didn't have a concept of caffeine overdose; after I finish a cup I simply made another one, such that I may have ingested ten cups a day at a certain time). Two am used to be my bed time, and I had to wake up by five. Now that I think about it, I was practically a zombie during high school.

Hence, the eye bags. I would have preferred dark circles around my eyes, but all I had were those puffy bags. I like dark circles on eyes, there's something beautiful about them. Maybe the depth it adds on a person, like seeing all those nocturnal adventures immortalized on a day time smile. It's like looking at someone and not seeing at the same time, as if the physical entity is merely a projection of the existential dimension you both share, but never of the other dimensions of being the person has. Like a secret you see and know, but can never really comprehend. A portal.

Seven years later, post-alcohol addiction and existentialism depressions, I'm still trying to get those beautiful dark circles instead of the puffy bags.