Ang Emisaryo

Matagal na daw nakalipas ang Dark Ages. Ang mga librong may paksa tungkol dito ay kung hindi nasunog noong mga nagdaang digmaan, malamang-lamang ay nabaon na ito sa lupa. Sa katunayan, lipas na lipas na ang paksa at kung uungkatin mo pa ang buong silid-aklatan ay siguradong ipapadala sa’yo ang emisaryo ng Constantinople para linawin ang pagtatapos ng Dark Ages. Tapos na ang lahat. Wala ka nang dapat gawin. Hindi sapat ang pagtunganga.

Wala nang Dark Ages? pabulong mong nasabi. Maya-maya, habang hinahanap mo ang pinaglagyan ng libro ay dumating ang emisaryo mula sa Constantinople. Tandang-tanda mo pa ang simbolo sa kanyang kwelyo: ang Haring Charlemagne. Sa liham nito sinabi na tapos na ang Dark Ages, nilagdaan na ang kasunduan sa Izmir, kasama dito ang paghahati-hati sa Pharsalos, Nicaea at Pergamon, ang pagpapaunlad ng Troy, at ang buwanang miting ng mga haring Griyego, Ruso, ng Romanya at iba pang mga karatig-bansa tulad ng Pransya at Alemanya. Nabunutan ka ng tinik, naliwanagan sa liham, at dali-daling naaya ng emisaryo na manigarilyo pagkalabas sa silid-aklatan. Nakalalango daw talaga ang mga insenso sa panahon nila’t hinahanap-hanap n’ya ang hagod ng Marlboro Black.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 12, 2010 at 10:56 pm, filed under Stupid, Tagalog, Vignettes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’ll walk my thoughts with a cigarette

My readers,

Too much vignettes I’ve been writing lately. Probably because I’ve been into Livejournal these days (made it three years ago and it’s only now that I’ve revived it for very personal reasons). Been listening to a lot of Up Dharma Down these days. Depress the hell out of me by singing the lines from The World Is Our Playground And We Will Always Be Home: I swear I belong / this is where I belong.

Triggers have been sent. I just woke up one day not feeling comfortable with my roommates. Our thoughts clash, our philosophies in a state of derision (because derisive is such an awkward word). Problematic enough that I’ve been planning to move to another apartment next semester. Problematic enough that I reside in the apartment to sleep and wake up. I even forgot my keys a while ago. Signs are surfacing. I’m not buying this shit anymore. It’s probably just me overreading things but I’d love to stay in another apartment and do (cook, smoke) anything I want.

And then I badly need a housemate. Like Sheldon Cooper, I do have a single requirement I’d rather not discuss here for the fear that my roommates would read this. We should have the same interests. That’s it. I don’t care if he’s limp or, I dunno, messy or anything.

My poetry class have exhausted me last weekend. I had to write five Tagalog poems under a theme I proposed (that is: tragedies in everyday life, where images of calamities should and must surface throughout the poems as organic as possible, and that it is a commentary with the mundane). It actually made me think: tragedies occur in the everyday. I’m proud of doing poetry for a while but I fear I should stop it. It’s too heavy to handle, too emotional, even. It’s not definitely as light as fiction. I’ll post it some time.

To bombard you with the mundane:

1. My wallet was lost last Tuesday. Contains several twenties. My ATM closed last June so I don’t have to worry. Sadly, all my Cinemalaya tickets are there. Memories: receipts, ID pictures. A condom. More receipts. My fucking school ID. How lame.
2. I’ve quit alcohol (thank god it’s working for a month and a half now).
3. I’m addicted to something else.
4. Health is at the least of my priorities! That’s… surprising! I jogged once last week, once two weeks ago, and I feel like I don’t have the will to run. Who am I running for, anyway? Back then I run for myself, to trim the fats and everything, but now I’d rather run away from myself because OH FUCK I’M RANTING.
5. Been skinning my lips again. I’ve been working on it, but it’s a sign of insecurity. Problems. Spaced-out days. The dry weather. Overanalyzing things. Stigmas. Issues. I’m getting moody sometimes. This is bad. Lips tell a lot, really. Basically you just have to stare at my lips to see whether I still function. (But that’s awkward.)
6. This is one of the lowest points of my life, but this is Livejournal shit I’d rather not write about.
7. For three months I’ve only went home four times. Last time I went home I slept for twelve hours, and then another twelve hours, then another. Dad thought I died. Friends have been calling me, asking where the fuck are you? Oh, I overslept.
8. I have one mushy line in my poetry, and it says (translated from the Tagalog): I’d want to tattoo your name in my body / under my eyelids / at my shoulders / at my nipples. It’s funny. No, I made up that nipple part.
9. When you do poetry and you’re shallow as fuck (just like me), you’re either of these: depressed-slash-suicidal or wide-eyed-romantic. You can’t go in between. You’re just either of the two. Labeling poetry classmates as these is a very honest pastime.
10. My professor in prose said you have to lose faith in something to know if you do have the passion for it. After a brief discussion on metafiction, I winced. I’m starting to hate the world (specifically the contexts I’ve been noticing in the world, in the society).
11. When blog posts start in you, as in “you, who shakes the bed with me,” it all gets whiny and mushy at the same fucking time.
12. Man, did that make you laugh.
13. Cloud 9 is made of win because they put cereals on it nowadays.
14. Seriously, this is one of the lowest points in my life. Friends aren’t friends anymore. I couldn’t disclose everything with them. Now friends should understand you, in a way, but most of them? They don’t.
15. See how the “you” sounded pedagogic? And mushy?
16. I haven’t watched too much Big Bang Theory that much (a couple of times, really) because I might get addicted to it. I get addicted to easily.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 5, 2010 at 2:19 am, filed under IRLs, Last song syndromes, Life at UPLB, Pensive shits, Sentemotional, Slang and random, Stress ball narratives, Stupid, Vignettes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

My cluttered life

2PM today, at the back of a t-shirt tag (which seems important enough to be kept; why am I very sentimental?) I wrote, and this I post in verbatim, and the tag–as I’ve always planned–would be pasted in my Moleskine for sentiment’s sake:

I consider writing as a specimen, treat it like a specimen, because it shelves with it a fragment, a moment of time.

With movies: Man is in love with making sense of everything. But, in the very harsh opinion of the world as nothing but a world–no art, literature, history or anything, films don’t make sense anymore, because what it talks about is nothing but farce made by society.

Information amazes us, makes us think of ourselves as smart, as someone more than ants, yet ants might say “these animals made too much bullshit.”

Another entry was written last Tuesday at the back of a Psychology–wait.

I went away from the laptop and tried to find where my note was. Not in the back pocket of the Moleskine. I lifted the laptop, scanned the desk, crawled under the table to look for the paper, then at the pocket of my luggage (just in case) or at my laptop bag or atop the table with my Limp Bizkit CD and bottled mustards and tikka masala and even had the guts to Google for the remembrance charm I read at some book I ironically forgot the title (was it Fight Club? Salinger’s Nine Stories?) because I thought it might help and… WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT?!?

Bullets of fuck, fuck, FUCK!!! was all I said while searching for the note. At 3PM today I was at Barnes & Noble Bookstore at 5th Avenue and was trying to figure out the location of the lost note. I didn’t find it at the Moleskine’s back pocket, and the same stream of bullets I hissed under my breath, conscious for other people in the bookstore, though I only scanned my backpack thoroughly for the note. Not at the laptop pocket, not in my pockets, not even at the pouch for bottled water. It wasn’t exactly important, but with my extreme inclination for sentimentality it is important.

I suspected that the girl who was sitting besides me–wearing a blue-green blouse if my memory serves me right, blonde, college, and coincidentally a prolific note-taker too (though she feverishly writes in a little steno notebook in a write-look outside the window-write fashion, as if she was writing about the landscape)–got the note. She probably stole my note. (Psychologically we’re talking about external locus of control where a person blames outside forces for faults, mistakes, etc. Just saying.) Maybe she is an aspiring writer too, or a writer-to-be, or a real writer who has been attending workshops for the past three years. Well, fuck her, I said, and I wished I didn’t open the swinging door for her at Port Authority. I wished I knew beforehand that I was losing the note at the bus.

I found the note at the study desk of the basement–my beloved room–and felt glad it didn’t really ruin the day. I told myself to forget the girl and sent apologies I know she wouldn’t receive. Then I remembered her face and it suddenly occurred to me that she was pretty (probably because of the knowledge that she didn’t steal my note after all), and that I was looking at her from the reflection of the metal furnishings of the bus as she scribbled away her thoughts, but I think they were lists.

Let me take a picture of my study desk.

Here.

Where was I? Oh.

So I found the note and, if my memory serves me right (though it blatantly is wrong, proven by the second loss of the note) I kept it on the back pocket of the Moleskine. I felt happy, ate chicken with gravy and corn and peas and rice. I then tried to make a movie review of Mammoth, but failed to do so. I thought of what to post next and I thought of the notes, that they probably can be a good topic to dwell on.

So I rummaged my Moleskine’s back pocket and found the aforementioned note I quoted just a while ago. The note which I thought I lost at 3PM and found at 7PM was missing, this time my ears reddened (this happens most of the time when I lose my temper or becomes impatient).

To chronologize everything (and not based on my very helpful stream of consciousness: 2PM I was at the bus, 3PM I was at Barnes & Noble looking for the lost note, 7PM I found the note, 12:30MN I lost the note again).

Then I thought of my sister’s story just after dinner, when we were talking about ghosts, that in the basement of our house in Bulacan was a ghost who steals things (I suddenly felt scared right now, typing this) and then puts it back on the original place for some time. (I feel very uncomfortable now. Why do I have to share this?) The incident actually took me back to High School days when I feel like someone was really fooling around with my things (I actually talk to myself in my room cursing a goddamn ghost).

So I found it. Again.

I found it sandwiched within the pages of the Moleskine and not on the fucking back pocket. In verbatim, I shall quote the note written down at the back of a Psychology Test in my Psychology class last semester:

JFK BLVD EAST 2:25 PM May 19: Tues

If you feel like you’re in a movie (like in a bus or someplace, listening to toe [it's a Japanese post-rock band]), well it becomes true. Movies aren’t true. When you become in a movie, movie becomes true. Is it a movie, after all? Everything in a movie may pertain to some truth, but in the very sense it still isn’t true.

You can’t be in a movie.

Oh great. This is just the first part of the note and I snickered because of this pseudo-philosophizing. Heck, I couldn’t even understand it now. What I think I’m trying to say is that you (real) can’t be in a movie (unreal) because movies are naturally (unreal) though, as I have said it, it pertains to something real (but still remains unreal).

Then, again in verbatim:

MAY 26 Tues (Oooh?) [That part is written, and the bafflement was out of the coincidence: why every Tuesday?] JFK BLVD East, about 1:37 PM

At the small town of Guttenburg the bus stopped for passengers. I was quite having the migraine of my life, probably from the stop-smoke-stop rhythm of [my smoking] Marlboros every week, and with a stroke of luck climbed four, five Indians wearing their sarongs smelling summer and curry blended together like a fumigating fog of teargas. God, I died.

Back when I was writing these three notes I felt creative, but now? No wonder my notes get lost all the time; it’s not worth reading.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on May 27, 2010 at 2:14 pm, filed under IRLs, Pensive shits, Slang and random, Stupid. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.