The Soundtrack of Our Lives

I was in great haste to finish some mundane task. But with a lightning quick maneuver, I managed to sneak a glance at my Facebook newsfeed.

It was then that I saw you, intense eyes staring right out of my phone screen. My heart lurched at the thought that you might be coming to the Philippines for a concert. Why else would CNN PH feature you? 

And then I physically doubled over at the headline. My boys started and frantically asked what was wrong as I kept repeating, no, no, no, no, with each word sounding like a shriek done in reverse. 

It was as if I had been disemboweled. I spent the entire night reading the comment section of your FB page. It was my only solace and refuge then. To know that I was not alone, that what I was experiencing was not some cultivated narcissistic affectation because after all, where do I figure in the great drama of your life? 

I read and read and felt to my core each testimony of indescribable loss. 

In those first few moments, I could not be anywhere else. Because those whose lives have not been touched by your voice would deem our grief theatrical.

But you have clearly moved millions by your music. And I, buried deep among them, echo the same sentiment over and over. You got us through our darkest times. Your songs have been the soundtrack of our lives, your haunting voice, the soothing elixir for our broken souls.

Chris Cornell, you're the shape of the hole inside our hearts. NO ONE SINGS LIKE YOU ANYMORE. 

What cannot be said will be wept. - Sappho

"In my shoes, a walking sleep
And my youth I pray to keep
Heaven send Hell away
No one sings like you anymore."

Devastated. Leveled. Stunned. Gutted. Reeling.

I don't know how to begin. I still remember 2015. I was planning to attend your concert in AU. It fell through and I let it go, thinking I still had a lot of chances to watch you perform in person. 

It "hurts so bad like a soul breaking..."  I love you. I love you. I love you. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Say it isn't so. 

The Architect

http://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality

All The Empty Things Disguised As Me

"The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies." 

(Ah, the irony of explaining why you hate to explain!)

-

I have been a Facebook prisoner for the better part of six years. I feel helplessly trapped, like an innocent man sentenced to Life Without the Possibility of Parole. 

An overwhelming chunk of the world's population thrives in the digital world. For a long time, I was part of this population. Until the unthinkable happened. I began unveiling my soul through social media, Facebook in particular. 

I am horrified at how I knowingly continue to be the most untrue version of myself. Upon reflection some years back, I discovered I lacked the gift of social grace. The smallest pleasantries vex me to no end. I am envious of people who can manage themselves very well privately and publicly. I wish posting my innermost thoughts brings me the same feeling of release as it does everyone else. Reluctantly, however, I can't help but regard certain people with the highest respect. Those who couldn't care less about Facebook. 

What a lethal combination for me to have a public account and yet hate small talk. When I post, it will almost always be about something or someone I hold very dearly. I am increasingly alarmed at the rate I am sharing the deepest parts of who I am and feeling extremely depleted afterwards for having let loose a part of me that I can never get back. Commiting treason against myself? A hundred counts or more.

Inevitably, with alarm bells unheeded, the Facebook culture has slowly seeped into my veins. I am aghast to look back at status updates about stuff I used to have the slightest concern for. 

The most distressful thing, however, is having to make allowances for the eyes that might read my posts. I keep making these allowances against my will and my better judgment. I abhor it in the strongest possible terms! It is like a corrosive substance eating away bit by bit the very fiber of my being.

So how do I walk away from it all and live as close to my nature as possible? Funny, to be in the viselike grip of something I thought was an instrument of Freedom!

To the digital world, please find below the reasons I am reluctant to deactivate my account:

1. How do I transfer into one personal file all the beautiful memories I have kept a record of in my account throughout all these years, except by the painstaking process of doing it manually?

2. Facebook bridges geographical distances. It keeps you connected to important people in your life no matter where they are in the world. Cutting this cord could mean ending the one thing that holds your relationship together, that sense of still being able to share the milestones in each other's lives, even if only digitally.

3. Facebook could save your life or those of others. Like television news, but only more accessible, it can be a source of live updates about current events, disasters and emergencies. And oh dear, I can't even begin to explain what this means to me.

Having reassessed the possible impacts of relinquishing these conveniences, I again vacillate. 

Aidez-moi s’il vous plaît! 

Cultivating the love of Woodpushing

The kids are becoming too addicted to Minecraft, esp. Hauz. So much so that Pappi and I had to stage an intervention. Any form of Minecraft is banned from being played at home. Pap and I have had a lot of rifts about introducing chess to the boys. 

We finally had a breakthrough when the other day, Pap found a way to make learning Chess more interesting. He figured that if there are youtubers for Minecraft, there must also be youtubers for chess. He found chess animations that really caught the kids' attention. 

And Lake is now becoming more and more engrossed in the game. Just about an hour ago, he pressed me to create an account for him at chesskids.com. This was such good news that I immediately obliged. His account name is NarrowSmoke. It's so amazing to know that these kids have a knack for online stuff. Lake has no trouble locating a player and inviting him for a match. I think his first game was against CleverCake. A little later, Sigh also demanded to have one. His username is WarlikeShed. 

Just a little disappointed that Hauz coudn't care less. But no matter, we will find away. He is a smart boy with hints of brilliance. Hopefully, in the near future, he would have a lightbulb moment.

Block 118 Lor 1 Toa Payoh 310118
20 Apr 2014
0125am


bi,

I wish you were here so you could hold me and look into the depths of my soul, to see me for who I am- a cold steel with a beating heart. I read somewhere that we never really change, that we only become more fully what we are. So after 3 decades, the self I thought I have only stumbled upon was revealed to me in horror and fascination. I am a thousand Gabrielle de Lioncourts and Christabel LaMottes, rolled into one.

My longing for solitude is equaled only by my desire for another being who would have the slightest understanding of who I am so that I would have no need to explain myself, to venture with words that never fail to fail me. On second thought, no, I don't even require understanding, as Eudoxia would put it. I wanted only a kindred, a soul made of the same stuff.

But what a powerful adversary life is. How easy one can be thrown into the mundane and be a slave to it. How effortlessly it has engulfed that part of me that yearns for the mountains, and green riverbanks, to wander around at dawn, holding your hand, and no one else's. To bask in the fading rays of the sun, to hear the ocean waves, to watch the stars and look death squarely in the eyes while this little spark that is our life together outshines even for a fleeting instant what is to be our destiny- oblivion. I love you, without meaning, without compass. I love you, like a question with no answers.

the little drummer girl

I have officially become a Gosling girl, just like the millions out there swooning over you. I hate being run-of-the-mill but I guess there is no way out of it, as far as I can see. One cannot watch Blue Valentine or Drive or Half Nelson or The Believer without knowing that there is something unfathomable about you. So there. I declare, I accept that I am just another statistic. Happy birthday!

My Immoderate Fondness for Ryan Gosling

Temperature check: forty one degrees Celsius. I have contracted the worst case of Ryan Gosling fever. Knowing me as only B does, I guess it is only understandable that he would feel a pang. I have a tendency to lose sleep over film and book characters.  And when I develop an obsession for someone who actually exists, though clearly out of my league, it scares him a little. I go through an indefinite stage of madness. (Sounds like an exaggeration until you witness it first hand, lol.) And so it has been for this past month. It started when I watched Blue Valentine. I feel like my heart just got torn into so many broken pieces and they were taped back together all wrong. So as a way to erase from my memory that image of Dean (Ryan's character) at the bathroom looking coyly at Cindy taking a shower, I had to watch a comedy movie. For no special reason other than that it is the most recent non-heavy film I have heard of, I chose Crazy, Stupid, Love. I was dumbfounded that it would be another encounter with him. My heart jumped after a fleeting close up of his face, with an expression that so resembled B's. I doubled back and had to convince myself that his shoulders are not wide enough for someone his height. And that his face has a longish quality that you don't normally associate with good-looking men. Of course you know what happened next. So by now, I had to be crazy not to do my research. I watched Drive and was pretty amazed that someone can have so many tricks up his sleeve. The Notebook. Lars and the Real Girl. Half Nelson. Ides of March. Fracture. And most jaw-dropping of all, The Believer. I am a sucker for depth in a human being and it is at once intoxicating and exasperating to be drawn to a Hollywood celebrity, of all people. Shucks, I sound like a school girl at the dawn of a new love. But darn, how exquisite it is to be reawakened!

My Tambourine Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMh8ReGEHdo&feature=g-upl&context=G2a6eb36AUAAAAAAAAAA

LOST

from my Friendster Blog
11/17/07

I’m crushed between
my left and right thoughts
I knock, and I swim, and I hide
deep in the blood of my veins
I wait to reach my eyes
as I open them
I float into the night
Oh, I’m lost, I guess for good
find me if you can,
I’m like that artist
with a carpenter’s hand.
I show mysef to you,
you try to read me aloud.
when you look again,
you realize I’m gone
won’t it be better if
I dont need you to understand?

Melancholia

from my Friendster Blog
written 10/17/03, 04:22pm 

you came like a vision. garbed in that raiment of shadows. you stared with clouded eyes and laughed with a mouth lined in pain. you waved to me. with that contriving left hand. that spins a wasteland of half-buried despair. i walked with hurried steps. to you. it was folly. you’d let no one through. that impregnable door of your desolation. in the silence of your wailing, i saw you smile in triumph. i’m sorry, i didn’t know. you were waving me away.

A Confession to Her

from my Friendster Blog 
06/28/06 11:55am, guada

what did i know of transcendence before i met you? i have always taken pride in my ability to brush aside conventions, norms… fancying myself too enlightened to bother with such social impositions. but your very name alone humbles me which is by no means the only thing about you that does. and i guess, finally, this is transcendence. what is gender to me now?


–about a stunningly beautiful being of the same sex (@ambergris)

Musings

from my Friendster Blog 09/04/07
written 08/14/07  9:25am, las piñas

I am a walking time bomb. I wait to explode but instead I crumple unto myself, like a doll made of paper. The past laughs at me, mocking my indifference to the lessons it had plastered on the walls of my eyes. You all smile knowingly and I look with studied nonchalance. Someday, John Galt will have nothing on me. For now, let the song stand in my stead. 

" And all the talks and all the lies were all the empty things disguised as me…"

Undead

from my Friendster Blog
written 10/30/07

how do you emerge from a life fraught with so much disillusionment? why have i allowed my insatiable passion to die? my tongue has gone to sleep and my fingers are typing words barely recognizable to me. have i finally succumbed to silence? i can remember a time when i was capable of extreme anger, joy as oppressive as grief, pain that makes you want to lie down on the pavement while it rains… i can recall purposely contracting dengue fever just to make a point and even hammering my first mobile phone into pieces in a fit of rage. i can recall how hard it was to breathe with my heart pounding while i willed the pacers to win game 7 against the bulls. i am reminded of the jolas days, the sorrow over the loss of my faith in a supreme being, the amazement at frank mccourt’s life, the bitter disappointment that i can never pen a novel as life-altering and all-encompassing as the brothers karamazov.

i used to feel with an intensity unparalleled by those i know. but i have forgotten how to become that person again. i don’t even know if i care. sometimes, i think to myself that like tristan (legends of the fall), maybe, i am the rock they broke themselves against. perhaps, it’s only that i’m too strong for normal people. but of course i know better. it’s only indifference, obliviousness, detachment.

it bothers me that this does not bother me at all!

The Downside of Acute Self-Awareness

from my Friendster Blog
written 12/05/07

for a whole month now, death has haunted me. i mean i’m sure most of us have a fear of death. it is a natural human reaction to the unknown. i used to spring from my bed at night at the sudden realization that we do die, all of us. for quite a while, this fear, well not so much fear as it is helplessness from something imminent and inevitable, this feeling had been relegated to some remote part of my brain. and for reasons still unknown to me, it has resurfaced with renewed force. i wake up and laugh at the meaninglessness of it all. why, we do worry about so many things! so many things that in the end would make no difference, would not cause a ripple in our transient existence! we work so hard to get paid to buy our needs to survive day to day only to die. it makes perfect sense to say IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE AT ALL!