the sudden clue sleeps

Ma'am Jing threw me a clue in class. I caught it in midair, like an afterthought. I shot my mind's hand up, absentmindedly, and cupped it. It's like when you're pushing your grocery cart down the isle, mentally squinting (what is it again that I need?) and you notice you've been holding something you picked up from the other isle: ahh! this is it! A clue. I hate my own writing, the clue said, because I listen for flight. For lyricism. Something I only mold in moments of downward plight. Or fleeting out-the-window gazes. Not a mood in the everyday. But if I hummed a metaphor and a rhythm for every articulation, I'm thinking I'd trip. Getting up, dusting my knees, I'd mumble and go for blunt and pedestrian. Like pulling out a branch from the mud, because I could shoo a stray dog away with it, just as I could with a sleek 9 iron golf club. The shame of the mundane! (When I read recent journals I etched in fatigue, I squirm at how wayward and pointless they sound.) 

To talk always in poetry. How else must I talk to myself so I'd listen? (Note to self: you're not even a poet.)

-----

A classmate, naturally I didn't ask for his name, because I thought I knew, and the way we talked, it's as if he knew that I knew, anyway, I've dropped hints in our talk that I'd show him my on going sudden novel. Sudden novel. I'm still reveling in the sound of that. Sudden. Novel. That's not a short story. It's got chapters. Maybe even an epilogue. A sequence of parts that long is not ordinarily sudden. It is not. But it is. Each chapter, composed of smaller scenes (episodes), are written like sudden fiction. Smallish, self-aware of a time limit, and they end in the moment following the moment they started. Put them all together and loop some scenes and symbols, and that's a sudden novel. But will it work? I'd have to put the chapters side by side and let another pair of ears listen to the short burst, for his mouth to sip the teaspoons of scenes. Since I'm inflicting this on him, I should know his name. 

-----

Turns out one of the short stories Ma'am Jing assigned is a chapter of a novel. Sly devil old woman. Fooled me into thinking we were into short short fiction (the other name of sudden fiction), not that I complained. If a chapter is that full and yet so short, how would the entire novel taste like? Anyway, what's important is that I skittered into class unprepared to talk about my assigned story. I could talk, yes, but it would have no shape. A chaos of rambles. Good thing she upped her chin in someone else's direction. The guillotine fell not on me. So I'm uploading my more refined, thought about, talk, to our eGroup, over the Christmas vacation. 

-----

One of the stories assigned is written like prose poetry. How can people write like that? (Translation: what the fuck? this is so great! i can't write like that even if i trained for a lifetime.) 

-----

One should stock up on sleep before running off, blinking silly, out of the house after a sudden toothbrush, so early in the morning. I had to catch the train to class two cities away. That's probably why I couldn't think straight about the story assigned to me. I had only read it twice, with no notes etched down. Just some confident private mumbles. But at the time those mumbles, my mumbles, about the story, seemed brilliant. Therefore I was brilliant. Sadly, no greatness survives when you articulate those mumbles. I hereby promise to sleep the night before. 

when the fog clears

I'm not even sure I want a cake. But my wife insists, and I think she's right (I'd probably want something to see that sets the theme), so I'm hovering over images of nothing but chocolate in my head, and the memory of my not wanting something so sweet. Maybe something with some filling inside, something that, when I rub my eyes in the wee hours of dawn, when the refrigerator fog clears, pokes me awake (a discovery): hey there's a cake here--I'm digging in. Over and over. Because it's not so sweet. And there's some filling inside. The last thing you want is to keep seeing cake and keep being reminded there's cake and whose birthday cake is it again, and that oh, there's cake, you want some cake?

Ayokong maumay.

And please, no two candles stabbed into the cake spelling out my age. We almost always eventually have to pull them out of the cake. Because the cake won't fit in the ref with the candles jutting out. And we're sure we'd see the candles later, in the same drawer where we keep the kitchen stuff, like old knives, barbeque sticks, plastic forks and spoons, electrical tape, and an unused can opener. Someone but someone on someday will slide open that drawer and see a 3 and 2 with wicks burned long ago and holler, huy, birthday ni Yayen, eto o, look: proof.

But that's in the foreseeable future, far and away from here, which is now, and now is the time for a cake. My cake. Darling, you buy. You choose. You know me better than any other psycho with thinning hair.

I'm gonna go grab the cat and hose him in the bathroom. It's my birthday after all.

almost a week

The thing about completely freelancing at home? Even after you've marked your work hours, your mind is never really away from it. I'm ronin. Again. But I don't even see it as work anymore. It's been six days since I quit my affiliate marketing manager post in Makati. Never felt better. Wish I quit earlier.

I'm just resting a bit before I go back to cleaning manuscripts to submit to clients whose names I can't be sure are even real. But they do pay. And they're polite in their emails. And they like my writing. if only I had the patience to copyedit for them for long hours. I don't have a proofreader's eyes. But I am retraining myself. I get paid extra for that. I just don't want to edit my own blog entries. That would be depressing.

Been cleaning up wedding jewellery articles for some British websites since this morning. This one article I migrained through, its title had nothing to do with the first paragraph, and the rest of the article had nothing to do with anything else preceding it. Wow.

This is who I am now.

a long overdue requiem

My art historian former boss, the eternal-bachelor graphic artist, my funny-chubby managing editor, and even the short and nimble utility guy--the people in my previous writing life--showed off, to me and Anne, their posh new office, and that they could elbow me some room in it ("We could compress and give you space right here," said Denes the graphic guy, pointing over Yam the fun-chub managing ed, showing that the continuous desk held only three people, but could in fact take in four; and one could probably squeeze in between Denes' iMac and Yam's PC: good luck to me, Yam isn't exactly small). Anne and I were visiting.

My former boss, the director of now three culture-and-media-related offices in my acacia-tree populated Diliman alma mater (he used to command just one) was blunt as usual: "So, are you coming back?" I buried my "No" in an awkward laugh.

Anne had to get used, again, to the open-air and thick and fresh air of the campus. Makati fed us only thin air. We moved out of our apartment near UP last December, bringing our cat, taking with me few memories of a savored writing life I can't reclaim. I'm different now. But no one among the smiling faces in the new cozy office can tell.

It's like coming home for the holidays. You see your old room, smell the scents of childhood, touch the old trees, listen to the old people, taste Grandma's cooking, and be reminded of the singular fact that you don't live there anymore.

You watch the old Saturday morning cartoons and catch yourself silly, still enjoying them / and you catch yourself silly, amused that you enjoy them when they're rather lame. You're divided. It's like your holding the hand of a four-year old watching a TV show outside a store's display window. The little kid tugs at you, this won't take long, can we stay a bit longer? The taller you gives in, all right, just a bit, but we have to go later, I have important stuff to do. And you do.

I quit my alma mater's PR office almost two years ago, and I've been churning out copy under unrecommended writing conditions: under an old aircon that could have thudded on my head anytime (during nightshift in anonymous Ortigas building), during daytime in our previous apartment, where neighboring kids yelled at their mothers for yelling at them first, and now, as a species-of-marketing manager where I'm more of a spammer than writer. A pen for hire has seen better times.

One must makes the monies. One yearns to write again. One wants to look out the window and sigh. The kid tugs at you again, and you have to tell him, breaking his heart, but knowing that he'll live through this, because you did...

You can never come home again.

pam got the cat's tongue

The cat is noisy. Pam talks to the cat. 

Pam: "Gusto mo ng pansin?"

Cat: "Meow."

Pam: "Ano tingin mo sa 'kin, kuhanan ng pagkain?"

Cat: "Meow."

Pam: "Maganda 'ko di ba?"

Silence. 

if you can write, then you can earn on the side

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Iron Man

It was a relief, finally, to watch a hero-origin movie whose actors, and the script they danced to, allowed you to forget the film's preposterous plot: a weapons-making billionaire builds a suit of armor and redeems himself through it. But with a solid cast and clever dialogue, and an action scene that relied (thank God) on Robert Downey Jr. fighting partially armored, and fumbling, we have a movie that trumps the origin stories of other hero movies (so far).

Though a Batman fan, I have gotten tired of the overly serious trauma-as-vigilante-catalyst angle. People get bullet-holed in front of their kids, we know that, we see it on YouTube, read about it in the papers. Statistically, at least one of those parentless kids is bound to be both smart and an heir. I'm just not so sure if he'd turn out to be dark as the Bat.

Similarly, I doubt if billionaire scientists will build weapons to suit themselves with, but "Iron Man" takes this premise without taking it too seriously, and that's the pure joy you get from watching Iron Man: you are never truly asked to push your threshold for disbelief. What is so morality-heavy about flying around with super weapons? 40-something Stark did. Stark's desire to redeem himself was really something thrown in for convenience, something you could forgive. Like trauma. He'll get over it. And that's ok, Tony is Tony.

Meanwhile you watch him fly and fumble and finally realize he actually likes his secretary.

(By the way, if you've seen the film, did you notice that there was always dialogue happening even in the midst of so much fighting? That's the beauty of the film. The CG was there for the polish, not as the backbone.)

Cheers.

you can't drag it with you all your life

I used to have a room made for daydreaming. Mornings were a golden brown glow, six a.m. light dampened by thin bamboo drapes over windows. Windows left half-open, and through them cold air filled in, like a slow fog, nowhere to go, and so it stood still. I would pull my blanket up, covering me whole, through those cool golden mornings, cocooning myself deep in white, white laundered so many times Mother said she'd have to cut them in large squares, fold them into rags, and what good rags they'd be, she said. I said no.

It had, that blanket, so common a design you could walk into any public market, grab a blanket from any stall that sold them, choose the white with wide-apart blue stripes, and flowers here and there, and you'd have my blanket.

But not that blanket. That one, remembered too much. It knew of a time when windows where half-open, and one could cocoon oneself in one's dreams. All morning.

With no one saying no.

Long, even beats

I'm exhaling loudly through my nose again. Slow, even long breaths, filling my lungs with air and helping not in the least. I'm that pissed. I'm trying, like I promised my therapist, to be aware of how I appear to other people. My dropped down shoulders rising to every inhale, my feet planted firmly and wide apart, my hands wanting to claw at something, my eyes in slits.

I blink and imagine wide open fields, like my therapist said, sunny all around, not a soul in sight. But the image in my head is a Gilbert from accounting choking into purple, the twin thumbs of mine digging into his adam's apple. But that's self-indulgent. I blink again and shake the scene out of my head.

Mark from marketing walks past me and I smile. He throws me a nod. I give back a shrug and that's the end of that. Socializing without words in corridors. Mark was probably sent to check up on me, how many veins on my skin-head skull is popping; he waits crack, as he administratively holds my section's new budget proposal hostage.

I've decided it's two-for-one month. Mark is joining Gilbert at the back of an anonymous van. The one I haven't used in a year. Because I thought this year would be a good one.

I exhale, relieved this time, the kind of exhale an pest exterminator gives out after examinining a house falling to termites. It'll take a lot of work but it can be done. It will, be done.

I walk to the end of the corridor smiling. Mike sees me again and his foreheard wrinkles up in a question. I throw him a nod and a smile. He's getting what's coming.

And oh am I coming. Am I coming.

disquiet

He sits in front of me, from across the table, like a wax statue: his back straight, unmoving; his gnarled hands cupped over a walking stick pointed at the wooden floor. His eyes straight into mine. He doesn't need rigor mortis to lock his limbs in that pose. His pride will do him in, and as the first-born, I should inherit everything (but he has to die first).

But as the only de la Casta to be cut off (cast off?), I'd get nothing from the old man. Father closed his banks, shut down his factories, and shook other gnarled hands, for the last time, fifteen years ago. I was fifteen.

Business, I always thought, appeared in Alejandro's mind as a means to buy respect. To my two uncles, father's brothers, business legitimated loud nights drinking with the governors, the mayors, the head of police, and actors who brandish guns. Business was, to the other de la Castas, a given. A wallet to open up in public, to draw in envious eyes, to waste and wine.

So when Emerito and Pablo de la Casta stabbed their eldest brother, and left him for dead, mother's heart stopped, right here, on the spot Alejandro's walking stick points at. Like an epitaph.

Father stomps his stick once. It is enough. I raise my eyes, from the floor, to meet his. Is it settled, then? his eyes ask. Father is, always has been, too soft.

There is so much for which he should not forgive me. His brothers. My mother. And soon my own brothers.

Yet he is here. In the house he used to call his home, now my own.

I stare back a long time. Steel against unyielding wood. Steel doesn't blink, doesn't creak. Finally, Alejandro sighs, from across the table. He is amused that I am amused that he is amused.

The man who taught me to trust in others, but plan ahead anyway, leans on his walking stick, as he limps away. He knows that I know that I'd do it anyway. His coming here was his way of giving me a stiff hug. The kind gentlemen of old times gave their sons.

The door closes behind him and I am left alone in the house that raised me.

flatline

Some days I hate my own words. They come off as lies. Even when they're true. This is why I've blogged nothing in months. I've quit a job I used to love. Took another in Ortigas. Left that and took another in Makati. I have all the memories right here. All the scenes, conflicts, drama, climaxes. Resolutions. How to weave them together. Not that I've been in the mood, in months, to do so. And there in lies why I haven't written anything, anything that amuses me, in months.