We Are All Alone

We are all alone. Who was the sage who said that we are born alone and alone we will die? We may also add to that that we are going to live our lives alone until our last breath. This stark bit of wisdom is hard to accept but it never fails to ring a bell to those who have stumbled consciously on this reality.

During our formative years, we are deluded that we are never alone. Our parents are always there beside us, plus we are constantly surrounded by other relatives and friends. In school, besides developing the notion that we are immortal, we believe that we would enjoy till eternity the companionship of our classmates and best buddies. We have the faith that the bond that we have formed with our college friends will deliver us from separation.

It will be too late and seems to soon for us to realize that there is an end with our friendship with our classmates. Right after graduation, we know now that each one of us has to take different path in life. Even if we stay in touch with them once they are in the real world, the connection thins out especially if they got into marriage already. They pass on the get-togethers and informal reunions then, finally, they just disappear out of the circulation.

The idea that we are alone will only dawn on us after several stints in various jobs. When we go to our first jobs and if asked one of the reasons why we want the job, we may answer that we want to meet new friends. Like a habit we have formed in our schooldays, we are deluded that this job will be our last and the co-workers we befriended here will be there beside us forever. But unlike in school, our tenure in this job depends on many factors and it is not unexpected that we may lose it any day. And when we lose our job we lose also our friends there. We are no longer part of the organization and we will find ourselves alone. Friends in the work place come and go as we transfer to different organizations, and there are there mainly to give us an itinerant companionship.

There may come the time when we will also get married and find our partner in life. The hope of making the relationship last until both of you grow old is intense and grave. Probably, if separation or annulment is avoided, you’ll reach the autumn season of your lives together. But somehow, as it is inevitable, one may go first in going back to the Creator. And the one who is left behind will find that he is all alone after all.

Can we say then that the one who past away first never lived alone? Does the fact that he or she died beside his/her partner mean so? On the contrary, the dead person at the hour of his death gets the illumination of his circumstances that he has been alone all the time as manifested by his departure; he was born alone and will die alone.

We are all alone.

Mental Calisthenics and Looking Back

Mental Calisthenics

Waking up late in the morning to the shouts inside the house between my parents who both manned the store at the front of the house, asking each other what was the price of a certain items were, I opened my eyes resolute that the day ahead is the day in which I have to start working on my writing. There was nothing left for me to do, and it seemed the task had been waiting for me ever since I began my self-imposed exile from real work.

I have to write, I said to myself. I have to do some mental calisthenics, flex my writing muscles. And what I had in mind then was the 15-page requirement a student of Creative Writing has to finish before the end of the semester. Indeed I will never be a writer, with a book to boost, if I cannot even pull that simple feat.

I have to write. Write again like I used to do without bothering anything about the world outside since my last refuge and salvation is with writing. Yeah, I will write. I will write those things that I saw and heard and felt and those things that I learned.

There is no other way.

Looking Back

When I started out this personal blog a couple of years ago, my agenda, like the usual blogger out there, was to utilize this free space in the vast universe of the Internet as a venue where I could post my peripatetic musings about life. Of course I cannot deny that I intended also to use this blog to hone my writing skill with the aim of perfecting the art of essay writing.

With excited, controlled pounding of my heart, I tried to set a goal of writing at least an essay in a week, pretending that I have a column here in the net which I need to maintain. (To think, I just have to mimic what I normally do for almost a decade in which I maintain a personal journal in my computer which unluckily had been deleted by an unscrupulous hacker.) The only question that hung in the air was whether I could stick and beat my imagined deadline.

And the answer to that, after all this time, is that I fall short. My postings are like erratic downpour in a summer season. Though I can blame that to the demise of my computer – which is now like a chop-chop vehicle with its memory chips, video card and harddisk dismantled from the CPU. With nothing to write with, my mindset of delivering to my own expectation has gone wayward.

Nevertheless, the aim of using this free space as a venue for honing my writing skill does not change. Right now, I’ve begun, like an old boxer, training for the task ahead. Anyway, as long as blogging is free and my postings are safe in the virtual world of the net, then I will write and post them here.

About an-essay-in-a-week thing, I’m still trying to gather my momentum then I’ll go ahead performing the task.

Bday

Lil Feather said that the sad thing today is the evidence that I’m growing old. (Yup, today my dear friends is my birthday though I don’t mean the date when I post this, but the date when I wrote this). I’m growing old indeed still without nothing to prove to the people around me and also to myself. This is the sad, hard fact of my more than 30 years of existence.

This morning, I woke up earlier than the usual, with the bad collective recollection of the years that had gone by. Drat! I said to myself, I haven’t done what I was suppose to do these past years and here I am rotting in my parents house. And this followed by the sutble pain in the stomach and sudden urgency to do something or else I will be in dire straits until my old age – and it is coming sooner than I expect it to be.

Then while channel-surfing I caught on the cable the 1997 NBA Finals between the Bulls and the Jazz. I could not imagine that it was almost a decade since that momentous time. I recalled how time flies by when then a document analyst and was having a fast, easy-go-lucky kind of life never bothering about the future. Arg! The year 2006 was a non-existent time for me and either as a goal for whatever undertaking I had then. Then suddenly, it stirred me that I was seeing this year as a gauge of what I have done so far.

And so far, nothing it seems.

Thinking about it, there are small achievements nevetheless that i have done. Like being published by a national paper and a magazine; working as a writer for an online magazine and two publication houses though for short period only and able to pose as a columnist once.

Then like a thunder of hope, I realise that it is not true that I have not done anything. My long-time dream of writing for a magazine and being a columnist, even just for a single issue, has come true. That is already a feat for a 21-year old then who could not write a decent sentence.

I have gone a long way so it seems.

The only trouble with my struggle is that I cannot take off completely but it is obvious that I can do something as a writer. Yes, I cannot take off completely. But, mother of all hopes, I am getting there slow it may be. I know I will get there.

Probably, this guilt of having done nothing is caused by the my relative absence of work for sometime now. And, probably, it is.

On Reading Stainless Longganisa

Usually the moment I open my eyes when I wake up every morning, my head is swimming in the murky, deathlike impression of another long day. I guess this feeling goes along with the realization that I don’t have a job and days inevitably are going nowhere mfor me. Add to that my passion for serious readings that makes my face worn-down as I wake up because of some memory of last night’s failure to decipher those difficult text by my favorite writers.

Then one day, like a grace showering on me, I wake up with a sunny and bright impression of the day without a trace of grudge against the world. I even afford to smile and grin from time to time feeling no heavy burden on my shoulders as if suddenly freed from long years of imprisonment. Life is beautiful and what a blessing it is to read and write and dream and be whatever you want to be; and yes, what a blessing it is to be able to read and live.

This quick turn from my usually stern outlook about life is the byproduct on reading Bob Ong’s Stainless Longganisa.

I long have known Bob Ong by my perennial visits to the bookstore but have never tried opening one of his books, which usually stare at me from the bookstore shelves of the Filipiniana section. I am never fond of novelty books, which gauging by the way his books are marketed are one — though his Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas stirs the interest of the serious reader in me.

It just happens that my one of my sisters bought Stainless Longganisa and the book aroused my curiosity of what kind of a writer really is Bob Ong since my sisters kept on flashing their pearly white teeth and making that strange upward curve on their lips while reading the book.

As I find out, Stainless Longganisa mainly tells in casual Filipino text the experiences and philosophy of Bob Ong as a local writer – but don’t be misled by the word ‘philosophy’ as a hint that this book is a heavy read. It is one light read that is hard to resist to put the book down without reaching the last page. Another thing is the book is an intelligent read with mischievous and constant fooling around by Bob Ong.

The grim clouds in my head vanishes the moment I start reading the book. For one, this book is a sort of an inspirational book for the regular guy who dreams of becoming whatever he want himself to be. Written in subjective anecdotal tone, replete with jokes, Bob Ong never misses his mark in stating that his readers are important, beautiful Filipinos.

Good book and a good pick in giving as gift this coming Christmas to those close to you who are starting to learn loving a book.

Blisters in the Sun

Blisters in The Sun is the first punk hits that I learned how to pluck in my guitar. I post this video to share this upbeat song by the band Violent Femmes.

An Evening Shower in the Rain

On September 28 the storm Millenyo whipped the National Capital Region with strong winds and heavy rain. Halfway through the day, people working in the city were ordered to go home. On their way home, and days later, we would hear how they’d seen billboards along the length of EDSA were blown down and electric posts put to the ground by the merciless storm winds.

As the storm progressed on that day, our place in Cavite promptly revert to the Dark Ages, literally, as electricity was shut down. Gauging by the force of the storm, I anticipated a complete black-out in our place for at least a week, or two at the most basing from the past storms that debilitated the electric service in our place.

The problem when there is no electricity in our place is that it means there is also no water for us. The centralized water pump that gives service to us relies heavily on electricity as there is no generator to give power to it to pump water from the ground and thus supplies us with water for our domestic needs: for washing our clothes and utensils in the kitchen and bathroom. It also means we will have no means to do basic health hygiene like taking a bath.

The next day, like a joke from heaven, the sky cleared up. The day presented a hot, sunny one that kept us sweating inside our houses where the electric fans didn’t work. (Yes, after only a day of a passing strong storm, the electricity had still not returned.) The whole neighborhood was a packed of oily herd on the brim of doing a rain dance to wash away the collected dirt in our bodies.

Then evening came. I retired inside the adjacent house that we had and tried to spend the slow dark hours reading under a candle light. I heard a soft rain pelted on the tin roof. Before I noticed it and firmly sank into my consciousness busy with my readings, the rain that started minutes ago intensify into a heavy downpour sans the lash of strong winds. It was just pure rainwater from heaven pouring on the earth.

I heard my mother outside in the rain trying to fill every container we had with rain in frenzy. And when I went out to help her out, bringing an umbrella with me to protect me from getting wet, I scanned the street outside. Some of my neighbors were in reverie taking a shower in the rain; the teenagers running to and fro with pails and bringing water to their house. There was no doubt that I had to throw away my umbrella and partake with the blessing of heaven soaking the earth with rainwater.

I put away the umbrella and let myself got drench. And good God! The rain was pouring heavily to my heart’s delight. I ambled in the street bonding with my neighbors as we find roof gutters gushing with bitingly cold rainwater. I trained my eyes at the street and I could barely see the end of the street because of the downpour. It was like New Year’s day with the rainwater as the firecracker smoke and with the same celebratory mood.

For once, for at least an hour and a half, I became a boy again gleefully taking a bath in the rain. And to add to the experience, I was doing it – for the first time – during the night.

Untitled

“Lucia, would you please do me the favor of pulling off the curtains,” Gabino Santiago rasped on his bed. “I want to see the outside.”
An ordered tangle of sensory cables and tubes connected to the pulsating machine, which gave readings in numbers, ran all over his body.
“I’ve been expecting to do that as I have been doing for months, old Santiago,” the nurse said. She put his breakfast of oatmeal, glass of milk and a piece of banana on the movable table before him and walked toward the window and pulled the curtain. The weak natural light from outside washed into the room.
“A favor for you, my love,” the nurse said in a tender, teasing tone.
He heard how lovingly the nurse called him ‘my love’, but it did not matter a bit to him. All he wanted was to see the outside. He pushed a button beside the steel railing and his bed adjusted propping him halfway up. He looked beyond the glass window, over the spacious green lawn, at the line of old mango trees that hid by its rich foliage a creek, then past the shrubbery knoll to the jagged outline of the city. Soon the sun would rise over those glass and steel buildings and perennial light crafts zooming in and around the labyrinthine streets of the city.
“Eat your breakfast now, my love.”
He continued staring at the view outside, not hearing anymore what the nurse was saying to him, until the blue sky turned lighter and lighter and he stared at it wantonly knowing that he was visually feasting on something beautiful beyond description, at something he would never forget.
He could have done watching the sunrise by closing his still sleepy eyes by automatically switching on the nanochip in his brain and recall the same, familiar view. But why settle for something artificial when you can have the natural fresher one, he thought.
He squinted from time to time as if to absorb the invisible spirit of the view. He knew this experience would never be orphaned, forgotten memory. He would always remember it the way he experienced it the first time.
Everybody in the world remembers everything now, he thought, smiling bitterly.
Anyway, the version of his nanochip memory was the still reliable Super MemSoft III that could store fifty more years of experience, if he ever reached that length. His wife had the latest PulseSoft version 6.0 which had the capability to tap it onto televisions and share her visual experiences in hologram media.
He winced when he thought about the fact.
In split seconds the atomic circuitry in his memory chip calculated that it was almost five decades ago, or to be more precise 48 years, three months, seven days and 16 hours since the 27th of December of the year 2252. He was a century-and-a-half years old then, and around the globe during that time China suffered a death toll of two thousand who perished when a meteor hit their controlled colony in Mars; the Philippines signed a ten-year agreement with Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia on a space venture to explore Pluto; an earthquake with 7.5 intensity in the Richter scale hit Brazil that virtually severed the country into half as the ground opened a maw of twelve meters wide and several miles long with half a kilometer deep in the gash.
It was during this time when an inexplicable obsession to recall something in his childhood forced him to consult a memory nanochip specialist.
Dr. Artemio Baltazar, who sat at the other end of the table, shook his head with stoic, industrial coldness in his mien which could be interpreted as a lack of interest in Gabino’s trouble.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the doctor said, leaning on the backrest of his black leather swivel chair as if announcing a terminal verdict on the case.
“Do you mean there’s no way to retrieve it?” Gabino asked, refusing to comprehend what he had just heard.
“The problem is that the experience occurred prior to the implant,” the doctor said rocking gently on his chair, then added, “You must understand that the chip’s function is not to absorb and interpret your pre-implant experience. It just does not work that way.
“There’s still no technology capable of decoding an already imprinted memory in your brain cells. Our science is still too young to pull that kind of thing.”
“There must be a way, somehow.” Gabino mumbled feebly.
“Have you tried the old science of regression? Practitioners of this ancient method are now rare. But I bet you can find one. As they fondly say: The soul remembers.”
Gabino strayed off his sight from the doctor, on toward the wall where wooden plaques of scientific achievements by the doctor hung, and composing mentally the right words to express his sad, frustrated thoughts.

To be continued…..