Fuchsia Faux

I have never been the sort to be self-conscious and consistently worried about personal fashion –until today that is, or except for today. Not that it would make me any more sophisticated, or that it would mean my suddenly being considered to have good ‘metropolitan bachelor’ taste, but I thought it would be selfish of me not to share the change.

I had been accustomed to wearing two beat shirts at the same time and some old and faded ripped denim jeans, when today my closet ran out of decent options and I secretly snatched a fuchsia La Coste polo from my older brother. That’s right: it was the shade of vividly glowing fuchsia, the elusive spelling of which I had to look up. The saturation of the color extended to a positive extreme.

To be honest, this new insight of mine has never before surfaced until one particular moment early today when a colleague had articulated her appreciation for my wardrobe. “Cute” was the adjective she used to describe the shirt, or the color of the shirt, in such a way that it made me feel as if I’ve long been exhibiting good fashion sense. And it made me recognize fuchsia as if I’ve known the exact emotion of the color all my life. It probably helped just as well that I immediately became conscious of being stared at by a number of strangers and commuters, as if I –yes, this lean, awkward skinhead- did something pleasantly illicit yet perfectly legal.

So today, and perhaps only today, I strode the streets with brazen confidence and swooped along the small, chilly confines of the office with the fiery joy of movement. I basked in the neon glory of guilty superficiality. Today, I imagined the possibilities of once and for all being boldly a love-or-hate and not blandly in-between.

Maybe, from now on, the clothes I wear will be slick, or be modish, or have configured chaos, or remind on-lookers of an era. Or maybe I’ll be a walking Yves Saint Lauren quote –“Fashions fade; style is eternal.” Maybe –but so capital and foremost a ‘maybe’ that it has warranted the longest contemplation- I’ll be more than a tad conscious of my fashion sense. I might be terribly sentient of it from hereon forth, or at least until the day comes when I’m the only one left paying attention.

I almost took these thoughts really seriously until I realized: it’s only a damn shirt –okay, a fuchsia-colored bubblegum shirt with the rough and wild elegance of its crocodile logo-, and the damn shirt isn’t mine. It isn’t quite me. Should I really care so much as to alter my attitude, my antipathy, my (ahem) individuality? It’s enough damage already that I’m writing a whole discourse on the subject!

And so tomorrow, true to the spirit of being an unfashionable beatnik, I’ll go back to my multi-layered, one-dimensional outfit. I shall have no qualms or insecurities that the look is far from avant-garde, and will only be glad to take it from Oscar Wilde himself: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

That said, I guess the French allusions can finally be put to rest.

***

Memories:



The flower shop haven at Dangwa, Sampaloc.


Cafe Albert in Pasay.


Budo, the photographer in a pose of conflict.


Some form of art (is it?) at PICC.

My Youth

Given the level of self-absorption and intimacy that a public journal allows, I am slightly amused and thoroughly delighted that you get to read this. You’ve read every entry –to my knowledge, at least- and I figure you read these written things more religiously than you care and than I had suspected.

You write more than you earn, you told me once, but when I really come to think of it, this wonderful avenue of writing -through which I can bear my tidings secretly yet somehow overtly- is priceless. In it the drama is not a stigma but a status; a story not just an experience but a perspective. The words serve to magnify a state of life; they configure my youth.

And so in response, I write---

Youth is going through what comes, however frightening.

Youth is the power to never be depersonalized by the very elements of progress human beings strive for.

Youth is marked by a yearning for lullabies and kisses and not much else. It is to be so intrinsically intoxicated with emotion and life that you’re unable to keep still.

While youth means being both Old Skool and Nouvelle Vague, it is also iconoclastic. It is all about breaking the mold.

Youth means challenging the convention and breaking the tradition. Youth is the painful realization that sometimes, when you find yourself having to get a high to get out of a low –even just sometimes, heck maybe just for a single time, for just one random, immeasurably minute time of your life that everyone would’ve either forgotten or forgiven it-, regret it you shall still do.

But youth is only a cunning defiance of odds, not logic. It is only the initial stage of understanding that to love because of a belief is far better than to love because of a reason.

And we can only be as young as our determination,
As innocent as our eyes that betray us,
As divine as our nature,
As blithe as our voyage to discovery and exploration,
As adulterated as our sense of humor,
As old as the color –and quantity- of our hair.

I exhort you: please cling not to your doubts, but to the hope that your deepest and darkest worries are a disillusionment of my happiest times. Otherwise we will both have had very old souls.

From a Loving Son

A Fool's Pleasure

A friend of his arrived from Singapore, I think, so father gave me one of the several fresh, plastic-wrapped Marlboro Lights flip-tops he received as pasalubong gifts. Having taken them as imported from another country doesn’t mark the tobacco with any significant difference, I shall wryly conclude. But there is nothing to complain about, either –nothing is in the cigarettes’ origin or manufacturing or variety for me to try to note with suspicious anticipation, except for the very frank warning sign inserted as a strip of paper behind the wrap.

Typically, you’d find a footnote that says, “Cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health”, or “Tobacco is a well-known carcinogen.” This box, however -and all the others which father has stored in an unknown place whereby I wouldn’t be tempted to steal them-, has been made sure that the infernal health effects of my consumption could be seen writ large. The type is a sans serif font -bold, of course- and the size is about at least as big as some 20-pt text in any word processor. The strips are even bordered with a thick shade of black just in case the sign hadn’t been too obvious.

Smoking kills.

Smoking seriously harms you and others around you.

Smoking is a fool’s pleasure.

It is indeed a letdown that the last line is not included yet is something I myself would have included. All the same, let it be known to my fellows in Singapore that I do want to quit smoking. I really do. I had even attempted withdrawal before, and though the battle was lost the war is far from over. On the back of my bedroom door is taped a self-motivational message in bond paper: Play, life is a sport, and no smoking -also a perpetual reference to my vice-free days as an athlete who could dunk and a lung owner who could be at peace.

This much said, and I have yet still to kick off the habit –the beautiful poetic bitterness of exhaling a white plume of smoke! I writhe in affective desire when I miss my coffee, but particularly when I miss my cigarettes while drinking my coffee.

I really do want to quit, but in blissful moments I take a short drag and inflame a tiny cluster of burning light, the upshot of which comes in the form of appealing ashes ready to be tapped away to the solid earth. And upon such an instance rises a feeling of solace, or a sense of release, or a crossing thought that maybe, just maybe, the hazards of this herbal vice have been ballyhooed more than what’s necessary. Maybe advocates and the government just have an unwarranted collective vendetta against filthy rich tobacco monopolies. Or perhaps cancer, especially the kind smoking is supposed to put one at a risk of acquiring, isn’t that (gasp!) serious.

As I carry on with contemplating these absurdities, I sadly realize that smoking is indeed just a fool’s pleasure. More than an effective stimulant, it’s a guilt-inducing weakness and a very real physiological transgression. It is, literally and figuratively, a formidable cause of heart disease.

During my infrequent but happy runs with college friends and acquaintances at the Valle Verde basketball court, I regret my missed jump shots, search in vain for my athleticism, and curse my weak endurance. I am sure these feelings don’t quite connect with what has just been described as “happy runs”, but far more than the yearning to reacquire old skills and detoxify a senescent shape, I affirm and understand something that is just as clear. I really do want to quit smoking –not because it kills, it harms and it makes me a fool (all valid but irrelevant reasons)- but because I want to play. That simple.

After all –and as my bedroom door memo goes- life is a sport. And I want to play not with what’s left of my heart, but with all of it, pulsating with life, beating along to a veritable smorgasbord of noble pleasures.

Happy Ignorance

On my “random notes” notebook –a black leather-bound executive pseudo-planner my former boss had bought me (that it lacks a calendar is beyond me)- have been jotted down a few words I don’t yet understand, or the context and connotation of which I don’t yet understand, and therefore cannot use: amapola, panacea, placebo, maudlin.

There are several other words on the notebook, but for now let us keep ourselves to this selection and save the wide exposure and open scrutiny of my vocabulary for another day. But if it must be known, yes –I compulsively stop my readings of D.H. Lawrence and Steinbeck whenever I come across words or phrases I haven’t yet encountered. I grab the “random notes” notebook from my backpack then bludgeon the pages with curious doodles of ink. My heart will go restless if I keep on pretending to understand what I'm reading.

Amapola is actually one of the tracks in Bocelli’s latest album. While I have grown to love the sweet sound of the song and the pleasant resonance of the tenor’s virtuoso voice (spectacular, isn’t it?), the lyrics have remained foreign and incomprehensible to me. So I looked it up. Apparently (by means of online encyclopedias), amapola denotes several meanings: it can be a flower, a song, or a reference to the highly-successful Filipina singer and romance novelist, Amapola Cabase, who has etched for herself a hallowed career in music and independent publishing. Nevertheless, ask me what amapola is and I shall hesitantly -then gladly- sing the 50s Hollywood song.

Panacea I have definitely encountered before -in a Paolo Coehlo book if I remember correctly. But I never held much high regard for the author, and have thus unceremoniously eschewed his prose. The pseudoscience of alchemy never interested me anyway. Nevertheless I shall remain contrite for my ignorant arrogance; everyone, after all, needs a remedy for ills and guilt.

Placebo was a tricky situation, for –to be precise- it was more a glaring mark of my premature short-term memory loss than my modest lexicon. As I doubted the science of some new medicines I’m taking, I had this very word at the tip of my tongue, thinking listlessly to myself (I wonder if this is some kind of –of what effect again?), the same way I fumbled for the name Oliver Platt when invoked to name the robot surgeon in the god-awful Bicentennial Man.

Maudlin: ah, finally, what a special re-acquaintance with the word I had! I had understood (only vaguely) its definition before but found it too risky to inappropriately reckon with its usage. But during an online conversation with my friend in New York, I discovered the perfect and most ironic term to which I can ascribe the adjective. You see, I had asked him to look up kunstlerroman in my humble request that he send over some books of that kind from abroad.

“That is cool,” he candidly remarked. “So basically, kunstlerroman is maudlin literature in the guise of intellect.”

“God,” I replied. “Either you’re right or unfavorable. But you can’t label them as such.”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, man.”

“What bubble?” I asked, defensively. “If there ever was any bubble then you (or I) would never have read or heard of some really good authors.”

To which he came to conclude, awkwardly yet characteristically, well… at any rate, who in perdition knew Mitch Albom was from Michigan?

And so to Thomas Jefferson let us all raise a toast: “Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.” I concur.

***

Memories:


Witness Street and Enya the Cicerone at Makati Shang.


Cute Carlo and Charming Mom Stella.


Signing up for the press conference at Milky Way Makati.

Walk On

The process of having to think what to write is a laborious one. At least for me, it is; besides, being my own worst critic has made me not a virtuous writer, but rather the prey of a relentless self-serving impulse. And while keeping a journal is a healthy exercise, having the audacity to prioritize keeping one -despite a beckoning flurry of more important tasks and the debilitating dead end reached when there is nothing more to write- is not.

So I walk. When I cannot write, I walk. An observant reader may notice the mood fluctuations of my attempts at prose (this boy can’t keep still, someone had once commented), so I walk.

It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly is therapeutic in the exercise, but in blind, impulsive obedience I walk to traverse the corners of my humble house, the skewed streets of our neighborhood, the peaceful confines of the nearby basketball court.

Not many weeks ago, I found myself suddenly missing the quaint majestic architecture of a Manila church. I’d walk to the parish of Lourdes, I told myself, wondering endlessly what possibilities could sprout and what writing impairments could be eased from such a frivolous Quezon City journey of five to six blocks.

It turned out that my agenda couldn’t withstand the temptation of walking elsewhere: in this case, the place happened to be forsaken NS Amoranto Park, a rather cheerless grey playground near a drugstore, where peanut and fishball vendors were stationed, beside the cracked concrete benches in which former drug addicts found makeshift pallets to sleep on, and where a furious lightning once struck the park’s epicenter of a giant oak tree –about the only occasion children had taken interest in the place.

I then walked towards one of the several barbershops along the street of Retiro, where the customary price tag for a haircut costs less than a dollar. I had my head shaved (ah, such an underrated form of salubrity!) to the tune of a three-year old toddler’s wailing -sweet and stubborn and maniacally shooing away his poor barber, who had figured that pointing to my barber’s dauntingly buzzing shaver would calm down the child.

As I walked back home I had taken note of a strangely poignant scene: three black cats and a white one in front of their owner’s home –someone must own those priceless furry creatures I assume-, all seemingly at a loss on why the animal rights tragedy of being locked outside before the insurmountable green gate had befallen them. None of the cats returned my inquisitive stare; it’s not as if an evening stranger’s interest in their plight would have any positive bearing on them.

The first thing I did upon reaching my house was to jot down all these in my precious “random notes” notebook, the results of which are now before your eyes. Oh I tell you, there’s nothing like walking; for after having wandered around the vicinity of places that belong to no one and everyone, all while enjoying the air of aristocracy and veil of anonymity …I can smile at my conviction.

I can finally write.

Merciless Nothingness

The diamonds spread across the midnight sky twinkled without any luster. The night made its fragrant passage without noise. The allure of cosmic constellations was distant –far too distant and detached, it seemed- to offer any sense of solace to someone hardened by the dull shadow of sleeplessness.

Insomnia, you’re back. But you’re not welcome.

Go away. You’re like a disgustingly self-righteous law invoking only rebellion.

Go away, lest the world around me conspire to whisper dark secrets and suspicions (or -gasp!- that I’m on to a sort of writer’s pseudo-exile).

Go away, have pity on a victim whose restlessness he can barely bear. Work, side jobs, travel, finance, society, coffee, and second-hand paperbacks yet unread: go away, Insomnia, for these are my essentials. My essentials comprise a daily itinerary –sometimes followed to a T; oftentimes followed in vain- meant to shoo you away, to implore the very opposite of you.

Go away, your omnipresence smells. It smells and it hurts.

Go away, Insomnia, even though waxing poetic comes fairly easy when I find myself alone in my bedroom, lying listlessly in a most sacred hour, thinking passionlessly how and why I -decidedly the last person on earth who needs to be awake- am awake. The breezy remains of a rainy evening have escaped into my lonely room, filtered not by the thin steel window screens but by the wind’s source of cold, now vanished. And as my whole body shivers upon the wrath of such an ominous setting, I realized I have written scantily, yet been rendered tired and exhausted and drained of emotions and inspirations needed to add one more word, one more sentence, one more mediocre metaphor.

There is nothing at my proximate disposal that isn’t a book, a malfunctioning USB port, a dusty pair of unfashionable but original Ray-Ban’s and an ashtray. This clutter of nothingness was the last thing I considered before life finally came, mercifully drifting me away to a distant dream.

The Dilettante Weeps

As I seek an eclectic respite from work things and business chores in the amazing online jukebox, I cannot help but drift into another episode of my exaggeratedly contemplative moments.

It must be the music, the songs playing on my line-up of customized stations, possibly putting me at risk of being perceived as a dilettantish audiophile –Johnny Mathis, Donny Hathaway, Grover Washington, Jr., Andrea Bocelli, Don Braden, Ray Charles, Alejandro Sanz, Tony Bennett, and a host of other artists whose careers peaked at least two decades before I was born (well, at least save for Sanz and the blind tenor). It must be the music; yes, it must be that, the melodic expression which I consider to be one of the universal human languages.

As I write this wearily (yet doggedly) at three in the morning, my mind is dancing to the funky backbeats of Jeff Golub’s Dangerous Curves. The rhythm is more fast-paced and less lazy than I would personally prefer, but the sound is still, in essence, jazz. And to jazz I am often obliged to associate with my so-called wonder years. Something about lonely saxophones and soulful piano tunes exhorts me to think of an enchanted past.

Interestingly, the earliest memories conjured are the most detailed and divine. Upon the faint rhythmic romance of old songs I remember myself in the sweet solid setting of, say, the city’s more discerning restaurants, with father and mother and the rest of the family, accompanied by the occasional clanking sound of white and silver porcelain, touched by the cool and pleasantly odorless breeze which whizzed every time a waitress walked by. I remember, too, that the lights were always a dim orange. But the faculty that struck the mightiest and most maddening chord of all was that of my hearing, which blithely noted always the smooth rendition of Mathis’ Windmills of Your Mind:

Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head;
Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that I said?
Lovers walk along a shore and leave their footprints in the sand;
Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway and the fragments of a song,
Half-remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over, were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair?
Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel,
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind.

While my being under the influence of music can be misconstrued as the obvious agent of such sticky sentimentality, I beg to...oh heck, I can offer no denial. I am prepared to confess this destructive misdeed of nostalgia, and without equivocation, too. I have, after all, granted myself the painstaking knowledge that

…looking back at the tears would make me laugh, but I never knew that looking back at the laughs would make me cry. (Anonymous)

Sticky -this is how you describe the emotion of someone reluctant to tread unknown futures and unseen tomorrows. It is mighty sticky, hard to repel, and especially in my case –wherein thought-enchanted jazz is virtually gone but in the magic of yesterdays, the CD collection of my doctor, and the in-between moments of work things and business chores- a cause of unexplainable anxiety.

The squalid prose of today’s music I am not allergic to; nevertheless, their choruses echo nothing I can associate with, or recount on, or weep about -nothing resembling the way How Do You Keep the Music Playing? equates to the fragrance of father’s car; nothing which I can assign as the soundtrack of my life as a dilettante.

At the end of the day, however, music –any music- is something I cannot do without. It is, using a most secular analogy, my cigarette…the art close to my heart with which I live, the vice of memory pangs by which I die.

So let’s keep it playing, shall we?

***

Memories (from the poetic peninsula of Bataan):




(Selected photos taken by V. Domingo)

Lord of A Ring

(Photo from Google Image Search)

***

Around one of the crumpled bony fingers on my right hand I am wearing a ring. It appears to be a metal engagement ring, but the band is unadorned with the glitter of shiny stones or the glory of an existing romance. Hence it has no profound significance, none at all, except maybe when you stop to consider how self-absorbed and self-loving one must be to slip on such a precious thing, with nary a vague idea of what marriage or commitment to an “other” is all about.

I had serendipitously found it in my bathroom one early weekday morning, when it was left all alone amidst the white, damp plastic container of toothbrushes and toothpastes and shavers. I had never taken much regard of jewelry before, but as the ring stood out among the rather clumsy and mechanical selection of the hygiene tools and things, I simply had no choice but to take it, and wear it, and glance at it -the immaculately simple demarcation of one portion of my finger and the rest of my hand, and the tiny but blinding shimmer that is enkindled every time I take a drag of my cigarette. Perhaps people would even suspect I’m married!, I thought to myself.

Now I cannot take the damned thing off. Even after several days of being taken, worn, and glanced at, the ring seems permanently steadfast in serving its already weary lord. I had remembered, too, that engagement rings are to be put on the fourth finger of the left hand –not on the right-, but my early attempts to rectify this mistake have failed and been foregone. Use soap, my colleagues advised with a chuckle. I did already, and for so many times to no avail, in visits to every washroom I could find –at the mall, in the office, in restaurants. The extent of my success has only been to look up the nitty-gritty of the human skeletal system in the encyclopedia and to terribly blister the skin that covers the (ahem) middle wrinkly joint and proximal phalanx.

This nuisance has at least deemed itself a perpetual reminder that jewelry in the wrong context and engagement to the wrong person –especially the worst person you might find yourself engaged to: your own self- will remove the luster of serendipity. And that the decoration of truth is almost as bad as a lie, as fake as a disguise, as harmful to the finger…as it is to the bearer.

The Importance of Being Ernest

A night before Ernest was about to leave for New York, we spoke on the phone to bid each other farewell. We both came from different engagements: I, from a classical concert (yes, and I shouldn’t have to mention it again); he, from a family’s surprise send-off party.

It was almost midnight. His flight was at four in the morning. He had only started packing, he divulged, but don’t worry, let neither one of us hang up, I am going to get my sleep on the plane anyway, and oh, Dwyane Wade is spectacular isn’t he? After the pleasantry of conversing about sports and predicting when we’ll ever see each other again, we digressed into painting portraits of ourselves five and ten and fifteen years from now. It’s not good practice to seize days that have yet to come, but I guess we were both too ready to forgive ourselves for indulging in a feral glimpse of horizons.

The conversation never intended to have any sentimental confession of twenty-somethings in varying modes of crisis; both were ashamed, after all, to scour for the “good” in goodbye. And both were friends –odd, silly, irreconcilably platonic- but they were friends that never gave much importance to being too earnest. Both, too, were at the twilight of youth, upon a whole new level of adulteration –and from hereon forth nothing shall be wasted on puerile rhetoric.

However, being the ever-confused, easily bored, temperamental bedlamite that I am and considering the Renaissance, bohemian and blithely unconcerned spirit which he carried, our talk gradually became a disclosure of real doubts and understated epiphanies…

“Anywhere but here: that’s where I want to be.”

“I’m too old to be changing dreams every year, dog.”

“I see myself being married at 28. Or 35. Or is it too late to get married at 35?”

“When I come back we’re going to cruise the classiest girlie bars in Quezon Avenue. And I’ll buy a house by a beach.”

“Dell is to Nikes. Any other laptop is to Adidas cross-trainers. Go buy those cross-trainers.”

“Andrea Bocelli? The voice of God has been bestowed upon a blind tenor?”

“I guess we should start writing our autobiographies.”

Probably none of these lines indicate mature forms of thought. None makes sense. In a light moment I might even find laughable my friend’s tardy discovery of Bocelli’s blindness. But perhaps whatever these thoughts are devoid of will be made up for by the realization that life is not (yet) half-way over; that the quarter-life fears that have seemed to strip away our senses of security are ephemeral fears; that the “beat and evil days” which Jack Kerouac was so able to painfully describe would pass, and soon.

And nothing is supposed to make sense anyway. Let us not crawl through sewers to find the underlying logic of the universe. As Heidegger himself said, the essence of man is a question.

Before I was about to pronounce my half-serious offer to drive him to the airport, he cut me off and blurted –as if having awoken from long, long thoughts- that he needed to pack. That he really, really needed to pack.

***

By the way, do yourselves a favor and listen to Grover Washington Jr..

***

Memories:

Peace to the sober!

Look for me in this bloody world.