09:38 PM 2/3/2007
I’m blogging. Hurray! Such an achievement. This is my first time to blog a blog. This is just an attempt. I hope it will work.
Two weeks ago, I was reading a book and got so engrossed on it that I let it affect me. It was only a book, I told myself many times, but I felt like dying. It was good. Somewhere between the lines, there is an unlying theme of death.
The book is so dark that it tasted like sugar. While reading, I thought of death surrounding the very air I breathe. I thought of suicide, leukemia and AIDS and all that is death, the secession of life. (But not death performed by other human hands.) It was so good that I always thought the book would swallow me anytime that I started to cry for the character.
The story was about a boy who wanted to grow up fast. The boy grew up. He traveled the world, met several people, did many things, partied, drugged, killed and loved. Now he’s afraid to grow old. Events occurred which made him young forever. He was happy. He continued to travel the world, met more people, did more things, partied, drugged, killed but not loved anymore. He met a person, which made him feel special. They went along for sometime. They had loved. But the other person soon aged and died. Now the boy wanted to die but cannot. They say the day he decided not to grow up was the day he died. It was sad.
I felt drunk after reading the book, like drinking dark sweet rhum. I felt as if the book was part of the dead boy, his bony white hand wrapped in supple skin clutching my hand not to let go. When I finished the book, I felt more death, lonely death, as I close the last page and finally let go of that part that is connected to the boy. I became sadder because I never get to know what became of him after that. I wanted to more about the boy. I wanted to search the very mind of author only to find out what happened to him after she has written him all up. I went emo for days. (By the way, my emo is not the music genre but a severe state masochistic loneliness. Let’s make these terminologies serious.)
It was hard. The very sunset that caressed my back in UP atrium while waiting for my next subject was black. Black is the color of the sky, and for the past days, it has been bringing black clouds to rain black tears.
Adding to this sadness was people who shared their yearnings, their old passions and never-ending high school songs. They call it nostalgia. I call it shit. It’s fun because in a sad place like UP, there’s nothing more comforting that the warm memories of our happy, young days. I can’t contest with the thoughts of childhood friends, first crushes, and the music that bound us together into an invisible era. We all go through that “bittersweet longing for the past,” but please, utang na loob, STOP!
It’s not helping because when they share, I wallow in their sadness and feast on it. I eat the very loneliness their hearts feel. But when I share, when I replace the dark blood they let their wrists shed, they think I have a major problem. They think I’m bullshit. So let’s cut the crap. Stop all of these emo shits. They’re the bullshit. Not me.
The last pages of the book were spent listening to REM’s “Night Swimming,” Verve Pipe’s “Freshmen,” that “Runaway Train” song and “Mombasa” from Denigrate. It was, again, rather sad because they were nostalgic songs.
Haha. I now remember. The first ever music video I saw was from Bjork. It has to be Bjork. I don’t know what the title of the song is. The video was done in monochromatic scheme, something like sepia or blue. She was in a Chun Lee hairstyle, standing, balancing and singing at the back of a truck while it sails the streets of New York. They played it fifteen years ago over and over again together with the Cranberries, Oasis and Mariah Carey. I didn’t know it was Bjork back then but I saw the video again in MTV last semester break. I remember the truck and the Chun Lee hair. It has to be the first video I saw, it has to be. Too bad, there’s no more of Bjork and MTV nowadays.
I feel so lucky because I became part of the last generation who experienced the full-blown power of MTV. Not MTV of the past five years but MTV of the 90’s. Well, not just MTV but the whole music in 90’s. Ahh.. That young sweet decade. Full of angst and hope. I really wish to go back there.
I feel stupid when someone talks and says that they want to live in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s. They say music back then was greater. Whatever! They seem great because the only songs we hear from those decades are those really great. The Philippines didn’t experience the greatness first hand. We are all born decades too late when it comes to music. You think your lola allowed your mama to listen to dreamy Beatles or Beach Boys? You think they know them back then? Dream on! I bet our mamas didn’t feel the greatness of that band not until the world wept for the death of John Lennon, and that was way after the band broke up. I don’t know but in respect to the great dead gods, ROCK ON! It saddened me that Lennon died before I get to know his music first hand.
Speaking of the dead Lennon, I heard he was gay. He married Yoko Ono because she looked like a man. His real love was someone from his own band. I don’t know who, maybe McCartney. Maybe it was part of the sexual revolution that was happening in his long dead time. Haha. At the same time, the Philippines back then was struggling with Marcos and his wife. Oh, those great megalomaniacs. I wonder what would have happened if Marcos didn’t won his second term and didn’t rise to be an ultimate dictator.
Haha. My friend back in high school first asked me that while we were watching our classmates play a little gig in an abandoned building. The guitars were authentic but the drums were made of biscuit tin, plastic pale and an old pot hammered together on an old school chair. All of us were doing the vocals of Hoobastank. The building was called Annex and molded with fire and rust. He sat beside me, at the back of a classroom, smelling of mold himself. He began asking me nerve-wracking questions that he knew no one could answer. He was like that for days after he handed me my sister’s copy of Bob Ong. I liked talking to him because he was a genuine person. He was intelligent but he was not afraid to show it. He wouldn’t even stop to think if he’s being intelligent or not. We just talk. He was not aware of his brightness. The last time I talked to him about those trivial things was a year ago. He asked me what if hell is not made of fire but made of coordinate planes. You can stand on the origin and trace your way on all quadrants every time Satan or God throws you a problem. You are lucky when they toss only x + 1 = 8. I wonder if he got that from Bob Ong.
He liked to talk about Bob Ong. He said Bob Ong is cynical, funny, questioning, and talks about everything as if he knows everything. In short, the very image of what every Filipino is. I like his bravery for he is never afraid to talk about things he liked. At that time, I already dismissed to him that Bob Ong is nothing but a know-it-all preacher. But he kept on saying his name as if Bob Ong was a messiah. Haha. How I used to believe Bob Ong was God.
The last time I talked to him, about his hell of coordinate planes, he also asked me if I believe in God. I said yes. I believe in the flowers, the trees, the clouds and all of the stars in the heaven. He asked me to be little serious. I said that maybe my idea of god was somehow distorted and I was afraid that it wouldn’t return to what it used to be. He only smiled.
I’m sorry if I’m jumping from one subject to another, one coordinate to another. Anyway, going back to the dark soul that is the book, I’m re-reading it again. See you all in hell!
