How long will it take? He asks himself in between commercials. So far, the only one that has kept him company on those days when everyone else is busy with other people or with their own thoughts. So this is how to be old, he thinks. He joined his hands together, watching the seconds drop in the dim light.

He knew but he never gave it much thought. How long has it been? Does it even matter anymore? Warmth, he felt it as he passed his hand over the lit stove to reach over the pot. Will he ever feel it again? Or has he ever? All those nights, why maybe she thought of another, in the dark, it’s not that difficult.

Heavy, the pail weighs down his hands as he carries it across to pour over dirty clothes. In another time, I guess.

Kwento lang, pero malay mo totoo

Always, he slips through the passage way, unnoticed, always at the corner of the jeep. In his stillness, you can see the outlines of his forehead, the tip of his nose, the peaceful mouth, a sharp chin—the invisible line dividing him from the background. Unlike him, the moon changes its phase with every succeeding night, he however leaves no instance for you to go further than the line, the perpetual line, and go westward, but you have to remain with what he can only give to you, the east face, a questioning ear, the strip of misled hair, a dark cheek and a balanced eye.

He has never paid a fare, he walks bare feet, maybe he thought that was enough payment, he shouldn’t owe anyone, he never blamed anyone for his naked feet. His naked feet, free to feel the earth and asphalt beneath him but he seems to be raised above it, while droves of people grind their shoes against them. He walks slowly, meditatively, like a man with metal balls chained to his feet. The world his prison, or was it himself that confined him? The world and himself… aren’t they just one? He may have thought while his feet remain still, flat, or just moving unnoticeably.

He passes through shops. Always in a stir, insisting their trinkets be sold, bargaining a price to buy you, the consumer consumed. As they paw and they aw at the display, they uncannily turn into one. He passes through the church and from the wall fans was blasting wind, from the speakers was the gospel, also blasting its way through, through the anatomical ears and the metaphorical heart. He passes through the fortune tellers, decoder of the yet to be written, palms spread out, a wrinkled finger tracing the path where the future is. He may have felt that he would have no need for it, what is determinate but is yet to be does not need any foretelling. The only thing that one needs to know and nothing more is death. And yet many seem to be consumed by living, or at least what they think it is. “But who really knows?”, he says. “What is real living and what is not? Am I right to judge one man’s life as unreal? To know anyone, is that even possible? Like how I know the triangle has three sides and nothing more…”

He knew some things, he knew some people; some people were like things, some things were people, then he remembered his shoes. He came upon it by chance, he was somewhere where he does not normally go, and he did something that he would not normally do, and there it was. The strange shoes. He saw it there, laces tied together, the one dangling in air, while the other hooks itself on the insides of the barrel, or a pot, he doesn’t know, anything with an opening is considered an invitation to be thrown out in this town. He just couldn’t leave them there. So you see, it wasn’t that he felt he needed the shoes, but he felt that they needed him. And they went on their way, him and his shoes. He let them feel the earth and the asphalt as he once felt it. He let them walk through the busy shops, the solemn church, and the mumbling fortune tellers. Once and again, in the hurried walks of this one and that one, they would be stepped on accidentally, by different shoes, with different indentations, with different weights. And once and again, he would wipe the mark off with his bare hands and feel the leather, the criss-cross of the lace, the turns and the corners of his shoes, as he stooped down.

They were borne of time, him and his shoes, and they ended in it. He outlived his shoes; they couldn’t be used for walking anymore, though he thought it was more than walking that he spent with them. He felt it was time for them, and time for him to bare his feet once again, feel earth and asphalt. Though once in a while, the man would stoop down, barely touching his feet, appearing to trace the outlines of the leather, the lace, and the corners where his shoes have once been, his eyes smiling.

She snaps out of her trance, she notices his face seemed mildly annoyed. Has it been that long?, she thought. At the next street, the outline begins to be disturbed, a voice calls out ‘Para!’ and he lifts himself off from his seat, making a clinging sound on the metal step as he goes on his way, finally tearing himself from the long curious stare of some girl from the other end.

On the Trade of Masking Tongues

we could never meet eye to eye as when you're facing someone. he's pupil never reflected my face nor his to mine. as are all the others were. that, i suddenly realized in his own attempt to mimic my laughable gesture of staring straight at the camera, the ridiculous attempt to give the impression that i was really looking straight at them. i've done it numerous of times and the first few times i've done it made me more comfortable to act as i may.

in front of an object, that carries no mood, never giving up its neutrality, i am far from any danger of doubt, distraction and annoyance. i have eradicated any cause for it. but at times when i wanted to have a look at, for whom my smile was being transmitted, i would have to break away from the mechanical eye and disrupt the illusion of contact for a moment. look into a small box where you can see their eyes staring at the screen where your face is stretched out in pixels. but to chance upon them with their curious eyes straight on the eyepiece, you could almost buy it for a second.

who are we kidding, kid? eyes on your book.

At Saguijo

As every good story, it begins with a hearty laugh, too bad I don't have a knack for telling stories, coz with a good narrator, you can make brushing your teeth as interesting as an Indiana Jones movie. Well anyhow, the night was worth transcribing as it is. At least, what i can remember most from it. Started off with not knowing exactly where the place is, a very enticing element of the trip, just making my way to accompany my little comrade there, who has no idea that he's gotta have to sacrifice some of his beer money for someone else (I get thirsty too). I was planning to lick his face, when it's turned the other way, but I didn't have the appetite for it hahah. A clear smack on the face, dried and wrinkled pucker just landed smoothly right there, on a possibly unwashed cheek.

For the first few seconds, he has the same face he had when we were out early in the morning, in a gas station, me holding and sucking on a straw which is my connection to the dark liquid paradise, a juice box of chuckie with bendable straw (hate those, keeps splattering little brown droplets when I have, for some reason, needs to tear myself away from the chocolate-y goodness (I have realized how boring the whole ordeal of blogging is just as I am relaying every thought that has passed through, if the whole thing can be done in a second, leaving enough time for really important things, then I wouldn't really mind, but it takes me a long time to transpose ideas to words, hopefully the digressions gives way to something worthwhile, I am largely dependent on stray thoughts, I think if I follow them long enough I might just be onto something). Well anyway, back to the face, he had the same one when I stupidly told someone to take the car parked right by me when they asked if it's ours, the car was blocking their way, they had to get out of there kasi nandyan na ang mga matatandang namamasko, mga tumatawad kahit wala naman binibili, they're running on illegally bought engines I think, as I understand from what grungeman told me. They seemed really pissed off at me and I was only going for a good laugh (just a short chuckle? a snort? a mild sneer? heheh. wala eh!), they weren't able to get away. People were just looking at them, they're the current spectacle, and as I was watching the unfortunate men handing over papers, and the blue-suited actors peering over them, from my right grungeman's doing some voice over:

"eto may pampunas na tayo sa pwet!"

another officer gets off his car:

"matagal pa ba? di pa ko nagmimeryenda eh!"

asswipe legality and money, the ambassador of peace.

what the powers that be should do really is order some civilians to intentionally break the law and then let them push for 'kotong'. set the bait and then see who bites. then maybe they'd get fired, and then run for higher office. haha. a career change. different clothes, but same shitty policy. how about that?

After the night's debacle

Again I had one of my fits. And someone had to hear it through the propelling blades of the generous exhaust fan, letting the cold artificial air through the room with a slanted ceiling. This exhaust fan, enobled by its buyers in salvaging it from sucking up the scent of newly deposited excrements, really seldom gets the gratitude they deserve in sparing us, potetial shit-sniffers. But with air, words are carried through, so it was the first time I regretted my little friend's presence, and the curly-haired girl who carries a modest smile at the other end.

It was egotistical as I see it, to feel humiliated in asking, and with the humiliation-anger and a thousand words scrambling to get out-litost as Kundera would have put it, if ever I was a character in his beautiful novels. I was more attracted to the novels' ideas rather than the scenery, but maybe that has been my problem all along, but hasn't that been the human condition, the sundered unity of idea and scene, if there has been any proof of it's oneness to begin with? Of having this idea of how something works between two individuals and just experiencing it for yourself, maybe I've simply equated him out of the whole idea, and he simply refuses, not even intentionally, not even knowingly, to let me reign in my own universe, like the simplest things can just put me off or just leave me in a f*cking daze for hours on, which doesn't sound godly to me.

It's tough to remain individualistic in the attempt to be personal and go beyond yourself, beyond the confines of your own thought system and just be confronted with someone else's thought process that could cancel out your own, who then wins out? It's hard to get through arguments that largely rely on what I WANT, which often stands on the irrationality of desire, how the hell are you gonna defend that, all you can hope for is for two wants to coincide. I wasn't really asking for much, no one's severed head, no grand gesture, just him to want to lay still. Just wanting someone to want something too, haven't I heard this before in a Jennifer Aniston movie? In other words, reciprocity or else I should have just dug out someone's grave and just haul out a corpse if all I wanted was militant obedience with no will of its own, it would've been more grand if it was a spontaneous initiative from the other's side. So with the other, again and again, the limit. To breach the limit, "to grope within the outlines of the self" you have to use words that are clear and relentless. To use those words to ask for something, bear it with an iron gut and a modest assent.