4:39 AM 2/10/01 saturday

what were we then? we were boys who thought ourselves men. we all thought our balls have been through everything. we were cocksure about everything, like those neophytes who thought they'd been through training and they've been through hell. but we didn't know war. sexual about everything, we were phalli and the world was neruda's "body of a woman." our analyses knew no humility. we may not know everything but somehow we never doubted that everything would be given to us.

we are different now. more character maybe, but less spirit. we look forward with more fear than excitement, more exhaustion than recuperation. in us you'll find more of the skills and less of the fight. we cease our aggressive penetration. we figured we were getting nowhere, producing nothing but a alot of noise and friction. now, we just basically fight to keep ourselves erect.

then we were boys who thought ourselves men. but at least then we thought at all. now we are thoughtless men. we stand now, daunted. we fight on, sometimes to remember those times when we took it for granted that we were the center of everything. we fight on, because we know of nothing else to do.

yet we sometimes rise enough to shake the feeling that we were the zombies in m. jackson's 'thriller' video. somehow we manage hope... a brand of hope entirely unaffiliated with any form of certainty.

For if then we always knew we'll have it all, now we just manage to hope at times... hope we'll have something at least to hold when a reckoning comes. Or hope that something will hold us.

and we continue hoping, because hope of something seems better than nothing.

4:26 AM 2/11/01

i dream and dread the same thing - a life without pretenses. i dream and dread the same thing - a figure without need of sight or shadow, without the need to see beyond non-existent masks or hide behind a motley of them. i dream and dread the same thing - an embracing understanding without language.

i loathe all things i love. it is my nature, i always tell myself, hoping beneath the self-whisper that this essentialism will save me. it is the way i've been trained, reflexivity, creative-critical-crap that nourish true progress. must fertilizer stink? it is the way i've been trained, i tell myself, and beneath the self-whisper i'm praying that somehow this activism will amount to something, save someone at least. then the messianic hunger will be fed and maybe then i could die after i draft my own persecution.

2:15 AM 2/12/01

of all the little things i've feared, i've feared this one little thing dearly. i encounter this dear dread of writing in the second person in my journals without naming that person.

i've written in the second p. plenty of times before, but usually, i am that second person. i become that schizo rosally jokingly fears me to be. i communicate between selves - which is not that problematic if you believe in fragmented selves. i've written to a future self hoping, at times, that he would not forget to read the voice of the past. beneath it all though, i'm hoping some archivist or other will read that empapered voice and that the future DSA won't give time or shit to what the past says. maybe this is the hope of transcendence. someday, a more powerful DSA unencumbered by his past, never visiting it, never making his dwelling in it. but maybe that maybe-man is more troubled than transcendent. and this little-man is more conceited than he thinks. for why would scholars take time or shit to trouble over him? maybe that is my "you," a construction borne of vainglory. and the ultimate sadness and shame would be that that "you" will never exist. and to another, nothing would be communicated.

see, i do that too. i write in the third p. about myself. that's a lot of fun. but let us return to the dreaded undeclared "you."

i fear i like writing in the second person without declaring that person because i just don't know what'll happen to whatever state of mind my future-self-reader will have at the moment of reading if he doesn't remember the hidden noun of the pronoun. or what'll happen to it when he does.

imagine him, maybe-high-and-mighty, poring over screen or page, cursing cursor or finger that ravels and ravels and reveals nothing. and he goes tormented by the failure of ungifted memory - the little torment of tune-that-can't-be-named, face-that-can't-be-placed, name-that-can't-be-given-form, raised to the nth degree. n depends on the relative significance of the utterance, the level of abstraction, the height of the riddle, the problems of fitting this-or-that-or-the-other-person into the unhinting mask of the pronoun. ifheorsheisthisthen... but ifsheisnotyousandtheothersheisyouthen... and the hell of the hanging enigma breaks loose. imagine all that aginst whatever emotional baggage i'll carry in the future!

so today let's leggo of fear and have some fun. let's not care about him who may or may not care about us. let us challenge his tyranny, for everything is lived for his benefit and may this little fun is a small price to pay. well let's hope it's small, anyway, just a little irritation. (the spurious "us" here may refer to all my selves or fragments of it, or it may include you if you care to be accomplice or audience - or accomplice by-being-the-audience)

let us commence!

you are such a drag. your silence stifles me because i can only respond to you, you know! without your thrust, how can i parry or counterstrike. to be proactive would not be gentlemanly. still, i fear i must accept that i can never know what you think or know (this is just too heavy) if you ever thought at all. silence can be the height of being inconsiderate. it may mean many, many things (applied to divinity, which i hope you're not, it may mean everything). or it may simply mean nothing. you can be silent without being-silent-about-something (meaning cover-and-concealment, secret, espionage thing). you can also be silent-about-nothing (which usu. implies a loudmouth) and still (technically) be silent. (this last statement holds that you are silent about nothing so if you have something, you spill it, but if you have nothing, you have nothing to spill in the first place.)

all this logical gobbledygook gives me fun. it gives me escape. were the tacticians of the impeachment defense like this? were they too lost in the maze they were trying to create to snag the enemy that in their awe they never cared what they were hiding? did the legalese challenge monopolize their hearts. who cares? let them raise their pesos without much blood or sweat and end their bloody lives without meaning. (that was immature wasn't it? the system was supposed to be adversarial. i should give credit. how would it work without willing adversaries? so then, i advise the adverse parties and their advocates to keep their own journals and curse us to death there. then they fabricate merit and flaunt it where there is nobody to flaunt it to.)

wow. that little digression took the better of me, didn't it?

as for you, we are not yet finished. the plan for now is to create a lot of "yous" with different people behind them all. nameless profiles. curses and blessings sent now but will lose its original meaning or destination once i forget the target. and in the future if and when i read or speculate, these will probably take on new meanings and destinations. that's cool.

you are not silent. as far as i know you tell me everything or you will if time and memory would permit. you are my friend as i am yours. best, you call me. i guess that gives it away huh? highschoolish, i now hope we stay this way. maybe evolve and all, but never devolve. are you my best? both unashamed egocentrists ("at a certain level only, of course," you will probably correct me) but i am much more selfish than you are. and i don't want to say i need you and all that stuff. why? maybe because you don't need me and i don't want a one-way thing. or maybe just because i don't.

but this is a "no"-pad and even with a blessing such as you, i don't want to be positive.

2:35 AM 2/13/01

* lousy fighting form. i am in no position to serve as friend or confidante. my very world outlook does not make me pliable enough. or maybe i am too pliable to serve anybody. i don't know. damn divergent thinking may be fun but it gets you nowhere.