Resolution

New Year’s Day
These are my New Year resolutions
1. I will revise for my ‘O’ levels at least two hours a night.
2. I will stop using my mother’s Buff-Puff to clean the bath.
3. I will buy a suede brush for my coat.
4. I will stop thinking erotic thoughts during school hours.
5. I will oil my bike once a week.
6. I will try to like Bert Baxter again.
7. I will pay my library fines (88 pence) and rejoin the library.
8. I will get my mother and father together again.
9. I will cancel the Beano.

Adrian Mole
Diary entry
January 1, 1983

Ah yes, the former method. I place another diary entry, decidedly foreign in place and time, as preface for my own blog entry. A tangential reference? An indulgence? A device of concealment? Whatever it is, it seems to me like I abstained from this tool for years. It feels like I was away for a long while – studies, skirmishes, whatnot, that haughty business of life – then I return home, dazed, feeling old, wiser and wiser by the day. Until months later when come the inexhaustible, unexhausted wisdom: I am not any wiser. I know it. The I-know-it-in-the-gut type of know-it. Still, I rummage through my room, make a pretense of clean-up, and ignore books already read, expanded lists of disciplines, the more recent weapons. These things don’t tell me anything new. They sing to me, every day in every way it’s getting better and better, which, like all of the greater truths, will eventually unfold into a lovely lie. More and more gets known, I hear, in lullaby rhythms. But it’s new year, it’s morning. Instinctively, I reach above the closet. I find the dusty shoebox. An old toy, a grand comfort, a fathering joy. I play – not as I used to, but as I would – and wholly I recall an allergy to dust.

Period Piece

Sometimes I think of Ernest Hemingway. He must have gotten it, how every story ended meant that a man cleaned a gun good, loaded it with a fist of bullets, and licked the always open for business end of the barrel. Every story meant that while there was a man who did this, he did not pull the trigger. This is a specific knowledge because it is not equivalent to its obverse, that every unfinished story meant a man did swallow a bullet. While that is a possibility, an unfinished story may also mean many things. Some of those things may bear the stink of merely staying alive. Just something akin to surviving. But an ended story is definite. One thing. Meant someone tried his hand at death. Meant someone was a coward, was fundamentally scared of cutting his story short. This may be what Hemingway got. He who took pride in being a brave man. But it is only sometimes when I think of Ernest Hemingway. Just some of those sometimes when I think of him ultimately taking pride.

Furball

Perfect conversation with Carlos and Emmanuel over goto, late night after working with the students’ extracurricular poetry. What could I say about that conversation? Motivating, edifying. Pushed me to dream farther. A rather selfish way of thinking, depicting the conversation’s effect on me rather than its true nature. I hope the later part of this paragraph will remedy that as well as answer the question of the conversation’s fate. Meanwhile, let me describe the goodbyes. We three called it a night. When the night agreed to its name, we paid the cashier our almost forgotten bills, grabbed our bags, and unpacked our destinations. Then we threw them destinations skyward. Caloy’s destination dropped on his kuya’s place in Batangas. Mine, on the Demarses unit. No one quite followed where Emman’s destination went, but he had an idea and was confident about the idea. We all believed that a growth of confidence is well worth an MIA destination. So, goodbye and Caloy hailed his jeep, Emman pedaled his bike, and I walked the blocks to home. I was thinking about our perfect conversation when it hit me: I didn’t know where the conversation went. I mean, we were throwing the furball to and fro, watching it change color and dance along our trajectories. We were happy and surprised and developed ideas in turns. The furball was thrown and caught even while we were eating, even with just tentative throws and side glances. There were no-look passes. Thus, I found it right to consider that we were catching it because it wanted to be caught. Indeed, it was one agile conversation. Up the stairs to the Demarses door, I thought that it didn’t matter. No one had exclusive rights to that conversation, but if either Caloy or Emman took it home, well, the conversation picked its ride. When I opened the door, a flood of air rushed out, throwing me back a couple of steps. It was when I stepped in to turn on the lights and face what I faced that I realized my ill-hid hope to find the conversation waiting for me, maybe gnawing at my slippers, or up nosing through the shelves, or ahead on the bead, muttering nothings in its sleep. But I hit the lights. What was at the door with the air was silence. She was grinning at me. I could not smile back because aside from the fact that she was wearing nothing, her lips were to red and all the floor held evidence of rainbow hair.

Easy

Asking for me without looking for me. How prudent is that? Was watching you and your fool hair and all your pain trying to pin the tail on the yuletide donkey. Fool hands, fool lips. You will never at least apologize to them and thus my sweet fun is forever legit. Not to either of them, and not with your heart. Yes, that racing racing heart.

Cuz

God I hate that I should call you Kuya when I do what I have to do, but there's the irony that I have to consider. And the thrill of a long chase. This is not your consideration, I know. Makes your life easier. Makes my life a hell to know yours is easier. Me, I have to write you down while all you have to do is strike. Now that I know I have your eyes, there's a tidbit I should tell you about. I want you to breathe. You ought to feel safe. Now that you let me know that I have your eyes, I can tell you this: you are not as unpredictable as you want to believe. Only the desperate enemy is unpredictable. Even the enemy who desperately wants despair but does not possess it is not really unpredictable. Now I know what she is to you. A shield. A shield, therefore you are not really as desperate as you want to appear, are you? Did you just sigh your relief, Kuya? Because I won't hit someone with glasses on?

Salvador Dali Cream

On top of everything else, three student writers passed their short stories. That was Wednesday night. Over a couple of nights, I left their stories in front of the electric fan. They weren’t wet, had no need for drying. I used a broken wall clock for paperweight. I admit that the dramatic effect motivated me. Stories anchored by the clock. Easy to identify with clocks. Broken ones, particularly. Or with the period in clock lives when the batteries are dead, when everyone had care to pump new ones in but no one had the wherewithal. Whenever we get around to hoisting them up fixed, powered, and aligned with the heartbeat of the world, my identification with the clock evaporates. That could have been part of it, the whole paltry drama. Or what could have been a more vital part of it may be my desire to see the clock melt like Dali cream. Then we would gain the necessity of drying the short stories. But that didn’t happen. So come Friday when I turned the fan off and took the stories home with my red pen, I had made up another reason for exposing their stories to artificial wind for around thirty-six hours. The reason I unearthed or claycreated was that I desired to see the flipping of pages like wings in search of sky. I wanted to know how the wind went about reading.

Had-Been-List

1. Sat through rapid eye movement. Not exactly a Sufi mystic stopping the heart but a good start.
2. Pushed my story some, okay with one Hum160 essay results and deeply disappointed with the other, hopeful with the workshop pieces. Wondered if I should tell one class about how good the other was. Did not bother wondering about telling the other class that it was better than the other.
3. Father still at the bad place. Sent message asking if I'll travel to Laguna despite the storm.
4. Somebody's sick. I want her out of the bad place.
5. No new lessons. A good phone call. Sent message saying I'll go to Laguna, do class.
6. Was home. Wasn't home.