Life, Death and Pinoy Big Brother

You find yourself in this artificial and temporary world. Everything seem nice and tolerable...a pool and comfortable beds, food. The chic furniture, the people, blow you away. Soon enough you forget that this is temporary, you get used to it, and adapt and accept. You make friends, you make enemies, and fall in love promising forever and ever, and actually feel a pseudo-happiness, and forget that this will end sooner or later.

And so you continue to sleep and be woken up by some joke expressed in music, and do what the big booming voice tells you. And if he’s pleased you get a reward, a promise of a vacation in a paradise or some heavenly place, now or when the time comes when you have to leave.

Some, who despite the “beautiful world” inside, still wanted to leave before their time, too homesick or just plain sick with the monotony, either do things that would piss the big voice off or simply decide and call it quits. They just simply stop “acting” the artificial life and just become plain annoying. Usually, when they leave they are never heard of again, banished, unforgiven by the host of self-righteous fans.

For to these zealots, you are a pet, a tamagochi that they need to take care of every night, nurturing your survival with SMS votes. You can’t just give up and get away with it.

And when you leave, your house mates cry as if they’ll never see you again, as if this is the only world. As if they’ll be forever stuck in that place. But you, who is about to leave, who can describe your expression? You who is finally allowing, after a period of calculated denial, the truth back in to your consciousness.

And when you are outside you will be met by your loved-ones, unconditioned by the world where you had come from, they seem to be wiser, for they’ve always known the truth.

And as you are debriefed before admitted back to the absolute, your whole life inside the “house” will flash in front of you in a big screen, as if to rub your foolishness in.

As Lola Laid Dying

Lola may die tonight, repeated the ambient voice over in my head, as I looked down at her shriveled form--almost no longer human, disconnected from any memory, almost impossible to create as a possible idea or an imagined image of her, none, nulled. The bulge and outline of her skull, as if itself alive, pressed against her face, wanting to tear away from its body. But she was still technically alive. Only in a comaesque sleep, and breathing with much effort. Her hollow mouth, all teeth gone with every son or daughter she bore, gapes and shuts like a tired socket. Her tongue receding to that dark place in her body. She even had that look behind the glass. The family she could no longer see--which she hadn't seen for a long time anyway--gathered around her, as if suddenly, in contest for her attention. But she was just there like part of the bed and the crumpled sheet, her face an embossed design on her pillow.

I have seen a lot of dead things. Fishes mostly and dogs. And I could not trace any difference from those things and with what I was seeing then. A thought passed me, that as the soul perfects itself, the body deteriorates. I can only imagine the darkness she was seeing behind her cataract-blinded eyes. As she was almost dead in the waking world, I can feel that she was, as if given a second childhood, bouncing, running or even gliding in that dream-state, in that delirium, in that buffer between the living and the dead.

My childhood was made up of pretty sick, superstitious, and terrifying stories of moments like this. It was mentioned that she had called for a name belonging to a dead person. Which only meant they were beckoning her already. Which only meant she was walking that path lined with flowers and a bright light at the end. Around her house/chapel filled with saints and misalettes, interwoven with laminated pictures of the dead and the living, in gray and in color, I had felt the room was crowded, yet my skin felt flushed with a certain chill. I'm a sucker for horror stories, but I felt the fear in this one was more of awe rather than just fear for pain or even death. The awesome mystery of death. Death, the misunderstood. Notions about dying came to me...everything I had read or seen. Reincarnation, the afterlife, heaven and hell, merging with the void, but none of these had calmed me down. I just felt so lonely and pitiful, that I was sure I would breakdown. Not that Im too crazy about Lola. But I guess my sorrow was for myself too. For one day I will also go through this solemn brutality; this tearing away of the non-degradable from the degradable. This part wherein you wouldn't know where to go: you are too set up for leaving life but your are too afraid to embrace death. And I guess that's what will transform us. Okay I guess I have wet myself enough.

I have many approximations of what we will "see" in death, one of these is the classic falling into a bottomless vortex. But I wish from here to the moon and back, that what I'd be seeing there would be all the best moments in my entire life and all the worst fixed into best moments, played out before me in eternal repeat mode. Amen.

A Day In A Life Of Us

Apr 29, '08 4:58 AM

For the nth time I am convincing myself not to quit. It started when I was brushing my teeth and suddenly, as if brought by the blurriness of my reflection, I have asked, what's the use? Maybe the usual-ity of the alarm clock has gotten in my nerves again, or I'm finally noticing my hatred for the number 8, and my insane craving for the numbers 12 and 5!

Now I am here, in front of my desk and my computer, whose monitor is tagged with the word "mayor's" (maybe Id like to have one on my forehead also), and the noises in the office has started to die out: ah, break time. But I'm here, for what's the use of having a break. Little nice ladies, several of them now, and counting, have "invited" me to a cup of coffee or a piece of sandwhich...and I said, I get shaky with coffee and a sandwhich at this point might ruin my wolf-like appetite later when I have my supper. I need to be hungry, for I may be too tired to eat, and instead be eaten by the couch. Eventually they just disappear and I'm left with myself, and the sound of these keyboards clicking like teeth of a restless sleeper...hah, poetry, poetry, anyway, what's the use of thinking whether I'd quit my job? For the nth time.

Who loves their day jobs anyway? Come on, man, a day job is synonymous with words like "corrosive" "abusive" "stressful" "fatal" and "easy." Why don't I try a "night" job then? Something more exciting like security work? Or relaxing like a dishwasher? Or rewarding like a drug pusher? Ok I'm feeling a lot better now. 5 minutes to my favorite afternoon number. Five minutes more and I'm back home, in my soft couch, and the only thing that could bother me would be to decide what channel I'd be switching into after my show ends. Wow, this is the life!