Confused-Shoes

The amount doubled and freaking hell was I ever the frugal monkey.

      Almost new year’s. What a drag. I want to get my lungs rehabilitated, and possibly my head could use a shrink. Then my birdies can use a whore. Oh man, omen.

      It was a golden breastplate that was sent late into a puny den of fastidious men who will have cornflakes for dinner all year long and coke lights to boot.

      Shiva, Ganesh, Asura, Kathmandu, Amanda, Dexter Doria. Tantra, Yoga. Yogi Bear. Anjo Yllana. Llama. Yamaha. Ranma. Ran. Rania. Wrestlemania. Manila. Nida Blanca. Blanka. Tatanka. Tank-tops. Curly Tops. Topless.

     Buddha. Oh what the hell. Screw Buddha, doggy style. Rectal abrasions.

I had ten thousand pesos in my pockets. My guy bestfriend and my girl bestfriend (which happen to be my parents) each gave me one half of the total sum I had with me as, for what else, December money. Besides, I’ve got some work and all the salary is for myself, if I dare chose to be a little selfish. So, those clarify the whole issue: I didn’t have to commit a crime to have such a fat wallet around this time of year.

Not being rich, I felt that what I had with me was quite a useful amount. I could spend it any way I like, perhaps entirely for myself, or perhaps, for someone else (who would have to be really special), or for whatever. Thoughts like these give me a bloated feeling in the head.

Sunday, I went out with my family to the nearest big mall from our place. As usual (what we’ve done religiously for almost ever since I was born, at least as I can remember) we had some sort of dinner (since mama hates to cook on Sunday evenings), strolled around, saw a few acquaintances doing the same, and actually enjoyed the lengthened shopping hours that are a Christmas-season necessity. So just then naturally there occurred in me the demon urging me to spend. That is when I started getting this depression.

You see, I figured, I could buy many things for myself, if I were wise and gratuitous at the same time. Yuletide gifts and presents excluded, I simply had much money for myself to spare. So around 9 pm I disengaged myself from the family stroll (just after we had a chat with the family of this girl I had a crush on) and went by myself around certain places. Bear with me.

I thought, hey, maybe I could buy a new pair of sneakers, so I checked the Lebron James poster-clad store out. But nothing fancy caught my fancy. Was I growing old, and these shox and air maxes no longer stir Jordan-esque fantasies in me? Oh well, my money and youth intact (still), I walked out the store, feeling proud that my soiled, battle-tested high-cut canvas Chuck Taylors were the comfiest ever sneakers for a kid like me to wear.

Next up: maybe I could replace my year-old Kenneth Cole with something sazzier, like the cheapest Swiss chronographs I could find? Well, well, I did go to some watch seller. Funny. For a moment I had delusions of purchasing an Oris or an Omega or even a Breguet right then and there. Haha, madmen have delusions. Kids fantasize. But my money wouldn’t take me anywhere, especially for something of Swiss descent. Besides, buying a watch while I still have nice ones right now would seem too much of caprice, wouldn’t it?

Many things came to mind as I walked on: new T-shirts (atttaboy, I could use some), new shirts and slacks (the people at the office might notice, the girl behind my desk might even let drop a compliment), new leather shoes (c’mon), new other things. Or I could spend on books (pity my bookcase – it might collapse anytime) or splurge on Cd’s (I still have not yet bought that 2-cd best of Miles Davis/Jim Coltrane). The list went on. The list goes on, only, I couldn’t really seem to manage to pick one thing to purchase from that. Talk about a pretty useless catalogue.

I went home in a state of trauma.

Cigarette after cigarette, and a little J&B in a freebie Jose Cuervo shot glass, with Oishi to boot, I watched Sergio Leone’s 3-hour plus epic Once Upon a Time in America. It was almost 2 am, and I was infatuated with the Noodles – Deborah love affair. Then I went to bed.

In the cold and dark of my room I raised my right hand as I lay flat on my back on my almost spineless bed. I felt like I was on speedball and coccaine, contemplating the vastness of my universe with my right hand outstretched, my eyes closely watching as my fingers cut through the moonlight-stricken dark haven. I pictured myself in prison, sentenced to lifetime imprisonment, like I have committed murder or something. Would my mother bring me cigarettes whenever she visits? I would down about five packs of Marlboro reds every day (assuming no inmates would hustle from me) so I would die of emphysema or cancer and I wouldn’t have to wretchedly spend every day of my sentence, rotting, sex-deprived, agonizingly thin, stricken with every imaginable skin disease. But that was pure stupidity, I reckoned. I would just be punishing myself more, for I might die of cancer very, very slowly, I living corpse of such an intelligent once inhabitant of St. John Street.

I have my money intact. But my mind was lost. In the darkness, brooding. A fellowship with other confused souls.

But I do remember, I said hi to her and her entire family later in the evening. She just smiled back, and I had a conversation with her equally beautiful older sister. Those are the things, or events, that money can’t ever buy/

Of course, now, it could. I thought. Trauma, this is.

I read her letter twenty times over, but unlike in most novels I know, I wasn’t able to memorize the lines by heart. From the heading to the closing, it felt like I was reading something new every time I read the letter. Every single new moment of rereading I experienced a whole new slew of emotions, ripping through me, crushing me. Once more, I thought, life was successful in hurting me the way it wanted to hurt me, and that day life used another ex-lover to show me how useless it was for me to go on resisting, living.

Though the emotions were new, however, my reactions were not. I’ve been through this before and I knew just what to do. What the hell, I told myself. That line from the Talking Heads song Once in our Lifetime rang in my head - “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was”. There was entirely, in general, nothing new.

Shrugging every new heartache off and patiently waiting for another one to come has been the main issue of late, and, I must admit, it must be weird for someone to be so used to such a thing. It doesn’t bother me anymore, nor does it stay with me longer than at most a day, the feeling of being heartbroken. In my 19^th year I was living my life like there were no great typhoons to face but there were the perennial thunderstorms to brave. Which was easier among the two for me to pull through, I couldn’t really tell. But I know the exact difference.

I dream sometimes of the old days when I was young and love affairs were novelties for us teenagers just beginning to discover the pleasures of touching one another in hushed movie houses and stealing kisses when we find ourselves alone in a dim corridor. Boy and girl, love and hate, chocolates and roses, condoms and napkins, briefs and panties, belts and bras. I dream of all the wonderful girls I loved and those whom I loved to spend sunsets with, clad in school uniforms, colored backpacks, a bottle of coke beside us. Nothing beats it, I decided. But oftentimes decisions are bound to change, and, until I find a new feeling to welcome sunshine, this precocious nostalgia stays.

When everything seems so dull now, and rejections and breakups don’t really hurt me anymore, I look back to the time when love seemed to be the greatest issue in being a teen; now, the prospect of work, graduate school or whatever looms, just as I am now realizing that when you reach 20 you can no longer claim that you are still too young to die. Everything seems possible all of a sudden and all these possibilities run in my head, chasing each other in a carousel, over and over again until they no longer shock me.

    There is great fear in me – I fear failure but I also dread my own success. Living in this contradictory state, I had no other recourse but to talk to myself  (as I would talk to people whom I am very familiar with) as if there existed two personas in me, one very consoling, counseling, mature, wise beyond his years, and the other very much in need of support, encouragement, like he would be living on every piece of advice that he stumbles up on the dreary road he threads.

    I would talk to myself as often as I could, but of course I rarely do this when there are people around, people who can hear me, people who will immediately judge me and attribute my apparent insanity to perhaps some problem or predicament of my own. Anyway, this makes me a great compulsive talker whenever I find myself alone, very much like a 13-year old who has just discovered the power of self-stimulation and just then jerks off whenever he finds opportunity knocking in his fragile but exciting moments of sheer solitude. When I find myself alone, out of anyone’s earshot (at least, the way I imagine myself to be), I talk to myself. I converse with myself. Then I break down and laugh at myself for doing things like these, and I feel pitiful.

  Of course, having a cigarette completes the ensemble. What better mood can there be, I am alone, it is 2 am, my house brightly lit, a lighter by the coffee table and there am I, asking myself how my day has been, talking myself out of my present concerns, pretending that someone concerned is intently listening, someone is giving me much needed advice, patiently nursing me back to a healthy state of mind and a hopeful disposition. Then, whenever the ice starts to harden, and no words could be said as of the specific moment, there will always be that cigarette to keep you company. It always saves the occasion from relapsing, or perhaps evolving, into high drama. So in a way, the cigarette keeps me sane while I dabble away with myself and lose my head.

    On certain perfect days I would have a glass of whisky (Walker or Chivas – leftovers from the recent new year’s) and some uncommon brand of cigarette to make sure the two conversationalists are well taken care of; and how can I forget, I would play Revolver and listen to She Said, She Said, I Want to Tell You, and For No One as if the Beatles were my destined musicians, officially designated by destiny to play the soundtrack of my life. They, as it turns out to me, know how it feels to hear you talk with yourself. And I, for one good thing, know that I tell myself only the things that I think I can never ever bring myself to tell anyone else. I will only tell myself the purest, as well as the most abominable, thoughts that make me humanly me. I become who I am because I harbor certain ideas and feelings and I am lucky enough to have someone to listen to me, because otherwise I would have just kept these things to myself and in my old age I shall perish, just like everyone, without letting any of their secrets spill; that way they are to blame for drowning their own hearts.

      I listen to myself talk. Words that are too wise for the ears of other people, and, on the other hand, to banal to be used in my prayers. I realized that all my life I have refused, willingly, to share my sincerest thoughts, whether good or bad, to other people for the simple reason that I think my life, or at least the way I perceive it, is too complicated for straight narration. My prayers, meanwhile, contain general thoughts, abstract ideas that are meaningful to me on the spiritual level, but they are not entirely comforting, I must say, during times of lethargy and soporific abandon. So I talk to myself, and I listen to myself talk. The mark of a blossoming madman, someone crazy, someone who could love so much and lose his sanity at the same time. There is not much difference, Nietzsche said. These things are beyond good and evil. And as I continue talking to myself in times of sheer solitude, I could not help but feel a sense of self-possession, a great deal of self-control. To know thyself, to know myself, by talking to myself, makes me perhaps a whole lot more sane than everybody else.

It was sad as hell. I was staring deep into the face of misery. When December came, I immediately sensed the ghosts that came with it, surrounding me, frightening me, killing me. The last month of the year has suddenly become the perfect setting for the reign of futility and gloom – portals have been opened and demons have been released. And what was I, a hopeless, mediocre, and sophomoric 19-year old, supposed to do?

Not that I could do anything about it. All my life I have tried to live knowing full well that every day there are untold possibilities for every one of us, tragic, wonderful, or serene events just waiting to happen, like curative potions waiting to be selected and administered by an apothecary or like magic spells waiting to be pronounced and cast by a sorcerer. When those things could happen, and they do happen, and one knows that it is just a matter of opportunity, beneficial or injurious, then, I suppose one could then live his life with a little less stupidity. When there are an infinite number of things to do and an infinite amount of chance for things to happen, whatever sort, then, one would then feel bad about wasting time.

But I was dead wrong. My entire skeptic arsenal proves terribly inadequate to meet the demands of my misery. Things I never have dreamed of happen, and things that I don’t suppose would do me any harm end up almost killing me. I thought I knew it all, I thought I could calculate it all, and I thought I could face it all. But in the end, like most self-proclaimed sages, I end up being obliterated by the prophets of fortune, by the apostles of destiny. I could not foresee the future, but I lived like I could, and so I ended up as miserable as a pretender could be.

I am too young to talk about absolute failure, about permanent doom, necessary non-existence. But that is just exactly what I mean, and it is the most salient feature of this near-ending life – I am too young for all these, and yet all these have come. They did not hold holy that I have not even reached yet my twentieth birthday. Funny. In the movies they always had to say it, as also with the news. But now I know, no one is too young to die. Nobody can be too young to die, and death is blind about age. If there is one thing true in the world, it is that all of us earthlings die. And no one can claim that it could not yet be his time. The time for death can be anytime at all. And that is what is absolutely tragic, wonderful, and serene about it.