Beat Madness by One

There come bad days. Days when you just quite literally want to die. I've felt it, you've felt it, everyone and their mother has had really bad days.

Sometimes I don't recover as quickly as I want. There are weeks and weeks where I would feel like I'm recycling tired monologues about all the things that are bad in the world.

Oh, but there are days, there are days when everything just feels so right you feel like the universe is quite literally bending, transforming molecules according to your desires. Days when you're just so in the zone, so in the flow of things, time stops, the world slows down and there's only you and the matter at hand.

These days, while golden, are golden precisely because the bad days exist. If this was how the world works, where the norm is the universe heeding your will, wouldn't a bad day actually feel good? The novelty, the burst of dopamine, the spark of recognition in the brain (saying, hey, this shit is new).

While my mind is wired to look for absolutes, I'm slowly learning the beauty of .. well, gray. Or not gray as in drab gray, but ambiguous gray. A gray you can describe as closer to charcoal and farther from smog, but, definitely neither black or white, and how that tone of gray is a new thing, a thing that is not quite either black or white.

And so, the past couple of months, whenever I feel down, I'd whip out an app to list the things that suck. Then I will list the things that rock. And the moment the things that rock begin outweighing the things that suck, I spontaneously begin to feel better. Maybe there's a little brain trickery there, that I'm in fact training my brain to look for the good things even in especially trying circumstances.

I don't care what you think, but I'll take any means to keep insanity at bay.

Some Joyful Tirade on the Walk Home

And so the thing about being human do you understand that the greatest thing the greatest thing in the middle of this, THIS, walking in the middle of multitudes of magical organic sentient animals who at this junction may be thinking of immortality or mortality or domesticity or the grave possibility that I, mint green sneaks with hot pink laces, speeding up and slowing down randomly to set strangers off, was out to either kiss, slap, snatch their bag/s off, smile at, scoff at, reason with them, and how that very fact,  the very fact you could either be seeing fear, love, excitement or even apathy in their eyes, IN THEIR EYES, do you not understand how very strange all this is? You take breathing for granted until your lungs give out, there is so much you can get used to if you don't watch it but even that, even that ability, the sheer ability to screen out sensations: the feel of clothes against your skin, the fantastic under appreciated support your spine has been giving your organs for countless hours, the strange pattern on the shirt of the dude in front of you--are these stars? Why are there stars? Are these dots? What is this shirt trying to accomplish?--the sound of public commute, the smell of commercial air, often judged and criticized for being wrong, when all it is is air, air that carries the very soul of the place you find it in, the thoughts of people and their collective energies swarming like dotted lines and dots in Brownian motion lashing about, tired, endless, happy, they are all this, you are all this, and the very fact that this can occur to you so randomly and so suddenly and so strongly surely something chemical has burned inside you but then there's nothing really but this, the promise of this random universe that it will continue to dazzle you with things to see and feel and people and beings to meet, and the knowledge that this isn't wishful thinking, this isn't some poor poet's way to console herself but the universe's mandate: that being human could be no other way or what else are we doing here? Whatever we choose whether we choose to live or die or make pancakes tomorrow or blaze a trail in this crazy empire of empowering technology, the fact you can conceive of these choices--you cannot not feel gratitude whether or not you wish to understand where the gratitude is coming from. Hooray, humanity!

Spin Dry

The truth is for all this drama and bullshit about living a fine life the only thing that distracts me from the world, really, is asking myself whether anything I'm doing is making any difference. It keeps me up at night, sometimes. It's easy to imagine where the work goes, how it falls into place in the grand layout of the universe--I'm not an aspiring fiction writer for nothing. But it's still there, a desire to stare pain in the face and give it a good rap on the head.

Part of why waves of emptiness assault me at my weakest: I've been around people for as long as I can remember. Now I've become too comfortable spending days in front of a screen. There are people in my immediate periphery, and I try to be there for them when I can (and God knows they've been there for me all the time when I need them). But you know when your emotional palette is not stretched enough. Life becomes repetitive.

One must find beauty where they can, or claw the earth and digital barriers and all colors of skies to find it. Both are valid. Both are real.

Bleep bloop

And so sometimes you do this because you can't feel anything and sometimes you just feel every single fucking thing so strongly you actually need something to get you down. Well. Not that kind of down.

I'm trying to name my feelings and all I can come up with is rhythmic.

Freak of the Weak

Pun intended.

I wonder how that short story Mechanisms in Hellbound Hearts ended in other people's heads.

Damn you, words! So magical.

I'm steering my boat onto different waters these days, and I'm giving myself more or less a week to make sure this is what I really want. I've discovered strange things about me the past few weeks, and instead of focusing on them as things to blame I'm glad to report they are only pushing me towards more, newer action.

So I've been reading the kinds of books that have always fascinated me: books about people! Or at least how their minds work.

My favorite story this week: Remembering how I've always held one moment in college so close to my heart for possibly the wrong reason. I love fiction, I still do and I'm still at it despite these new stirrings. But whenever I feel like I need to escape where I am, I always find myself back at my Comm 3 prof's room, where she and her boyfriend listen to my defense of my paper. She was someone I liked to impress and I've heard she doesn't really give out high grades and such and I'd always find my work riddled in red ink when she returns them. So I never really figured that she liked me or had any special opinion of me in all my  days in her class.

So imagine my shock when, after I've given my speech (which I don't remember for the life of me), she says, "You know, Macky, you're in the wrong course." And how she always finds herself looking forward to reading my papers. And before she can say anything else, I started crying. She handed me a tissue.

And so I've used that story in my head countless times, whenever I want to rethink where I am. I've always told myself I wanted to be a writer. A fiction writer, and if all those self-imposed responsibilities weren't there then this is where I would rather be: writing about the stories in my head.

Here's the catch: the paper I submitted wasn't fiction. So I don't know where that connection came from. Do you know what it was? It was about schizophrenia. I tried to prove the theory that poor nutrition increases the likelihood of mental problems in people.

And somehow I forgot that little piece of information. I forgot that while I was creative, I was also painfully analytical, that I had the ability to think critically and in terms of data and facts. I may suck at math, but I get relationships (not the emotional kind, at least) and connections and inferences.

Which is probably why one of the earliest lines I wrote with any measure of pride from my novel was this:

Why do people do what they do? 

Of all people, Dumas Chang should know. He had been tossing that one question around in his head for all of thirteen weeks and five days. Like some annoying bad tune that gets lodged in one’s consciousness despite all efforts not to sing it, the question would creep up onto him, disguised at first as a simple, logical sense of wondering along the lines of “Why am I stopping to look at my watch?” and “Why am I getting out of this really snazzy bum rest?” onto “Why am I walking towards that door?” Until, of course, he was asking it again. “Dumas Chang,” a voice would taunt, “why do people do what they do?”

Sometimes he would hold the thought in his brain. He would step out of it, looking at it, challenging it. If a question could sneer right back, “Why do people do what they do?” would have given Dumas the ultimate evil eye.

It appears the way is forward.

Spell

Might as well write about it, you know. I'm having a spell again, and the heat is not helping. Is life always like this? Days of joy, days of madness. There's this ache, the one that doesn't go away, or the one that does but comes back mightily on its own, without warning, without mercy.

I thank writing for allowing me to name things. A spell! This is a spell, a weird spell, the kind of spell that screws you right over.

But I'm okay, all things considered. I just had a really good time yesterday, no alcohol involved, and I remember smiling to myself in the living room at midnight, thinking, this must be what happiness is. I have all these goals but what do they mean if you're bleeding inside in the present moment? Address that, and you can move planets.

It just gets scary sometimes, how I'm doing all this alone, that I have to constantly remind myself that my mind is brilliant enough to make this thing happen, despite the odds, despite the criticism, despite the voices in my own head.

I got another rejection from an agent again today. I've got 33 more to query before I call it quits. 

Meanwhile, Out in the Heat

There's a place I go to when the world scares me. I can't seem to return these days. I miss it, sometimes.

It's so easy to assume this saddens me. It doesn't.

It's how I've always pictured driving. Outside of the driver's seat I feel safe and comfortable and more or less happy getting from point A to B without the stress. It's a nice life. You can backseat drive.

When I'm driving, all my senses are engaged. I'm stressed to the point of pain and so in the zone I don't even hear my father giving me instructions. I am the brakes and the clutch and the gas and the stick. I am the car and I can run over people if I really wanted to.

It's not safe at all. But there's nothing more free. I don't know exactly how this trip is going to go, but I do know now, with a strange, frightening clarity, where I want to go. I've had memories I've held on to for years, for the wrong reasons, but now isn't really the time to blame myself or feel sad or regretful or lonely or jealous that I'm only beginning to see things this late in my life (I say this objectively, and only in comparison to my immediate peers).

The truth is I probably would have squandered and belittled and laughed at my dreams if they came up any earlier. I did kind of do that five years ago. And that has caused me to give up and continue living in my head thinking a 7 is not bad at all. That said, let's do this!

Processing Pulag

Because this is how I deal with things I don't completely understand.

So. I joined the trek because I wanted to go see a mountain. I thought what the hell, people I know are going to Pulag, might as well join.

And so Mt. Pulag it is. The highest peak in Luzon, second highest in the Philippines, close to 3,000 meters above sea level. My buddies chose the other trail, the tougher one called Akiki because...well, some of them had trekked Ambangeg and thought hey, we want more pain! I don't know, I didn't really know what I was getting into.

So anyway, I don't want to talk about all the other details, like the ten-hour hike and how I discovered the worst and the best of me in those two days, and how desperately alone you can feel when you're standing in the middle of a dark forest at 3AM in the morning not knowing if you're really seeing lights in front of you or you're finally hallucinating because your body can no longer stand the cold and the heat and mixed emotions of wanting to get this over with and just wanting to die. (See what I did there?)

What I really want to talk about is one moment, at the part of the trek they called the grasslands which, when you hear about it the first time your mind conjures a flat plain full of knee-high grass and how easier that would be to traverse than everything that came before it (imagine stairs a foot high each, and then a thousand of those). It turns out that the grasslands was exactly how I imagined except everything was on a 50-degree incline (or more, actually).

It wasn't easy. It was the part of the trail that I really, truly gave up. I had just trekked mind-numbing hours through dry grass and trees and the crazy heat and I could feel my lungs giving up on me and the absolute discomfort of feeling too hot from sweat but too cold from the mountain breeze and I was just gripped with this insane desire to turn back. Whatever that means, considering I was in the thick of the trek and there was quite literally no choice left but to continue.


It's that moment when I lifted my head and took in everything around me. The sun was rising. My thoughts were a jumbled mess of self-hate and self-doubt and frustrations and all sorts of questions like what in the world made me think I was up for this kind of physical challenge and what if I died and what if I just laid down and let everyone else go ahead and leave me there to run out of breath and eventually die.

Then I saw the mountains.

They were so large and silent and imposing. And yet they looked friendly and comforting. I cried a bit. Not because I realized anything or had some grand epiphany about the meaning of life or what all of the shit in my life means but because it was just so damn beautiful. It was so beautiful the first words in my mind were "I'm not worthy."

I don't know where that thought came from, but it tells me a lot. And I'm not about to over-analyze myself into a corner again but there was just so much joy and humility in that one weird moment after I gave up that I had to write about it and make sure I never forget.


Of course I can tell you that the trail was a metaphor for the story of my life but then I'm not done living yet. What I can tell you is that none of the empowering, positive thoughts that I repeated to myself to motivate myself worked. None.

What saved me was getting out of my head and moving one foot forward. That's it. No magic tricks. As with life, you only get to exercise power in the task at hand. You can't control the past, you can't control the future, but you can take charge of what's in front of you. You get just one window to do something. So I guess the idea is to make it count.

I didn't take a picture of the moment I was talking about, but this was the mountain range

Here, There Be Stories

I can tell you all about what brought me here, and why I wrote it and what it really means to me (and it's probably not as straightforward as you think), but I'd rather you click on the link to download the epub version, read the story and tell me what you think.

Read me! Read me! 

It's a short story (3,100 words, thank you very much) called To Pong, Before I Go, which is really about loss and despair.

It ends where it should.

Ultra Blue

I'm going to write something about the girl giving me a manicure. I bet she has no idea that while we are inches away from each other, and my hand is in hers, I am actually thinking about her and why her face looks familiar. Granted it isn't my first time here and I already have some rule set up about how the girl who's no good at bodywork is great at manicure and vice versa but this girl is neither of these persons. She looks like some lost classmate. I remember this girl who recognized me from high school. I'm not very good with names. But I'm pretty good with faces.

Anyway the girl is messing up the blue, which is nowhere near the Star of Bombay nail polish I was expecting. But, surprise surprise, it is the ultra blue of fast cars and I love it.

There are a couple of other girls who got the same package I did. I wonder if they knew how old they looked like. I'm thirty-one now, look who's talking.

I think about the totality of my life and the pain in one of my fingers she probably over-cleaned and trying to recall when I set the email I sent to my future self would ever arrive and would it say nice things.

Aha, now onto the foot.