Beating a Dead Horse

I don't want to be continually apologizing. And knowing what I know now, it may be best to leave well enough alone. I'd hoped that there would be time, prayed for a different ending, gone so far as to try provoke a response because anything was better than this existence without you.

I honestly don't know how I could have messed us up. I did love you; I still do. The bottom line as best as I could determine was that you felt I was taking you for granted, was too hung up on the past. One day you simply decided you wouldn't live with that anymore. From your standpoint, there was no feasible future with me. Everything else stems from that simple fact. Everything snowballed into that big mess that saw me driving you farther away.

I'm sorry. For everything. I can't fix this; I so desperately want to. It's not my call anymore.

Please believe me, I do mean you well. There're so many things I'd wanted to show you. Like in the old days. I wish we could talk.

Someone's found me on Skype

...and I'm not sure if she's even a "she."

It's flattering being asked if I want to "play." Lord knows it's been a long while since someone's called me "Baby." Sadly, as much as the loins may stir at the prospect of a virtual tryst, work still needs doing.

And that this girl is always on-line seconds after I sign in, makes me wonder if she isn't an online software version of a femmebot. One designed to ping the accounts of select Skype users periodically to see if they're online and then send them messages encouraging them to follow a link to her home porn site.

Intriguing, this possibility of being propositioned by a marketing gimmick.

Jogging in Place

I don't like myself today. Every other word I'm saying is either "f_ck" or "bullsh!t." And every other gesture I've been making with my hands is to flip somebody the bird. Not that I would normally point that at anyone but I've been doing that so much someone is bound to see it.

I haven't been truly happy since August. There were moments-- in the middle of editing and contributing to a really fun video or talking about camp icons. Or that time when I became a mime for my friend Maureen. Or that one time when I helped the mideast resto with their electricals and maybe saved 'em from a fire. But since then, nothing. Abso-f_cken-lutely jack-bull-sh!t.

Which is ironic, since in that respect, I'm in the exact same place I was two years ago.

I can handle it better, thank God. And my current workload keeps me preoccupied enough so that thinking about where I am doesn't take up all of my headspace. I still have some major decisions to make that I've been postponing, pending the end of my current work project. Check back with me next month and I'll let you know how those are going.

I am praying that when you see me next I will be smiling, and not because I'm ruminating about the aptness of the image below--

I've logged a thousand miles following the highway, and all this time everyone else was moving while I was actually jogging in place.

Oh god I'm flipping someone the bird again...

Weeks--maybe a month ago-- I dreamt of you. There were scars on your legs, your shins and I kissed them. In the dream I didn't know how they got there. I wanted so much to make the wounds and the scarring go away.

Again, off multiply. June 05 2007

I am getting really tired of serial romances. The kind that begin like a sunrise-- warm, slow and sweet, lending life to last night's washed out colors. I'm even done waiting for the cooler, more muted liaisons, the ones that are built on love and logic. I am, simply put, tired of waiting for sense to make its way into my friends' thick skulls. The self is not God's Gift to Women, but it's the best and only self I've got. I am tired of laying it with my customary roses, marjoram and fruit on a silver platter only to have it unceremoniously sent back to me for consumption with all the parts torn up and put back together wrong. The f_ckups I've had to deal with are nowhere near the legendary levels of last year, but it's very discouraging just the same to be told in so many ways to go hang. I am especially tired of waiting long periods of time for fear, loathing and contempt to fade away when they should not have even been there in the first place. I refuse, however, to give in to indifference (everyone else does) because neither of us has to. (Why am I the only one who sees it?) I will not play the pissing contest of "Who Loses More?" There is nothing stupider than two once close people pointedly ignoring each other and telling their friends what an utter moron the other person is. The situation is unfair and I'm supposed to sit here and take it because everyone else does? Bull cookies. Something has to be done because it can't keep being this way. None of us can afford it. Yes, I'm a gods-damned moron for thinking that there must be a better way to live and go about caring than this. Because if there is none, then we're all screwed, courtesy of our own fickle and benighted natures.

(this is a cross post from my multiply account)

Evil Dex and His Big Bodega

There was a time when I could post stuff about everything that's happened to me. That was before the advent of communities of interconnected interactive blogs. Before I was formally part of a group of people who blogged interactively. I had functional (if relative) anonymity. People who'd stumble on my blogs wouldn't have the luxury of prejudging the content based on how well they knew me. Select instances from my life seen through my eyes would serve to inform and divert and (sigh) entertain to an extent dictated by personal, social and geographical distance and by simple common sense.

Then I started to have an audience: moral supporters, curious and bored readers, at least one critic who put my writing and ideas to the test. The dialogues between blogger and audience was still thankfully somewhat Hegelian, and they were dropped once we left our terminals. The topics we argued about online were important --comics, art, philosophy, love and politics-- but they didn't spill over into our personal lives and social interactions. At least that was how it felt back then.

I was very opinionated, very pompous, very angry, very happy, a little sad, somewhat paranoid, very much in love, and very reflective.

I could almost freely blog about what it felt like, being the houseband living with my then-girlfriend, my issues with mom and pop and God and authority figures. I had a very lengthy blog entry (two parts!) about writing, English and, of all things, my hair as a political statement. I could blog about how much I disliked lawyers and advertisers even if I'm as pedantic as a lawyer and was a college-trained ad man. I could look over my posts and learn and relearn things about myself and the way I think and write and live.

Nagusame's Dex, Shrinemaiden

Somewhere along the line my reflexive activity started to affect other people outside my life online. I think this happened sometime after I lost my wife (the girlfriend). She was my center, or a large part of what kept me together as a person. I lost track of why I was blogging. I stopped talking about politics and comics and America and Hegel and Nietszche and St. Augustine.

And everyone around me knew it, could feel it, was affected by it. Some were inconvenienced and debilitated by it.

I was shouting it on every online mountaintop: I love you. I was arguing, on my blogs, the nature and merits of a life lived for two. Off line I was campaigning earnestly, assiduously for such an alliance.

Reality TV

My online life and my off line life had become one and the same.

What used to be entertainment and diversion that could be shut off as soon as I left the terminal had become ...reality television. I was talking about the dynamics of a romantic affair online and, off line, I was living the equivalent of a romantic affair ending horribly.

And everyone in my social circles (active online and regularly meeting off line) could not help but see it, even if they couldn't bear to watch.

But I couldn't stop-- these were events, variables. These had to be recorded, analyzed, compared with the experiences of friends and colleagues. Future scenarios extrapolated from insufficient data so I could find the one with the happy ending and bring it into existence.

And I felt it then, everyone tired of me talking a topic to death. Everyone tired of me number-crunching scenarios and throwing them away. Everyone with a prepackaged pop psychology solution to something I needed to work out for myself.

How do you stop an Imploding Man?

Perhaps I could have lived these lives separately had I not been part of several groups of people who knew me online and off line. It certainly would have spared my friends the grief of seeing someone destroy himself. It certainly would have spared me the grief of being sorely vexed by people with the best of intentions, by people who loved me. But that's neither here nor there now.

The point is that this is partly why I destroyed my old blog, my old friendster account. Why I stopped going to the club meetings, to the martial arts classes, why I stopped seeing friends. Why I hid. Why I talked about my disintegration and other personal matters in other blogs and venues. And why until August, I didn't post anything about my latest interpersonal stuff.

Bottom Line

Perhaps the lesson is that familiarity breeds contempt, even in the most well-intentioned people. I know for sure though, that I'll be reviewing these musings and referring to them to guide my future interactions with the World Wide Web and the world beyond it.

Too much has happened for me to put it all down in a way you'll be able to read properly. Which is good, because that means I've been productive. What's maddening is that this is also true: there's a lot of nothing going on in my life. Large chunks of my time are spent just waiting.

Waiting on the customers.
Waiting for them to fully pay up.
Waiting until I can safely leave to buy supplies (and by then most stores are closing).
Waiting until I can get on line.
Waiting until the public toilet is available.
Waiting until income actually clears debt.
Waiting for plans to come to fruition.
Waiting for God to act.
Waiting for people to soften, and
Waiting for Godot.

Not that I don't fill these waiting times with other activities. But the filling does not change the feeling that I am again, likely, time's fool. That something is up and I have no idea what it's about or when it's all going to happen.

Well. Back to work.

This is how I know I'm not being read. My hit counter's gone up by one and I sure as hell know I was my site's last visitor.

Tin. Hey. Look. You're important to me.

Believe it or don't that I love you; decide that it does or does not matter; you're important to me. I can't stand that we're not talking.

I've wronged you, yes. I'm sorry, definitely. But please, at least talk to me.

You're one of my few best friends, trysts, mixed signals and fouled expectations notwithstanding. I need you not because I need to play someone or otherwise screw him up.

I need you for you.

People can't spend that kind of time together and not be marked by it in some way. I don't care that what happened to us was a freak accident; IT DOESN'T MATTER. It hasn't mattered since the night I called you Baby and I threatened to pluck out ***s nosehairs if he got absent and made you go to work early.

I don't care that we were a freak accident. I feel stupid for fighting it all that time.
That you cared for me was the best accident to ever happen to me in a long time.

Please talk to me

I love you

Prayer

Father I come to you again with sullied hands, storming heaven with my incessant requests. I am fully aware of my unworthiness. But each time I've prayed for someone else you've answered with speed and grace and subtlety. I want you to answer me this time.

I do not want the comfort offered by a parent who can't prevent pain. "Shhhh, shhh, I know" is not comfort if I have been at the receiving end of it twice in a row. What comfort is it to know that you know, but will not act? I don't have your vision. I can't see what's ahead. I only know that you move in the world because when I pray for friends, something good happens.

I beg you to let that something good happen to me.

I sense your handiwork in the events that swirl around me but I cannot see their end. And for now, I cannot see my heart's desire on my horizon. Let me not love or pray or struggle with my backsliding in vain.

I ask this in your name.

Amen

Dearest Tin,

I love you. I did. I always will. Goodbye.

Dear Jerrah,

I'm writing to let you know I burned out on a girl again. I'm also beginning to wonder just what the latest of these rejections means for me. I scare women, we've established that. Lord knows I scared you. But the things that scare you are seemingly the essential parts of me-- an earnestness that translates into creepiness, little gestures of affection that are often read the wrong way in the world of sexual politics.

People are obsessed with finding their Other, saying aloud that he or she doesn't have to be perfect yet thinking exactly the reverse. Then when faced with imperfection, they buckle, they break. They can't or won't seem to remember just what it is that made you special in their eyes, just what it is that they saw in you. And you're the one cursed with all the remembering and all the regret.

You want to try the experiment of simply being friends but they see your feelings, your intent and these things threaten them. You want simply to be with them, see them, and everything you say and everything you do is always heard and seen in the wrong light. The things you used to be able to talk about when you were "just friends" are the same things you can't talk about now, even when they're talked about with other friends. You become an imposition on their time, which has suddenly become more important to them than it was previously. And they say hurtful things and you say hurtful things and it just spirals into worse...

It's so easy to change people's views for the worse (hurt them), so hard to change people's views for the better. We tell ourselves love isn't about changing the other person but that's what we expect when we engage in loving.

I don't know, Jer. If a person's character is destiny, and if it's nigh impossible to change it, then it's quite safe to conclude that some people are simply never meant to marry, or love another on intimate, personal and sexual levels. I'd be better off hiring prostitutes to bleed off my libido since no one wants to share herself with me in that meaningful way.

My heart knows this isn't true in spite of the evidence in front of me (you know how well the logic of "evidence" damns). Maybe I'll have some proper answers one day. Or maybe I'll be writing you again about this exact same impasse a year from now.

In the meantime, I hope you are well.

Dex

Cat Got Your Tongue

Tonight I'm going to the nearest adoration chapel, to pray for friends who have cause to grieve.

Pacs' girlfriend Joyce miscarried and is dealing with the loss of her child. Pacs has been pushed away, is unable to help. Not all is well between Anna and the American who stole her away from me in '05. Him, I don't much care about, but Anna deserves the happiness I could not provide her.

Meantime I don't know if I can still bring myself to pray for my own needs. You see, several months ago there was not a day when I wasn't at a chapel, praying that God would at least soften Mylene's hardline stance against having me around. The year before that, the name in my prayer requests was Socorro. I am... less than satisfied with what happened.

I'm thus not too keen about praying re: my situation with Tin, never mind the fact that I love her. I haven't been the best of boyfriends and most anything I say would be a cop out excuse regardless of how... But I love her. I want to do right by her. That's the important thing. I can only hope her heart can see me rightly one day soon, before this missing her kills me.

I do love her.

My Best friend is Getting Married... Again

As befitting a Baptist who is part of a non-denominational Christian church, my friend Dexter Buenaluz, known to a few on deviantArt as hyperdex, is getting married in the same church.

In my universe, one wedding is usually enough. In an ideal world the "real" wedding is the church wedding. Take the cue from some of my oldest friends and call me a delusional sentimentalist.
I think that this is one instance when the church and the state can drop the separation. It would save us a lot in fees and logistics and stress if a marriage solemnized in a church ceremony was also recognized by the state.

One ceremony, one set of fees. One ring to rule them all... and in this marriage bind them.

Nevertheless, I think it's sweet that he'll marry his wife again.

Well.

Time to implement Oplan Zero Visibility.

A Return to Living La Vida Fringe

I've quit my ultra-stressful high-paying job to live on the fringe of society again. Not to say that the life I'm coming back to was always stress-free. Like many people who were suddenly saddled with the cares of adulthood, I was also presented with irritating catch-22s.

Have lots of time but make measly money. Or make a crap-load of money but kiss your time goodbye (hello, you're married to your work now!).

I am determined to beat this. If there is one life-changing thing I can do, let it be that.

The God in Me-a

My co-worker surprised me once again. She did the equivalent of reading my palm, and quite accurately too-- she asked me to draw a person and a tree and she told me stuff about myself. While I didn't appreciate her going into shrink mode-- I've had a sh!tload of people falling all over themselves to judge me and chart the course of my life-- I did appreciate the sudden epiphany I received. I was appropriately thankful.

There wasn't much that's changed in me since the time my wife left me. I'm reserving judgement about whether or not that's a good thing.

I'm thinking maybe the Universe is trying to tell me something with regard to the broken, needy thing that is my heart. Let you know what else I discover in the coming days.

On Friends

One

My friend is still a sanctimonious jerk. But I love him and I'm not about to lose him because he has to be right all the time. Neither do I want to lose him because I dislike how cavalierly those who are right treat those who are wrong. His viewpoint is not the only valid one in the universe.

I am upset because he continually sees me as a basket case. If my peer group was Asia he'd be Taiwan and I'd be Bangladesh in his eyes.

I have to keep in mind that his universe revolves around him as mine does around me. He is my friend regardless of how we see each other.

Two

We were lovers. Regardless of what people say or think or do, that is what we were. I just wish she would acknowledge that. Am I so loathesome that to say we were once joined at the hip is an embarrassment? an affront to nature?

I am beyond asking her to love me back now, even if that is my dearest wish. Her actions have spoken volumes about who she cares for, who she chooses for a mate, what she seeks in a man (obviously not me).

I only want two things now-- that she speak to me again; and that she acknowledge even if only to herself that we were lovers once. I have slandered myself enough; I've no desire to have others tarnish who I am pereceived to be.

It's All About Me

I've been asked, at the Quezon City residence, why I'm so selfish. It's only dawned on me a few days ago why this is so. It's 'cause I'm pretty selfless everywhere else. At the end of the day or the bleeding work week I just want to go someplace where all I'll do is eat and sleep and be oblivious to everyone else's pain.

I guess this also answers other people's questions regarding why I'm so "needy."

Anyway, it's a sh!tty situation, being too tired to spread warmth and cheer where it's needed most (the home) because you're expected by everyone else to be cheerful outside of it. I don't exist to be someone valued for just my skills--at least not in the home-- and certainly not when those skills can be easily learned by the people at home who need them.

Yes, no one really has the time to do all that learning, especially when the computer is involved. But then that means the people concerned will have no choice but to put up with me being a very reluctant, irritable and very condescending old sourpuss.

Nobody bothers to visit this page anyway, so:

I am no longer part of your clique, your subset. You won't miss me, not if your actions are anything to go by. It'll be as if I've never been. Damn bleeding shame. But maybe it'll be for the best.

Goodbye.