Exhausted

Made another mistake in a long line of these. Still shocked, still processing the night's events. Bottom line: I was lucky, probably we all were. I can't make this right directly but I will when the time for it comes.

Setback!

I can attribute some of the work-related weirdness that's been happening to me to the godawful Christmas rush. I've been trying to keep away from it, trying to work in sealed bunkers where I won't have to move out until absolutely necessary. Getting out of these bunkers depletes resources that I'll need to continue all my work. But I still have to go out, to rush to meet people though, and lately things have been getting lost, shuffled around, because it's harder and harder to travel the streets. I'm losing gas and sleep and I'm often stuck in between places where you can't make output or send it. My phone battery is on the blink. And yes, I'm not eager to make or return phone calls.

So here I am preparing to rush out again. I am hoping I won't be as unprotective unproductive.

rock

There is a piece of polished masonry I've been carrying since late August. It was part of an office building that had likely been demolished a month before that time in the Ortigas Center area-- the facade, perhaps, or the floor. I'd seen pieces of this dark, marbly substance. I remember telling myself what a shame it was to waste these pieces. They would have made a good trophy base, name plate, sign or paperweight. I picked a good-sized bit of dark building-facade rock (wikipedia calls it a conglomerate) and took it home with me.

This was sometime after August. I don't remember the exact date. (I admit I have that problem with death anniversaries and birthdays too.) I do remember that there were strange colors in the clouds at five in the p.m., traffic was decent and that later on in the evening the moon was a sickly, lurid red.

The point is I kept it because I wanted to remember: my little conglomerate held its own against the wind (a good paperweight), and I liked looking at it, gently touching it with the tips of my fingers. Its dark hue, its pockmarks, the small embedded imperfections, its points and varied textures--sharp, rough, smooth-- these things comforted.

It's just sad that, as events force me to accumulate new junk, this rock (and my memories) finds itself unused, corwded out, hiding in more and more obscure locations. I reached for it, in a dark bag full of wires and cheap electronics, and it nearly cut me.

It's sad because I don't want to simply throw it away.

Nobody really reads this crap. Why does my hit counter register increasing hits? It can't be all me. Sheez.

Why I can't live and work in Eastwood City

It's a nice place to visit but it has its own snags.

You can't really walk out of the condo unit wearing rubber slippers (flip-flops to my American readers) or an ugly shirt. Everything is ridiculously expensive, from food to internet time.

But this is a great place to hide out when you want to work without external interruptions. There's ample power, ample water --and a heater to boot! After the guards get used to your face they tend to leave you alone. When you need eye candy you can take a stroll and look into any of the posh and semi-posh temples of commerce.

I tend to keep to myself and the condo though. I'm in no mingling mood. Even if I'm often faced with the threat of cafard.

Fringe Workflow Reports—

Dexes and Exes

When I started Fringe Living it was meant to be a blog about living and working on the fringe, that is to say, life and work outside the comforting miasma of a desk job and life with the parents. Lord knows it was long overdue (the blog and life and work sans mom, dad and desk job).

It was supposed to be devoid of the heavy political, philosophical and personal baggage that permeated The Big Bodega. Then I lost my—okayokayokay, I’ll get off that topic since I’ve talked it over to death.

Fact is I’ve talked of nothing else but my troubles with my whole peer group and my exes.

Today I’ll be doing something different. Talking about something I should have been discussing in this venue. It’s something called work.

Project Yearbook.

I’ve been doing nothing but the Saint Columban’s Diamond Jubilee souvenir program over the last two months. I can’t market my others services while I’m doing this thing. That’s because there’s only one of me and I can’t promote myself, do videos and the yearbook at the same time. The yearbook’s long overdue and God knows I really won’t be getting money for it.

In between bouts of non-stop work and non-stop stupor in places where I can’t easily be reached for comment (or for nagging) it’s almost a gift to be able to marathon episodes of Smallville and Supernatural.

Anyway here’s my progress report—

I’m still indexing adverts that I’m working on. Should be done by tonight.

1. I have to re-import some jpegs (I’m using Freehand) because they’re coming out pixilated on the printouts. Should take an hour, should also be done by tonight.
2. I gotta get started formatting the ads. I’ll do this last. Hopefully I’ll be done with what I have by Tuesday.

Litmus

Every second an opportunity to turn it around.

It sounds easy. It is easy. In principle. All it takes is a little courage. A little understanding.

My courage and understanding failed me last night (actually two nights ago). I could have changed tacks. Stayed on the line, been my charming self. I did love this woman—I do love this woman. I knew it was her the moment she picked up the phone and spoke.

All I could remember when I heard her voice last night was just how bad the situation between us was: this woman hated me so badly she wanted to forget me. I didn’t, until that second, realize just how angry and afraid I was. Angry at our choices, terribly afraid of the day—this day— that we would speak again.

I wanted the conversation over and done with quickly before I said anything stupid. By default, she wouldn’t believe me anyway. And what new thing was I supposed to say, to add to this stilted conversation? She’s already heard everything—

“I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry we turned out badly. Life just isn’t the same without you in some way shape or form. I miss you, your mannerisms, your jokes.”

That night there was something I wanted to add: I am so afraid of displeasing you any more than I already have, that I have exhausted your capacity to even listen to me. I wish I could get past this. Despite what you feel about the actions I took and the choices I made, everything I did, since you decided we were over, I did because I value you.

The moment passed—

In the real world she asked for the caller’s name. My name. The name that finally came out in a rueful breath. There was no way to give it without her finding out that this voice belonged to the man she hated, the man who "used her," the man who "frightened her." Never mind that this voice belonged to the man she once loved.

In the end I can only pray for similar moments, for the strength to cut through the bullshit and reach that dear friend I once had.

Every second an opportunity to turn it around. Every day a litmus test to see if this is true.

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.