the brewing machine

I am still in awe at how the creative juice can sometimes just flow out of you so effortlessly and as natural as an orgasmic release. Boys and girls, I’m not talking about sex ayt?

Sometime in the first couple of days of last January, I created one whole song in 30 minutes. It has 3 verses, a chorus that is repeated about four or five times, and a trying-to-be-cute of an interlude. This is a personal record. That was the shortest time it took me to create a whole song, complete with lyrics and melody. And it’s even one of the best I ever made.

A couple of hours ago, my third creation for the year 2006 found its way through my guitar strings and vocal chords, or whatever is left of it. This one took me more than a couple of hours. That’s well within the usual time it takes me to finish a song—two to four hours.

I was prying at my blog entries, unconsciously internalizing the thoughts and feelings that ran through me when I wrote them. Then came the sudden queer feeling that something is amiss.

For an infinitely ephemeral moment, everything stands still.

Then comes the itch, an itch that emanates from the deepest recesses of my being. An onslaught of creative inspiration permeates my consciousness.

In a snap of a finger, I was a biological entity beaming with mercurial ardor waiting to be expressed. I, once again, elevated my place in the hierarchy of God’s creations. As a creature that has the ability to capture a once meandering mute tune in the ghostly air, I was more than human, almost divine.

I had to abandon all my plans this afternoon. It’s like a duty to fulfill, a gift that has to be used when the opportunity comes.

The arrival of the itch is almost like the appearance of and angel. God’s messenger.

In its presence, you have to abandon everything and let the rapturous inspiration enter your mind and heart.

When the itch comes, you have to let it rule you.

The song is entitled Taken. Generally falling under the Folk music genre, Taken has the warmth of James Taylor songs in the seventies. It sounds like an inferior version of John Mayer’s Daughters.

Inferior to any song or not, I still like it. I like my own songs like they’re my children. I’m as loyal to them as they are loyal to me. Each one has a history, a meaning, a memory in my journey through this drama we call life.

These amorphous melodic creations give me solace, refuge, sanctuary. Ours is a relationship built on an endless tapestry of serenades. Sounds good eh.

This will be my worst and crappiest entry ever. 

Among the myriad of colors that the human eye can discern, green is my ultimate most favorite color.  Now the way those last seven words were put together is not the way I speak.

Obviously you don’t have any clue to what I’m talking about.  Might as well stop reading now for there’s no way you can understand the rest of this cathartic crap.  Aside from perhaps a couple of people, the rest of you can stop reading and spend your time on a more productive activity. 

Yes it’s a fact.  Green is my ultimate most favorite color.  Since the time when consciousness entered my brain, green has been my ultimate most favorite color.

You can ask any of my friends.  It is!  And get this.  Lately, only this year, it became my lucky color as well.  A friend who has a thing for pointed shoes and peppermint tea knows this for a fact. 

For the greater part of my childhood, I liked the color green so much that I thought it was everyone’s favorite color as well!  You know, the way everyone likes to gulp a cold drink during summer or the way everyone likes his or her fruit ripe and sweet rather than sour. 

I thought green was a universal color favorite of man.

Of course I learned that that wasn’t the case when I grew up, yet it remained to be my favorite.  Through the years I gaind an aqcuired-taste for other colors as well like black, blue, and rusty red.  But still, green is my ultimate most favorite color.

Do you know the way some things can give you both happiness and sadness?  The way some people can be your source of both profound pleasure and excruciating pain? 

Green has now become to be the color I love the most, and the color that I concurrently abhor.   

It was Saturday last January when green became my lucky color.  Fate really has a great sense of irony, for it was also Saturday last March when the color green was the object of blatant blasphemy.

My only request.  Don’t claim that green is your ultimate most favorite color if you don’t mean it, especially if such a claim is for some other squalid act like  flirting.

Or you’re going to hurt me.

But then again, it’s a free country.  If I have some sort of incestuous desire for the color green, it’s my problem, isn’t it?  It’s my perversion, not anyone else’s, right? 

It’s not anyone else’s problem but mine.

So I’m going to take it back.  You can talk about the color green in vain as much as you want.  From now on everyone can claim that green is his ultimate most favorite color if he desires to, whether he means it or not, and I won’t complain.

I guess I give more importance to people’s inherent right and freedom to express themselves than to my love for the color green.         

In the first place, I have no right over other people’s lives.  And I don’t have the necessary documents to prove that the color green is mine. 

The color green is not mine. 

Yet i know of no other color. 

This renders my world monochromatic…melancholic…forlorn…at the mercy of the sullen sobriety of black and white.

Everything left is black and white.

Even as a metaphorical catharsis, this article has totally lost its point.  I warned you not to read.

      

The proverbial glass of water that is half empty or half full? I finally get it.

To a biologist, it begins upon conception, the union of the raving sperm cell and the infinitely more poised egg cell. To a writer, it is a seventy-year-long story that has more sad endings than happy ones. And to a wise man, it is one’s existence which morale sometimes cannot be fathomed.

I don’t known what life is to me. The most that I can come up for a definition is a goofy four-word sentence—It’s a bittersweet thang.

It’s a journey to places you never knew existed, or to places you’ve heard about but never been to. There’s a place called Success, which is one of the last destinations you’ll arrive at. You’ll be a frequent visitor to Pain and it’s neighboring country, Sadness.

To some, Confusion and Emptiness are two turfs they oftentimes find themselves dwelling for long periods of time.

But there’s one place where all of us pass by once, twice, or even several times in our lives. Love is a day in Disney Land in your Tokyo trip. It’s a visit to Japan’s angelic geisha’s for American soldiers during the world war. It’s a mid summer affair in Morocco with the person who gives you a ride to the heavens and back.

It’s your boat ride across the moon river with someone whose fingers are locked with yours.

We are all pilgrims to a valley in the middle of nowhere.

Life is a pilgrimage.

It’s a million-mile long hi-way where you sometimes travel with many others, at times with just one companion, but most of the time you travel by yourself.

Some of those you meet on the road are amazing people. Your walk with them can be so fun-filled that you give part of yourself as a parting gift when you part ways. To some you give your hand, to others you give your foot. You can even give your butt if you wish.

And there are those to whom you give your heart.

Life is that glass of water. It’s never full to its brim, until the time the person who holds your heart gives his or hers to you.

And the Creator is the only one who can keep your glass from emptying itself again.

It was over way before it started. It was 14 months in the making but when it finally arrived, it lasted only for six weeks.

Over at Kamagong Street in the southern outskirts of the wilderness of Makati City, a resto-bar called Booze Stop was the place where I was once part of a band.

In front of blinding lights and all, I played rhythm—and sometimes lead—guitar and second vocals for an act called Scala. I never got the catch of the band’s name though.

Tuesday night was gig night. For a few weeks I experienced the thrill of hearing people clap after every song we play. For a few weeks I took off early from my Tuesday class in UST, hailed a cab, and cockily clutched my Ovation guitar upon arriving at the place.

I felt my ego caressed by the slithering wind each time I strut my way from the cab to an empty table inside the bar. I was living my dream.

Or was I.

In hindsight, it wasn’t as smooth sailing and ostentatious as I wished it would be. The lights on stage were not that bright to be blinding. The crowd was more often sparse than packed. And applause came in every four or five songs, actually.

To add to that, you can count with your fingers in one hand the songs we played well every gig.

It didn’t help to know that I was the least skilled instrumentalist in the group. But because of that I devoted most of my time practicing, particularly lead guitar playing. And just when my fingers gained confidence on the guitar’s fret board, I had to leave.

In those six weeks I learned as much as I did in the whole of last year in guitar playing. Thanks to Pau, the other guitarist.

Scala still plays every Tuesday at Booze Stop. One of these days I will drop by and jam with them. One of the last songs I sang with the group was Play With Me Tonight. it’s not a bad idea for them to play with me again. One more time.

Pikoy was his name and he knew how to love.

The first thing you should understand is that you don’t find it, it finds you. And when it does, it hits not just that fist-size perpetually pumping muscle inside your ribcage, but your entirety.

It’s like lightning when it hits. You get struck before you know it.

It’s like a missile from outer space…from an unknown galaxy. In utter stealth, it plummets down to you while you lie supine in your backyard, stargazing, exactly at the moment you decide to blink. Booom!

And in its presence, the sit of intelligence (supposedly the frontal lobe of our brain) bows down to it.

I once thought that the human mind is the final frontier. I was mistaken. Love is.

It was Doctor De Leon, our professor in Psychodiagnostics, who said that emotion is always paramount to intellect when studying human behavior. I wouldn’t be surprised. Remember, it was deemed capable of conquering everything.

Yes, conquering everything.

Only the creator of everything has the power to conquer everything back. I guess it’s no coincidence that people say God is love.

But I know I’ve just started to scratch its surface. The greater a thing is, the more elusive its true nature gets. I’m afraid that even if I experience it a million times it will remain unfathomable.

It can make you, hey, even complete you. But it can also break you into a million pieces.

Huh. I don’t care. It’s all worth it. For only upon the time when it stops wandering in the cosmos and decides to finally give you a knockout that you start living. Before that, you were dead, a zombie walking on the face of the earth whose existence is without meaning.

Pikoy is a bird.

He ceased to be a zombie (a zombie-bird) since the day he started loving the people who adopted him. When the time comes when he is to be set free, he will be shattered into pieces. But I’m sure it was worth it for him.

It was worth it for Christ. All those wounds.

Amidst all the pain, He was happy.