some place else to be driftin’…
Posted in Journal on May 30th, 2008
Friendship is finding someone to walk with you. He might not be there for the long haul, he might only have the luxury of sharing time with you for the duration of a conversation, or the time it takes for you to cross a bridge on your way to the next town, but, by […]
A friend showed up in my mailbox today, just in time to perk up my numb calves. I cracked the seal, of course; plonked the smile she sent my way into the cd player, sank into the old, comfortably battered couch, and waited for the first bars…
A Ukelele?
The minute turned into […]
Posted in Journal on Feb 17th, 2008
I have a dear friend who wants to be involved in everything, even if she didn’t have the time for them. I do not know if she even understands what she’s doing, or why, but, in my worst of times after she’s let me down, after all the allowances I’ve made for her, I just […]
Posted in Journal on Nov 8th, 2007
A short list for me, for you:
I’ve been smoke-free (yeah, cold turkey!) for 3 weeks now. I mean to keep it that way.
I’ve been watching the CFC leaders make a mess of their service.
I’m exploring, wanting to expand, my relationship with my Lord, while still carrying a garbage-load of questions.
I’ve gravitated between feeling very […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 8th, 2007
While in the middle of listening to the exhortations of the latest deacon to come to this particular church, I got snagged by an eddy of thought, more like a convergence of an earlier musing and today’s scripture exposition, and I wondered, meandering forward, how scripture, broken down into its individual chapters and verses, might […]
“We are a population of desires, and the only thing which holds us all below excess is other people’s opinions.”
That sudden, if subjective, thought lashed lazy reflection into frenzied attention; unfolding the conversation backwards to its birth, a mutual tapestry unrolled from storage, guilty consciences reviewing every wrinkle of blame and culpability.
I wasn’t even talking […]
Posted in Journal, Out of the Box on Jun 24th, 2007
What would have Neruda been like without his love for country? Would Gibran have been just another Lebanese extolling the cedars of his native land without Haskell’s interjections? Would Martin Luther King still be as remembered now without his dream?
What would I be if all possibility was taken out of my essence? […]
Posted in Journal, Music, Transpositions on May 17th, 2007
Your resident philosopher is back.
Where have you been? I feel bereft without your emphatic anonymity. You should see me now; ambivalence clothed in fatigue, left shoulder leaning against a headboard, arms stretched tensely out, palms flat on the edge of the table, fingers, rhythmless, tapping the keyboard, brows furrowed in concentration, my soul […]
Posted in Journal, Out of the Box, Transpositions on May 10th, 2007
The most delicious fodder for the idle mind are the irrelevancies in other people’s lives. The errors other people make; these are what gives us the most vicarious of pleasures. Growing wise, at the cost of living life secondhand; with the collateral damage limited to any life other than our own, and safely […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 28th, 2007
“How the hell did that happen, bro?”
I was pointing up to the night sky, west of where Ron and I were standing in the middle of the church lawn tonight. The dark, blue sky where the night was streaked with sharp spears of clouds framing the curve of the far horizon. Clouds no […]
Posted in Journal, Transpositions on Apr 26th, 2007
My mind was the hunter deleting transparent fantasies, and keeping all that was certain and possible to populate my rotting mind. All that was almost false I discarded to color the gray expanse of similar detritus floating in the wake of my lifetime, and all that was perceived to be closer to acceptable truths […]
Posted in Journal on Aug 11th, 2006
I got off work tonight feeling like a man freed from a cage, and for some reason, and still with the feeling of a stiffness lifted from the back of my neck, I looked out and saw, perceived, a startling sight. I do not know how I did, but I looked out at a full […]
Posted in Journal on Aug 7th, 2006
I have always believed that when you look beyond what is evident, when you peer past the superficial, almost every choice you make in consequence assumes far more than you can ever admit to anybody. The same potential underwrites every attempt at expression, particularly when it comes to personal journals or poetry.
What I feel […]
Take me as I am; that’s what she said.
Seems fitting to take her at her word. So what did my soul do, but looked to emptiness; make the choice to go naked, too. See what value there was in standing alone; to see if there might be movement in words bereft of visual […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 7th, 2006
I have always thought that I needed a specific frame of mind to compose; to achieve the odd synergy of circumstance and thought which birthed and delivered expression. And if I must be honest, I need to admit that the writings on this blog carried a common air — perpetual pathos. And I […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 10th, 2006
Manzelle has gone to another place; somewhen, somewhere, she is past all worldly care and human weakness, to a state beyond time.
It was a few minutes past noon, and for all that it was hot out there in the sun, I did not even think about it; just walked from car to the shade of […]
He used to do this a lot: throw, underhand, and as far as he could, flat stones over the water. It was beguiling in its own way. Back then, his curiosity in how such a simple thing might be done well was cause enough for doing it, cast after cast. When he discovered […]
Posted in Credo on Oct 17th, 2005
Ree Joy Baldonado. Filipino. Believer. Seeker.
In a lot of ways, despite that I have not really been young in a long time, I am still the little boy who enjoyed building castles out of thin air and sand. If there’s something that I have not truly lost, in the course of a lifetime that is […]
Posted in Journal on Sep 26th, 2005
The way the woman strolled through the visible heatwaves burning up through the pavement; one would think it was inconceivable for anyone else to do it, with an insolent panache which acknowledged The Hot but also disdained it. I knew this person, but did not see her that clearly before. Or as dimly. […]
Posted in Journal on May 19th, 2005
A line is one dimension. An area makes two dimensions. Space makes three. Space going through time? It’s the fourth, they say. And all these lying on top of nothing. Everything existing on a bed of nullity. It sounded so simple. Yet it was not.
The preceding concept […]
Posted in Journal on Feb 28th, 2005
He did not know if he wanted to write anymore. Everything he had tried to pin down with what words he knew to use seemed but pale echoes of his daily dose of reality. And this was his only remaining motive for writing; to approximate, if only to himself, what he went through, […]
When this site was still a pipe-dream, I had envisioned a site-design that was a universal setting for personal expression. I wanted, looked for, a concept - a combination of colors and images - that would encompass my moods at any given day. I wanted a universal landscape; a proper attire, as it […]
Posted in Journal on Dec 13th, 2004
He walked with the cold. He felt morose about it.
Julie’s house was not too far from his own, but the shortest way to it took him behind five houses by the lake, and at almost midnight, the walk also took him through a sharp breeze and a December cold that reached him to the […]
There is nothing in this site that makes it different from other personal blogs. I say that, not as much because I wanted to make it different when I first started it, but because I know that people, inspite of the basic differences of personality and attitudes brought about by disparate upbringings, are fundamentally […]
Posted in Journal on Dec 1st, 2004
In my heart’s eye, I am frozen on a field of glittering stars draped over velvet night; stars spelled into proximity by my sight, stars realized into unspeakably-untouchable distance. I see a light slashing across that field; falling or climbing, I could not tell for sure; but plucking at my vision, like a […]
Posted in Journal on Nov 18th, 2004
Katie calls “it” unproductivity and Vernon “belittles” his openness to other thoughts from other people. I’d like to say that “conflict” brings out the competitiveness in us. I use “competitiveness” here in the creative context. We require misery in order to put joy into proper perspective, and to frame one or the other, or both, […]
Posted in Journal on Nov 13th, 2004
There is something about the sky, something about being outdoors, that facilitates clear-headedness. Being out on my stoop, my back against the door, my whole being facing open space; this — not the posture and not the act, and certainly not just nature — exposure to space has given me the best opportunity for […]
Posted in Journal on Nov 3rd, 2004
This is all Vernon’s fault.
I had no taste for writing tonight, so I thought I’d wander around and simply read. As “fate” would have it, his blog was the first I decided to go to. I’ve always liked his writing style, by the way. Crisp and neat, that’s him and his […]
Posted in Journal on Oct 26th, 2004
He was sick of himself.
He realized that while he was trying to sleep last night; he had felt his body and knew it to be too tensed, muscles too tight. He realized further that this had not happened this one night, that he had been this tight almost every night since…he could not even remember […]
I remember a time when Id walk to school in the rain, back-pack slung on my back under a too-small raincoat that was no cover at all, rubber shoes sloshing wetly as I crossed puddles. Sometimes my feet would just go through potholes on the road, and walking became even harder. You walk […]
I never want to cry.
When you cry, you are at your most alone. True? True! So yeah, I don’t want to cry. But saying it is different than living it, because where two or more people connect, that’s when you invite yourself into the very probability you try to avoid. Does that […]
Me and Mine…
Love was a carpet of scenes rolling out and away past a long plane-flight, a tapestry of memories, held desperately against the certainty of unraveling distance, pulled past and too fast across both his inner vision and physical sight. Love was a month in the embrace of his native country, perfumed with suddenly-familiar smells […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 25th, 2004
Someone engaged in taking a photo unconsciously prepares himself to wait, and indeterminately. An artist who sets up a blank canvas on an easel, there on a high bluff overlooking a sight stretching to some horizon, consciously seeks to align his inner vision with the sensitivity of the fingers holding the paint-brush. A person, waiting […]
“Hullo,” the voice breathed the word out.
In an eternity that breathed for one real-time second, he tasted the quality of that voice; the depth to which it reached into his soul, the echoes achieved in its rise and fall way inside him where the familiar crossed into the untried. The simple reality of it […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 9th, 2004
He had never learned to whistle.
His dad, a whistler of the first rank, had tried to teach him the proper ways of forking a tongue preparatory to the act. Even then he had no ambition involving perseverance. He had a father, and as fathers go not much different, from everyone else, in a […]
Posted in Journal on May 27th, 2004
He stood on the darkling shore, bathed in the dancing reflections of moonlight on tireless little waves, by a lake whose placidity invited trust like a bed. His bare toes curled over the edges of flat stones that dotted the shore, scuffed over the grit of another day gone past; a […]
Posted in Journal on May 23rd, 2004
There is a reason why you sometimes prowl a night away, he told himself that while he slowly tapped out letters on his keyboard to give shape to his thoughts; the process of his word-choosing itself a somewhat laborious wending of shadow following the solid form to which it was tethered to over a terrain […]
Posted in Journal on May 11th, 2004
A good song is a key into a locked door in your house of seeking.
He turned that thought round and round in his mind, much like rolling the nuance, the taste, of a new word in his tongue, worried and nursed that tidbit of a thought into an alignment inside him until it echoed […]
He decided that as years acrrue in a given life, so do epiphanies tend to proportionately become luxuries.
Wistful thought, that.
Traffic was inordinately slow this afternoon, he thought, idly resting his left elbow across the cranked-down window of his Nissan. He was stuck about ten cars down from the stalled traffic […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 16th, 2004
A dissatisfaction does not materialize, all at once, like a tsunami, to swamp you with one huge wave. Its root consists of small doses of irritation which seemingly appear without cause: a despondency on finding yourself under scrutiny, however slight, from something you did without thought; a stirring anger growing out of proportion, after a […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 8th, 2004
Snip. Snap. The sound of the shears he was handling was a rasp to his ears; it was time to put some oil on the joint, he decided. It was getting harder to pull the handles together. He went down the folding ladder, critically running his eyes across the work he’d already done, estimating […]
Posted in Journal on Feb 11th, 2004
Whew! At last, I was alone, on the living room couch, sunk up to my haunces, and my back cocooned against soft silence. Blessed quiet, I thought. I just sat, enfolded in the deepening night, encompassed by dark silence. But wait…
…no moment is ever quiet. Isn’t it?
Posted in Journal on Feb 2nd, 2004
I felt like cursing a blue streak. I felt like giving up.
The morning was chilly and I had my shoulders tightly crunched in towards my chest. I was sitting on a chair, it was my lunch-break, and I was in the middle of the New York Times crossword puzzle. There was a long phrase, divided […]
Posted in Journal on Jan 22nd, 2004
Sometimes I get this feeling that I should be moving on, a little voice inside me saying I should be going through this stagnant phase of my life and on towards the things that matter. Going on to living because however long I speculate, those things that run through my mind are as ephemereal as […]
I was recounting a mental difficulty to a friend. It was suggested I might be focusing inwards too much. That might be it, I agreed. And it called for thought.
It has always been my belief that the most solid beginning I could have would be myself; in the acceptance of all that I am, […]
Posted in Journal on Jan 7th, 2004
There are things that keep you forging on.
Sometimes these are the things that have worth to you; sometimes it is a single random act of kindness in a life made arid by uncaring acts of people whose universes are threaded through and through by their own regard for themselves; sometimes it is the strength that […]
Posted in Journal on Dec 2nd, 2003
My religion is simple. My religion is kindness. So said the Dalai Lama.
What is yours? What was mine?
I was trolling the web, aimlessly as I have been doing for months; as in a great dark, looking for pinpoints of light to show me the way, if not to some great achievement, then to […]
Posted in Journal on Oct 25th, 2003
I havent been to the beach for a long while. I would not so miss it if being there didnt somehow mean I was closer to the unalloyed strains of life in its most natural and furious state. The collared shirts I wear to work everyday chaff at my sensitivities, like a darkness that hasnt […]
Posted in Journal on Oct 17th, 2003
Conviction can be a scary thing. Without balance, without a definite way to weigh right and wrong, religion can be a burden. When Christ calls to a soul to trust its fears to Him, does the trusting provide strength or promote weakness? Is this the proper interpretation of what being with Christ […]
Posted in Journal on Oct 14th, 2003
Silently, thinking, coming up out of the dream. In the microscopic recesses of his mental avenues, neurons flitted and chased thoughts - much as eyes try to follow the dance of fireflies in a moonless night - following combinations that might reveal something about the nature of, this, his apathy. Thought has a certain […]
Posted in Journal on Aug 23rd, 2003
He didn’t know what it was - he ought to be able to tell by now, why he glossed over the details of his day, and, when he did deign to talk about anything, he tended to explore inwards; to rant, in detail, about his pathos, as opposed to explaining how he functioned because […]
He sat down.
For a long time, that was all he could do. Motionless on the chair, his mind centered, dragged into the gaze of his own dark reflection from the glowing black of his computer screen. He assumed the streetlamp off to the side of the window he was facing was on, because […]
Posted in Journal on Aug 9th, 2003
Have you ever sat in total silence, neither in the presence of repose nor grief, listening to nothing, except for the strangely phonic feel of your toes etching figure-eights against those of the other foot, as if the thinly-scratchy roughness of boned-skin against another was the exact small sound necessary to greatly magnify the […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 29th, 2003
When one day seems like the day before, when those everyday demands that we face and overcome become so routine they might as well be a blur, the organism — recognizing a certain unexplained discomfort in such a robotic rendering of daily living — resorts to doing the same things with methodical intent; the […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 28th, 2003
There is a soul out there who perceives color and substance like I do; breathes life into regrets like I’ve done, embraces the lost nuances of times passed like I may always will. This soul’s cup is as brimful, as mine, of thoughts longing to break free; if only the rhythm of a first word […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 19th, 2003
It’s been a while since everything I do seem new, been some time since a piece of music has carried me away to a realm of thought where every word was a caress and every sentence a strange, smooth wine sliding over the hurting roughness of my soul; been a few memories away since the […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 11th, 2003
I remember my youth as a time of questions. Questions that were often posed for the effect they caused; that sudden subtling of the air surrounding an audience that lent more weight to what was asked than for what was answered, that quick shifting of a mood solidified or dispensed with how what needed to […]
I wonder, sometimes, how it might be to live quantifying my most obvious, and my most obscure, reasons for doing what I do. Part of the time, I do find myself doing that, out of the knowledge that however good I might be at any given exercise, there will always be someone better at it […]
Posted in Journal on Jul 4th, 2003
It doesn’t make a difference where you live; where your “place in the world” is, how and where circumstance and fate have conspired to put your life where it is now. Rich or poor, it is your life within that carries utmost significance.
Posted in Journal on Jul 2nd, 2003
I failed my board exam…
A big fat zero — that’s what my hopes and dreams gave birth to this past Thursday. I sat and daydreamed my way through one-and-a-half-hour’s worth of questions, only a few of which I remember on hindsight.
Posted in Journal on Jun 29th, 2003
There is no true answer for crisis…
It comes, inevitably, in the affairs of men. When it comes, it is only a little thing after all. Among the great sweeps of history, among the massive forces moving people, or even empires, toward success or extinction, a death or a birth can make all the difference…one little […]
Last week’s thunderstorm was so bad that my computer screen froze on me while I was in the middle of finessing up a likely post. I was so frustrated with the whole thing that when I finally gave up trying to cnp the write-up so I won’t have to dream it up again, and […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 25th, 2003
There’s a group of people in my city who go beyond just writing poetry. They espouse the belief that poetry, to be more than good, must be performed — not merely written. They meet every Tuesday in front of a fireplace in a converted restaurant roughly two miles from my home. They bring their […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 24th, 2003
A friend tells me that even for a person who “has everything”, there will still be times — a fact, he added, inescapable as human mortality — when you stalk around your contentment with a sense of incompletion…more like a vague premonition that hovers around you like an oppression, of something not quite right, something […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 21st, 2003
They say youth always looks forward for answers. They didn’t say that when you’re past youth, there’d be even more questions. They didn’t say that when you’re old enough, a part of you meets life butt forward, with your face looking back to the road you’ve traveled…the part that occasionally wishes you could be […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 18th, 2003
It was a nice day at work today. The vibes were higher than usual. Two of my work-mates just got engaged to their long-time boyfriends, and their smiles and good cheer caught everybody up in a cheerful bubble that didn’t dissipate until people started getting ready to go home.
My own personal bubble of […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 17th, 2003
Some days, I feel the greatest sense of fruitlessness; as in, who reads this bunk that I write…as in, who cares? I know, that sounds like self-pity. If it does, then that’s my fault too. But, right now, I think about the number of people who’ve found this journal on their own…and I […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 7th, 2003
I can’t think of harmony without thinking about the process of growing up; the teaching, the learning. Think about the marriage of different instruments, think about the chords struck between a voice and an accompaniment. One can ebb and flow in counterpoint and rhythm with the other. Listen to how one can suddenly fall […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 4th, 2003
Silence can be the most fertile ground for planting both our hates and our affections. We may think words are the best weapons to shoot our points home; that given enough intelligence and savvy, our words can pierce granite walls as well as the most effective missiles. We like to speak of the pen as […]
Posted in Journal on Jun 2nd, 2003
It was a conversation, set in no particular atmosphere except for the light touch of banter between friends, that did not end as it started. But it was one that left me something to think about, in the relatively-quiet somnolence of the afternoon hours. It was only a small, offhand, observation; yet, thinking back, […]
Posted in Journal on May 31st, 2003
It is a curious thing how we can get so fired-up with all the technological marvels of our age, and so indifferent to the progress that one soul can make; for his own behalf, for the enlightenment of others. Is it because nothing about the intangible has ever been pared down to an equation you […]
Posted in Journal on May 26th, 2003
When they speak about the sound of one hand clapping, do you think they might mean how silence might be so palpably, even noiselessly, loud, if one were to listen hard enough? When they speak about your soul being the still point of a dancing world, do you think they might be alluding to […]
Posted in Journal on May 25th, 2003
The idea of divinity, a sense of God, is as unique as every human being’s existence. In that particular context, no one person can impose whatever truths he distills from his own aggregate experience on another, unless a particular set of circumstances has left the other virtually empty, and willingly, whole-heartedly, embraces the totality of […]
Posted in Journal on May 24th, 2003
Each one of us must have a place within ourselves, well within our souls, where we can lie down to rest. We spend time and countless words to define our need for it; as if to define it was a way to find it, as if analysis was to finally substantiate it — as […]
Posted in Journal on May 23rd, 2003
There are days in my life when thinking leads me nowhere. I look out windows of my soul and see gray expanses. I measure those spaces out; expand and decrease both my ‘line of sight’ and the depth of that grayness, with perspectives varying only in degrees of desire, or the absence of […]
On Thursday night, I was told to stay up so I could watch that lunar eclipse that the newspapers and radio stations were carping about earlier in the morning. They said the moon was going to look gold, then red. Reports said it would especially be a sight to see in Florida. I was curious.
Posted in Journal on May 16th, 2003
I love you; unquestionably so. I cherish you as one of two of the gentlest, kindest sisters I will ever have in this lifetime. We have shared so much, and loved so much, and in the same way. We may not have shed the same tears, or for the same reasons, but our roads as […]
Posted in Journal on May 14th, 2003
Truth is, some of the nicest things in existence, you got to earn them; you have to work for them…
The short view can be so hard, so dreary, if only for its normalcy.
Posted in Journal on May 10th, 2003
I do believe that one is truly, awfully alone. When you know that, then all your relationships — even the most ephemereal — become most precious. As candles in the wind are to lives, so do ‘falling stars’ are to relationships. We are there, we are gone.
Posted in Journal on May 6th, 2003
“Blue punch buggy, no punch buggy back!”
A little fist thumping just over my shoulder blade jerked me up from my slouched-down-hunched-over-the-wheel driving posture on this too-bright May morning. It was my turn to drive three irrepressible 8-year-olds to school today. I whipped my neck around to send an all-too-useless glower of resentment towards those grinning […]
Posted in Journal on May 3rd, 2003
I don’t know if Armand believes a normal blog should have something new to say everyday, but I love the subtle ways he wakes me up from general somnolence. He sends me the most remarkable links. Check out this poem generator if you’re having a sour-heavy day on the creative department, or if […]
Posted in Journal on May 1st, 2003
What is the shape of time? We speak of it as if it was a world peopled by the breadth of our pains and scope of our joys, as an immutable and bottomless well where we pour our tears, as if it was a cup we fill with the moments of our lives.
I have this sometime propensity to go back to something I’ve written and, well, change it. As the mood takes me, I spice it up, take chunks off it, and rip it apart…which changes the original intention with which it was written. Which is a pity because, for the most part, it loses its honesty. […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 22nd, 2003
Some days, the simple process of driving home from work becomes a robotic experience; turns are made with unconscious familiarity, evading recalcitrant traffic an exercise in automatic recognition. You do any particular thing often enough, and it becomes matter-of-fact; something you take for granted. Maybe.
There is a discombobulating nudity to laying yourself out in a blog.
I sit here in a cocoon of safe privacy, away from the scrutiny of people, and I’m beginning to feel so exposed. I know I’ll probably have a lot to say, but I’m having the willies because this business of blogs and […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 19th, 2003
So yeah, it’s another night. Being quiet, listening to my knees creak when I stretch my legs out under the keyboard. Feeling skin over my elbows rasp and slide between bones and the arms of my chair. Lifting fingers over the space-bar; resting palm against the slat holding the keyboard in. Mustering up the […]
The best poems are the ones never written. The best moments in our lives are those we have no words for. The greatest loves are the ones that do not grace the greatest libraries, slowly drying up in pages going brittle with the years.
The merest thought of death and dying depresses me. I wrote Requiem a while back and I’ve been despondent for weeks. I’m not just hearing my bones creak, I can palpably feel my soul gnashing its figurative teeth on the awareness of how the more I strive at honest writing, the more affected I […]
“Help me, I’m dying!”
I jumped out of my chair, almost catching a foot on a chair-leg as I pushed myself up and away; mostly, from the voice belling out in front of me. Quickly recovering, I stood up and looked around — there was nobody!
It had been a tiring morning. The overhead paging system […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 3rd, 2003
I was one lout among many, drifting through the downtown crowd; most of them, I’m sure, bent on doing mayhem on their own pocketbooks, searching the shop windows for the perfect glitter, caught in perfect light, to assuage their near-atavistic need to buy the perfect adornment to crown, or cover, their self-perceived physical endowments, or […]
Posted in Journal on Apr 1st, 2003
Sandwiched between an afternoon’s chill and a need for a cigarette, you pause by the driveway and watch the kids next door, blowing bubbles at each other. With your usual awareness of stimuli in unexplained hibernation, you, nevertheless, watch the display of carefree exuberance.
Posted in Journal on Mar 30th, 2003
“When the day goes home…”
I walked into the sunset like one going home.
It was a long walk to the bus stop, from the grind of the work-day just passed to the stop sign on the curb, the pole standing as straight and unweary as my shoulders were as stooped and burdened.
