mahiwaga

So where am I? More importantly, what do I do now?

I’ve always believed in the aphorism “You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been” (I can’t find the attribution anywhere. I remember the first time I saw it, it was in Tagalog, allegedly written by José Rizal.) But now I’m not so sure. The past, while useful, can’t predict the future, can’t tell you what to do. Much like all knowledge based on the scientific method, the past can only tell you what not to do.

So.

I can’t help but mire myself in self-pity, analyzing and re-analyzing the convoluted paths of my mind. I wonder why I always have to make things more complicated than they need to be.

For instance:

Somehow, I have learned the inklings of the art of making sincerity appear insincere, of making my words stand on their head, of telling the bare truth to people and convincing them not to believe me. It’s all an act. I’m pretending to be insincere. Or maybe I’m pretending to be sincere by pretending to be insincere. You can take it down to the nth level of recursion, I suppose. Half the time even I don’t know what I mean.

I’d like to blame it all on growing up in L.A., where everything is an act, a facade, illusory. The thing is, everyone there knows everything is fake anyway, so discerning actual reality inherently becomes difficult. Bluntness, frankness, and sincerity all become liabilities, subject to being immediately interpreted as irony or sarcasm, as some kind of twisted mind game. Everything has to be convoluted. There are hidden conventions to communication. Sometimes it works. But most of the time it doesn’t, and I really think that I’ve grown accustomed to being misunderstood. Because, I suppose, in a world where nothing is really real, understanding is not really the issue. It’s the act of listening (or at least pretending to listen) that becomes critical, that signifies connection.

Or so I like to think. Or so I’d like you to believe. No, not everyone is this insane in La-La land, but I think enough of them are to make my point have some validity. Especially since I’ve bought into the whole mess.

It reminds me of that story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he tries to get into the mind of Shakespeare, in which he describes the Bard as this guy who immediately takes to acting because it’s only when he’s pretending to be somebody that he feels like he’s actually somebody. Without the pretense, he feels like he is nothing, he is no one.

So.

I like to say that, in a way, this blog is all fake. Or, as with all fictional works, I am lying in order to tell the truth.

Yes, I realize it sounds like I’m trying to play off the emotions flickering through this blog, pretending that they’re not really happening, that I’m just being melodramatic, that it’s all fake when in truth it is all too real.

But as I’ve just expounded, it may be that I really don’t know what real is these days. Or maybe I’ve never really known, ever.

So, like many writers, of course I’m drawing from my life when I paint these broad strokes, these vague depictions of existential angst. Like many writers, this all becomes much to autobiographical.

Ah. But isn’t that what a blog is supposed to be? A true-to-life description of day-to-day doings?

Well, yes. And no.

I could never post my deepest, darkest secrets here. In the end, it has to be a show. I write these things because I want somebody to read it, despite my repeated declamations that I know no one is. While in a convoluted way, it may be cathartic, it isn’t the same thing as venting with a friend on the phone or scrawling into a triple-locked journal in my own invented code.

It’s like reality television. The Real World, Survivor, etc., etc. Does anyone actually believe that it’s completely real? It’s a sign of our times: staged reality. Or the reality of staging. Or the staging of the reality of staging. Or anything even more convoluted than that.

In any case, I’ve always been melodramatic anyway, taken to exaggerating things in order to bolster my point. So caveat lector.

I suppose I could feel sorry for myself, but that would just be boring. I think that over the past few years, I’ve managed to perfect self-pity, thank you very much. There are other ways I ought to spend my time.

I refuse to feel a thing.

So I’m thinking about the future, in terms of days, years, decades, and it’s all so bewildering and stupefying. A million decisions to be made, a million million million branch points hither and thither. It’s hard to discern which ones have significance, and which ones don’t matter at all, and amidst the noise, the clamor of all these imagined futures, I find myself growing weary. If surrender were an option, I might take it.

Is there truly no rest for the wicked?

So if things go well, I could very well have three weeks free in June, and pathetically, I can’t figure out what to do with them. The best I’ve managed to figure out is that I am going to go to the beach and lie there everyday if I can manage it. San Diego, perhaps, if my sister will allow me to crash at her place. Worse comes to worse, I suppose I’ll be making a commute from Eagle Rock to the ocean.

But I don’t know. I know that everything I dream of is just running away. Running away from what, I think I may have forgotten, or am at least afraid to give shape to it by naming it, describing its outline. I have gazed at infinity, at the stately order of the universe, I have tried ot shape my life around this order, tried to somehow make myself be a part of the eternal dance and weave of Life in the sad, crude ways I know how, and I have been rebuffed, damned to spend the rest of my life half broken, my soul leaking out slowly. I like to think that we are all the same, damaged in some manner by the heedless vicissitudes of the world, but maybe it’s not true at all. Perhaps I’m the only one who has managed to screw things up this badly. In the end, I will face all of this alone, there will be no words left, and it won’t matter because there won’t be anyone to listen anyway.

So I dream of the sunlight and of the sandy shore and the endless waves, because I cannot think of anything else, cannot seem to extend myself outside of my own circumscribed boundaries, cannot seem to grow like I feel I should. There are greater things than I can imagine at this juncture. I do not know how to reach out. I do not remember how to open my eyes and truly see.

As if the rest of my days were confined to damnable reiteration, tossing and turning in my sleep, dreaming of the same quiet misery day in and day out. Yes, I know. There is more to life than this. This hopeless sequence of mistakes and regrets and words not said when they might have mattered. To grow out of this, the step outside the circle. To dream. Oh.

I cannot seem to find what I need, do not know how to name it, and I’m just barely hanging on to this faint glimmer of hope, that somehow it will all turn out right when I wake up, that somehow I’ll finally make the right decisions, that I will become what I need to be.

Oh, what is it that I’m hoping for?