Kind of like Leaving Las Vegas

I remember when I first started watching movies seriously, one of the dark, beautiful films that came out that year was Leaving Las Vegas. I'm still trying to find a copy of it for my personal collection. Well, I get to thinking about it because the premise has a guy who gives up on his life, fills up his suitcases with liquor, and decides to drink himself to death.

I think of this because, as I was embroiled in that thing with my job in the balance, I was planning to go on a massive bender. I decided that I would see the whole thing through sober, and once I had resigned I would spend at least one week waking up at 10am, pulling a bottle out of my closet, then drinking until I passed out and it was the next day. There was a time when I hit a much lower point than this, a few years ago, but all of the stress that came with this recent thing, along with all the personal issues I'd been facing made me just want to lie down and attach an IV drip full of whiskey to my arm.

I weathered the thing sober, following a friend's advice. She said that I had to be all there to be able to get through it. And after I still have yet to recover from all these things that have happened. I haven't made the conscious effort to go on a bender, although it turns out I have been on one.

When things are happening normally, you don't really notice them. For example, I used to weigh about 120 pounds. I did not notice that I was gaining weight. I mean I saw the same face in the mirror every day. It wasn't until someone I hadn't seen in a long time saw me and said, "Tangina, ang taba mo na!" I weighed in and saw that I had increased by a good number of weight divisions. Similarly, you don't feel old, until let's say, your favorite bands from high school start getting played on MTV classic. Man, how did I feel when I was listening to the classic rock station and they played Pearl Jam's "Even Flow"?

So this morning my mom saw me out of it. I passed out last night and woke up without a hangover but disoriented, trying to piece things together. My mom accepts a lot of the things I do. When I failed math she said, "Anak, ok lang yan. Sa UP ka naman e." She's nice to my girlfriends. When I bring friends over to hang out or drink she always does something nice for them. She's just that kind of person, terribly nice. And when I start to get weird, she will dismiss the behavior as something I have to do to write. But I think she has seen something I hadn't.

Not in an angry tone, but in a disappointed one, she asked, "Uminom ka nanaman?" And I said yes, and was embarrassed to say so. Like I said, she accepts the drinking, but there was genuine concern there. You don't have to say much to express certain important things. Her bringing it up meant that she had noticed something.

So I sat back and started thinking. What have I been doing this week? and here's what came out: Monday- Happy Mondays, downed most of a 350ml bottle of gin (with Marge, Kael, and some of the TWG boys taking a few swigs) and somewhere around six beers; Tuesday-movie premier, no drinking; Wednesday, was supposed to just stay home but wound up heading to Blu Fin and having somewhere around 8 beers; Thursday-dinner out no drinking; Friday-went to a birthday party, drank maybe a quarter of a bottle of tequila straight from the bottle and had more than ten cups of beer (there was a keg! and i lost count somewhere after the eighth beer); Saturday- one-on-one drinking session with Anna, we downed a pitcher of margarita and a beer tower. that beer tower was massive. so i passed out. today I'll be in the recording studio laying down tracks for the last song on our album/EP, and most likely after that we'll be downing a few beers.

See the thing to be noticed here is the frequency and intensity. Out of six days, I was drinking four nights, and this wasn't like having a beer or two. This was real, hardcore, hit the bottle like there's no tomorrow drinking. I've told people, as long as I don't drink, I'm fine. But once I get a taste, well, it's a downward tumble. The thing about it is that I haven't noticed. I mean, someone asks me out, and normally the people who know me know that when they need someone who'll have a drink with them I'm their man. I just go. But not until my mom expressed concern did I realize, whoa I have been drinking way too much. It's time to turn this around.

As I write this I'm feeling something in my back, this twitching inside and it frightens me that it could be my liver or kidneys making complaints. These could just be ghost pains that I am imagining because I am thinking of this. But a good number of friends are getting sick with all kinds of things. Our pasts are catching up with us.

Easy and I get to talking sometimes about how we used to feel immortal. In your early twenties you feel like you can take anything on. Nights of mad drinking, going home as the sun comes up and getting up for class or work, shrugging it all off as if the body were adamantium. No more these days. I make a wrong step and my knee pops, I'm afraid it will get dislocated again at the slightest movement. All these things I've done to my body; I feel that my body betrays me when I get hurt, but I can't help it, perhaps it is the body's revenge for all the abuses I have subjected it to.

Without being conscious of it, I've already gone on my post-crisis bender. It's early morning now, the sun has come up while I wrote this entry, and now maybe I should try and turn things around.

Thinking about Fear

It's been rather fun teaching horror this quarter. Like I said before, it's great to be in a room and watch something and get that overwhelming reaction. It's different, in terms of say writing. When I write I'd like something to happen with my audience, but I'll probably never see that unless I stand in front of someone as they read my work. That I could not bear. Just last week I was with a friend and to play with the writerly insecurities she got a copy of a book I'm in and started reading it aloud in the book store. I had to tear the book from her hands because I felt that I would melt as the words were read.

However, having these film viewings is more like putting together a good mixed tape. Wow, I've written a lot about making mixed tapes, and I'm sure that many of my friends from the cassette generation will have their own nostalgia trips about it. But the whole idea was you take careful consideration in crafting this tape that plays a certain mood perfectly. You enjoy it when you play it and the person you made the tape for really likes it. Some level of music appreciation. Similarly, I'm getting a kick out of putting together a set of readings made to scare. And then picking just the right things for my class to watch.

Now the question comes: will I get better at this as the year progresses, considering that I'll be working in genres that don't generate such an apparent and immediate effect as horror does, or is this the peak since I'm very comfortable with this genre.

Teaching in genre has many challenges. I have taken on something pretty big. I think I went for horror since I've been thinking a lot about teaching it, and that results in it being the first thing my mind went to when I was pressed to come up with something to teach. Soon enough I'll be raiding my book closet looking for all of those old anthologies I picked up and making my selections.

Yesterday a co-teacher lent me a book on biopsychology. After she sat in on my class to watch the horror show she heard my mini-talk again about fear and the like. she recommended that I skip ahead in the book and read about the fear reactions.

So during some meeting yesterday I was reading and it turns out that a lot of the studies on fear are really interesting when it comes to the basic responses. One of the interesting things that came out there was that animals, when fighting intra-species, will not go for any lethal moves. Hence, the fighting stances of animals will allow certain weak points to be exposed because they know that those from their species won't hit them there. Interesting, parang yung usapang, sige pare sapakan, pero walang sa bayag. Possibly interesting too is this notion that in the animal kingdom, there's this implicit, unspoken agreement, probably brought about by evolution and the need to propagate the species, that you can hurt each other to establish social order, but you can't kill each other. Now line this up against man and our development and really, how easy it is to kill someone.

Another thing I read, which I wished I had read before, when the shitstorm was coming down on me, was about defensive reactions to aggression. It said there that in systems with a developed hierarchy and pecking order moves made by superiors are considered aggressive. And the common reaction to that kind of behavior is a defensive attack. If I had this information, then it would prove that my reactions were only normal. When the big bad wolf came at me, I had no choice but to mount a defensive attack to protect myself. Amazing what a study of science and behavior can reveal, how our most basic reactions are driven by evolutionary models developed over the millenia.

I can't help but be interested in evolution and these new theories in various fields that allow us to understand ourselves and how we function. Reading up on neuroscience, evolution, and all these trends forces us to consider that, no we are not merely products of our personal experiences, but the development of countless generations, genes passed on, behavioral traits and beliefs that ensure the propagation of the race. While we feel so much as individuals, and I personally have this tendency to think about my various failings, we are all part of this massive human project moving towards the highest and most efficient and developed forms possible. The immensity of evolution and an understanding of how large things are, a realizing of how large a scale things could possibly operate on, and how limited an effect we have on these things on a literal level, can be overwhelming. I'm thinking of a Flaming Lips song, "The Stars are so Big, I am so Small...Do I Stand a Chance?"

And so we can still turn to art, that imposition of form on the artwork, the creation of something, from materials already there, be it statue from stone or poem or story plucked from the language of the social subconscious. These are things that transcend space and time. With the immensity of it all, our collective understanding and knowledge, the awareness of how large the world is, sometimes, it's just a three minute ditty or a few beautiful lines from a poem that can allow us to transcend this world and enter some higher level of consciousness. Even with all our knowledge, there's still something mystical out there.

i'm getting to rambling, but now i have to start questioning, how do I reconcile all of this reading on science, the systematizing of knowledge, while at the same time holding onto these beliefs of transcendence and the mystical experience. In class, we were reading about Plotinus and the "A ha! I've got it moment" where it's not this conscious thought process that leads you to something, but at the snap of your fingers you just suddenly have this moment of understanding. I believe in study and science, but you can't deny that moment of sublimity. I guess I am deciding to live a life of inquisition and constant thought and understanding, in pursuit of that transcendental moment.

Christmas in July

A side note before I get started. As I typed in the title of this blog, two other titles popped out, so it seems that I have a tendency to use Christmas in my titles. Lots and lots of entries with christmas references. Makes me wonder how that season seems to always inhabit my subconscious.

These days have been a blur. Still reeling from this great crisis concerning work, disaster seemingly averted. I'm not out of the woods yet, but people are reassuring me that the worst of it is over now.

I've been looking for things to brighten up about. One thing I think is this new project I've undertaken with Adam David. It's usually bad luck to talk about it or pre-empt things, I've seen since I started working for real that usually I give up on a lot of things I write; but if I say I'm writing something I feel this obligation to show people that I actually finished it. So if I announce I'm going to finish it, I somehow find the willpower to.

Again this new project I find very exciting. I won't claim to be a T.S. Eliot fanatic. In fact most of the stuff of his I've read I've gotten from various anthologies and collections. Still I consider Prufrock one of my favorite poems, and I really enjoy reading him. Enjoy so much that a couple years back I wrote that series of weird dramatic monologues in the vein of Prufrock. So the new project has us working with some of Eliot's poetry and kind of updating it. I think that the source material is so sublime, and the kind of interaction between text, old text, new writer, it's very experimental and makes a lot of room. Some will remember how Ricky de Ungria's Pidgin Levitations tried for this kind of reaction, with him revising, as an older man, poems that he had written in his early twenties. Now here we are engaging one of the greatest poems, and one of the greatest poets of all time. There's a measure of conceit here, for Adam and I to think of engaging Eliot in this way. And it seems very ambitious. But I haven't been writing anything else and this seems so large and challenging that I can't say no to it.

There's that, and in teaching I find myself always excited about teaching my advancement class. I'm having fun because I'm teaching what I want. Going genre based and mixing up TV, film, and literature, I think I'm plunging my students into a critical study of forms that will enrich their understanding. I like to think of things in terms of The Matrix where Neo sees the world as if it were normal, but as his consciousness of things is raised he starts to see the binary code, the structures that are in place, all of them underlying the seeming reality that surrounds them. I think that an understanding of forms allows you that kind of vision.

This brings us to the whole Christmas idea. This quarter so far all I've been able to get in is a detailed study of horror. This friday we watched The Descent. On my own, watching these films helps to pump the adrenaline and allow for some intellectual engagement. But watching with the class one remembers the joy of communal viewing. Just the screaming, the tension everyone suffers from, and the inevitable laughter at the reactions, which always has to seem a little uncomfortable.

So I'm thinking of other genres to jump into. And I think one of the most ignored genres in terms of criticism, is the action movie and the action story. Its popularity at the box office is almost inversely proportionate to its critical reception. But I grew up on action movies, and I love the good old gun fight and explosion. So I'm hoping I can find some way to get them into my class. In an effort to see what I can do with them, I've picked up two of what I consider to be genre defining films. The first installments of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises stand in my mind as landmarks in the develpoment of the action movie. These films ushered in a new kind of action movie during the 80s, each providing the prototype for two different strands of the genre. I can't specify here yet, since if i'll be teaching i'll be pre-empting, and according to the format i'm supposed to teach in I can't give it, I must elicit or something.

So I spent the first half of this day watching these two movies again and the funny thing is that they are both set during Christmas. For the first two Die Hard movies, the Christmas setting was well defined. They dropped it in the later two though. I still can't remember though if the second Lethal Weapon movie was set in the yuletide season.

I mention these things because as the different parts of my life fall in and out of place, there's this need I feel to do things that will make me feel like a child again. Many people have called me both child-like and childish, and they are probably right. But as the adult world and its responsibilities impinges on mine, I think I want to feel like a child again.

I mention this because when I was maybe ten we bought a new VCR because the old one had been broken. The new one stayed in the living room. The old one I took and tried repairing. I don't know how I did it, but I managed to fix it. Among the few videos we had at the time were the first two Die Hard movies. I watched these over and over. So seeing it again now brings that back. Other things that help bring back the child are my watching Transformers. The first time I watched as a critic, but the second viewing I watched as that child who cried when Optimus Prime died.

Lately I've wanted to go somewhere with a rollercoaster. As a kid I spent a lot of afternoons at Six Flags getting my brain shook in and out of place. I don't think there are any rollercoasters here that would provide that kind of extreme rush, but if anybody knows any that might up the adrenaline level, drop me a comment.

Call for Links

hello friends,

well, since the closing of the old blogspot i kept, i kind of lost all my links. so please visit here and drop your blog addys or send them to my email so i can start linking you here.

With all the things going on these days all I want is either a long vacation or a return to some semblance of normalcy, before everything going weird.

Tonight I headed to the Harry Potter premier. and I hate to pre-empt my own review, but well, it was a pretty long yawn-fest. I've never been a Potter fan, and this doesn't do much to win me over.

I am hoping that the students I have in my advancement classes are getting as excited as I am about it. Thus far we've been talking horror, and I can't help but get excited about certain stories and ways to look at them. I've been throwing my favorite classic stories at them. Not too sure yet how they are taking it all, but the discussions have been pretty good, though not everyone participates. This has always been a problem with me. But sige lang.

And tonight, with time to kill in the mall, I went to the video store and picked up copies of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. Buying these things shows my openness to the idea of still teaching I guess. I hope that I can stay on now and at least teach some of these things.

The merchant is in business. After getting screwed over by my last blog being found, i've decided to start up again here in blogspot. attempts at anonymity will be made. so hard to manage a blog, writing things about your personal life and worrying what evil may come of it, like say losing your job.

anyways, here's the new stuff. i will post things as they come. back to the good old stuff that you read in the bayaw site.