Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

This is Milos Karadaglic, playing my favorite Doris Day's "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." Do me a favor - if you're planning to read the text below, click "play" on the video first. 

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From my office you can see a boat in the sky and every time it catches my sight, I think of Noah. Of his dream and legend, and why the idea of placing an object so out of its depth in midst of vacant air is so enthralling. It is the unexpected that captures our attention, the abnormal. We see beauty in the strange, the alien. We hail the people who create these strange, wondrous things. But not always.

When Noah was tasked to build the Ark, I imagine he wasn't very popular. People would've called him insane. Got few loose screws in his head, probably could benefit from some knocks. Oh Noah, he's a loony man.

Had he ever felt despair when the ridicules got too much? When the barbs stung a little too close to heart, had he ever wanted to join others in the mocking? Had he ever hated himself?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

According to the story, however, the Ark got built anyway.

I wonder if Noah had ever seen this coming—his story surviving the thick coils of time—and what he might've said if he could see us now, trying to do what he'd done so many ages ago.

Nowadays the sky looks ready to release another biblical flood and even though I do not put much stock in the doomsday predictions (plural, of course, because we, as a species, have a universal fascination with death whether we want to admit it or not), I keep waiting for the crack in the clouds that will bring rain of lightning and hails. It crosses my mind now and then that the world may really end on a Friday, which is just two days away, but then the thought simply excuses itself and slinks back to the corner.

Some people say that humans are born alone and will die alone, so even when all perish two days from now, each life still leaves this world as alone as they were when they entered it. But alone doesn't mean lonely. Alone doesn't mean hopeless. Even at the end of everything, there can still be hope and companionship.

Allow me to recall the thought that has been festering at the corner. I'd like to call this nearest doomsday prediction the Unexpected Expected. It's expected because people were told beforehand that it's coming (although no one's vouching for the source's credibility), but at the same time it's also unexpected because people think it's an almost certainty that it won't happen since experts all around the world have managed to drag the hype down to the level of superstitious murmurs. 

If the Unexpected Expected does occur this Friday, we are faced with a huge abnormality and like most I suspect, we won't be ready for it. We had our chances to become Noah, but we didn't take it.

Reading this, you may think to yourself, "Pfft, it ain't gonna happen. The world's not going to end on Friday."

Well.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Formulaic Dharma

When I thought I knew how things were going to end, I always ended up with defied expectations and a bittersour aftertaste. Bittersour because it's the kind of taste you wish you can forget forever and not to be fondly reminisced once in a while like bittersweet. I believe this is why I rarely set any expectations at all, the least for myself.

Whenever I get involved in a social setting, which deals with one or more people who don't live inside my head (yeah, you read it right - there are voices inside, trying to say many, many things all at the same time, which gets really noisy at times), things had a way of spiraling out of control very fast. One moment you were laughing, the next moment things went whooosh downhill.

Every time I would be replaying the scene in my mind, trying to figure out where the hell it went wrong. The answer would always come shrouded in doubt because I can never be sure of anything. In the end, all I have of the whole process is a lot of bruise I inflict upon my intangible self. Oh, I must've said this, I must've done that. Oh, how could I be so stupid? So careless? How could I cause such trouble?

I wonder where this tendency for self-blame springs from. I wonder why I like it so much. For once, I want to try living without the fear of offending or hurting others. Trying to read people and please them all the time is so tiring, is it not? Perhaps then, without such fear, the self-blame game would stop. The world would cease being such a scary place. I would be able to wave the figurative middle finger without a shred of guilt.

But then, what an unfeeling person I would've become. I don't know if I would be truly happy like that. One suffers and suffers - perhaps it is the best state of humanhood (I know I'm inventing a lot of words right now, but shush) and from it, one's true self emerges.

So what does that say about me? I suffer from a perpetual guilt of failing, which leads to an endless fear about everything. I go through my day with countless scenarios inside my head, minute by minute, a perpetual sort of What Ifs factory, an infinite number of parallel worlds swirling within the universe of one. Imagine how many regrets, big or small, I have. Imagine trying to sleep like that. Imagine having to wake up to that. I truly am amazed that I haven't dashed towards insanity after all this while. 

Perhaps this is normal; meaning, others experience this too. Perhaps this is not unique, this is commonplace and many, many before and after me would've gone through the same tiresome thought process. If it is so, what is our true self? What emerges after the long torture of what-could-have beens?

Logically, I would answer (like the good student I am), "Self-reflection breeds wisdom, applied wisdom breeds enlightenment. Applied enlightenment breeds peace." It sounds good in theory. In fact it sounds perfect, like the answer to everything. If Deep Thought the Supercomputer had to describe 42, it would've said it like that (anyway, digressing a bit here, 42 is a pretty, flat number in my head, like a wooden bench painted white against a white background). But it is easier said than done. Much more so. Hence, the discrepancy between what we know to be ideal and the reality we face is the suffering itself.

Putting it in a formula:                                  Suffering = Ideal - Reality

where the ideal state is the enlightened state, and reality is what we're facing when we are currently unenlightened, hence:
                                                   
                                                      Suffering = Enlightened state - Current state

Epiphany! I've always been confused about how suffering can bring about enlightenment, but I think I might've started to understand it a little now.

So if this is true, at the end of my conscious self, I would've had the chance of finding enlightenment and finally peace. But only if I move on from endless self-reflections to wisdom (and even if I manage to do that, there's still the whole thing about applying wisdom to achieve enlightenment. Life is really not easy, hey?).

Anyway, the whole point of this rambling is to get my thoughts straight. And this is why I love writing. Amidst all of those voices in my head, only mine is heard when I write.

I can finally hear myself speak.

On Sleep

 There's a sickening lurch in my stomach that always coincides with the tides of pressure behind my right eyeball whenever I stay awake past one in the morning. I suppose this is a way my body signals sleep deprivation, a sort of second alert of the impending crash that will happen sooner or later.

The pressure on the eyeball, I can take. But the nausea? I'm a slave to its whims and I know the only way to stop it is to lie down and try to get a shut eye. It doesn't matter that after the eyelids close I still see images in my head, running around, screwing each other, colliding and getting tangled in a mess that cross stories and genres. It matters not. Sleep will come, dreams may or may not, and the nausea will be gone.

Whenever I sleep, I always strive to wake up as naturally and as early as possible. But that's actually a lofty goal because my inner clock is skewed towards the unnatural after years of practiced insomnia.

So I wake up groggy, most of the time, tight-lipped and cursing inwardly (because it just ruins the whole day when your first utterance first thing in the morning/just before noon is a loud, "Fuck!").

Despite all that, I like sleep. Sleep's my friend. Sleep is where I meet interesting things, where my brain shakes itself loose and goes woo-hoo on me. Sleep is nice.

Having said all that, I'm going to bed now.

[Dream Diary] One

Wacky dreams are the norm for me. If it's not wacky, then I don't dream. This is why I like sleeping so much - the stories there are so much better. I've thought about starting a dream diary, but that's just too obsessive and time-consuming for my taste. Despite the degree of weirdness of the dreams, I try not to analyze them. It's a losing battle because each time I do that, I hear Freud telling me I'm a horrible person. And he's been dead for like, what, a hundred years? That creeps me out.

Hiawatha (Later Rio)

 

last night I had a dream about the child I lost

a hundred times within a single sleep

and his name is Hiawatha

I saw his soft arms

and somewhere in between the cracks

of waking and slipping back, his fingers

met mine and I held them

a thought remained when I woke

how love slips easy

I was shown his room

and a framed picture he treasure

Oh, my God

the soundless recognition of him

rang through me as I perched,

awaiting a sign that it was real

but none came

it was a strange dream

and no,

I didn’t see him anymore