defragmentation

When so many thoughts are tussling in my head and I can’t even begin to decipher what each of them really means, I sit and pause and reflect like a monk with a shaved head. It might be futile to find meaning in the universe and ponder on some feel-good Coelhoen conspiracy shit that only Oprah would excitedly jump up and down for. Neither do I feel like waxing philosophical about my existence. I’ve long abandoned ontological and metaphysical inquiries on sober days. I reserve them for drinking sprees, when the mind is made more brilliant by alcohol and the tongue finds eloquence in sisig. Hell, everybody thinks he’s Nietzsche when drunk. I sit and reflect just to make sense of what my neurons are trying to say, lulling my body to catatonia in between defragmenting my brain cells and discarding unused memories that are caked with three feet of dust and grime in one of the dank crevices of my brain. I have no need of memories and thoughts that resurrect rancid blood and stale semen. I need some change, dynamic change.

Having been reminded of mortality, I snatched a floating thought about epitaphs, specifically my epitaph. How do I want people to remember me when I’m gone? For someone who lives his life regardless of what others may say, I find such a thought irrelevant. So, yeah, I guess I will just discard that one. Mad thought. Who the hell cares about what they’d write on my tombstone? They can engrave moron or butthead there for all I care. I will have had more important things to attend to by that time, like thinking about what species of worms I will allow into my body to hasten my decomposition. I should just think of happy corpse thoughts. Cadaver business. Putrefaction catalysts.

I might not even be buried at all. I’m seriously toying with the idea of donating my body to science. I mean, what’s the point of having a grand send-off complete with elegant hearse and shit when you’ll just end up a pile of stinking, decaying biological waste? I might as well find good use for my body when I’m dead. Just imagine how titillating it is to be stripped naked, ogled at, and tinkered with by medical students in some sterilized laboratory. Oh, yes, that’s good, slice me with a scalpel, yeah, spank me with surgical stainless steel tools, fuck my left ventricle with a spatula, vacuum my blood and cut up my liver, oh, watch my blood squirt, yeah. It’s like a cadaver’s total sexual fantasy. Even in death, it’s nice to be the center of some mad, bloody orgy. Now that’s a happy corpse thought. I’d adopt that. Proceed to next thought.

During my initiation rites into some Society years ago, I was given a brooch engraved with the group’s insignia and three Greek letters representing the Society’s name. I was also made to recite our motto in Greek and then in English—“Let the love of learning rule humanity.” After my stint in the real world—which sucks big time, by the way—I feel I’ve betrayed that motto.

Coming in and out of graduate school, changing courses but never finishing any, and getting Incompletes in major MA subjects don’t exactly embody some noble motto on learning. After imploring my college dean to take me back in after a year of Absence Without Leave (AWOL), I stayed for one dull semester and then went AWOL again. I don’t know how else I would beg for them to readmit me. I’ve run out of sappy stories and pathetic histrionics.

Just recently, at the office, I signified interest in this eLearning scholarship on trade matters and international economy. Just a few hours of online discussions and research per week for one whole year and I’d get a handsome certificate of completion. I don’t know if I could sustain interest in a topic as remote to me as the South Pole. But that’s better than pickling my brain. Or is it? Hell, I don’t know. But what the heck, I’d still go through it if only to know how much self-inflicted torture I am capable of enduring.

I’m still studying German and French but find them utterly useless in my life right now. Unless I decide to move to Europe in the near future, which seems like a swell thought. Unrealistic, but swell. I got rejected in the MA scholarship I applied for in the Netherlands because my office favored an older, more qualified employee. There goes my ‘learning rules humanity’ motto. But, come to think of it, isn’t what I’ve been doing—reading books on my own, living life with a keen eye, drawing wisdom from the people I meet—aren’t they all part of learning? Is it obligatory that I go back to school and slave away under the rigors of academic convention? Can I not learn boxed-in archaic knowledge on my own and engage in intellectual masturbation with the Internet? Or is it just the voice of a failure that is me sour-graping because I wasn’t able to achieve what society thinks I should’ve achieved at this point? Maybe. Maybe not. Bad thought. Discard.

What’s a school junkie to do now but wait for god’s spare weed to fall off like manna from heaven? Which brings me back to my good old college days. I should’ve tried smoking weed back in college, when my friends rolled out woven mats on a grassy patch of land beside the Faculty Center and started puffing their way to nirvana in broad daylight. But I guess that’s just not my thing. I can get a natural high on other less destructive vices and become a demigod in my own delusions. A demigod that tries so hard to inch back to Olympus after having been evicted unceremoniously.

What if gods and deities did not drown with the sinking of Atlantis? What if they survived Vesuvius’ eruption in ancient Pompeii? What if they still thrive in some virtual Olympus, still fighting and hurling lightnings and lusting and feasting with grand passions of Herculean proportions? What if they still hold sway over everything we do and we just don’t know it? What if I am indeed a demigod and I am unconsciously controlling the destiny of lesser beings? What if we are all lesser creatures being manipulated by a god or gods? Some crappy version of the Matrix? What if gods exist and are actually walking among us, silently taking down notes like Quality Control Engineers intending to improve on their next batch of creations? Mad thought. But plausible.

One can’t discount the possibility of the impossible. If the President can conjure votes out of thin air and still sincerely believe that she has the mandate of the people, then why can’t we believe that there may be things we haven’t grasped yet? Or at least, give it a thought. Things that reason frowns upon but intuition favors. Things that are not part of our realm of experience but are nevertheless extant. I’m not about to propose that we wholeheartedly embrace theism like a bunch of idiotic fundamentalist maniacs. Far from it. I’m driving at something deeper, something more profound than the existence of supernatural beings. Something like the concept of parallel universes, of bent time, of warped realities, of a whole new system of physics and metaphysics. Jostein Gardner’s insinuation that this whole universe and everything that happens in it are just in somebody else’s brain may not be too far-fetched. We have, after all, invented religions and other myths positing similar concepts. Or, are these concepts just offshoots of our failure to comprehend what we perceive? Attempts to make sense of the baffling mysteries this world is so pregnant with? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I’m drunk. These thoughts are labeled ‘for drinking sprees’ only. Defragment. Hell, maybe I am really drunk. I am Nietzsche. I am Foucault. I am Kant. Or Cunt. Whatever. Please pass the sisig.

Defragmentation done. Would you like to clean up your Temporary Internet Folder now?

Yeah, fuck off, Einstein. Or come and drink with me. Or, yeah, whatever.

sisig