Freedom Is A State of Mind

I used to love going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings when I was in recovery in San Francisco. Every single day I went to at least one meeting and when I had the whole day to myself I'd go to three, even five.

One thing that weighed most importantly in what made a meeting worth attending was whether it was frequented by the people with whom I shared quarters in the rehab.

Naturally, if they went, I didn't. Out of the maybe 60 people at the rehab there were only about two I could tolerate running into at a meeting. It was understood that I had my own thing going, which piqued curiosity somewhat. When asked what meeting I was going to I would lie; I wanted to keep the useless hordes away from a good meeting the way environmentalists attempt to keep tourists away from virgin beaches.

There was something for every flavor of sobriety. If I wanted to hear a tranny's life story, there was a meeting for it. A couple hours later there would be a choice of language. There was also a location option - you want to go to the foggy part of town, or the sunny part of town? There were meetings where the coffee was good and there was Coffee-Mate....and in others were there was good coffee, Splenda, half & half and Coffee-Mate. Some meetings served cookies and cakes. Some even had beef jerky and Caramel Diet Pepsi.

You could opt to go WASP male alcoholic on Nob Hill, Black recovering crack head South of Market , Latino in the Mission District, Haight Street Hippy, Castro Queen. You could even go to a No Scents Allowed meeting if your sinuses weren't doing too good.

It was like having 2 or 3 parties going on at a given time. The freedom of choice was like a high in itself.

And then in Makati I got squeezed into four meetings a week, seeing the same people, as it were, week-to-week. The same people who were either useless ornaments or annoying individuals. People whose stories didn't inspire me and who didn't deserve to know details of my story.

These people must have taken it personally that I wouldn't share much of myself with them. If they thought I was one of those assholes who thinks he's better than everybody else, they were right.

Rather than finding a maintenance plan for what had been a successful program in San Francisco, I found a group of chain-smoking, sugar-addicted, big-fish-in-little-pond with unhealthy habits and cloying personalities. Aloofness, for its absence in that group, would have been a virtue.

There was no possibility for my own brand of sobriety here unless I would wing it and do my own thing.

Understanding that micro-culture and juxtaposing it the macro has helped me see what exactly has been choking me in this country. It is the lack of options.

One may argue that anything is possible, even in this country. However true that may be, the fact that there is usually only one road for everyone to take to get to a certain destination limits the sense of personal freedom immeasurably. The road less travelled, if I may indulge myself a cliché, is depressingly rare.

And for a picky mothafucka like me, having only one way to do something is just as much of a prison as having no way to do it.

Pre Greyhound

One blazingly hot New England summer day I jumped on the first of several Greyhounds that would take me from Boston to San Francisco. The trip took four uncomfortable, dirty, inconvenient, and chaotic days and I will never forget how fascinated I was with the differences in landscape, climate, and people that I observed throughout the journey.

I really have nothing say when asked (by myself in self-reflection and by others in curiosity) why I did it.

Here is something I wrote a day before I got on that bus. It still doesn't answer the question, but it is a vivid reminder of how excruciatingly abstract my motivations could be.


I got no needle & thread.
I got no magic wand.
But I do weave webs.

The only way that I am content is to be floating dead center in a web of reality whose structure I had intricately and obsessively personalized. Such has been so in every city or community I've dwelled in. I've always had a VIP pass to my reality; no it didn't come for free-it was and is a result of my web-weaving. Some may call it schemes and manipulations, but towards what? Schemes and manipulations produce money, sex, and power. The three things I am most intimidated by.

I need to weave my own little ShitShow, where I enjoy the benefits and privileges of Those Who Call The Shots without having to bear with the pain of Calling The Shots, Aiming The Shots, And Shooting The Shots.

I aim to personify the term "extra-hierarchical", where I can and do exist alongside the hierarchy/ies, past and present.

You see, I can't quite be King Arthur, anyone on his Round Table, nor any of his subjects. I must be Merlin, subject of none and ruler of only his own little reality.

And when does this end?

When my web of reality is patched up, deformed, and groaning with the weight , it must be put to sleep while it's still whole.

I refuse to watch it get dessicated and fed to the vultures. It must quit before it gets fired. Like I did. No looking back, no visiting the gravesite even.

Only the memories I bring to the new venue; it's really the only way to preserve the most valuable parts of the exiting reality, the only method of keeping the volume crisp.

Chasing an impossible dream? Bullshit. It's possible because I've built a couple....and boy, what a dream THAT was. I lived it.

Destination SFO.

Must I climb her ladder???

Late last night I got a message on facebook from Warehouse 135 inviting me to a night of tech-house, house, micro-house, and techno care of Science of Sounds.

Skeptical as usual of Warehouse 135's (and Manila's) interpretation of electronic music, I did some research online until I found a couple audio samples posted on the S.O.S. website. There wasn't much, but it was enough to convince me that my idea of tech-house and their idea of tech-house were similiar: a Terry Francis sound.

I got there around midnight, went straight to the bar to exchange my P400 ticket for a bottle of water. At the door they'd told me, "sir, one free drink", so I was annoyed at being denied a bottle of water by the bargirl. She agreed to give me some really flat Coke Zero. It didn't bother me too much at this because I saw it as a compromise; they had probably been instructed to pour out Jägermeister. It did annoy me when I came back a couple hours later and was sold a P100 glass of Coke Zero from the same assed out bottle. They no longer sold cans of Coke Zero and they'd raised the price from P90 to P100.

Since Manila is a hotbed for remarkably crappy electronic music, the 2 Science of Sounds DJ's, Impulse & Lupen, were relatively good. Track selection and mixing were decent.

In principle tech-house is a tasteful genre: it is understated, smooth, neither too dark nor too cheerful, very "safe" sounding. However, 3 hours of the same flavor of tech-house can get really, really monotonous. The switch in DJ from Lupen to Impulse should have given some variation, but it didn't.

I danced for all the 3 hours I was there, and for the first time at Warehouse was approached by a couple of people who commented on it. One was the DJ, Lupen. He was appreciative of my being the only one dancing for hours. This, of course, was entirely appropriate for him to have appreciated.

Sometime during the the 2nd DJ's set (Impulse), a bunch of maybe 25 of 20-somethings decided to form a breakdancing circle. Hmm. Tech-house isn't exactly b-boy material..and lo and behold their moves were entirely out of sync with the beat. These kids were a cheesy mix: wannabe-Bench-billboard-model-looking-Olongapo-mestizos, uber-flaming hip-hop homos (who merged female stripper moves with..trying-hard breakdancer...and some Rihanna & Beyoncé), and random white tourist dudes with their National Geographic dates.

From the time I got there there was this chick who had parked herself beside the DJ booth. Because she was hanging with a random white dude, had on a short dress, heels, and was dancing a certain way, I had assumed her to be a G.R.O. Apparently she didn't think she was, because she was the second person who came up to me and tried to be friendly.

This is what she said (and no, it's not a pseudo memory because it's quite recent):

"You're cool! You dance cool! Where are you from?" she punctuated this by giving me a 2-stage handshake. Sooo, maybe she wasn't a G.R.O. Her english was decent.
"Makati," I grunted, not quite reciprocating the friendliness.
"Oh my God, I'm sooo high on ecstasy!!!"
"Uh, okay...."
"What are these kids doing? They can't dance!" ....and you can?
"In case you haven't noticed, all of Manila can't dance. Embassy's no better than this place for dancers."
"Ooooh, Embassy! My BEST friend, you know Tim Yap, he owns it!" she gushed. "I should show these kids how to really move....I've danced all my life....ballet, plus I'm from Long Beach, California so I know what I'm doing! I'm actually gonna have my own club, focussed on dancing, with a 'no VIP' theme! At the Fort!!"
"So show them!!" I urged her. "Show them your stuff!
At this point I was really hoping she'd get in there and make a spectacle of herself, a fool among fools. But she wouldn't, despite my urging.
"So, do you wanna see a REAL party? After this you should come to my house for a REAL party. My place is at the Fort."
Hmm. So she lives in the Fort, where she's gonna have her own club, and her BEST friend is Tim Yap, plus she's from Long Beach, California. Impressive. I was so unworthy of her gracious attention. What had I done to deserve to bask in this parvenu's presence?
"No," I said. "I'm going home."

"Get With The Fuckin Program"

I admit, I have this fear of being a lemming. Living a prescribed life is like going to another country on a package tour.
Rebellious behavior is no longer part of my character. It still, however, dictates my day-to-day decisions, and consequently, my actions. Most of the time this desire to be different, to go against the grain, appeals to me still. It is mainly uncontrived nowadays, unplanned and often only evident in retrospect at times when I allow myself random bursts of thought. Like when exercising.
I think it is part of the reason why I haven't done the career thing and have only had jobs. I find myself resisting workplace culture. It is one thing I cannot embrace. I can be the star of achievement at my place of employment, but I would hardly find myself spouting the jargon, or planning extra-curricular activities with co-workers. If for some reason I find myself not on the clock with some colleague/s I avoid shop talk. The very thought of the Japanese workplace terrifies me: regular after-office drinks with colleagues; socializing with the boss after hours, inviting him to your home, or being invited to his? Socializing with the boss, period, isn't too appealing. The same guy who sits beside you at work doing the treadmill beside you at the gym, discussing the same people, places, & things? God forbid. Of course, your wives are social with each other. Of course, you share very similar tastes in clothes & shoes, even like the same music, see the same bands. Doesn't everybody at the office?
Of course. The prescribed life.
Naturally, this turns me off to potentially rewarding "careers" in which I may excel, like law, or hotel/restaurant management. My perception of those fields is that in order to get professional satisfaction one must embrace the workplace culture.
This tendency of mine to sidestep the mainstream also comes out in how I have refused to get colloquial anywhere I have lived. In Genève everybody said "ça va ou bien?" all the time, and it irritated the fuck out of me. Especially when said with a dissonant accent. Imagine a thick Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai accent trumpeting "ça va ou bien" as frequently as I say "fuck". I mean, I really can't blame them for trying to assimilate, right? It's what you're supposed to do.
In Boston I refused to use the word wicked as an adverb. Everybody there says shit like, "that's wicked cool". It particularly irritated me to hear it contrived in someone's speech, like when a black guy from the Hood or an F.O.B. Asian used it. You gotta know that this particular usage is really just Masshole (Massachusetts Asshole, which is a really white demographic). It probably also signifies something for me to not have worn any Boston Reds Sox gear then, but I might now.
In California the use of "hella" as an adverb I kinda resisted, but not as much as I resisted wicked. All sorts of people used hella: black, white, Latino, asian, gay, not gay. I may use it occasionally now, but I never used it in California, where everybody used it.
Here in Manila I refuse to use words like jologs, or phrases like "in fairness lang". I think it's jologs to say jologs. The word baduy works just fine. Another thing that doesn't sit well with me is how at the workplace part of the culture is to sling po or "poh" in all directions, whether superior or subordinate, colleague or outside contractor. I also refuse to speak Taglish. I think being able to speak both Tagalog and English fluently is admirable, but it's just really common to do Taglish.
The local contemporaries with whom I share a socio-cultural background and like electronic music are supposed to get hard-ons for names like Tiësto, Paul Van Dyk & Armin Van Buuren. If they think they're really cutting edge, their panties get wet for "Sexy House". They all have Hedkandi, or Ministry of Sound CD's. They don't dance, or if they pretend to, they don't really groove. You can't really groove to trance anyway.
My iPod is full of shit none of these people have heard, with none of the shit they have on CD or in their iPods.
I don't stop dancing, and I keep the groove all throughout. You gotta keep your feet moving or else they're gonna get caught in that sticky mainstream. I won't go where everybody goes, like Embassy, because there they play shit that everybody is supposed to like.
When someone ends an almost 2 decade long relationship with crystal meth he's supposed to turn to sugar, coffee, cigarettes and get really fat and look like he smoked crack for 40 years. That's the system.

Someone asked me, "so why do you speak Spanish so well?"
"Because I look like a chink", I said.
"So you took Spanish lessons because you look......Chinese?"
"I never took Spanish lessons".
"Um, so why do you speak Spanish?"
"Because I don't look like I do".
"Neither do I, how come I don't speak it?"
"Yeah, well, I'm special".

I don't even know if that conversation really happened or if it's a pseudo memory. Fuck, I don't keep track. At least I wouldn't be lying if I say something because I really believe it happened....