Sister golden hair surprise

The games that they play. The games that we play!
Looks like I will not survive my first brush with the law of the glop.

And Mags said today, “But you are also playing games with their minds!” The point that I missed, since I didn't know that I really am the one who has the resources to be throwing dices.

"You have a career to look after, Sheilfa, you have so much to lose." When all the while I had been making so much of myself, believing I have only so much to give with none to lose.

You scare me, she said. Told her that I spoke to her girlfriend telling her I’m in love with her girlfriend.

“You have to take into account their emotional maturity in dealing with competition, what they can do to you. My God, you don’t know them!”

“They”, I wanted to tell her, is of my kind. Poor, gutterbred. Therefore, there was not much to know. And there was not much to fear. But of course, that is only my point of view. The “real” gutterbred think nothing of me. The real gutterbred think of me a bourgeois shithead trying to lay a dirty hand on their virgin souls.

“Don’t put yourself in a very vulnerable situation. This isn’t the love of your life, is it? You are just there for the adventure, I suppose?”

Damnshit. Would that I would just call it an itch.
But if they're getting themselves some experience, shouldn't I be glad I am of help?



26 december 2005

Beyond the Ash Rains

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thicket monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived.
I had still not learned the style of nomads

To walk between the rain drops to keep dry
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

Without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we’d at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for lost. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, “I am going,” I murmured,
repeatedly, “going where no one has been
and no one will be. Will you come with me?”
You took my hand and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won’t again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won’t ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

Agha Shahid Ali

The Peace Zone

"The The Peace Zones comprise barely barren ground. While it may be simplistic to mock the concept as offering no more than a future in which the archipelago might resemble a jigsaw of sanctuaries and withdrawal areas, the proposal can nonetheless appear static and unimaginative in the broader context of Philippine politics.

"But there is a far more sinister problem: The Peace Zones represent the antithesis of political debate and threaten to depower the very people they aim to protect."

Peter Sales (1992, p. 32)

Ending up in Istanbul on a train off for Siberia

"Over a number of years spent ruminating on the distinctive characteristics of the Celts, I began to wonder if their legendary nomadic ways arose from an inner need. An involuntary response, rather than a pragmatic one; a restlessness that had its roots in an insatiable curiosity.

"I suspect it was my growing awareness of my own wanderlust and curiosity that made me aware of the real sense of connection I felt to the Celtic lineage, as part of that New World extension of a people who ranged so astonishingly far and wide. And the more I learned of Pan-Celtic culture and its unexpected turns and twists, the more I was drawn to learn about the Celts’ contemporaries, which in turn set me off on tangents which might have little or no connection to the Celts themselves.

"In casting your inspirational net as an artist, you become familiar with the humility that comes with watching your best-laid plans veer sideways, and recordings becoming something other than what you expected. So, you set out to travel to Rome and end up in Istanbul. You set off for Japan and you end up on a train across Siberia. The journey, not the destination, becomes a source of wonder.

"In the end, I wonder if one of the most important steps on our journey is the one in which we throw the map. In jettisoning the grids and brambles of our own preconceptions, perhaps we are better able to find the real secrets of each place; to remember that we are all extensions of our collective history."

William Butler Yeats