Outside Trinoma a balloon of Patrick the starfish is flipping and tumbling in the sky. Patrick, Spongebob's five-pointed bugger friend. (Ever notice why Spongebob has so many holes?) Some idiot kid must've let go of the balloon and committed suicide. The smiling pink starfish contrasted with the drab watery heavens, it's like a pimple of meaning in the face of a vast and pointless universe.

You can just hear Patrick's voice ripped off from Bikini Bottom, saying, "Hey, look Spongebob, I can fly!" And Spongebob would scream saying, "You are NOT flying Patrick! You are being taken to Starfish Heaven!" And so on.

I've just begun another journal. The traditional ones in moleskin and black ink. The only thing is, it's in Tagalog.

Huwhaaaaaaat?? Me, makata??

It's a requirement for Malikhaing Pagsusulat class. I mean the journal, not the moleskin and black ink.

There's a different sense of intimacy in writing longhand with blank ink on creamy paper--not that it's real moleskin, mind--than letting my fingers trampoline on the keyboard. I used to keep journals since I was nine, and piled them all up into an infernal tower of destruction when I was sixteen. All them diaries burnt, smoldered, crumbled, gone. Why? Ionno. Maybe our gas range ran out.

The leathery feel of the notebook, the smooth ruled pages, the nib of the pen pissing black abominable things called words, the penmanship, the pressure and thickness and blackness of the ink: the sensation of writing longhand is rather visceral and clitoromaniacal it's like fingering the soul of the persona, all the warts and bruises, the stabs and slipknots, all the flesh and bone and blood.

Writing longhand has perpetually deserted me. To type is to transcribe the thoughts directly from the quivering regions of the brain; while to write longhand requires more than the physical effort of the hand. You use only one hand instead of two, and allows you to fingerfuck with the other, or scratch your butt, I don't know. But the lack of speed for writing longhand allows some other thoughts to vanish--it's rather laborious. Fingers would hurt like FUUUUUUUUUUUUU. And you get that annoying ephemerality of the journal--it gets lost, stolen, burnt, or wet... Yes, wet.

Bought the notebook for just P150-something. My pseudomoleskin and my quasiwriterly instincts. I'm no writer in Filipino. My expansive Filipino vocabulary hasn't changed since I was eight. I haven't read any book in Filipino except for failed attempts at perusing Bob Ong--three times. All failed. Bob Ong is simply the epitome of mediocrity.

Henso, good luck to this attempt at journaling in Tagalog. I just know: I shall fuck up royally.

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