I’m watching EMPIRE RECORDS as I type this, and I’m lost in a time warp. I’ve slipped through the cracks, I’ve fallen up and I think I’m in heaven. I’m ten years ago. Don’t wake me up.

Even if I’ve been crawling through monkey vomit and broken glass this past decade, it’s not enough reason for me to forget how fucking AWESOME! this movie is. Sure it’s about as deep as Super Mario Bros. 3, but it’s THE movie of my generation, back when alternative music really WAS the alternative to anything else, when plaid shirts and Doc Martens went together like Guns and Roses, and when Renee Zellweger didn’t talk like a clogged dog whistle yet.

The store was run by all kinds of people: the garage band kid, the indy kid, the artsy kid, the mini skirt kid, the klepto. The list goes on. And back before the world had iPods, everyone shared their music by piping in through the P.A. system. We all shared music by experience, not by firewire or USB. And nobody was afraid to let theirs songs be heard, the more different the better. Everyone in the store just stopped and listened.

The moshing, the moping, the music! The pretend-anarchy, the self-destruction, the term “wigging out”, god-fucking-damn it! I can’t remember a time when I’ve never felt so lost, so miserable, so fucking unsure, but never lonely. We were all Alice in Chains, we all knew the riffs and words to Plush, we were all Soundgarden and Gin Blossoms and Pearl Jam and Lisa Loeb and Juliana Hatfield.

We were the kids who knew what it was like to be the underdog generation, to get the short end of the cultural stick, but the same kind of kids who would survive a nuclear holocaust.

We all worked at Empire Records. We were never paid, we hated our boss, we were all wretched, miserable, broke, disfranchised, and a little too stupid. But we all stayed for the music.

All together now: "Empire Records, open til midnight, how may I service you?"

Okay, okay, OKAY. You don’t have to twist my arm to admit that my weekend was a pretty good one. Sure, it was an old-lady-with-a-broken-hip-bone kind of weekend, but it was the first time in dog years that I was enjoying myself.

See, the upside of suffering from S.A.D. is inasmuch as rainy days make me want to do 15 shots of tequila-and-rat-poison cocktail, warm Sunday afternoons make me a card-carrying citizen of the Prozac Nation. I couldn’t help taking my canvass and paints to the park and listening to Joni Mitchell. And as I was sitting there in the park, right before the tock followed the tick, it felt like:

1. Everybody likes me. Likes me enough to not leave me, likes me enough to listen to me, likes me enough to just leave me alone.
2. I like everybody. Nobody is too stupid or ugly or catholic or materialistic or rich or fake or dramatic or color-coordinated or immature or boring for me.
3. My office isn’t the Asia-pacific satellite headquarters of Satan
4. There’s a point to working in aforementioned satellite headquarters.
5. I’m free.

And I just took everything in, like a teabag in reverse.

In fact, even the evenings weren’t so bad. It bothers me how I’ve turned into this Were-nerd by nightfall: I become whiny and depressed and lonely. Maybe it’s the summer in the air, but I was a happy camper just watching the Discovery Channel inbetween DVDs.

I don’t really know what I’m typing here. And with all this happy crappy sap I’m writing, I’m probably going to cringe reading this later on. But I thought I’d take a snapshot of happy before Fate notices that I’m not getting enough misery in my diet and starts pissing in my drink again.

Whoops, spoke too soon.

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I'd just like to share: buy your pirated copy of THE ARISTOCRATS. Not the Disney movie about cats, although there's just as much pussy in this movie. It's an interesting documentary on famous comedians (like Gilbert Godfried, Drew Carey, Jon Stewart) and their take on the old vauldeville routine.

And i finally learn what a DIRTY SANCHEZ is.

I'm so glad you asked. It's when you fuck somebody in the ass and pull it out to draw a moustache on that person's face with feces.

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“I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend
I know it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend
A lady stepping from the songs we love until this day
You’d settle for an epitaph like “Walk Away, Renee”
The sun upon the roof in winter will draw you out like
a flower
Meet you at the statue in an hour”

--PIAZZA, NEW YORK CATCHER by Belle and Sebastian

I’m tired of being introspective. I honestly am. I feel like Elmer Fudd with his shotgun in hand constantly bending over to look inside the rabbit hole waiting for Bugs Bunny to pop up.

I think I’ve been trying to numb myself with self-destruction, PS2, and more work you can shake a dead copywriter at, just so I don’t look back to see if Euridice is still behind me (and lord, we know how THAT little greek debacle turned out). And I think I’ve been off the blog for 2 weeks now just so I can avoid the urge to purge.

Yet here I am again, with my finger down my throat and ready to barf up a whole bunch of boo-hoos on your pretty white Sunday dress.

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I lack any form of coherence right now. Or a sunny disposition for that matter.

Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Fiona Apple: they’re all here wedged between the bullet points.

1. The apartment is one less warm body now, and my life is half a heart emptier. And it’s sad. Like, Eleneonor Rigby sad. I hate the feeling of sleeping on my side of the bed, even when I’ve got both sides now (ha-ha. A cleverly hidden homage to Joni Mitchell. God I am so pathetic.). And honestly, this is the third time I’m playing the six-month waiting game. That’s a total of 18 months, which is three 6’s. And 666 is the devil’s number. Which is why waiting for 6 more months the third time around is going to bring about the apocalypse on our heads. (Ugh. Levity again to hide the anger and sadness. That is SO late 90’s.) Bottom line is: I’m torn yet again to shreds because you had to leave, and it’s wasn’t fun the first time; it’s still no party the 3rd time around.
2. You know, in retrospect, this is probably my fault. I’ve done nothing but whine about not having enough alone time, and now I’ve got 6 months worth of lonely Arrested Development marathon nights and Cocoa Puffs-for-one breakfasts. I think God is really Benny Hill and he only answers my prayers if there was any of that weird british comedic irony involved. The universe is a sarcastic beast.
3. I came from a weekend retreat which was supposed to better my relationships with my peers at work. It was everything I feared it to be: forced meditation, food that tasted like leftover leper, awkward moments with bosses crying into the Yves Saint Lauren hankies, and the big scary hairy group hug. With flowers. And tears. It was like a Care Bear Orgy, only hairier.
4. The hard part about carving a niche ANYWHERE is you end up carving yourself into the consciousness of people. And then you wake up with knives in your back and gossip like crabs in your underwear. And then you get disheartened, and you don’t want that niche anymore after all. And then you whine about it on your blog, hoping that God googled your name and is reading your entries. And then you realize that he wouldn’t have any DSL because Satan would be spamming his email all the time with online newsletters from “Brokebackapostles.com”.

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Happy crap:

1. I have the Belle and Sebastian anthology: “Put the Book Back on the Shelf”. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, it’s a graphic novel based on the Scottish band’s songs by different creators. I’m happy beyond belief: I’ve got a thousand clowns with A.D.D. dancing on the head of a pin. It’s on my reading pile along with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Legion of Superheroes, and Girlfriend in a Coma. In spite of the table-for-one at the Misery café, I’m looking forward to the weekend.
2. My friends rock. They’ve all got their poetry and their pitchforks, hang-ups and Harleys, and god damn it they rock.
3. Summer’s right outside my window. There’s a giant tsunami of sunshine drowning the street right now, and it’s so fucking hard to stay suicidal when the world’s swimming in all this light.

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I’m listening to Blink 182’s ‘What Went Wrong’ right now and yeah, it’s very cathartic.

“I'm sick of always hearing
All the sad songs on the radio
All day it is there to remind
An over-sensitive guy that he's lost and alone, yeah
I hate our favorite restaurant, our favorite movie, our favorite show,
We would stay up all through the night
We would laugh and get high, and never answer the phone
I can't forgive, can't forget
Can't give in, what went wrong
Cause you said this was right
You fucked up my life”

(You can never blame anybody for fucking up your life. But wouldn’t it SO rock if you could?)

Hello.

Yes, it’s me. Surprised to get a letter from your arch-enemy in spite of blowing me up in my very own home? Bwa-ha-ha-ha. I survived the explosion, and despite your plans and schemes to thwart me, you’ve failed miserably. I would pay good money to see the look on your face right now, as the realization that I am indeed alive and the fear of my impending retaliation is crawling through your veins and burrowing its many-toothed jaws into your heart.

I have to congratulate you for your outré efforts to ruin me. You’ve distanced me from my comrades in the most complex way. You’ve even burdened me with work to slow me down and make myself vulnerable for your attack. Most disfiguring of all is that you’ve taken away the love of my life for the 3rd time and giving me barely moments to say goodbye, which I have to admit, was a deeply scarring experience. Although you’ve managed to brand me as a mad genius to discredit me among my peers, strip me of my resources, and send away the person that I truly care about, I have successfully retreated to my hidden lair to lick my wounds and plot your imminent demise.

And believe me, your death will be far from quick.

It pleasures me to imagine your bereavement, really. I envisage it to be a slow, excruciating process that will only be sweeter with each passing scream that escapes from your blood-crusted lips. Perhaps I will unleash all the various machinations of torture on your person, perhaps I may relish just one painful method. Needless to say, you shall suffer, and only through death will you be at peace.

So dear nemesis, I must thank you for this most challenging game of cat and mouse. Unfortunately, I am the one with the claws, and you’re just the scared, tiny rodent who fortune had been favoring but for merely a moment.

Within the eye of the storm, might I suggest that you take the downtime to organize your possessions, kiss your loved ones goodbye, and make peace with your maker because I shall be upon you before you even realize it.

And I shall eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Ta!

In spite of listening to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and overloading on Feist’s Mushaboom, I’m in a horrible mood. A psychotic, tits-up rampaging disposition that does nothing but make baby Jesus cry.

So now it’s Green Day (mildly angry) and Pantera (hide-your-babies-angry) looping on my iTunes now.

Argh. I hate this mood. I want to pick a fight with somebody, anybody. I keep sticking my foot out every time somebody passes by so it can either be tripped on, and then I’d just point and laugh; or somebody would step on it and I’d have a reason to get into a fight. And then I’ll just point and laugh. Come on people, fall into my ACME trap so I can blow you and your mom up with a box of TNT and some broken glass. So I can point at your charred little corpse and laugh.

My iPod’s still broken. For those of you who don’t know, my iPod Nano just got smashed in the most graphic, heart-wrenching way an MP3 player could die. The monitor just went black, with cobwebs of cracked ugliness smeared across the LCD. And it didn’t happen because an anvil fell on it, or because it was tied to the horn of a rabid bull. I just put it in my pocket, pulled it out half an hour later, and ta-daaa! Instant iPod Nano death.

I took it to the Apple Center, and they confirmed that, yeah, iPod Nanos get dead easily. What are these little digital pussies made of? With the way they easily break, you’d think somebody from Apple took all of the delicate little feelings of fat little ugly insecure gay people with the emotional intelligence of a twelve year-old girl scout, wrapped them in tin foil and stuck in a pair of earphones (which break just as easily too, lest we forget).

At least they’re replacing it. I should have it by, oh, when the Jetsons move in at the floating house next door.

I just want to go home. Then again, I just want to be alone right now. Living with somebody kinda robs you of this freedom. The only kind of solitude your life can offer now is spending humid nights sitting outside a Mini-stop drinking from a greasy bottle of mineral water while inhaling taxi fumes as snotty little call center people walk by with a trail of bad English and an absurd sense of self-importance behind them like shit from a pantsless homeless psycho.

I want to go to the gym, but Friday night is creepy-old-Caucasian-with-a-wet-underwear-fetish night at the gym, and as much I want to be ogled by orcs and trolls and the entire ensemble cast of Mordor: The Musical, I’m just not feeling up to it.

It’s too late to hit the mall and just look at the pretty crap on the shelves, or go to a comic book store and just basically build a ruined future on top of a heap of comics I shouldn’t have bought in the first place. And I can’t torment people with my laser pointer from my apartment window anymore because it’s broken.

Well, it’s not like I’m looking for a way out of this mood. I’m angry and annoyed, and I’m just really pissed, and just like making a movie about two gay cowboys, you don’t need a reason for that.

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“Believe the word.
I will unlock my door...
And pass the cemetery gates.”

--Pantera, Cemetery Gates

Right now I’m supposed to be working on speeches/messages/lullabyes for the annual report for T.W.M.B.B.E. (or The World’s Most Boring Bank Ever), make a 30-second spiel on sinuses, and write a script on the benefits of exfoliation. So why am I NOT surprised that I’ve barely lifted a finger or batted an eyelash or twitched a testicle to get any of these done?

Hehe. Twitched a testicle.

Man, I’ve been zombie-walking through these past few days. I’m sunburned, tired, groggy, and nursing a baby fever, which will soon grow up into a full-fledged, angry, surly, obese 35 year-old flu who has never been kissed by a girl because he spends way too much time at Star Trek conventions.

Tsk. All this angst after a weekend marooned on Isla Greenbelt (aka Boracay).

I guess I should talk about Boracay. In bullet points. Because my brain doesn’t have enough juice to work with transition elements, paragraphs, and proper sentence construction.

1. After more than two years of sobriety, I was utterly sloshed on two Jam Jars. Two. Freakin’. Jam Jars. God, what am I, twelve years old? Who gets sauced on two mugs of Jam Jars? And by drunk, I mean staggering-to-the-toilet-to-pee-but-ending-up-puking-every-step-of-the-way drunk. With the way I was vomiting, I might as well have “Hey Boracay! Date-rape me! Drive a Ford Pick-up up my ass and I won’t even know the difference!” written on my forehead.
2. It’s actually nice to be in a place where after walking barefoot on the sand for over an hour, you can just plop down wherever and sleep. It’s like being homeless and crazy, only with less clothes on.
3. I had a pimple on my lower lip, and if you really know me, you should know that I don’t do pimples. I’m not a pimple person. I deal with pimples in the same emotionally scarred way I deal with amputation and getting audited. And I had to deal with the pimple on my lower lip that ripened the minute I set foot on the island. The welcoming party might as well have hung a lei on the thing. And after assaulting it with pimple gel, cream, and even toothpaste, I found out that the most effective way to kill one is to drown it in seawater. Then all you have to deal with after is the fact that a dried-out pimple on your lower lip makes you look like you have herpes.
4. I love my quiet moments of Zen. The kind where your own thinking drowns out the sounds of pokpoks flirting with shriveled old Americans, that annoying Bonnie Bailey song that kept looping and blaring out of just about every orifice on every building on the island, or the loud shirtless alpha males in every group of college friends whose annoying frat-boy behavior conceals a penis insecurity issue. And I love how I just tune out and wade in thought, thinking about my job and trying to put every little facet of everything that comes with it into its own cubbyhole perspective, or my inherent sense of loneliness and alienation in spite of every effort I make to fit in; or the people I pretend to like out of obligation or routine, or how unafraid I really am of the future and only pretend to be scared because everybody else does it. You know, I wouldn’t mind doing the Zen thing forever, even if it means having the glazed look of a hippy who’s had too much acid at a Woodstock reunion.
5. I played fetch with two strange Labradors, whose loyalties lie with the human race. I’d throw the ball into the surf, and they’d only swim after it, only to barf it out before my feet. Rinse and repeat. For that moment, I kept wishing that a death ray from the sky would just kill me where I stood because, well, I wouldn’t want the rest of my miserable life to spoil that perfect moment where the story of my existence involved two dogs, and boy, and a ball.

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"Life is precocious in a most peculiar way
Sister psychosis don't got a lot to say
She go let it out, she go let it in, she go let it out
She go let it out, she go let it in, she go let it out"
--OASIS, GO Let it Out

Haha. It’s 2:40 AM and I’m still click-clacking away in an empty office, while everybody’s either asleep or knee-deep in somebody else’s underwear.

Look up “workaholic loser” in the dictionary, and you wouldn’t find me. Because I’m under “workaholic-wannabe lower-than-loser toenail-boy”. (God, how long till I realize that self-pity neither justifies nor liberates? It’s just a lazy man’s way of doing his best Woody Allen impersonation).

Waah-wahh Boo-hoo.

So anyway, there. Office. Empty. Work. Sad lonely worker drone who listens to too much Indigo Girls and Tom Waits.

I made a choice last Friday. It was a clear-cut, metaphor-free, now with less-analogies! kind of choice. The kind of choice that’s put on a silver spoon, crammed down your larynx, and if you still don’t grasp the obvious, shoved up your ass with a pinky finger. THAT kind of blatant choice.

It started with my evaluation from my boss. It was pleasant. No, I’m being too modest. It was a huge handjob from Jesus himself. It went great. It really did, it was the first time in, what, years that somebody from upper management gave me a pat on the back which didn’t involve a kitchen knife or a hand sliding from my back to my ass. It was Obi Wan telling me I was a goddam Jedi.

But, he told me there were some things I had to give up. But I’m not a twelve year old girl with pigtails; I know about these choices. They’re those giant red buttons on the dashboard of a fighter jet, it’s that blinking switch in the middle of the war room in the pentagon, it’s the pussy-fart before the “I do” at the wedding, it’s the tightly-closing eyes before the kiss.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I made the choice yet. As Marvin the Martian once said: “Where is the Earth-shattering ka-boom?”

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The weirdest thing: I really feel heartbroken, I don’t know why. More on that later, I used up all my introspective credits on all this JOB ZOMBIE crap.

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Oh by the way, for you J, who left a message which read like a beautifully downward, freefalling map:

Falling just makes us become better devils or broken angels.

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“Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick!
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.”
--AMERICAN PIE, Don Mclean

There goes the weekend. Well, there WENT the weekend. I rode it fast and I rode it hard, and I think I got my rocks off a little too soon. But those are my weekends: afternoon delights at the penitentiary conjugal trailers.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the weekend. Nothing that would turn water to wine or heal the world’s leper population. But I did some thinking:

And this is my brain-juice, bullet-pointed:
1. Living in Makati has been good for me. Wading knee-deep in suits and briefcases, slaloming through the towers of concrete and ennui has made me care about others. The lives of these Lego people have made me notice the ones that are actually alive: the lonely barista, the displaced foreigner walking his terrier, the homeless old man, the ex-junkie hanging out at the 7-11 hoping his soulmate walks in with the munchies and his only shot at redemption.
2. I want to help people. Not in a guilty Catholic way, not in a heaven-for-helping-others tradeoff way, not in a Jesus-complex way. But just in a… person way. In the way when people actually cared about other people’s happiness and sense of self-worth; or even other people’s survival, at the very least. Before self-importance was bigger than sliced bread. You know, pre-Oprah and Doctor Phil.
3. My job is criminal, it’s murder, it’s stressful, it’s an epileptic whale beached on my zen garden. But I swear, it’s not going to kill me. Not if I bludgeon it to death first.
4. I should paint more. I should continue modeling. I should begin writing poetry again. I should read less comics, and more books. I should switch to lactose-free skim milk. I should stop listening to emo music. I shouldn’t put up with drama queens. I should stop being so stupidly hotheaded. I should stop getting into so much trouble.
5. The Backstreet Boys aren’t so bad. Well at least “Quit Playing Games With My Heart” is bearable. And even sing-able.
6. I was watching MTV the other night, and they had Toad the Wet Sprocket’s ALL I WANT under the banner ‘Classic Rock’. Ouch. I used to write suicide letters listening to that song. I’m SO old, I own Jesus a dollar.
7. I’m SO not okay, and nothing, not even my façade of nonchalance, rudeness, arrogance, vanity, pop culture barbs or greek god good looks can mask it.

It was a pretty bad week. By pretty bad, I mean in-serious-need-of-a-Prozac-cocktail bad. My bad days are on a constant loop cycle; it’s like some ugly spy in black leather snuck into my Karmic center and switched the security tapes with a bad VCD copy of incessant shitty reruns: Gian buys ACME rocket skates, Gian chases roadrunner, Gian misfires into TNT shed, Gian gets blown up, Gian buys ACME rocket skates again, rinse and repeat.

But really, I don’t feel like launching into another boo-hoo-wahh-wahh soliloquy. I’m too lazy right now, and I can’t get Robbie William’s rendition of Beyond the Sea out of my head (I feel like I should be dancing around a Styrofoam moon in a velvet robe and a glass of rum).

Time to switch internal soundtracks…

There. ‘Perfect Situation’ by Weezer.

Anyway. It’s Friday night, 12 Midnight to be exact. And I’m working on a major pitch right now, because this is what all the cool kids are doing. They’re all shacked up in their offices, tapping away at their keyboards with a carton of Chinese takeout beside them while thinking of cooler names for a mobile phone which *gasp* can call ANOTHER mobile phone! Will these crazy, new-fangled wonders EVER cease?

God. I’m getting so tired of the work I’m doing already. They don’t just stop at sticking a straw in your left eye socket and sucking out your soul; they rip all the Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays right out from the calendar with a pitchfork. It’s like the world’s going to go all Planet of the Apes if we turn off all our iBooks and run out and skip rope or something. Come to think of it, does anybody really know how to play anymore? I mean, just stepping out of the barracks and into the sun and just…play? I figure we’d all stagger into the sunlight rubbing our eyes, not knowing what to do with all that open space and free time, like a Stanley Kubrick sequence. Wow. How far and how fast we’ve fallen; to be so fucking self-centered; to think that our responsibilities hold the world together. And if somebody hears me saying this, he’d go: “That’s what growing up is about”. And then I’d go: “had I known this was the life that was waiting for me after puberty, I would have eaten ALL of the Eskimo Pies from Coney Island and then shoot myself in the head.”

Sigh. Advertising. The cancer that pays good money.

It’s going to be a week since my twenty*cough*cough* birthday. I guess you could say it’s been uneventful in the sense that I didn’t have any Wild on E! orgies or waking up next to an overweight Mexican with too much tequila and not enough Tourette’s medication. It’s been one of those birthdays where the line you cross to being a year older is clearer and more distinct, like being the 1,000th customer to enter the drugstore and winning a bedpan and some gauze. I could actually feel the train pull over at the station, the wheels slowing down, stopping, and then rolling again, and then the station falling away. I think I actually grew a year older for something, for a reason.

Now I have to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I’m beginning to think my job is evil. Not because of the long hours or the insanely high expectations, because it’d be so seventeen-year-old-cheerleader-ish of me to complain about that now. I just feel that my job isn’t exactly making the world a better place. I don’t think God actually thought of bikini beer commercials and discounted telecom rates as heralds of a better world.

Seeing people who have a world of less than I do used to do nothing for me. (You know, that old lady holding out her plastic cup and a prescription for medicine to prove that yes, her cancer needs treatment and she doesn’t have any cash to even buy a Vicks.) Encountering people poorer me didn't really move me, but I wasn’t appalled either. Sure, I wouldn’t hesitate to help in any way, but that was the guilty-Catholic/nagging-jewish-mom in me. But now, it’s different. It’s like my pre-programmed conscience has become sentient and is taking over, consuming me. My sense of (self? Peace? Accomplishment?) has recently been heavily dictated by my conscience virus, my love bug. Now, I feel I have to really help. Now I have to stop what I’m doing, stop whining, stop spending, stop finding money, stop the hamster wheel and just be yseful for a change: help the poor, the tired, the wretched. And I’m not talking about my family.

I was sitting on the front porch with Ning, Larry, and Mai’s stick-figure friend. I was telling them about how I feel like I’m not doing enough and my need to fill that hole. Stick-figure guy said” “maybe you just want to be good.”

Be good? Is it that simple? Can a guy just flip on his Be Good switch and suddenly be flooded with pangs of guilt and the need to be cosmically useful? I guess if a guy can snap and make a bloody donut hole through his girlfriend’s medulla oblongata, I guess people can snap and decide to save the rainforests.

So what do I do about it? All I’m doing right now is getting bothered by it. Maybe my life won’t allow me to do good, or maybe my brain won’t make me feel like I’m not doing ENOUGH. Maybe I’ll actually do something useful and make the world a more bearable place, hungry person by hungry person. Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and suddenly my A.I. kicks in and the hamster wheels spins again, and I just serve my own selfish purposes down to the very littlest zero in my paycheck. Or maybe I’ll just keep sitting here, rubbing my eyes and in a daze from waking up to all of this. I don’t know. All I know is It’s a horrible awakening.

(Why yes Morpheus, I’ll take the blue pill. Can I have a keg vodka to go with this?)

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This week is going to suck on all cylinders, I swear. My spider-sense can smell it. I can see my deadlines holding torches and pitchforks from their little deadline village coming up the mountain and over my moat. I am so screwed.

Should my life really be like this? Am I doomed to a life of utter servitude and infinite hamster wheels? (I wonder if it’s legal to mention the words ‘hamster wheel’ more than once in a blog.)

The expectations from me in the agency just went from paperweight to parting-of-the-red-sea levels. I’m told that this is a very good thing, and my inner 45 year-old with salt-and-pepper chest hair and a set of golf clubs in the trunk of the Sedan agrees with them. But I know this isn’t me; it’s just a boring bank commercial in-between shows. I’m not going to hate myself for this, although I expected to. I know that even if I look at myself in the mirror and see the careful, contained, caged creature looking back at me, it’s just a temporary face for a temporary phase. I’m still stupid and crazy and arrogant and I laugh at the great unknown, and sooner or later I’m taking off the safety.

“Pssst. Hey, hey world. Fuck you. Enjoy this while it lasts.”

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I’ve rediscovered my love for painting. I set up a pretty decent studio in the apartment’s balcony. My goal? To fill the apartment with lonely robots.

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Eleanor rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong ?

--‘Eleanor Rigby’, The Beatles