Twilight

Much has happened but I was simply out of synch that I did not find to jot this down in my blog. My morality was tested when two kids barely on their teens, who had been doing chores for my tatay, were caught stealing money from my tatay. My kumpare and I trapped them and they confessed – my friends were pleading with me to jail these kids – to teach them a lesson, what more the father of one of the kids was blazing with arrogance when he stormed the barangay hall – where the kids where brought – and demanded where did his son got his black eye. In the scuffle someone punched his son. But I thought they were kids, and kids are known to test the limits without minding the consequences. So I decided that they just render community service – by cleaning the barangay hall for free for a week. If that would make me a Jose Laurel (remember the Nalundasan case where Justice Laurel pitied the young Marcos and let him go, only to wrought havoc in our country for a quarter of century years later), I left that to the wheels of history. But I gave them a chance, and did not bother to ask that the money stolen be returned to my father, since the kids’ families are mired in poverty. I was not able to follow up if they fulfill the community service since I began to be pre-occupied with my wife who became sick and later diagnosed to be pregnant. And she began bleeding last week, and the OB advised her to take a bed rest to avoid miscarriage. I spent Christmas with her in our house, she still bed rest. My honest and solemn wish is to make them both healthy, and I will even barter my own for them. While at this, what’s more commercial than holidays – where the capitalist system roars mightily? Brands and consumerism at their best. It stinks, and my kid is being eaten by this system – I know, but I am not resigned.

Ah, being a father to a new tot really excites me. The not-a-believer-in-planning and love to dare the world of spontaneity is now worried for the kid’s future – with all the lies and perversions he/she will inherit in this society so lulled into injustice, it became immune and apathetic.

As the old year bids goodbye, a reexamination of the past year is beckoning. 2005 is a good year, materially. There were little money issues, we were able to live above water. Salaries were raised. Spiritually, that’s another story. Work – and maj hong – really interfere with my education, I feel so empty – is this a case of mid-life crisis. Aside from family, I can’t find any meaning to my existence. I wish I get out of this viscous cycle by 2006, but now I even question what path should I need to take. As I age, I become more confused, more fearful, more unsure. The fire that I keep on stoking that brings the rebelliousness of youth; my desire for being at the other side of the establishment has been slowly fading. Dylan Thomas, I might fail you. Instead of raging against the dying of the light, I watch the flame slowly dissipate in the sea of darkness. But as in the Boy Who Cried Wolf, I myself is getting immune to my rumblings, to my whining, as I can’t really devise my own exit plan. As I have written a couple of weeks back, I am the someone looking for the lost key in the dead of the night in a lamppost rather than to the actual place that I may had accidentally dropped it, since the lamppost offers light, while the place where I dropped it is a sea of blackness. Better to be blinded by the light than struggle to find el dorado?