"paul newman is flying," a friend sent me a rather flippant text message the other day just as i was about to take my pre-work nap. i called him instead to confront his apparent inappropriate levity.
"you know alright that i need my sleep at this time?" i barked at him. and instead, i heard him at the other end, half screaming in his thick tongue unintelligible sentences after another. "if only you have a decent phone, i could have sent you a photo of the guy." this much i could initially understand.
it turned out, paul "cool hand luke" newman took on a dare by david "late show" letterman and hopped into what the comedian's show called its party balloons aircraft. my friend happened to be on his way to a bus depot midtown when he chanced upon the spectacle by the back entrance of the ed sullivan theatre where dave's show was being recorded that time.
"it's magical," he was still screaming and unwilling to tame down his enthrallment. mundane me and totally missing the point, i asked him instead "what was paul doing at dave's?" "i don't know," he sounded exasperated, "maybe some new movie he needed to promote." then his voice was drowned by what sounded to me like an orchestrated squall from the rubberneckers. "oh, he's being hauled back down," my friend said, this time sounding a bit defeated.
sometimes, i think that the trick in life, i mean, the happy living of it, simply involves waking up to all the ironies in one's existence and righting everything about its incongruities. now here's someone, and i mean my friend, who, for the past four years that i've known him here in new york, has yet to step foot inside a bookstore, much more shell out even a measly buck for a title of fiction. and here i am, my rathole of an apartment littered literally with novels, most of it, i must admit, has yet to be thumbed through. but that's beside the point.
the point being, here is a person whom my so-called literary friends back in manila would easily scorn for his hickness in anything literature but being more attuned to the wonders of our shared existence. and here i am, full of my putative love for literature and yet all dead practically, too dense towards its beauty. "one does not see anything until one sees its beauty." ah, if only everybody were as acute to beauty as you were oscar wilde.
last week when the weather was not as crappy as these past couple of days, i went for a jog, well, a leisurely walk, really at the botanical gardens. having just walked about the equivalent of two city blocks inside the garden, i decided it would be better for me, that is for my aesthetic growth (here i go again with this tired word) to just sit down on a bench and wallow in all these beauty.
to heighten this experience i decided to turn off my blaring hip hop mix on my ipod and switched to a more literary album, a collection of slam poetry. i really thought then knowing the intricacies of internal rhymes, of kick ass enjambment in this park, in this oasis of extraordinary beauty would make me a person more facultied to confront whatever is beautiful, or meaningful in my life. only that, i realize now, i must have certainly missed out on the more meaningful song of a horned lark preening atop a branch of a blossoming dogwood or the more magical sight of a magpie darting in the pollen heavy air like a yellow short circuit spark, gathering whatever it could to cozy up its, without a doubt, very literary nest.