good writing need not be signified. and since apparently i don't do that - good writing, that is - let me denote as unambiguously as i could how you may read this post right from the very beginning.
do me a favor, hear the edge in my voice when i say this: i am pissed. now you see how sophomoric that was. and very dissembling, too. but having said that, let me also say, i'm sorry for not posting this past week. actually, i'm saying this more for myself than for anyone else's sake. happy with my candor, now?
anyway, back to the not posting thing. not slacking, but utter, pull-my-hair helplessness. that's why. or so, i say. crazed now with my run-ons? bear with me more. my computer just flat out crashed wednesday. major adware/spyware attack, so my computer guy said. and if i give him the benefit of the doubt further, i can only retrieve my detoxed cpu by middle of next week. hence, this incoherent, mad dash post from a friend's computer.
so what to do now? well, nothing really except bitch and kvetch. i don't live in new york - borough of the baddest bellyachers - for nothing. but here's the more ignominious part. i just found out that whining suits perfectly my constitution than most other stuff i do during my boring free time, say reading, perhaps.
and talking about free time, or the lack, thereof, i am reminded of a story a journalist friend filed for his paper back in manila years ago. he went to this penal colony in southern philippines - where was it now? in palawan? davao, perhaps? - and came back with quite a grisly account of how penal officers - to defuse the inmates' rising frustration level? or just pure sadistic fun? - invented this weekend gladiatorial, sort of, contest.
a raging adolescent bull was let loose in a pit. tied in its whetted horns was a piddling one hundred peso bill, approximately two dollars. the object of the game, obviously, was for willing inmates to snatch the prize money without being gored. no safety gears there, just plain pluck.
but the raging bull's not the story. it's the inmates. my friend's account showed how there was no dearth of inmates, most of them looking at a life with hardly the possibility of a parole, jumping on with glee at this opportunity to be gored by a rattled bull.
what this bull crap of a story has got to do with my snuffed out computer and my subsequent whining, i wish i know. all i definitely know now is that i couldn't come up with a killer end paragraph for this post that would claim unequivocally i prefer the freedom to post, to write regimentally daily over and above the sweet amorphous, unstructured life i had so far this week. because - i know this is apostasy for someone professing to love the craft of writing - like a true traveler, as alduos huxley wrote, i find boredom rather agreeable than painful. i accepted my boredom - unlike those thrill seeking inmates - when it came this week, "not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
