Surreptitious Student of Life

Surreptitious Student of Life

          "A true poet does not bother to be poetical,
            Nor does a nursery gardener perfume his roses."
                                                      Jean Cocteau

You are a surreptitious 
C student of life
first thing hummer of Nietzsche
emotional alien
suicidal bug
Yellow Peril: neo-American
way over your head
in love and fiction
self-overrated
Mama's boy
sentimentalist
inveterately romantic
stranger in strange land
forever
lonely
yet always
trust the thrust of your heart's desires
and hanker
after
Peace

Adapted from Chang-Rae Lee, a Korean-American

Roberto Wissai/NKBa'
January 30, 2012

Ironies

The Saturday morning and afternoon were spent to make friends happy. In other words, I sacrificed my own time which could have been used to make money or rest my weary body. But then unexpectedly by 3 pm, some magical event took place. I was presented with a gift that was worth $1,000, but actually purchased for only $230. As I coolly gazed at the article placed at the table surrounded by my friends who oohed and aahed at the exquisite beauty of the article, my mind turned to all the ironies of my life and I was thankful for being blessed with luck. But then I wondered what luck really was. I used to have an obstreperous personality and that accounted for many unpleasant events in my life. Now I am wiser and more pleasant to deal with, except for certain assholes I cannot stand. And that has been bringing me more luck. What I am realizing that there are humans who persistently think they are nice folks, but they are just plainly delusional. I also think those individuals begin to have no effect on me, except a rather quaint wish that I would like to exterminate them if opportunities present themselves. If you think I am a miserable unhappy, unforgiving, revenge-obsessed son of a bitch, you are half-right. And I don't bother to explain why you are half-wrong. You would neither understand nor believe me, anyway. You would conveniently forget, as the Asshole does, that I have spent decades thinking of how to make sense of my life while knowing that in the big scheme of things, I am nothing and insignificant. Okay, I've done enough inveighing and railing against trivialities and nonsense. It's time for me to get serious with my remaining time on this planet.

Einstein once was reputed to remark that everybody is a genius of some kind, but if a fish judges its worth by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is hopelessly stupid. Think about this remark long enough and you may realize that happiness is not a state you get there by luck. It takes understanding and and knowledge of oneself and others. I'm not saying that I'm happy right now. I'm just finally realizing the world is mostly populated by liars and filthy animals which call themselves humans and I have to treat them as such.

The weather been absolutely gorgeous in the last few days. There is not a single fluff of clouds in the blue sky; temperature is hovering around low 60's with low humidity; the winds are brisk, blowing all the auto exhaust pollutants out of the valley; and I've been gloriously horny and randy and intoxicated with life. I haven't let the thoughts of any bitches and assholes disturb my psyche. Of course, if I could blow the heads off some or all of them, I would feel much better. But I know I can't have everything at once. One must enjoy life in small dosage, in whatever amount it is available. Greed is the creed of the stupid. And I am not stupid. Close, but not quite.

I've cautioned my readers more than once that they should not read my words too quickly lest they would think they really understand me. But they, especially the Asshole, wouldn't heed my advice. Armed with a meager and feeble and cursory and kindergarden level knowledge of the English language, they plunge headlong into the morass and maze of words weaved by me, and they get stuck and lost in the labyrinth of graphic symbols. And they bellow, hollow, scream, shout expressions of confusion and bewilderment while pontificating and mouthing off they understand me and my psyche.

This morning I leafed through a fancy magazine full of ads for luxury items and my mind was filled with thoughts of the nature of fashion, advertising, and simian-like traits of slavish imitation and the power of priming effect upon humans. That reminded me of the limitations of the mind of my High Priestess. Despite having a formidable intelligence and acute sensitivity, she only is at the threshold of enlightenment because of her lack of education and proper spiritual training. She has an unwarranted faith in her powers of understanding. Luckily for her, she always felt an unrelieved loneliness and that led her on a path to my door. Still, she does not quite understand me. The real world is much more complex than she has made it out to be. But that's all right. Compared to all the bitches I used to know, she is far more moralistic and spiritual. She helped me put things in perspective and deal better with my impending mortality. Every morning I sit down and tell myself that I need to be kind, understanding, and forgiving, and that I would not let memories of the bad deeds of assholes, bitches, and scumbags bother me to a point that I would pack up a gun and hunt them down because they are not worth the time and trouble for me to do so. My High Priestess keeps telling me that I am a blessed lucky son of a bitch and that I must always remember so and be happy with that, and I just must let the unpleasant memories go and be wiser next time. Life is not fun if there are no challenges, she said. She believes that all those assholes, monkeys, bitches, and scumbags are really my benefactors because they remind me that I'm made of finer stuff. She pointedly tells me that if I keep being angry at them, I am not that different from them.



(to be continued)

Ta quyet nang niu doi nghe si,

Ta quyet nang niu doi nghe si,
Sao em con ap u mong giau sang.
Ngan nam cai kiep da doan ay,
Chi song ban khoan voi mong vang.

Vo danh
 
Rough translation

I'm determined to pursue a life of artistic niches
While you're hankering after dreams of riches
And bogged down in the mire of your schemes
In the pursuit of your golden dreams.

Translator: RW/NKBa'
January 24, 2012

Lunar New Year's Day

So another Lunar New Year is knocking on the door.
The first day of the year is here once more
Without you being by my side
I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
The mere fact I'm writing these words of mine
Indicates I can't get you out of my mind.

The New Year Festivals are celebrated outside
With firecrackers blasting themselves into petals crimson,
And dragon dance going on in a frenzy with the drumbeats
And clanging cymbals
While inside my eyes welling up in tears,
With love songs blaring from the radio,
Reminding me of a love that flowed into oblivion.
You once told me that forever you would love me.
Now it is I who would miss you for eternity,
Who would love you till I die,
Who would do nothing during the New Year but cry.

Anger and Annoyance

Despite all my readings and meditations about the ultimate futility of anger and annoyance, I take to anger and annoyance like ducks to water, bees to flowers, and moths to flame. They are part of my nature, my default mode of consciousness, my dark angels of destruction who help me see the dark side of people's moons. I'm not claiming that I'm anybody extra-special. I'm just a seeker of truth and peace. Of course, truth and peace are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other, if by truth you mean the ultimate truth, not the kind that skims and glides on superficialities. I hate superficialities with a passion. Those who don't understand me are invariably tied to superficialities. The below cannot understand the above, a part cannot comprehend the whole, undeveloped minds are forever mired in ignorance and darkness, and fancy that they are the only realities in life. I'm reading about the origins and evolution of language. My fascination with language is a matter of course for a person who writes poetry and knows several languages. Reading and thinking about language makes me feel good about myself as I think I know something about the subject, not like the stupid and ignorant Asshole who loves to pontificate on subject matters of which he knows nothing. He is nothing but a jaunty, linguistically impotent pontificator, yet he is wont to foamy-mouthed, quivering pontification, and agog with sardonic, stupid triumph. For instance, the poorly educated bastard couldn't distinguish a "can" from a "cane", yet he pathetically said that he used a "can" to whack a barking dog when he was delivering mail as a postman. I was wondering what kind a postman would carry a "can" in his bag and used it as a defense against a territorial-minded dog unless it was a can of dog food that the postman was accustomed to consuming on his delivery round when hunger struck him.

Anyway, I used to pine and sigh longingly for a certain woman who in her youth attended Lycee Marie Curie, the woman with the downy outline of her pommettes in the sun, the amber-tinted darkness of quick eyes, lips shaped into a friendly smile. Nowadays, if my thoughts ever turn to her in passing, I shudder with horror at the stupidity of my youth, and the idealism of my innocence. And if my being registers any feelings of anger and annoyance, they are directed at myself and not at her because I understand she did what she had to do: she only responded to the dictates of her nature-- and to her perceptions of my nature-- and not necessarily to my true nature. As I often repeat, it's not easy to understand me. Many fools have tried and in the end they only see themselves in me. I'm like a shining mirror where men read strange matters, like the case of the Asshole who has opined that I am full of insecurity and fond of chiming in! He was counting on a possibility that his words were like the weighted tips of a flagrum across my soul. He was hoping his iniquitous, nefarious, meretricious, tawdry words would have an effect on me. And the bastard was right. I collogued with my inner self and it told me to wait and to act towards the harlequin in the mean time with a studied, persnickety shibumi while maintaining a winsome disposition.

The tragedy of my youthful misplaced affection has overshadowed and colored all the subsequent love affairs, even to this very day. I am a prisoner of my distant past. The painful memories have haunted me and shaped me into the person I am today. I've often coiled and curled and clung to my own intimate and bittersweet recollection of a love that could have been. And I often reach a painful understanding during which I understand why a piece of a broken glass sparkled so on the pavement, why the sunlight reflected on the ice cubes of a tall glass of ice tea on a picnic table at the road stop in mid afternoon, and why I loved so much the shimmering sea.

Sometime ago, a kind elderly man pulled me aside and whispered to me that as a writer, I must regard all living experiences of my own and others as gist for my creativity; thus, I shouldn't be so angry and annoyed by ignorance, taunts, and slights especially if they come from filthy dogs like the Asshole. He further advised that I must learn to manage my tapasya (Sanskirt for heat/essential energy. The gentleman was an Indian and well versed in yogic tradition) in such a way that I could achieve my evolution as a spiritual being. I asked him how he would know that I have potential to develop into a bona fide spiritual being. He replied that his master had taught him how to read people. He said, "I was observing how you were baited, drawn in, sucked into a vortex called "debate" initiated by the mangled, maimed mongrel of a creature who called himself fittingly Asshole. I listened to your arguments and the nonsense uttered by the Asshole. I watched your facial features and his simian and canine traits. While your face radiated with human beauty and intelligence, his muzzle showed the cunning of a dog. In addition, he had lousy teeth and he was short, pudgy, and ugly. He was obviously not as well-versed in reading, languages, and logic as you were. So I wondered why the fuck you were wasting your tapasya on an animal like that. He has no chance to evolve. His destiny is already set. He's well on his way straight to samsara while you still have a chance to reach nỉrvana." I explained to him that I was suffering from HDADD (High Definition Attentcion Deficit Disorder) and that I usually didn't pay attention to words spoken by dark-skinned men from India, but when I did, my attention was crystal clear and in his case, his words did hold my attention. He laughed uproariously and then stepped forward and embraced me---the pungent curry smell still clings to me to this day---and said the following parting words before jauntingly sashaying away: "Intensify your receptivity. Make yourself highly magnetic to core truths."

Well, core truths are what I am intimating today. Only those who are strong enough can withstand them or are attracted to them. The rest, like the Asshole, are scared of them and would resort to lies and cheap pontifications in order to avoid the head-on collisions with them. As Daniel Kahneman was fond of reminding us, we easily think associatively, metaphorically, and causally, but statistical thinking is the kind that gives us trouble. Statistical thinking exposes the limitations of the human mind: "our overconfidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events." (Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp 13-14)


(to be continued)

The Love that could have been

The Love that could have been

Love comes from shared and mutual understanding and respect, not from condemnations and rebukes arising from actual or perceived hurts and slights. 

Some people may go through their entire lives and to their dusty deaths without ever experiencing true love, rarely not because they are unlucky of never meeting their soul mates, but very likely because they are inherently unlovable: lying, selfish, arrogant, peevish, and self-righteous. Who in their right minds would love assholes like that? So while they may dream of the shared magic of raindrops, snowflakes, crackling fires, lightening flashes, and rolling thunderstorms, they in fact spend their time alone with TV or with a book, and with an aching awareness that there is an unending, nagging loneliness weighing down on them. 
 

On dit que tu te maries

On dit que tu te maries,
tu sais que j'en vais mourir."

Somebody sent me through snail mail an announcement of your wedding. To disambiguate my distaste for you as a harridan and to let on an impression that I thought of your matrimony was just a bagatelle, and my once affection for you was a vernal error, I dug up an old photo of mine when my "beauty" was in its prime and emailed it to you. Then I went out for a walk. 

The air was bristling with winds and chilly, with a faint tang of burning logs and raucous twang of seagulls. The sea was glaucous and gray with waves busily breaking into foam. I stood at the beach, looking out to the sea, and I felt in the hollow of my solitariness the unending syllables of the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers. And the flutters and effluvia of that gray day filled me with an unredeemed melancholy. I still remember the day you said you loved me like it was yesterday. We were standing on the second floor of the college building, near the railing and looking at the leaves falling off the trees in the yard below us and fluttering in the winds. The dry season was in full swing. It was late afternoon. Our classes were long over. We were shooting the breeze. You asked me what would become of us. I sighed and replied that somehow I felt in my bones you would make me sad and suffer for a long, long time. You retorted that I was talking rot and that you were very much affected by our daily talks. I queried, "For sure?" To that you answered, "Je t'aime. Je t'aimerai toujours."

I am not going to share this part of me with you. I am just confining it to this cyberspace. The photo I emailed was a reminder of me, of us, when we were young and green and not yet tainted by greed and anger. I am not really angry at your decision. After all, we have been drifted apart for such a long time. Anything that is left of us is this lingering strange desire of mine to dissect and analyze a love that could not possibly last.

Another sordid story

Some stupid people complained to me that I was overly harsh and out of line in denouncing the Asshole. My reply to them was that the Asshole was very lucky that I still retained my sanity. But enough of that sordid story. Let me tell you another, not that I like to wallow in sordidness, but human depravity never ceases amazing me. The other sordid story involved igmorance, dishonesty, and cowardice. This one is about greed, lies, and tawdriness in the name of love.

An ugly, homely, unaccomplished, and of course lonely middled-aged man was fixed up with a fairly attractive woman young enough to be his daughter. He fell in love, married her, got two children with her, aged five and one. She took all of his money, kicked him out of the house, and turned his children against him. He is now half crazed with love for his children and on the verge of suicide. The moral of the story: love is cheap and marriage is a sham and a scam, if you are a nobody and ugly. You are much better alone and let your hand be your guide if you feel horny in a certain Friday night.

(to be continued)

Fame

Every year, as Christmas rolls around and then a new year knocks on the door, my thoughts turn to mortality and fame. We are all destined to have a brief life and then we just disappear forever. Very likely nobody will ever remember or know about us unless we were individuals of exceptional deeds and talents. Some rich individuals bought fame by donating money the establishment of colleges or hospitals. There was a special group of self-expressing artists who managed to achieve immortality through the exquisite beauty of their crafts. Among these were certain "confessional" poets whose tortured lives,, ended in self-extermination. I had in mind American poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman. I had an impression that these suffering poets turned to poetry for therapy, not for fame. Fame was only incidental in their lives. The Vietnamese poet Bui Giang could be labelled as a "confessional" poet. And his life could be seen as a long flirtation with self-destruction, but we must give him credit for not pulling the trigger. Somehow he must have found reasons to hang on to life. My life is also a long flirtation with self-destruction and I've been trying to fall back on words as therapy. In the process, I'm discovering the power of music. Let's hear what Anne Sexton said about "music":


Music Swims Back to Me
BY ANNE SEXTON

Wait Mister. Which way is home?   
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.   
There are no sign posts in this room,   
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me   
and I can feel the tune they played   
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.   
Music pours over the sense   
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better;
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November;   
even the stars were strapped in the sky   
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me   
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.   
and there are no signs to tell the way,   
just the radio beating to itself   
and the song that remembers   
more than I. Oh, la la la,   
this music swims back to me.   
The night I came I danced a circle   
and was not afraid.
Mister?


Name Le, a young Viet expatriate fiction writer assuredly gained fame with his debut collection of short stories in 2008, and possibly immortality with the story "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" which has been widely anthologized. How many of us can honestly say to ourselves that we have lived our lives with love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice?
Roberto Wissai/NKBa'
January 11, 2012

Words and Language

Random Musings about words and language

Hearts of fire are not the same as hearts on fire
Just like speech is not the same as language
One is the subset of the other
Speech is one vehicle for language
You can have speech but without understanding of what you are saying
A lot of parrots do that, including the human ones
Ever wonder why some can write poetry while most cannot 
There must be some process involved whereby a confluence 
Of factors takes place: words, sounds, rhythm, and suggestions
Bilingualism or more brings on the magic of language
Have you ever wondered
In which language does the speaker dream the most
And which language he writes poetry, if he does so at all
Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov,
Su Tong, Ha Jin, Carlos Castaneda all wrote magically in adopted tongues
What was going in their brains when they wrote
How did the words get together
Did their mother tongues get in the way
I can express my thoughts,
No matter how complex, in my secondary language,
But how come I keep making basic grammatical mistakes
What goes wrong
Back to my favorite adopted slogan:
You are what you write in an adopted tongue
You cannot fake it
No matter how hard you try
Somehow the reader can see through the stumbling, stilted prose 
And recognize you for who you are: a poseur

The Moody and the Mysterious

What can I say after escaping a terrible, horrifying death on the road, wasting my energy on an ignorant fool that goes by the nickname Asshole, and coming across a novel such as "Feast Day of Fools", all within one week? Not fucking much, let me tell you. Putting it this way: the events stunned and numbed me. They changed me drastically. They radicalized me further. I am now lusting for blood and hungering for peace at the same time. I am now more in touch with the moods that humans are heir to and the violence they are capable of. Insanity is the inability to say no to an obsession. And silence is invaluable to those who can wait. Have I told you that if I have to, I can have infinite patience? I bet you don't know that about me, right? What really made me hopping mad was the Asshole's hypocrisy and basic dishonesty. Anyway, I have to direct my thoughts away from the moral leper and towards more tranquil sources. As Bob Dylan once said,

"Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord,
But you're gonna have to serve somebody."

(to be continued)

Vile, loathsome character

So the Asshole revealed his character. That delighted me. The loathsome fellow has a peculiar, disingenuous dishonesty that verges on being pathological. He merrily constructs his own version of reality where facts don't really matter. He says whatever suits his conception of himself. Application of logic and reason is cast aside; appearance and denial take precedence over substance and fact. In short, the individual is evil and lives a life of a lie.

I don't think the Asshole has a vision of mortality when a human being makes a bet with his life with the full knowledge that his foot is on the edge of a big abyss. I don't think the Asshole realizes that he is evil. On the contrary, he fancies that he is more complex and above the common folks. And the fool tries to evince that he has some vestiges of humanity in him whereas in fact what he has is a conscience of a predator: a starving, mangled mongrel on the loose.

Anyway, I'm tired of thinking of this vile, disgusting, despicable, loathsome, repulsive dog. Evening has arrived. I'm hearing rumblings of thunder in the distance, and then rain starts falling down in buckets, hitting the roof and the window panes with a vengeance as if the sky has split up. I look up from my iPad. Streaks of lightning are arching the sky. That reminded me of the fateful evening a long time ago. I was back from a date. And it was raining cats and dogs when she drove into the driveway of my house. It was our fifth date in three weeks. My car was in the shop.

I asked her if she would like to come in. She said she'd better not. I said, really, please come in, it's raining and the roads are wet, you should sit out the rain. She said, I'd better get going. All right, then, I really had a good time and I really would like to see you again, I said. She didn't say anything to that overture. She just sat there looking at me, smiling that unforgettable smile of hers. I smiled back and then I opened the car door. When I got to the front door of my house, I looked back and waved at her. She backed her car out of the drive way. I got in the house, took off my shoes, and went upstairs to change and was getting into the bathtub when the doorbell rang. I knew it was she. I hurriedly put my bathrobe on and ran downstairs to the door.

I yanked the door wide open. And there she was, standing in the rain, her hair dripping wet, looking straight at me. I softly said, "please come in." I closed the door behind me and then touched her wet face with my fingers, and in seconds that lasted like eternity, I felt her body pressing tight against me, her wet hair against my face, her fingers fumbling to loosen my bathrobe, and all my concerns and worries about the vast age and wealth and education discrepancies between her and me dissolving and disappearing like rain water run-off into a swirling drainage pipe. I still remember her saying even to this day, "Oh, Roberto, Roberto, Roberto!" when my bathrobe fell to the floor.

Later, as she lay snuggling close to me, sound asleep in my bed, with her rhythmic inhaling and exhaling of air on my chest, I had sensations and feelings of peace and love, I thought I was lucky to have found her and for the first time in my life I became a believer in the mysterious, in the Higher Power, and in my own spiritual goodness.

A couple of years later, she disappeared from my life, but the awakened belief in the mysterious and in the Higher Power stayed. I no longer think I possess a spiritual goodness, however. My current High Priestess has been chastising me for that self-doubt. She has frequently said to me, "Roberto, you must believe that you're good, that you're blessed to be born as a handsome, intelligent, sensitive, artistic human being, that there's a Higher Power looking after you and shielding you from evil spirits. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I'm not babbling gibberish and spiritual nonsense. It's not so much what you actually believe in as the uplifting power of that belief that does to your soul, to your conduct and behavior towards other sentient beings, including people that you currently despise and hate. Over time, you will come to a realization that this life is brief and all too beautiful to have your precious energy expended in hating and despising benighted souls. Forgive them since you're made of better materials. Don't bite on the bait that people like the Asshole is hanging out for you."
(to be continued).

The Sound of Loneliness

She got hysterical when he explained to her that the primary reason for his attraction to the other woman was her need to alleviate the oppressive loneliness that weighed down on her. It was not so much her loneliness that cried for relief as the way she said about it. She sounded so achingly sincere and vulnerable that something inside him responded. Maybe he was stupidly sentimental, but that was the way he was. Anyway, love has something to do with language. When two persons are in love, they speak and share the same language and music and in the process the loneliness each experienced prior to their union dissolved and they knew the meaning of love.

Unrequited love invariably hurts. The one who was rejected should spend more time contemplating on the reasons why his/her affection was not reciprocated than blaming the one did the rejection. Rejection usually falls within one of the two circumstances: misunderstanding or lack of acceptance. The rejector is at blame for the first scenario whereas the rejected is at fault for the second case. Nobody in his right mind would reject something/someone of value. The best way to handle rejection is to work on oneself or to lower one's standards so next time one can have a better chance to be successful in conquering somebody's heart. Remember, as unenlightened human beings, we usually have a higher opinion of ourselves than we actually deserve.

Back to first personal pronoun, I have known a lot about rejections. I have been usually at the receiving end. I didn't blame others. From each rejection, I learned something very deep about myself. Honesty is the best policy. Having courage is also very helpful. In order to be able plumb the creative well, I have to dig deep into myself to come up with something fresh and striking, but not necessarily personal. Imagination and embellishment are thus necessary.

Loneliness is not the inability to be with kinsmen and family members. It is the absence of somebody who really understands and cares about us to a point of saying, hey, you matter a great deal to me and I would do everything within my power to ensure you are alive and well, in other words, I would take care of you regardless you want to be taken care or not. You are like a wayward son or daughter whom I cannot possibly turn my back on even though at times I wish I could do so. Love is the inability to stay away from the beloved. And when we are forced to be away from those we love, we feel unavoidably lonely. In the case we have nobody to love, we feel a void within. That's when we also feel lonely. I have been lonely all my life. I have intimately known loneliness. It's my constant companion.

Tell me lies,
Tell me sweet little lies.
Tell me everything to your heart's desire
While doing so, on your face keep your smile
Don't you know
I love you so?
I would love you till the day I die.
So go on,
Tell me lies,
Tell me sweet little lies
Tell me till I cry

In your way, Asshole, you're not a stupid guy, but vastly ignorant and crude although you managed to finish college. But you're a narcissist. Like most narcissists, you're probably a self-loathing motherfucking scumbag and not a very brave one either. It's likely and I dearly wish so, one of these days you would find your sphincter failing you; any courage you might have, draining through the soles of your feet; all your assumptions about your time on earth leaching from your heart; your last glimpse of the earth dissolving in a bloody mist.

The new year didn't bring any relief of the torturing thoughts. Instead, you found yourself annoyed and irritated beyond measure. The sons of bitches and the bitches had better pray hard for their luck. They say insomnia is an affliction. I say it is a gift if one knows how to avail oneself of its power. It helps him see things with more clarity when all is still in the wee hours of the night except the beating of one's heart. I once had a very big heart. It used to beat loudly and wildly. I used to feel sorry for humans, including myself. Not anymore. I suffered too much. I no longer give a damn who else is suffering. To suffer is a sign of stupidity and naïveté. I am sick and tired of listening to tales of woe and wailing stories of self-pity. This world is tough and rough. And every motherfucker thinks he/she is nice and decent. But the reality is that they have an inflated sense of self. They are blind cowards at heart. When was the last time they actually read a book from cover to cover and when they were through, their minds were in turmoil and their hearts beat wildly for they had changed. The book had changed them. Yet they all the gall to tell me that they read books! What a bunch of liars! I could tell they didn't read many books just from the way they expressed themselves in writing. Ironiically they know how to read iniquity in others because it breeds in them. No surprise that they have accused me of stealing, pickpocketing, avarice, and lies. In them mendacity and cruelty are not occasional and accidental vices, but ingrained, inveterate, deep-rooting, and pervasive defects. They are nothing but "sanitation" engineers and bug sprayers and pond scum suckers. They probably didn't master toilet training in their childhood and thus have lived most of their lives with skid marks on their underwears. They consider themselves educated, but they understand nothing of the books they read. They are simply grandiose idiots and smug simpletons. The likes of them nauseate me no end with their endless, stupid pontifications on subjects they know nothing about. They think that armed with a college degree, they can dispense opinions.

Loneliness is not the only subject I have spent time thinking about. I have also long reflected on the subject of cowardice with all of its dimensions. And of course, a person worth his salt in the area of thinking would press on and think of honor and homicide and punishment and death if he thinks about the subject of cowardice long enough.

Revenge or fighting back is an ingrained trait in all sentient beings. I don't think I took revenge into my hands, but rather I fought for my ow survival and peace of mind when I wrote th following words:

"Your references about lagniappe and your being there when I was "teetering" left me in a foul and uncommunicative mood. You didn't really understand me. For that I didn't blame you. It would take an extraordinary human being to understand and thus appreciate me. Ordinary folks tend to underestimate me. They were thunderstruck by the obvious and underwhelmed by the bizarre and the inconsistent when it should be the other way around. Call me arrogant or whatever, but I firmly believe I am rare and beautiful. With the right person, I can bring peace and joy and security. I don't think you are the right person because you are so keen to jump to conclusions, so quick to defend yourself, and too lazy to read between the lines or listen to the unspoken words. 

Peevishness and strong words from you turned me off royally. For both our sakes, we must terminate all communication. You will not hear anything further from me except silence. One day (maybe at least five years from now) when you no longer get angry or are self-righteous, you will understand these words and appreciate them for what they are.

Fare thee well, my friend."
(to be continued)

Who are you, Roberto?

I just got off a long conversation with a friend. He pointed out that my so-called stories left much to be desired while my poems and essays were pretty good. He also noted that apparently I only wrote about love and violence. In reply, I said that I concurred with his assessment and that I was not really a writer of fiction. I merely wrote about the issues that preoccupied me, aesthetic and or redeeming, uplifting messages be damned. I wrote about love and violence because I was fishing, angling, hunting, searching for an answer. I like violence. I know about its function and role in life. I think I know about love, but I am not really sure anymore, despite having been married five times and having been in and out of love more than two dozen times. Almost everybody chuckled when I told them my name was Roberto Wissai. I lectured them with a straight face that it was rude to laugh at somebody's name, and what was so fucking funny about the name and sound of the words Roberto Wissai? I like the name and the way it sounds. Next time, if some asshole makes a snotty remark about my name, I hope I would be in some position of power and able to make him pay for his insolence.

I used not to be overly touchy and hypersensitive. I used to be calm, cool, collected, and reasonable kind of guy. Something happened to me way back when I finished college. Now I am plagued with a propensity for violence and a preternatural desire for love. Today is the first day of the year. If I am a sociable guy, I would call my friends up and say "Happy New Year". But I am not. I would rather read a book and be true to myself and others.

(to be continued)