Street Sense

The smell was that of a place where old garbage piled on top of older garbage, where rodent and hints of dead cockroach stench dominate. This characterized the daft air over one of the many underprevileged part of the should-be CBD of the Philippines...Makati City. If you let your mind go blank for a while, making it not process anything intellectual, for a change, you could actually triger your senses up on hyper-mode, like seeing and processing details you would not think of having noticed before (like a part on the asphalt of your neighborhood street that accumulates rain-puddle and dries up last after the rain, for example), some things only the idle would waste time on. This is how I noticed the smell, walking two blocks away from where I'm residing the other day. It just unwelcomly hit me. The stink could not have been made in a year's time. You would sense. You will know. No confirmation needed there. Then the idea of writing about stuff crossed my mind. I would write with vivid details through scholarly fashion but thought better because it would only be a fleeting idea I could write about. An instant. Not much point to it other than having my observation writ on webspace. Purpose served. Time wasted. My time writing this pointless thing down, and your time reading this.

I recalled of reading some prose that had surprisingly similar characteristics. Where often missed out details are given form in vividly sewn and impressive vocabulary. Had run-on sentences been criminal offences, the author could have been sentenced to four life ones. Beautiful words. Impressive workmanship. Pointlessly worthless. Only middle parts, no beginnigns and ends. For some, the so-called literature might have validated a point. Good for them. But my time was wasted.

So I search for a redeeming factor. Something I'm optimally good at. And it seems to be not so bad at all. And I go tell my self that, at least twice. And I close the issue believing I gained something. Then I believe. And I leave it at that.

(Originally published at aramaic.blogs.friendster.com on June 12, 2005)

posted by Fritz @ 8:44 PM