It pains me to say this now, but I may have been a little hasty in growing up. After squirming through the preliminary hazing ritual of life called adolescence, not to mention devoting so much time and effort into breaking free from the concentration camp known as school, my admission at this point is quite unnerving. You realize before you’re even dead that you’ve got some unfinished business to take care of. That you may have dropped a few essential characteristics, relationships, maybe even who you were in the worst of cases, while you were struggling to cross that quarter-life finish line.
But realizing this at 23? Not bad. A few blocks from pre-awkward pre-teenhood isn’t too much of a stretch to trudge back through. It’s certainly less of a walk back to core identity — the inner child and central “you” you were before all of this growing-pain business started — than, say, coming from the avenue of mid-life or the twilight year boulevard.
I do believe that we were all our purest selves when we were kids, no matter how many times some of us may have reprised Macaulay Culkin’s chilling role in The Good Son by trying to be the best li’l murderous sociopaths we could be — or lied lots through our milk teeth, at least. Before we had to bend over backwards to fit into society or claim an acceptable seat in the school lunchroom; before we were strapped onto life’s interminable treadmill of work and success with the carrot deemed to be happiness dangling above us; before we knew about carnal pleasure and all its trappings, there were those “core-nal” pleasures we indulged in as kids.
Drink Your Retrograde…
There wasn’t this single, spectacular moment that suddenly hurled my version 2.8 self back to 1995. Rather, certain memories nagging at me recently from a time not too long ago; my 11-year-old self poking me from behind and asking what the hell’s been up since I abandoned him on the curb by our old house 13 years ago. The rain that’s been pouring down frequently (either a product of global warming, the outset of La Niña, or, well, does this usually happen in February?) has also prodded me to embark on mental time travel back to the year that grunge angst began to give way to techno-millennial fear, just ‘cause most of my memories of said year involved rain: me in the backseat of a car staring as rain droplets wriggled like guppies down the window pane while half-listening to my dad getting worked up about moronic politicos (then again, this still happens quite often) or surveying the gray skies and dampened streets from the family library of the house I grew up in; a room I’d hole myself up in every time I’d get home from school.
Last Friday, during a midday rush from one meeting to the next, there I was weathering Existential Crisis #754, dodging the evil PUVs on EDSA and planning a spiritual journey to India in my head as the perturbed, gray sky seemingly reflected my own restlessness. While wondering if PLDT would finally fix my DSL connection if I told customer service I was on the verge of killing myself, the rain began to pour, and suddenly, in the annoyingly predictable manner these things usually happen, Lightning Crashes by Live seeped from the car radio, at once transporting me to our house of yore’s family library: a kid surveying the post-rain streets from plastic blinds with Live’s “Throwing Copper” album — a gift I’d gotten my brother for Christmas, but that I’d kept for myself, anyway — playing from a humongous Sony CD-Cassette component (’93 model) and the mustiness of rarely scrubbed carpet and old paperbacks redolent in the air.
Sensory recollection has a way of stopping you in your tracks, especially if it’s of a time when you were unburdened by things and could actually nurture your inclinations without anyone giving you crap for it. More so if it’s you who burdened yourself and gave yourself crap most of the time. While you’re swerving from one lane to the next trying to get to your destination as fast as possible, you might just find the ghost of childhood past playing with the car radio from the passenger seat and reminding you how things used to be and about the things you used to do. And how happy you were doing those things.
With life aspiration enumeration websites like 43things.com, best-selling books like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and people writing up bucket lists as an homage to whatever feel-good sentimentality/urgency they got out of watching Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in, er, The Bucket List, I’ve chosen to go the other way. In the movie, the two geriatric cinema gods become cancer-ridden hospital roomies, end up as buddies, and spend their all-too-short remaining time on earth checking off everything they’d like to do before they, as the saying goes, “kick the bucket” — like skydiving and burning the rubber off a couple of Shelby Mustangs; or visiting the Taj Mahal (see, that Indian spiritual journey pops up everywhere); or reconnecting with long-lost kin. Now, that’s all well and good in getting us to pop a few tears out — and a few laughs as well what with Nicholson unleashing his I’m-an-old-prick-but-you-love-me-anyway shtick — but the film feels like one huge tease to our morality ‘cause not everyone has, like, Jackie Boy’s character, billions of dollars to finance their pre-death desires.
…And Quench Your Thirst
Everyone does have a thing or two that once made them happy but that they’ve stashed away somewhere in time — an idea that is grazed upon by connoisseur of contemporary existence Douglas Coupland in his latest novel The Gum Thief, where the character of Roger, a divorced and miserable 40-something manager of office superstore Staples, observes that as one gets older, “You may not only have a To-Do list but you can start making a Things-I-Used-To-Do list, too.” Brilliant, I thought. Especially since the idea coincided with the recent visit of my 11-year-old self, impelling me to compile what I like to call a “F**k-it” list (all the stuff you screwed over for the convenience of assimilating conventional cool) or “Back-it” list for the sake of avoiding parental lynching.
Looking over my list, there weren’t very many things I used to do that I was particularly proud of. There was #5: “Wanting to be black” (I thought 2Pac was cool in the seventh grade, so sue me), #8: “Voraciously reading comic books” (I used to steal cash from my dad’s dresser to feed this habit; oh, the shame), and #12: “Memorizing the medical dictionary” (E.R. was way popular back then. I still remember what an ECG is) among trifling activities like “Burning things” (# 7), “Waking up really early” (#13), and “Getting lost” (# 19). Still, there was a reason for my circa ’95 quantum leap a few days ago. Among over 30 items in my list, “Painting” was one that I knew I could do well (anyone can do abstract painting well, I guess) and that I’d so brashly tossed into an incinerator due to, I don’t know, thinking it was plain ol’ uncool.
The sad thing was that it was one of the few things that made me damn happy in those afternoons I’d spend in that old family library. The coarse feel of canvas; the stinging smell of paint thinner; the oil paint under my fingernails that disclosed one’s having actually created something — even if it was an abstract depiction of people burning in hell (messed-up kid I was, indeed). It’s beyond me now how I could have ditched my paintbrushes for a remote control after discovering it was my duty as a budding teen to suck in as much cable TV as I could. Or that, even if the kids down the street couldn’t bother me when I was swishing brushes around and creating what I deemed a regular Rothko on canvas, such a hobby would play no part in making my teen mating call more voluble. Thing is, we spend our post-adolescent years chasing whatever we think we didn’t have when we were young — be it love, money or respect — without realizing that we had something special going for us then: something we took to as soon as we were pulled out of our mothers’ vaginas that represented everything we were about when we were our truest selves.
An easel stands by my window now, just across from where I’m typing this column. Since I snapped the thing up yesterday, that 11-year-old kid’s shut up and I’m raring to get my fingers all smudged despite a few other deadlines I need to quell. At this point, # 34 on my Things-I-Used-To-Do list — the last item on the list — comes to mind: “Not give a sh*t.” We used to do that a lot when we were kids — perhaps something I’d like to salvage as well while I’m at it.