Help

Cuss and smoke fill the air but I don’t care.  Another guerilla night out it was then.

 

I sit there, a chair away from the carpeted wooden duck with two bits of a stair and glaring heavy colored lights. There was Basti then, there was Jet and then Kevin and a lot more like them—Gods of music, fathers of Rock.  Great musicians came all together as one for a night of selfless performance for the typhoon-stricken people in the Visayas. 

At some point, we closed our eyes and bowed our heads. We offered some bits of silence. And then we raised our glass to cheer for the brave members of those families who passed over.

We made a toast for a man and all his likes, who lost his home, his wife, his kids, but who decided to stay when he had all the reasons not to. 

The Dawn performing "Iisang Bangka"

It was tonic ecstasy that got me high. But it was the genuine heart of the people in that night that pulled me up, touched my heart and revived what has been a long and standing affection for these men —  the men of black shirts and electric guitars, with a cigar and a beer in each hand, with hearts of gold and ecstatic hype to rally round the hapless with their  trembling growls  and guitar string-callused hands.  

Jet Pangan

Basti & Kevin 

- HELP Concert; 19East bar
 

"You are an addict," take it from Liz

"In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place."

the culprit

"I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, my neediness  only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating  under fire of my weeping pleas of, “where are you going? What happened to us?”

I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement.

Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore– despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free).

Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have ‘that thing’ even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes. 

So that’s it. You have now reached infatuation’s final destination– the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - Eat, Pray, Love

This I read last night. How amusing (and embarrassing) to finally find the right words to describe the situation you are in right  now. To see yourself, your story, articulately described, painfully drawn in words you never would have discovered for yourself. To find in paper, the puzzle you  have been trying to navigate your life with. 

That I am an addict is undeniable, that the only help i need should come from myself  is a universal truth no one else but myself MUST adhere to.