Salve for a crappy day

I still believe I hear
hidden beneath the palm trees
your voice tender and deep
like the song of a dove
oh enchanting night
divine rapture
delightful thought
mad intoxication, sweet dream
in the clear starlight
I still believe I see
in between the long sails
of the warm night breeze
oh night...




And here's six takes on a classic:

Recess

Ten hours of uninterrupted sleep, in my book, at least, qualifies as God being in a good mood. I simply shut up my mind and wallowed in dreamless limbo, pacified by large, restless waves and the angry hiss of a stormy night.

This was a rare occurrence for me, this state of delicious vacancy, made possible by a friend who, towards the tail end of a working day, brightly announced in the middle of a conversation: "Go to the beach house this weekend with me!"

For the first time in many many months that have come and gone, I felt restlessness dissolving. The afternoon melted into evening, evening drifted into midnight and I was without any passing disturbance of work-related thoughts. It's as if my mind agreed with my goal to crack my head open and aerate my brains, allowing endless priorities to simmer and trail off like the salty air.

I was calm, and for a short while, lucid.

A moment of exhilaration and creeping sadness.

However, exhilaration was the clear victor.

I started to read again. And immediately lost myself in a parallel, comical universe of a thin volume of essays:

Shakespeare Wrote For Money.

And everything seemed just right in the world again.

+++++

"Are you comfortable?" the friend who owns the beach house interrupted my reading with a tone that's quite concerned for my welfare. "Please feel free to find a spot, anywhere in the house where you'd be more relaxed."

"I've found this to be the perfect spot." I smiled back.

Both reassured, an elongated silence bisected us.

"You know what?" I suddenly blurted out. "I've always believed that us humans, being creature of habits, whether we are in a new town, a new city, a new house, a new place, will always have that first goal of finding the spot where we will be at ease, at home. I'm not sure if that's what birds are hot-wired with, an innate homing instinct. And when we have tagged the spot as home, where we are perfectly settled and happy, every other spot immediately becomes a point of curiosity, a place of exploration. But first we have to find that spot to signpost as home, a vacuum to occupy, a point of reference. Only upon finding it can we compel ourselves to wander, get lost and then once more crave for that sense of familiarity. Am I making sense?"

I stopped to catch my breath, slightly embarrassed by the amateurish streak of pseudo-philosophy  that's palpably growing into full-blown silliness.

The host smiled, returned to own book at hand and drifted off, lost in a pulp of horror and suspense.

"Yes," came the slightly-lagged reply, but the suddenness of the delivery made me jump a little, startled."

"Just a passing thought," I murmured. "Go back to reading."

On the way home it dawned on me.

I wasn't embarrassed by thinking out loud.

In fact it was one of those happy episodes of unfiltered streams of thoughts where an editorial streak wasn't vigilantly present.

And I was sober. And I have no excuse for such fumbling, sloppy platitude.

Unlike before, when I was babbling, drunk, incoherent and quite free-wheeling above the din of truants in the crowded Ho Chi Minh street many moons ago. Unlike when I was in similar drunken state a few weeks ago in Hong Kong, where, downing San Miguel  Pale Pilsens with a friend I haven't talked to in a while, rationalized about life, clarity, the pursuit of purpose, identity and happiness, the burden and traps of expectations, the heroism of petty struggles and why Nick Cave could sum up the human condition in a song.

I miss those two episodes. And up to this day, was quite incapacitated to write about them properly.