my concluding simile is somewhat bull, but it sounds cool

Is July Alex Freewrite Month? Wow, that sentence is grammatically correct and has five capitalized words in it. Very good. Yeah... I'm just gonna leave this freewrite untitled until I get to the end, because I'm not quite sure what I'm going to talk about, but I know it'll be about the Philippines, and "the Philippines" is an unexciting title.

Yes, this is an obligatory freewrite about the Philippines. The other one was kind of inadequate; it was more of a list than something truly coherent or anything that required effort. Well, where to begin? How about a scene from the middle of the trip... We were coming back from Olangapo, a town next to the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, where they apparently have less business restrictions or something so that well-needed investing companies can treat workers like shit in order to have better profits. Something like that. Well, Subic is a nice place, at least if you're a tourist, and it's really not crowded at all compared to anywhere in the metropolitan Manila area, which was right next door (although I wish it were somewhat less than SEVEN hours next door, through rush-hour traffic). So yeah, Subic was nice and free; it kind of reminded me of America. Or was it even Subic where I saw this happen? It might've been Tagaytay (pronounced "ta guy tie"), I don't know. Whatever. Subic for now.

Yeah, it was Subic.

We were coming back from our less-than-24-hour vacation there. (I'm not kidding; seven hours in rush-hour traffic to get there was still worth it, though, regardless of the short-ass stay.) Rolling roads over rolling hills, Filipino men with the rolly-shaped arms (to steal the adjective Jennifer Lopez used to describe men's forearms), rolling down the mountain, down down down, roll roll roll, plop plop plop. More like BUMP BUMP BUMP. That's how shitty the car ride was, er, more like bus ride, with like 17 of my relatives in a van with inadequate air-conditioning (and this hilariously weak fan in the back; I've gotta put up a picture of that). Serene scenery, relatively speaking, even though you couldn't avoid seeing cars pull stupid maneuvers everywhere you looked. Serene as could be, with a relatively high elevation over who-knows-what? in the middle of the steamy Philippine rainy season.

It was about one in the afternoon. Most people had something to do, or someone to talk to. In the Philippines, that's generally expected and necessary; being anti-social is relatively uncommon there, or at least I'd think it is, compared to what I see in the US. Some of the kids, though; well, the kids are still growing up. They just tend to wander around, I've noticed. So, they get bored, and when they get bored, they wander, and when they wander, where do they go?

Why, atop somebody's tomb is where you'll see them!

Yeah, some kids were just bored, so they would sit on top of somebody's resting place (and clearly marked this was) and just kind of chill out. First of all, a cemetery is not generally the kind of place I would chill out. Secondly, I don't think what's-his-name (and clearly marked this was) would appreciate you sitting on his box. Finally, you must be wondering why this tomb is out in the open. Over there, the cemeteries are huge and elaborate, or at least that's true from what I've seen. I fear that how good your tomb looks depends on how rich you are;... ah, yes, so not even dead people have respect for each other. What an afterlife! Anyway, yeah, they do have these things just kind of not buried. They're just in this big concrete box grave constructions. Wow, I feel like an engineer after using four consecutive nouns to describe something. (That job...) So they're out in the open, and I guess in the Philippines, in the daytime at least, cemeteries are a good place to be alone. (There's no such thing as a good place to be alone at night in the Philippines.) They've really got no space elsewhere.

Speaking of death, they have funeral homes advertising on their signs that they're open 24 hours. WHY?

I've hit a bump in my creative road as of late. It's really weird, but I'm not as good anymore; maybe I'm not putting enough into my practice. I can't help feeling that the journal I wrote while I was in the Philippines was nothing more than a journalist's report. I'd prefer not to put the "journal" in "journalism," or something more clever than what I just said.

But then I realize that some of my stuff actually does work; I guess since I'm outside of an intense school environment I don't notice it anymore. Like, "I've hit a bump in my creative road" works well with my "BUMP BUMP BUMP [agh bad driving]" thing earlier! Maybe. It's not easy to be certain. It's tempting to wish that I was back in time, somewhere where I was creatively better, like at the Prep maybe, or even my freshman fall semester at Tufts, but...

It would feel like I'm kind of chilling out with a dead spirit. Just like that girl sitting over that unburied grave. Maybe on some occasions you stop and gain a lot from the dead, and sometimes you've gotta avoid them and learn from their mistakes, but sometimes you're just chilling out with them. And you don't know whether you should go any further back or how much you should care about the past. So, Mr. Alex of old creativity; where are you, and is there anything you've got to say?

Write about what you know about that.

There are some people who tell you to only write about what you know. It was brilliant of T.I. to turn that around and make it into the biggest rap song of the year last year.

Say hey hey!

I wonder if one of the results of religious enlightenment or self-fulfillment is a pervading sensation that you're always with someone, even if you don't know who's with you. Maybe that's what it means to never be alone.

Hmm. I squeezed that one out of me, like a self-contracting orange. I haven't believed lately that I'm still capable of deep thought and musings, but it's all still there, perhaps. I've just got to force myself to put it out.

Hmm, I wonder what it's like to be a self-contracting orange. You know, oranges have seeds in them, and that's how them orange trees make babies. Well, imagine the orange evolving into a species separate from its tree, as if the tree were giving birth to a new species! Then, the orange wouldn't want to get hurt. It wouldn't want to have to be eaten solely for the purpose of reproduction, but it would still want to reproduce. That's when it would try to self-contract and roll around and stuff so that it wouldn't get hurt, but it would still reproduce.

"It wouldn't want to have to be eaten solely for the purpose of reproduction, but it would still want to reproduce." A good sentence to apply to humans, too. If we do really want to get eaten, then we want it to be for something good. We don't just want to sacrifice ourselves so that the human race keeps going. We want it to keep going for a purpose.

I just realize that "self-contract" does not make sense as a verb. "Contract" would've sufficed. Well, whatever; it's all about the self.

Or is it? The English language tells me it isn't.

ところで, I'm not high.

4:55 AM

This is the time at which I have arisen for the past three days, today included. Today I got ten hours of sleep; do the math. Yeah, it's really weird.

I guess I'm off my jet lag now, because yesterday I was begging for sleep like you would beg for clothes if you were naked and in an ice box. Well, actually, only your feet would be in the ice box because ice boxes are small, so maybe you wouldn't be begging for clothes, I don't know!

So what happened those three weeks in the boonies?

One: I got tired of reading. I think I'm going to be physically unable to read a book for the next month or so. I read Hornby's The Long Way Down, Vonnegut's Timequake, and Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but my mistake was trying to read Dostoevsky's 1045-pager The Brothers Karamazov. Don't try it. The dialogue is boring and way too long, which is a shame because when the narrator speaks it's pretty ingenious. I almost got halfway. Almost.

Two: Twenty-six people related to me were all there at one point. That's a lot of people, so it was basically a family reunion. I think I'm the only one who doesn't know how to play guitar among them. My great-aunt was there too, which was pretty cool. She's especially conversational for her age, a big contrast against any of my grandparents.

Three: I wrote a lot in my summer journal, but I don't remember writing anything particularly strong or particularly amusing. It was just an exercise. I think I've lost my mojo.

Four: Mark Bellhorn's average rose to about .260. In celebration, I changed my voicemail greeting.

Five: Iran and North Korea both sucked up to the US at the same time. I don't know why they suddenly decided to get obsequious like a kidnapped prostitute. I kinda only read the headlines.

LATER!