I Wrote a Poem

Adrift and without a schedule to really stick to, I wandered through the streets of Brera, Milan. In the past few years I have made a tradition out of spending Easter in Italy. This year, I found myself rather aimless and, for the first time, really just ticking cities off a list.

I was looking for an astronomical museum, aiming to reconnect with a past life. After detours and distractions, I found myself in a university, reminiscent of the one I attended three hundred lifetimes ago. It turned out the astronomical museum is not open around Easter—my plans to pass the time were dead before they could get even started. But that’s travel; you have to be flexible.

Instead, I found myself seated inside a moving art installation engulfed in the sound of literature read softly. As the sculpture rotated in its own solemn rhythm, you could, almost, see everything in the midst of the busy bustle of students and staff, tourists and travelers. Time, in dreams, is frozen, or so they say. And I was left to wonder just when—or where—the boundaries between dreams and my waking life blurred.

Time in Dreams is Frozen

It was while seated here that my mind opened up and the words came. I have been trying to write a poem for the past few months with nothing really to show for it other than scraps of embarrassing drafts. I had a high-level idea of what I want the poem to be, how it would work, but ideas are not art until realized.

One cold December night, in the busy scramble of last year, I thought I had the words but I forgot them like a dream evaporating from the first rays of daylight.

But I did not feel the need to rush and write down the words as they came to me in Brera. The past few years, I have come to learn how to kill my babies, figuratively speaking. If you make one good piece for every ten attempts, the only way to be prolific is to keep attempting, get the bad out of your system so you can get to the decent much quicker.

These words are not precious if I could not still remember them by this evening, hopefully in my hotel, where they will be written down for the first time.

Fortunately, they came to be. There is at least one person in the world who found the formulation strong enough that he cannot forget them; they were worth remembering at least a bit more longer. And now he’s sharing those words, without further ado.


Shadows in Summer Skies

I drown
in a paradoxical sea of binaries,
of contradictions mutually defining each other,
of contrasts defining form.
Light and dark.
Plus and minus.
You and me.

(We are drowning
in a paradoxical sea of binaries,
whether you know it or not!)

The words have been drained
from this pen,
from my hands,
from the soul;
these are the last ones
and yet they fail my goal
to deify and sanctify
the very air you breathe
the very space you take
the very…you.

I drown
in waters uncharted.
I guess I am afraid,
that when all the words have been said
when all the praises have been sung
all the hallowed verses immortalized
I will find
inside
Merely you.
Beautiful. Still. As you are.
And yet, mortal.
Not an emanation of the Divine.
Not the ethereal resonance of the celestial choir.

From a whole divided,
Comes forth identities multiplied.
From the darkest night,
Breaks forth the dawn.
The Beauty Surrounds.
And yet all I have to remember your presence
is that sacred and terrible air of your absence.


Well, what else can I say? Over the years I have come to appreciate art for the abstraction with which it delivers messages. As such, I am not really inclined towards over-explaining my art. There is a message, yes, but much of it will be left as an exercise to the reader. No, there is no solution key either.

(How terribly author-is-dead postmodern of me. But I will leave my complicated thoughts on postmodernism for another time. Perhaps.)

This much I will say about this: I have been very deliberate about the form and the words. It doesn’t mean there will be no wrong interpretations; it just means my message, once decoded properly (for some definition of the word “properly”), will be very strongly supported by the poem. Who is it for, what is it for, etc.

I like the intrigue. My greatest achievement in this mortal plane will be to buy a decommissioned lighthouse that I will reside in. My greatest achievement from the planes beyond would be if people (hi Academia) analyze the bunch of writings and journals that I will leave behind, reading between every damn line, distinguishing the purposeful puns from the accidental, maybe subconscious, wordplay. I like to think that from my artifacts, it is possible to reverse-engineer the unwritten rules of my work, my life. You’ll chase a bunch of red herrings, finding patterns where none exist. It will be glorious. It will be crazy. Okay, mostly crazy. It will spawn at least a couple dozen professorial chairs, maybe in my Alma Mater if not elsewhere. You are welcome, intellectuals, I just gave a handful of you in the future purpose in life.

Okay. That’s a looooonnnngggg shot. But in our consumerist capitalist society, dreams remain free. I’ll leave that in.

Another thing about the poem, I mentioned above how I had only a high-level idea of how the poem would work. Well, the concept on which I wanted this poem to operate (and which, I think, it achieved) is contrast. Lately, I have had a lot of thoughts about art and I have come to the position that perhaps the baseline that distinguishes art from kitsch is contrast. Elaboration is left as an exercise to the reader but you can take my 0.02€ worth of advice. Contrast is the baseline of art.

Is this poem about me or my life in any way? The short answer is yes. The long answer is yeeeeeesssssss. The smart answer is that I find it disingenuous to respond any other way. One can write about, for example, war, without ever having personally experienced the horror, and it will be no less a mirror of the author’s life.

But maybe, for this poem, it’s more than a mirror. Maybe it’s a window.

Anyway, another strong influence for this poem is the critically-acclaimed intellectual game Disco Elysium. No, I still haven’t found my next Bioshock Infinite. As a matter of fact, my experience with Disco Elysium has been very confusing. This is not a detailed analysis of the game so, suffice it to say, the way the game was set-up dissonated very heavily with my idea of an RPG. Whereas, for contrast, I had some idea of how I would like to personify my Geralt of Rivia or my Dragonborn, I had zero idea how to roleplay renowned alcoholic and amnesiac Harry Du Bois. So I ended up choosing the most non sequitur choices for better and for worse. I needed the thinnest of threads to tie me to the character and, at least, that manifestation of chaos is something we could share.

All this changed in the final act of the game, its denouement. For the first time, I felt like I knew what Harry Du Bois would do in the situation. His character made some sense. I won’t spoil the game but I wrote this poem from the soft places between dreaming and waking that I, as a player, went through with Harry. It is definitely not written as from Harry Du Bois—I simply don’t think a renowned alcoholic and amnesiac-until-recently could be half as eloquent as me.

But maybe, what I had to confront in this whole exercise is the possibility that I might be more similar to renowned alcoholic and amnesiac Harry Du Bois than I’d care to admit.

Divide

Fun fact: I had a poem published in our school paper in my senior year in high school. It was exactly 100 words long, 102 with the title, purely out of coincidence. It was inspired by Star Wars, Norse mythology, and Tobey McGuire’s Spiderman 3.

Another fun fact, possibly related to the first: I was the layout artist of our school paper in my senior year.

Commerzbank Chapter Concluded

It’s been rather like watching a camel’s back as you add a strand of straw after another. Or, to use the German version of the expression, watching a bucket fill up with water one drop at a time. Until someone drops an iron block on the poor camel/indiscriminately turns the faucet on and the suspense peaks in one glorious heartbeat of chaos.

I have finally decided to relieve myself of the burden of being a Coschmerzbank customer. It actually happened quite some time ago but I’m only writing about it now that I’m at a comfortable level of confidence that my escape worked out well for me.

It turns out that Coscherzbank got my address completely wrong. Despite having presented them with my official registration documents (i.e., the Anmeldung, something everyone needs to do in Germany) they confused my street name. If, for example, I lived in Musterstraße they put me in Musterallee. Is it a mistake anyone could’ve made? Yes. Is it stupid? Heck. Yes. Very.

(As a software engineer, I can just imagine what must’ve happened when their customer support changed my address. He started typing in “Muster” at which point some form autocomplete must’ve kicked-in and suggested -allee and -straße. Guy absentmindedly clicks on the wrong option. But now I realize, this is what zip codes were made for. Both options do exist in Hamburg but in different zip codes. How the hell they didn’t clock that is beyond me.)

This is another mistake that I only figured out due to my own effort following-up with their frankly-useless customer support. I was one breath away from basically telling them how to do their jobs. It puzzles the mind how they can have such a relatively-decent customer support workflow, have agents that are, at least, confident in their jobs, and yet be just about as useful as a bookmark.

Anyway, despite having corrected that, for some mysterious ineffable reason, they still couldn’t get me the activation letter that would’ve finally re-granted me access to online banking. And I know for certain that they finally got my address correctly because I did receive some mail from this joke of a bank, just not the kind of mail that I so urgently needed from them. I know one should never attribute malice before ruling out incompetence, nor should one attribute human traits to faceless, soulless bureaucracy but it’s hard to feel neutral when I can get advertisements in my mailbox—apparently mailed no less than a week before I received it—and yet the activation letter is one of those things that “simply take time”. To add insult to injury, they are advertising their online banking to me when, you know, they can’t even apparently deliver that letter that will activate my online banking.

Hence, I began to consider enough is enough. Why should I stay with a bank who doesn’t give a flying damn about their customers? They feel so at ease taking their sweet time delivering me an important document but should the roles be reversed, they wouldn’t let me take the leisurely route, that much I can guarantee. Of course, this is not an action I could take hastily; having designated them as my “primary” bank, there are actually a lot of essential and automated payments going through my account.

Then fell the iron block. The faucet burst into the dangerously-full bucket. They decided to completely do away with the free tier of their banking services. Which meant, from my perspective, that they are basically asking me to pay them for their incompetence. The audacity. If I wanted to pay someone so they can treat me like dirt, Hamburg’s red-light district has, uh, ladies of that inclination.

(To be fair, this issue notwithstanding, I have a fundamental opposition to the concept of paying a bank for the mere privilege of having an account with them. But what their incompetence ensured is that I wouldn’t have second thoughts leaving them despite all the essential payments like rent, gym, and internet that I am making through them.)

I wouldn’t bore you with the details of which payment was what (nor do I have any inclination writing about how I spend my money). As of this writing, the only inconveniences I have suffered from my move was not having Netflix for about a week and a little surcharge from a transaction I made at the gym. I’m pretty confident that there wouldn’t be more.

Quitting accounts in Germany requires you to mail your formal request to quit, the whole stamps-envelopes-and-Deutsche-Post dance. This is when I realized that I have never actually sent postal mail in my life ever, until now. Yes, I am hardcore millenial, the only thing I purchase from my phone is public transport tickets, and I don’t take public transport. But out of sheer spite for this bank stuck in the last century, I learned how to distinguish between a mailbox and a trash can.

Unsurprisingly, they also took their sweet time processing my request. It got to a point where I just manually moved all my money to my N26 account because I’ll be damned if I get autocharged for my account come June 1. About a week before they started charging for accounts, still with no confirmation that they have processed my account closure request, they send me mail reminding me to accept their new terms and conditions where I reward their incompetence with a small monthly fee.

“Sehr geehrter Herr Estioco,” the letter started.

Don’t Herr Estioco me you bitch. I am done speaking German with you.

Auf Niewiedersehen Commerzbank

TwentyTwentyPHOurTOS

I got ungodly swamped, busy, concerned, and distracted this year, mostly towards the end. It’s all resolved gracefully now, thank goodness but all the same, it’s the bad kind of busy, one where I wasn’t enjoying myself at all. Actually, it even ate into the good busythings, which must’ve just drained me even more.

I don’t really have much time for words right now but even in the busiest times, good or bad, I always have time for photos. And you know what speaks a thousand words?

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First of all, I met John Romero, one of the creators of Doom, arguably what ushered in the whole PC gaming industry. I know this photo conveys a lot of things but it doesn’t convey my machinations and orchestrations to make my employer pay for my opportunity to meet John Romero. I am such a savvy guy.

And oh, I already admitted to my not-really-malfeasance. And since it is not a malfeasance, they can’t really do anything about it.

He even signed my copy of Masters of Doom, a book I brought with me all the way from the Philippines!

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I didn’t get to travel as much, unfortunately, for reasons related to the annoying busythings I mentioned above. I don’t feel as hard done by the fact; after all, living in Hamburg has been a continuous five-going-six years of “vacation” abroad for me. And I get paid for it!

And I can visit the Schengen area basically. This year I went to Florence, cradle of the Renaissance.

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The Passage of Time

I visited Prague in pursuit of the master himself, Alphonse Mucha. I like Prague. It’s my first Schengen-but-not-Eurozone country and it has its distinct charm. Plus, when I was there, it was not really crowded. I can’t believe it myself either.

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And back here in Hamburg, Homeburg of five-going-six-years, I finally entered the hallowed premises of the Elbephilharmonie, the most expensive acoustics that money can buy and that German taxpayers paid for, and listened to the prestigious Vienna Philharmonic perform.

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Can you believe COVID19 has been half a decade ago? Goodness!

I might write up on the annoying busythings that got me this year, and maybe more about this eventful year in general, next year. But for now, Happy New Year World! I don’t like the number 25 for reasons but let’s show next year who’s boss, okay?

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Twenty Twenty Three

I’m writing this in a rush, in an attempt to beat the new year crossing into Germany in a couple of hours. Honestly, I kinda just took it for granted to even attempt to write something for this year. But, well, I got into the mood. After all, this will be the last alliterative year I’ll get for quite some time. I think the next one will be, what, Twenty Thirty? Hoo ha.

Medea at the foot of the Acropolis

Well, what to say? That’s another year in the books. If I hadn’t updated this blog for a while now, it’s all because I am happily hands-full with other things. I’m touching grass, internationally too. I’m, you know, doing that thing they call life.

Honestly, Twenty Three could’ve been better but I survived it, without new injuries to my person. I lost some luggage. I made some mistakes but also some friends. I managed to start the year in a liminal space of being between Germany and the Philippines. Now I’m ending it on a Sunday, which is really a neat and strange day to have such a transition to occur.

Titan Cat/El Gato Jumbo

Apparently, this is the year disposables and point-and-shoots are in-vogue again, which is a very head-scratching trend for me, given that one of the earlier story arcs in this blog is how much I struggled to escape that aesthetic. Kids, to recap: I saved up the money from my internship in order to be able to buy my first ever interchangeable lens camera, the admirable speed shooter, SLT-A35. And now you kids have the gall to say these grainy, never-properly-exposed shots are “more authentic”.

Kids. With all due respect. Get off my fuckin’ lawn!

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This year, Netflix also adapted All the Light We Cannot See, which is, to my knowledge, the last book to have made me cry. The adaptation, incidentally, has become the last piece of media to have made me cry. Funny how that works. Louis Hoffman is great as a co-lead but, honestly, I’m kinda disappointed the adaptation treated Volkheimer’s small personal story arc very superficially. I understand the creative decision but he’s really one of the memorable side characters that, I think, helped drive home the treatment of war in the story.

Note: I didn’t re-read the book nor my review for that small paragraph above. Also, remind me I gotta watch the film treatment of The Light Between Oceans. You can really tell this blog has been around for some time now when story arcs like this go full-circle.

Oh lastly, this year, I also saw FC Barcelona play live at Hamburg Volksparkstadion for Champions League action, no less. They lost to the “home” team, FC “Giantslayers” Shakhtar Donetsk.

That’s it! I ended up writing more than I intended to. I have some noise/music to meet the new year with. Ciao!

DSC08958 St Peter's Square DSC08664 Booze. Brits. Football. The Geographer DSC09393 Cato the Fluffy of Cathens DSC09902 DSC00094 DSC00386 DSC07527 PXL_20231001_123930406~2 Letratura

A Finish Forestalled

Corona Warn. It works.

After months of wondering whether or not Corona-Warn actually worked, I finally received proof positive confirmation that it does. The moment the strange new notification squeezed its way into the queue of never-to-be-opened Reddit suggested posts was a moment of strange emotions. First came the novelty—wow, this actually does something! And then came the concern. Of course, I would’ve rather went through this whole pandemic wondering whether or not Corona-Warn did something than ever have exposure to COVID.

Since I got my full vaccination, I’ve decided to start trying to carve normality back into my daily routine. I am still taking advantage of the work-from-home offer in our office but I started daring to do small things that were previously out of the question. That meant getting on a train to have coffee in Berlin. And popping up in various restaurants even without a reservation just so I can move them off my Trello list. And stepping inside a movie theater finally so that The Rise of Skywalker is not the last film I have ever watched inside a proper theater; and oh boy is Dune a big gun to break this duck.

Dune!

(Note: While I still think one of my gods, Christopher Nolan, is rather snobbish, if not outright mistaken, for insisting that his latest film Tenet is an experience that can only be realized inside a proper movie theater, I gotta give it to Denis Villeneuve. Dune is an experience for the big screen. Or, actually, it’s not so much the screen but the expensive acoustics of a movie theater. That film engulfs the audience and the sound—shout out to Hans Zimmer’s ever-impeccable work—is a huge part of its magic. In my pantheon of contemporary film makers, Christopher Nolan just had a companion.

But still, great films should have enough to stand on even if the sound is streamed through a ~30EUR Bluetooth speaker.)

I also decided to see buy tickets to Alanis Morissette’s concert in Hamburg. I’m not exactly a huge fan and I even came late to the party. I discovered her music just a few years ago alongside entrenching my fascination for dark and clear skies. My Spotify streamed Jagged Little Pill as I wrote TypeScript for Kalibrr. Nonetheless, I thought it would be such a strong “pandemic over” statement, being able to join a crowd in a live performance. Heck it was even booked in a football stadium not five minutes away from my apartment by bike. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, for the time being, I would have to keep striking out my usage of the verb see when talking about this concert. It was canceled, due to the very thing I thought it made a statement against. Apparently, it’s still too cumbersome to bring a whole production on the road given the situation. Score one for the pandemic there.

Zanshin Dojo Outdoor Lessons

Another thing I have taken to is that, finally, I’ve set foot inside Zanshin Dojo’s premises for the first time since March 2020. In between the first and the second waves, Zanshin Dojo started to offer outdoor classes. Attending these sessions was actually the primary reason I bought my bike. Of course, as soon as they could, indoor classes were also offered at a limited capacity. But despite the withdrawal of outdoor offerings due to the unsuitable conditions of autumn, I opted not to take any indoor classes; I thought the risk was just not worth it. This decision will be vindicated as Germany went into a second lockdown just a few weeks after the outdoor sessions stopped.

And then, it happened.

Coming to my senses after an initial dismissiveness—I received the notification almost a week from the purported exposure date; never mind that the long incubation period is among what made this pandemic a smashing global phenomenon—I noticed that the exposure date fell on a Thursday. I could’ve only contracted it in my first ever indoor class since the pandemic began, not in the restaurant I visited that week, as I initially thought.

This suspicion would later be confirmed as I received a call from Zanshin Dojo itself, informing me that someone among the participants of the class I took on 14 Oct tested positive for COVID. The Global Pandemic 2, Chad 0.

(By the way, no worries at all. My quick test after the fact returned negative results. Unsurprising as I am fully vaccinated anyway. I even went in for my second indoor session that week.)

But still, I am rather put down by how the activities I am taking up precisely in a personal attempt to declare the pandemic over do nothing but keep reminding me that it is in fact not yet over. I don’t remember asking for a Damocles’ sword ever hanging above my plans.

I even thought my next blog post would be the first in a while to not bear the tag “coronatimes” and yet, here we are. Frustratingly, the pandemic finish seems forestalled until further notice.


I have already talked about the things I’ve been doing to keep myself occupied outside of work in this pandemic. A curious observation for me is how my focus shifted towards active pursuits, rather than passive. Creative rather than merely consumptive. I’ve planned to spend my days reading books and while I’ve had quite a success on that front during last year’s spring, my free time efforts have shifted drastically after I got my Wacom tablet.

I’ve been teasing a comparison of what a game changer Wacom is for me, as opposed to my previous workflow of drawing on paper and then scanning it (with my phone). After my injury, my spring has been spent recovering while my summer has been busy utilizing my rehabilitated left arm. But today, you are in luck. I have some season-appropriate drawing comparisons to make.

The manual workflow needs a lot of post-processing—time I could just spend making another piece and even then I haven’t really found a reliable post recipe. Not to mention, a very controlled lighting set-up that I simply didn’t have. Take for example, this portrait I drew of Death of The Endless from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, circa 2018.

Death from Sandman (colored pencils and sketch on Canson paper)

I want to say from the get-go that the actual sketch looks better. This is digitized from Google PhotoScan with a Google Pixel phone, the best of several attempts. Of course, I can’t really exhibit how the actual piece comes across to me but what I noticed here is how the colors are far less vibrant and how there’s a lot of detail lost in the shading and the line work.

I am actually really pleased with PhotoScan. It’s not its fault that it isn’t a scanner for artwork. It had to make algorithmic choices with the data presented to it. And this is where the choices lead to.

That said, how about straight from the camera app? Will it do any better?

Death from Sandman (colored pencils on Canson paper)

The midtones and shadows are immediately better at the expense of the highlights (i.e., Death’s pale skin). Better, and yet still leaves much to be desired.

Before we go any further, I think I should explain what I’m going for in this piece. I wanted it to be a rendition of that scene in The Kindly Ones where Morpheus talks to his sister for a final time. I have referred to this scene (and to this piece) as “It Always Rains on the Unloved”. There is also some intentional imagery behind the framing. Do you have any idea what that might be?

Back then, I didn’t really have a visual motif to go for. I just wanted to do a good drawing of Death.

Which leads us to today! I have decided to recreate this drawing using Wacom. The past year I have been really learning a lot about illustration and draftsmanship. You have seen me go for a visual style before, with varying levels of success. This time, let’s see. I wanted to go for a very early 90s comic book look, reminiscent of when Sandman first came out, as well as, to some extent, the jarring flat visual style of The Kindly Ones arc, where this scene heralds from.

death-portrait

I have to say, this went better than I expected. I am actually personally satisfied!

Back when I first mentioned my new digital painting hobby, I mused at the outcome of re-drawing Embrr, The World’s Most Dognified Dog, The Biggest Puppy I Know, etc. I noted how the illustration I made of him back when we still shared residence had a very soft boyish character to it whereas my newer attempt painted his features in a more compact bulk. I see a similar shift in this exercise with Death.

My 2018 attempt at Death had softer features; the digital version, in contrast, has an angular face and an almost diminutive framing, further emphasized by the additional space at the right side of the piece. In fact, the digital version reminds me of someone I have drawn previously though, unfortunately, it’s been a while since I last saw this reference in person.

death-comic

I really intended this to be a straight-up portrait, but the visual style I achieved just compelled me to make this comic-captioned version, like it’s straight from the stories. Though the portrait’s inspiration came from The Kindly Ones, this text is adapted from the haunting closing pages of the World’s End arc. How postmodern isn’t it?

The digital paintings I have posted in this blog is just the tip of the iceberg that is my oeuvre. What’s more is that, save for the pets, the portraits I’ve posted here have been exercises in implementing a specific visual style; they don’t really reflect the techniques that I’ve come to develop and rely on, in my free time learning digital art. So, I decided to do another piece that is in my own style.

Death: The Sound of Her Wings

Coming to comic book stores near you!

A few closing notes

  • While I am satisfied with my draftsmanship, I gotta admit I wanted this last one to look a bit more like the previous one. I mean, it is still recognizably Death of The Endless and The Endless take on different forms depending on the viewer but it seems the viewer has changed slightly in between portraits. My point is, I’m not yet good enough for consistent character designs.
  • In making these pieces, I actually broke a rule I’ve been practicing and that’s to never use the extremes of #FFFFFF (white) and #000000 (black). That is, once you go black you never go back you paint yourself into a corner, committing that this will be the darkest shadow (or lightest highlight, in case of white) of your picture. No one is ever ready to make that commitment, unless your are drawing Death of The Endless, I guess.
  • Maybe using the extremes of black and white is inevitable when you’re going for a 90s comics aesthetic but I couldn’t justify an extreme shadow in my personal style. Hence, I used a brush with opacity features in order to bring some variation and character into the darkest areas of the image, though it was loaded with #000000 black.
  • All that said, I am really pleased with how my color choices came together for the last one! It seems it really helps to know a thing or two about color theory.

P.S. This is a Part I. If I ever get around to it, and the subject matter coalesces into something coherent, we will have a Part II. Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed.