Blogging, Basically--Or Excerpts of Essays on Exile

While on the road to Nativity Church to pay homage to the spirit of life, the homage at noontime prior to my reporting to a work you will never envy, I thought of this blog and what it should say about blogging, bloggers, and blogging from exile.

Yesterday, an esteemed professor who was one of those responsible for my crossing the border from an armchair academic contented with book knowledge to a seeker of some knowledge from the field and from actual experience, has called my going from one place to another, this 'migrancy in thought, word, and deed,' a kind of 'lagalag.'

Loosely, 'lagalag' is wandering of the better kind, I suppose, the kind that Carlos Bulosan and many others did in search of a better life--or when the searching was too taxing, the idea of a better life.

I had thought of a title for a book containing all those that I mentally wrote while everywhere: on the road while driving, on the crossroads while waiting for the traffic light to go green, on the long walks to home, on nights that the winter cold does not allow you to sleep soundly but you have only those on-and-off dozing, your sleep as fitful as your soul wandering from day-in to day-out.

I had formed that title in mind, and let me document this now: I had the kernel of the idea while I was passing by the Nativity, while I was turning left to take Carson Street and from there make a right turn to hit Hawthorne, while I was making that left turn from Carson to Hawthorne, and while I was finally cruising along Hawthorne towards Sepulveda, also known as Pacific Coast Highway that links the southernmost part of California to its northernmost part, from San Diego to San Francisco.

It is going to be: Blogging, Basically--Or Some Excerpts of Essays on Exile.

What a title, I thought.

It will give me the excuse to not write long essays.

It will give me the reason to write whatever I wanted to write, what hits my fancy, what, to me, is most meaningful under duress, the duress a gift of exile.

So there, I will begin to plot the next move: to write and write and write until I feel that I already have enough to fill the pages of a respectable book.

You watch out for the birthing of this 'Blogging, Basically--Or Excerpts of Essays on Exile.'

It should be more than the hype on the birthing of a certain 'Brangelina,' that child, who at birth has already the privileges of being a ballerina of all the blessings of a blissful life without having to lift a finger to deserve it.

Talk of the blessings of Hollywood, the boundless blessings they accord to people whose charms they can sell to the hyped public, unthinking as always, for millions of dollars.

Life is not fair, really now.

Life is not fair in exile as well.

Then again, life has been like this ever since the beginning of Time, this Time that does not end, this Time of strangers and estrangement in this land of exile included.


A. S. Agcaoili
Torrance, CA
June 9, 2006