by Vince Alvic Alexis Flores Nonato

Prescription is the enemy of perfection.
Not everyone is capable of competence in a snap. But, most of us have no choice but to wallow in mediocrity, as we are forced to give something, anything.
It is past 11 in the evening, and I am still struggling to breathe life into these lines that I have hastily been typing straight from my stream of consciousness. My mission, for now, is to submit what I have been writing as long as numbers up to 59 follow the colon.
If the numbers turn to zeroes, then I shall be doomed. In one scenario, I have squeezed out a huge turd, but I can somehow pretend its questionable quality is some metacommentary.
The alternative is, I will have nothing to show for all these thoughts swimming in my head, never being put to paper because of writer’s block or because there is no chance.
I still cannot decide which one is the worst-case scenario.
I have been living life for the sake of beating deadlines every day. Deadlines at work and at school are a must, but self-imposed deadlines for life goals keep being shunted aside. I have to keep churning out output after output while studying codal after codal, case after case.
Catching my breath is a luxury I cannot afford. Sleep has become exclusively involuntarily, being commenced only when my body inevitably crashes. The human body is the ultimate counterargument to the idea of intelligent design, for it is utterly incompatible with a world that does not sleep.
Yet, no amount of effort seems ever enough. It is like juggling with eggs or Ming vases.
It is a wonder how people can keep finding the energy to propel them through this ceaseless journey. I still have not found the answer.
But, the world cares not for those who are slow to catch up as it turns every 24 hours. The general rule is that for the prescription period to be tolled, you will have to take action.
Maybe it is better to have your case be denied on the merits because you had neither the time nor the talent to file the perfect pleading, than to have your perfect pleading be dismissed on procedural grounds.
For the sake of compliance. For the sake of achieving something, anything.
Perhaps everyone is capable of greater things. But, we will never know. The Deadline reigns supreme. The Deadline is the death of us all.
Just write something. Just Just read all the cases that you can read for the class. Just hope to the highest heavens that somehow, you will pull through.
And so, with only about an hour left to go, I forced myself to write down everything that my brain can come up with and somehow string them together into something at least coherent, if not cohesive.
After all, it is better to have done something at the risk of failure than to have done nothing and ensured that failure would be a fait accompli. It is better to be forever disturbed in the aftermath of the event, rather than to be forever disturbed because the event never occurred in the first place.
This is a world that stops for no one. This is a world that demands things right here, right now.
I have no freaking idea where I am going with this—or how to end this.