the time is mañana

A little chat w/ i care not to mention {w/ helpful audience commentary}

2009-01-17T16:53:00.021+08:00

—So. Kamusta si Denominita?

—Umiiyak parin, every night. All night, right there beside me until she falls uconscious at four and I have to get up to work. There are times I go through days without sleep. And I spend my weekends laundrying mucussed pillow cases.

—Di parin maka-get over? That’s a pity.

—She hates it when people say that’s a pity, or give condolences, or claim to be sorry for her loss. I told her once that people meant well when they said those things. She told me to go fuck myself.

—Really? What did you do?

—I did as she told me. You know I could never refuse her.

—You did what?

—I went and fucked myself.

—Oh. Well. Did you enjoy fucking yourself?

—Very much, thank you.

—Good to hear. Pano nga pala namatay si Amadoro?

—Run over while on a donut run. Tragic. We always thought he’d be done in by the sickness first. We had a pot going.

—That’s a little insensitive.

—It is isn’t it? I know her pain must be unimaginable,and I'm sorry for her. I try to be understanding. But things have been heavy on me too. I'm sorry. You know, she still says his name in her sleep. I'm ashamed of myself. I really am.

—Olats. You don't need to be. Olats nga nun.

—Oo nga. Pero kailangang intindihin, siyempre ... Pare, teka, pa-segway lang. May napapansin ka bang mali?

—Ano yun tol? Wala naman.

—Mali talaga e, tignan mo. What are these dashes doing in front of the dialogue? And where the fuck are the quotation marks? And what the fuck are our names!?

—Easy lang tol. Wala lang yan. Di nga nababangit mga pangalan natin no? Your name is _____. Mine, I care not to mention. About the dashes: It’s a little funny if you think about it. The queer eye writing this shiznit is going through a James Joyce [who writes dialogue w/ dashes] phase. ‘Di halata sa sulat no?[Whispering:] He’s going through a big quarter-life depression of some sort.

—Gets. I think he mentioned that last week. He thinks an attempted tackle at the mountain of modernist literature—i.e., Ulysses, which was considered by some the only good thing to ever come out of the WWI years and was therefore looked upon as a masterfully rendered finger up the nose of man’s unscrupulous munchies for war, hatred, and violence—will save or at least sufficiently distract him from the pangs of his melodramatic afternoons and sleepless nights. He’s trying to drown his ‘great’ pain in something ‘greater’. Yet he knows, he's perfectly aware, that he’s resting his sanity on the words of the insane and long dead, and that Ulysses won't help him, and that love-song junkies have it better.

—His life is sad. Our lives are sad. And the ozone lair is doomed.

—It's unrighteous. Unwell. It is corn on a cob.

—As in púno ng my God?

—As in putanginang shet.

—Betamax sa pwet!

—He's unfit to live …

—Too stale to kill …

—Too bland to adore

—Two three to ignore

—Being the place that it is, the world isn’t his.

—No it isn’t. The world is mine.

—Okeeeyyy …

—And nothing is certain. But we’d like to believe otherwise as we contemplate our tombs. Remember:

—In darkest night

—In drear’est day

—When even the proudest mountains cry themselves to dust

—And your loved ones are gone

—Fear

—But fear well

—Because

—Hope

—Kontra to what they try not to say—

—Springs

—Eternal

{‘Ano ba naman yan.’ ‘Woooooo!’ ‘There goes the neighborhood.’ ‘Ano yan, Sheksfir?’ ‘Alexander Pope, bobo!’ ‘Ahhh ...’ ‘Kambing!’}

{ ... }

{Kambing!}

opisyal ala Cubana

2008-11-26T13:23:00.003+08:00

below, what i suspect to be a badly translated poem by Cuban writer Raul Rivero

National Pride
None of our officials are rich
None have estates, factories or companies
None have accounts in Swiss banks
Nor do they want them
and can't help but be surprised.

but, here's the URL http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/cubans2001/story-fourwriters.html

Sige lang! Revise lang nang revise! Sige lang! Kahit ma-KRUNGKRUNG! Sige lang! krungkrungan na

2008-10-21T14:51:00.009+08:00

Q: WTF?

A: Here is early take of a scene i wrote a long time ago in a galaxy far far away; i'd say it's about Take 5:

Martin said once, when stabbed by ice pick, there would be no immediate visible bloodstains. I didn’t believe him, but he insists. He’s seen it. The size and shape of the steel would gun for the inside organs but puncture as little flesh as possible, making the wound small so the blood liberated from the vessels would clot inside, leaving for the victim a hemorrhage and slow death.

Toots tried imagine the last year’s riot, people dropping like mangoes during summer from trees, the dull thuds. They’d look like they’d been punched out with fists, not wounded by blade, only to be dragged away later as dead weight.

He thought of the perps shooting shabu and gin the morning after, nearing delirium, while barangay cleaning crews and sleep-deprived residents of his neighborhood scrubbed blood from the pavement. These images and imagined stabbing sensations were never so sharply defined in Toots’ mind until the moment he knew he could be in the receiving end of something sharp, rusty, and real. The stories of criminal activity and urban violence people told over beer and highly animated hand gestures never really mattered before, the way a man being tortured in a war movie in hi-def doesn’t strike nerves anymore.

Martin said once: a .45 is fifty times larger than life, in real life.

here is a later take of same scene (excerpt pala), mga Take 24:

Anyhu, Ika ni Martini: pag nasaksak ng icepick, walang immediate visible bloodstains.

Siyempre dehins ako naniwala, but he insists. Nakita daw niya, with his “own two fucking eyes.” Sabi: “The size and shape of the steel would gun for the inside organs but puncture as little flesh as possible, making the wound small so the blood liberated from the vessels would clot inside, leaving for the victim a hemorrhage and slow death.”

Sinubukang isipin ni Toots yung mga riot nung nakaraang taon: people dropping like mangoes during summer from trees, the dull thuds. Para lang silang mga nasapak nang malufet, yun pala ay mamamatay na kasi nasaksak ng miyembro ng organisasyon ng disgruntled urban youth.

Naisip ni Toots: Putangina siguro yung mga yun, malamang nagshabu’t nag-gin lang sila kinabukasan, nagpapakawasak habang nakikikuskos ako ng kalye para alisin yung manstya ng dugo sa harap ng bahay. Dati, gusto ni Toots maging gangstah. Exciting, barilan, saksakan, yoh mama. These days, this minute, it’s slowly shifting, his opinion. These images, his imaginings of stabbing sensations, they were never so sharply defined in Toots’ mind until the moment he woke to the possibility of being in the receiving end of something sharp, rusty, and real—i.e., ngayon lang niya naisip na oo nga, masakit nga, malamang. Ang mga posebilidad nga naman. Yang mga kwento ng crimen at karahasan na yan, mga bala para sa kwentuhang lasheng, they never really mattered to Toots before like the way a torture scene in a hi-def war movie doesn’t hit any nerves anymore. —i.e., wala lang— …dati. Now he shivers a little and doesn’t volunteer to break ice.

Anyhu, ika ni Martini: a .45 is fifty times larger than life, well, in real life.

Before the second of five shin-shootings

2008-07-21T00:44:00.008+08:00

O: So, ano yung sinasabi mo kanina?

H: Ah, before she cut me off? I know it’s her. It’s always her. Hehe. Kaw kasi. Too busy with your tsikababe, no? ;)

O: Di naman. Hehe. I’ll text her later nalang. Wink wink. What was that?

H: Ah, yes. Man, I’m telling yeh, kahapon, I’m not lying. I met the people who saved the world.

O: Oh? Ows!? Oh? Oh?

H: Yeah. Yesterday, at the fairgrounds. The people who saved the world.

O: Oh? Ows!? Ginagawa nila dun?

H: They were shooting the homeless. Libingan lang. Giving ‘em hell.

O: Libingan?

H: Ay, sorry. Damn typos. Libangan.

O: Ah… so, nakilala mo sila. Ayus? Olats ba?

H: Yeh. Finally, I’ve met those bastards. All this time. All the damn press. They’re bastards. They’re very racist, you know? Without even knowing. And they’re gross.

O: So nakausap mo? You find out what they’re like?

H: A little. We were all a little drunk even by early evening. I even shot one of them homeless. In the shin. I gave ‘im hell.

O: Was it fun?

H: No. I want to kill myself. Meyn, the little I remember. God man…

O: Bakit?

H: I’m telling you… God man.

O: ???

O: Dre, dyan ka pa?

O: ???

H: My chest and my head hurt right after... I felt like I did after donating blood. I mean, they were friendly, a bit alien but friendly, but. Ummm…

O: ????

H: Listen. (sighs.) ok

H: Hmmm... (wipes nose, a tear fills the corner of his eye but he wipes it off immediately. only now does O____ realize that H____’s hands have been shaking. O____ feels concern for his friend, and he feels a slightly unwelcome pang of nervousness. but he shrugs it off as one would sweep dandruff off a black cotton tee-shirt, and he just waits for H___ to continue.)

H: Ok...

H: Ok, ok, Listen. Our hearts, they’re the size of raised fists, they’re not made for that kind of blackness. We won’t survive, man, ano ka ba? We won’t survive in one piece or with healthy minds in our heads. We will not survive The Wonders They’ll Build All Around Us, or The Magnificent Things They Want to Achieve for The Good Of All and, not to mention, The Things They Propose We Do For Our Own Good. No way. Shit, pare. Shit Shit Shit. Putangina. I doubt we’re ready. We’re not ready. We’re not ready. I doubt we ever will be. And if we fight it

H: ...

O: So. (a long pause happens after this first ‘So’ is uttered. neither O___ or H____ feels bad about the extended dead air, please pardon the expression. they are unanimous in their unspoken gratefulness that a little quiet has now happened, before days they expect will be too fast, too loud, and it makes them both feel even just a little bit the better for it. small comfort, i know, given the situation.) So, what do you suppose we do?

H: I think we should run

[ Coming to theatres in ______ ]

What the real problem is

2008-06-12T09:21:00.005+08:00

(or, First sentence of screwed up chick lit story about Marie and Mark)

The Bhagavad Gita calls the human body a wound with nine openings. Marie’s justifications for her hatred of men always begin with this reference—she says it’s an insult: all they’re interested in is one (in Mark’s case, two, I mean three).

[to not be continued ... ]

The girl who blew me away

2008-05-29T09:39:00.008+08:00

It was midnight when she blew me away, to the wind, to the pieces, I was helpless. She didn't use a shotgun, but she did own a shotgun. A Remington double barrel her Lolo gave her for her birthday. Her Lolo was weird that way. His name was Paciano Marques, but he liked to be called Senior Humphrey Bogardito. He once called to me, ‘Ah, Conde Pompeyo de la Mante y Pancetta!’, and asked me to give him a neck rub with Ben Gay. When I did, he said I should marry his granddaughter. He said he could use a man willing to apply Ben Gay on another man. Two seconds later, he forgot all about me. When she told her fiancée about this, his eyebrows made sweet love to each other.

She blew me away with her guitar. It was after her grandfather’s funeral, on the patio of her household, which was asleep, except for us, after a week’s worth of crying. Nobody was crying anymore, neither was she. She decided to wear a rich crimson dress to the rite instead of black, and everybody understood, or pretended to understand. I was there because for two seconds, her Lolo wanted me to be family. She said ‘that means pamilya ka nga, Senior Conde Pompeyo de la Mante y Pancetta’.

Then, out of thin air, she drew her guitara—she was still in crimson dress—and played Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. It gave me le shivers!!!. I asked her if she wishes her Lolo could hear her. You know—right now. She said Lolo’s never even heard the song before.

‘I’m playing for us, the living. The people left behind’. That’s what she said. She was looking at me, still plucking the chords. ‘I’m playing because sometimes we need to justify sadness with something pretty?’

I offered mine: ‘It’s like that whole thing you told me about, no? Yung eating chocolates when you’re feeling down?’

She smiled and said yes—and no no no not quite. I don’t get these things, I never did. She asked me if I loved her and before I could answer, she said she didn’t [‘I … don’t’]. She said it like she was telling me she liked Papa banana ketchup better than Del Monte tomato ketchup. First thing I think of was her fiancé, involuntary, unwelcome, never welcome thought. I remembered a clubhouse sandwich I dropped once on a sandy beach. I remembered picking it up and wanting to pick out all the grains of sand from the soiled bread. I tried to pluck some metaphor out of somewhere that midnight, anywhere. Something pretty maybe, solemn, like: unwittingly charming portrait of teenage goth bombshell. I asked her if she was talking about herself or me when she said the words ‘I … don’t’. You know, I said, didn’t love her/me. She said she wasn’t sure. Not now/anymore. She asked me if I’d hate her if she ate too much chocolate and got fat.

I said no no no. I said this too fast. Then she sang again, Julia by the Beatles. I know this song. Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia. Prepare to be wowed: that’s her name: Julia,

I would have wanted to call her ocean child, I would have wanted to call them seashell eyes. If there’d been a cold breeze, rain and some wet T-shirts involved, I would have tried to kiss her, but there wasn’t. Nothing in the air but the quiet of two people too many things to each other to be anything together. Instead I was blown away by her voice. By the hiding atom bombs of feeling behind it, by the things bigger than us. And her sound was a tempest rising.

(Note: This is revised version of past entry in same blog)

Armada

2008-03-13T13:16:00.011+08:00

Ta tara tan tan, tah tara tan tan, tah tara tahn tan, tah tara taan tan!!! (1000x)

List ni Barthelme

2008-03-13T11:05:00.015+08:00

Believer Magazine’s Kevin Moffett’s copy of Barthelme’s eighty-one-book-strong CW syllabus. [http://www.believermag.com/issues/200310/article_moffett.php]

I post this because myGadwaynat. Eto: (1) Donald Barthelme ys premium short, short short, and novel-length fiction writer. (2) Previous sentence ys criminal-leyvel understatement. (3) Kung nandito si Yoda: a savant The Don is. And (4) from what i hear (read), he is an excellent CW teacher; this is probably the closest thing we could get to a crash course under him that is blog-entry friendly. Umm!

Kung tinatamad kang pasukin yung link sa taas, o kung nawala na page niya, here is the overall: si Moffett estudyante ni Padgett Powell na estudyante naman ni Barthelme dating dati pa. Padgett gave list to Moffett and said Barthelme said to read the books in the list in no particular order or manner. Just read them. :D

Moffet says list blew his mind in good way. No boring read in the list daw. WOW!

Please note that as of this writing I have almost none of the books listed above, but I do intend to catch em all by fortyish at least (I am currently at mid-twenties).

So ......................................... if you just happen to have one, or find one, and are not interested in found, purchased, or owned literary parcel, (pls.) contact me. This goes also for copies of barthelme novels and his 60 Stories. Am willing to buy with kash or kind. Yes I know, parang ginawa kong classified ads yung blog ko. But hey, eighty-one birds and then some. And tell me the look of that grittly marked-up, stained-with-probably-coffee list doesn't get you all giddy under the chest. Cammon, tell me. Cammon. Thought so.

TY :D

this title shouldn't be No Fury. It should be something else, something bettter

2008-02-14T17:57:00.006+08:00

It is still a beautiful sight, even when she is angry and pouting. No. Grimacing, sneering—at me, at something I have done that is horrible, horrible horrible. It is still beautiful, the way you could extract an uneasy—even a guiltily longing—melancholy from old sepia photographs of long-dead couples whom you hope, in secret, were happier than everyone you know today put together, Or maybe, more accurately, and this is just e.g. mind you, beautiful like Mozart filling slowly a room to where you have escaped in order to cry.

I tell her this, though not in verbatim, toned down, the way one would speak it, not write it, and not about the crying, and with just a hint of the Mozart; say it like above and she will think I am manic in some way or the other, which I am—she must not know this, although I suspect she suspects already, to the point of being certain, in which case I must not give her evidence, not a smudge. She says, stop staring at my face. She is not crying, bless her strength, she is relentless, unneedy, and beyond those words she does not speak another: but by God her sneer. It is the quietest rampage I have ever seen. I stop, like she tells me. I pass the next tired hours, even after she has gotten up and gone, looking at my feet, which have large, stocky toes and toenails that need a cleaning. I promise myself I will clean them tomorrow. I will have little else to do by then. No, I think again, an epiphany, albeit a small one, but still: I will stop writing this shite and clean them now

My love, the word ‘moment’ might as well be euphemism for both ‘liplock’, and ‘the sightings of lightning in full bloom’. Oh

2008-01-29T13:35:00.000+08:00

the wildnesses of them, our momentos: they excite us[!], you and I, all the way: to our bones, to the marrow; make us braincrackingly giddy, as children should be on our lawns, or in cities built up there, in the sky, just for them; make us hopeful, we are hopeful[?], naïve, maybe naïve, just like tadpoles, maybe defiant, as are ants under torrent—fire ants who bite and breed to survive in perilous times, right on through the cascades: the geneses of their colonies...

[This is an as accurate a transcription as could be of what Gerard said one second after kissing Mandy for the fifth time that night; it is also more or less three and a half seconds after she had asked him what he thought of the moments they spend together, and six point nine seconds before he was chastised by Mandy for being so noisy in bed and therefore getting her out of the mood.]

Bystanders and their crap

2007-10-05T14:42:00.000+08:00

‘Like an eagle hunting in the summer,’ said Kanto Tambay Number One, about the agile young woman and her quality. Tambay Two, in a trance, replied, ‘like raindrops frosting to snowflakes in the tropics’.

[SHAMELESS PLUG (ni Gelo) THAT WASTES YOUR TIME.]

2007-08-29T17:05:00.000+08:00

UST Publishing House launches 23 new titles on August 30 (Thursday),3:00 p.m. at the Manila International Book Fair, World Trade Center,Roxas Blvd.includingAngelo V. Suarez'sDISSONANT UMBRELLAS: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerka full-color verbo-visual poetry experiment/collaboration with youngvisual artistsKeith DadorCostantino ZicarelliSandra PalomarMark SalvatusStephanie YapnayonMacy Cruz + Mike MendozaDwein Balatazar + Julie Grafia.[A solo launch is slated for Sept. 15 with lecture-performance/s atArt Informal, Connecticut Street, Greenhills. (Details to follow.)]Pasa-pasa! Kita-kits!

BLURB:

“A reference to Dada this late in post-modernity? Our residual modernshere might scoff at the gesture as passe. A resuscitation of theWagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art)? Our fiercelygenre-bound artists are likely to raise their brows in skepticism. Aspeak-back to the once-revolutionary insights of Saussureanstructuralism? Local literary critics who style themselves aspost-theoretical are certain to dismiss the effort as once-startlingbut now unwarranted. But no matter, and who cares about theself-appointed cadres of modernism, theoretical discourse, and theavant-garde (themselves already anachronistic positionings in ourpresent times)? This work of Gelo Suarez and his collaborators is bestread as simulacral (reproductions without originals). More aptly is itregarded as virtual, moving toward and beyond what people prizenowadays as performance. It is a creative text that refuses to cohereand in that sense is also critique, subjecting our age-old certaintiesabout artmaking to crisis and unsettlement. Riddles/ripples shall eddyfrom it, washing over and across our tightly guarded turfs!”

–Oscar V. Campomanes

how we pick up slowly

2007-04-25T16:44:00.000+08:00

There isn’t anybody around that I know, so I think I should be going home. Although the old lady sitting alone at the table by the farthest corner might like some company.

I know I would.

I walk over to her, and she doesn’t look up. I sit down, on the side of the table that is at her right; I order a beer, and she doesn’t look up.

I greet her a fine evening, I try to catch her eye, and she says nothing; but she also doesn’t move. So I stay.

I do not mind really. I am here. She is here, doing nothing, so there is no reason for me to go. It is perfectly normal, I think, for people to totally ignore things that do not fit in with their moment-per-moment view of the world. I think it is an almost automated action: to disregard things that do not matter. How are we to function as proper human beings if everything has to be taken into account? We will stumble on our tracks, be out of focus. We will go hungry for quality time with our cognitive nows. For example, if there is a war a continent and a half away that does not coincide with the dinner party you have planned for this evening, then as far as you are concerned, there is no war until somebody asks you about it. If, when you think about your neighbour killed by a motorcyclist with a shotgun the night before and are distracted from your very urgent desire to see the ocean, then you forget about the whole affair for the meantime in order to see the ocean. He is already dead, you’d think. What more can I do? Afterwards, if you feel the need to, with your new tan you will visit his gravestone.

To this woman, I think, I am maybe like a beggar; that beggar, on the road you take during a time your pockets are devoid of spare change or your consciousness wiped clean of any desire to give it. I acknowledge her presence directly, by talking to her. In a way, I beg for her attention, for her affirmation that I exist. She doesn’t give me any. This is probably because she cannot afford to give any attention right now. It would take to much effort to be congenial to this new person. She is not, to be simple, in meeting-people mode. It might, for her, even be too much effort to repel me, or to simply walk out on my behalf. I’d exist to her if she did either of those things. And, as of late, I have come to realise more and more that granting something its existence is more taxing than it sounds.

The lady is nursing a bottle of very strong beer. It isn’t usual for people her age—or in fact her gender—to nurse beers of that calibre. It makes me think of Bambini models sporting Kalashnikovs. I look at her face and find that she isn’t as old as I first thought her out to be. She looks worn enough to be mistaken for a woman in her late fifties, but in fact, it is more likely, upon closer inspection, that she had just entered the very middle ages of 39 to 45. Her hair is salt and pepper, and wrinkles have started their supposedly permanent occupancy of her face; but there is a quality to them, a manner in which these signs of ageing seem to be stamped on her instead of incorporated as a part of her, that make them seem like they have arrived too early for the closing party. She is not old, I conclude, but tired. Beautiful also, but tired. She strikes me, I just realise, as the type of lady one would like to just walk up to in a social event. I imagine the legion, now I included, that has attempted to reel themselves into her sphere of attention at one point of time or another, each of us made brave anew by a confident but inviting countenance that, for all I know isn’t intentional. I had thought of her as old, and yet she still interested me as a companion for a drink. If you consider things, what happened tonight is definitely not an isolated occurrence. I try to imagine a gathering of all the men that have approached her uninvited. We would be of different age groups, of different styles and maybe even of various nationalities. We would talk of what we have accomplished in terms of success with her, how in-deep we have managed to penetrate her formidable social defences. As far as things are going, I would be the dunce of the evening. I didn’t even get her to talk. Then the others would laugh at me, they would pity me and stroke their egos in one synchronised motion. They would be pompous, those jackasses, their laughs would be loud and unforgiving and irritating like a party of 20 15-year olds in a theatre, watching a film running for best picture nominations from the Academy. Their snickering and swaggering, their incessant offers of cocktails and companionship, their gold watches and musky smells—I’m surprised the lady even manages to still step out of the house. Those men, they would have been the reason why this fine lady, right now, has nothing to offer me except a very impressive denial of my being here. She is, as I have observed, tired, worn out, jaded if you will. She drinks a little of her very strong beer with a movement so subtle a corpse could have done it in a funeral without alarming anyone. Those men have sucked everything out of her, I think to myself. I catch myself, a little to my surprise, clenching my fists, angry at those men. If I would have the chance, I would like to kill those men.

For the longest time, she does not move and I start to wonder if her little drink a while ago was something I had imagined. I put my forefinger on her throat and press, to check for a pulse. Her heart is moving, but it is very slow, with the rate of a hibernating animal. She survives, but in many ways, she is dead to the world around her. I signal the waiter for another beer, and I tell him I will be paying for both our tabs. The waiter responds efficiently with the beer and asks if the lady would like anything else. I tell him she is fine for now, but keep mine coming. I say it will be a very long night, and I remind myself to tip the waiter generously. The lady blinks, or maybe I just imagine it. There really is no reason for me to leave, really.

The day God wore His ‘Kiss the Cook’ apron, and decided to put on the divinest of His mittens

2007-04-18T17:12:00.000+08:00

4/18/07—The temperature out in degrees Celsius is Diyos ko na po, putang ina, and most of the people who have so far survived more than two waking seconds through the day could not remember a hotter one (1).

When Randy Remington woke up this morning and found the sun to be at its most prodigious, he stepped outside and decided right then and there to melt. In order to do this he must finally become what he has always wanted to be—a blue M&M candy treat (2). Why blue, nobody knew; and in fact, nobody cared. In dinners and in long walks with conversation, his companions would always assume that Remington had a knack for the whimsical that made him such a charming personality. In all truth, he wasn’t whimsical, nor had he a personality that was charming. What is true is that this was a day he has long waited for, and his lips twitched with an honest glee. Remington justified his intentive and flimflamous blasphemy of the laws of physics and reason by saying out loud: ‘Hey, the world has been called many things, why not call it god’s mouth for once?’ The powers that be—be them the fates or the fingers of deities—found no sense in this argument, and therefore no reason to contest it. Remington melted on a spot two feet into the street and nine feet from the sofa on which he used to spend numerous restless days masturbating to the opening credits of The Young and The Restless (that’s how long he usually took). The time he spent melting was also time he spent convincing himself that the world must be god’s mouth, and can’t, for the life of him, be god’s hand, because, as everybody knows, the mouth is the filthiest part of the human body, of which god’s image serves as default template (3). Remington couldn’t imagine a place filthier than the world, and this was just one of the reasons he had nothing but fond thoughts for his spontaneous decision to just drop everything and liquefy.

Contrary to what you might think, the fumes Remington discharged during this runny state of affairs were not pleasant the way a toffee shop’s smell would be pleasant. Despite the best of his hopes, deep inside, Remington really wasn’t chocolate after all, but was, in essence and cellular configuration, meat, just as his father was, and his father’s father before him, and his father’s father’s father before him, and so on and so fourth, forming an unfortunate gene-chain of protein that leads back to the centuries wherein good ways to process meat weren’t even invented yet. No, despite his polished cerulean outer appearance, Remington’s smell under the decomposing heat was pleasant the way the kitchens of Pulutan Republic: Grilled Meats and Bullalohan would fare well with the nose of a man just fresh from a night out drinking, on the prowl for something cooked and fatty.

Remington’s remains bubbled and boiled, sizzled on the pavement, and hoped, with its now most fuzzy conception of sentience, to evaporate into what most landlocked creatures would think is a favourable place—up there. The heat was, of course, hot enough to have been able to grant this primitive wish over time, had it not been overpowered by gravity’s more influential influence.

Instead, the new Remington, first a puddle, then a blue river of miniature proportions, found itself cascading downhill into a gutter, then into a sewer, were it will eventually be divided unequally and digested by subterranean rodents and curious prepubescent turtles.

Remington, had he survived the day of most untemperate temperatures longer, would have been proud of the people who were his neighbours and countrymen. In this greatest heat, they found within themselves a renewed energy once locked inside bodies too weak to handle them, and the ability to make their most exquisite deathwishes come true (4) (5) (6).

Notes

(1)
For those who are curious: the people who just so happened to have memories of at least one day with temperatures exceeding this day of burning pavements and steaming seas were septuagenarian X-pats from Japan and the Bikini Atol. Most were, to certain extents, pilots of bodies that were the human-anatomical equivalents of automotive survivors of the once popular videogame, Twisted Metal 3. Few were taken seriously; had they not been foreigners, they would have been kicked in the face for disagreeing with the locals of this country in their own country.

(2)
It was a bitter swansong statement from Remington’s first girlfriend—‘buti sana kung lasang M&Ms yan, susubuin ko siya—that planted in him the subconscious seed of desire to become an M&M milk-chocolate candy bit. Over his years of living, this seed grew within Remington, and eventually, with the power reserved only for the most primal of our thoughts, it overtook all dreams of doctorates, SUVs and interstellar cremations, and became Remington’s one true holiest of dreams, accessible—as result of the sheer amount of willpower granted to it by the dreamer—via the mere glance of a conscious thought.

(3)
Genesis 1: 26, 27 contains words to be remembered during the moments you are in your most privet and intimate self, doing things unfit for other people’s sensory consumption (like when overzealously engaging the toilet, or when masturbating to the opening credits of The Young and The Restless). The world would be a better place if everyone practised this.

(4)
Ria Cuambanco, a troubled young girl whose YouTube account was popular among the teenage daughters of upper-echelon Maynileño society, decided that day to spontaneously combust on-camera. She did so with a grace not expected of a girl on fire, whose beautiful hair was curling up into smoke and whose skin was searing from red to black under virgin yellow flames. She stood still, and kept her eyes locked on the web camera. To the smoking end, she stood upright on her seat, her roasted eyeballs still proud, giving off the illusion that within them there still was life that was angry still, and still waiting. Her last will and testament included a last-minute request for her video to be uploaded to her YouTube account, where it was immediately viewed by anyone within three degrees of friendship. All who watched were hypnotised by her staring eyes that were surrounded by fire, and burst into flames seemingly as willingly as the progenitor of what was going to be, through word of mouth and mismanaged grapevines, somewhat of an online cult of death by flames whose members are added as quickly as they are killed off. It was through these occurrences that every private and semi-private subdivision in the capital burned to the ground in a matter of five months.

(5)
Omar Opada, a portly middle-aged man living in Quezon City was waiting in line to withdraw cash over the counter in a bank that had a busted air-conditioning system at the height of sweltering noon. He sweated with such profuseness that the whole bank flooded before anyone realized what was going on. Everyone but a guard who had three children, one of which had a terminal illness of the colon, died of either drowning or dehydration in the boiling brine. When the rescue teams arrived just minutes later, they found not a dampened office, but a dry wasteland of salt and salted meat corpses. One member of the paramedics took a chance to rip an ear off one of the victims’ heads and nibbled at it. He concluded that it would be very tasty if deep fried in vegetable oil and dipped in vinegar, and took it as his social duty to tell his friends about it. As a result, the bodies were reported missing, none of the victims made it to the morgues, and the families of more than a dozen paramedics enjoyed particularly fine fried-meat dishes for five months to come.

(6)
Allen Midea, a successful bachelor in his late twenties, who grew tired of the heat that managed to crumble trees and subdue the air-conditioning of even the most advanced glass towers of Makati, decided he would take half the day off, go home, and make it snow. His house, within an hour of his arrival, became the picturesque interior of a snow globe. By three in the afternoon, he had invited every female friend he knew to join him in what he fancied to be his very own winter paradise. He invited them with pitches like ‘see for yourself’ and greeted their inquiring looks when they arrived with ‘you’ve gotta think cool, babe. Let me get you a warm beverage’. That night, while the rest of the city had the benefit of sleeping in what could have been a very moist oven, Midea and twenty-five of his friends slept in winter weather. None of them emerged for five months, after which a concerned neighbour built up the courage to ask what was going on. Inside he found a solid shrine of ice depicting what could have been the shortest orgy in the history of humanity. The efforts of authorities to thaw and break the ice from the bodies were futile; they found that anywhere within a fifteen-foot circumference of the naked, solid corpse of Allen Midea, suffered stormy winter-arctic weather conditions. When the President heard of this, she quickly made calls for the monument to be spared from what was to be a discrete disposal by way of nitroglycerine. She arranged for it to be delivered to Malacañang, wherein she had the ice statue placed in a room where she had a ridiculously expensive thermostat system installed, which she had to order all the way from the Neatherlands, but was worth every taxpayer’s peso she used to purchase it. The President used the system to heat the room with the statue, which she had come around to naming Midea’s Nymphets, in order to bring down the temperature to sub-arctic conditions whenever she wanted to impress and entertain Northern European guests. The said guests, although they appreciated that the President made efforts to mimic the colder outdoor environments of their homelands, usually opted to have meetings in plain regularly air-conditioned rooms, at least for the Madame President’s benefit. They also would never fail to say out loud that Midea’s Nymphets was an exquisite and rather unusual piece of modern art, and would usually wonder inwardly whether it was normal in a predominantly Catholic country to have fairly-realist [sculptures? Art installations?] that depicted an excessive sexual escapade of the oral and group denomination.

friendster fanmessage for ****

2007-04-02T18:00:00.000+08:00

Hi there,

This is going to sound stalker-like and man-dog-drooly (it isn’t), but I am an adoring, googly eyed fan of your ‘miaow’ photograph. If your account allowed for comments for individual pictures, this would have been a comment; if we were ‘real friends’, this would have been a testimonial. If this were an email, the subject would have been ‘e-fanmail for ****’.

I look at this photo and caption as parody of the overly rampant, sexually suggestive, untastefully labelled Friendster picture, except its comedy comes from well-placed subtlety instead of crude exaggeration. Please do not think that the cuteness of the photo’s subject has escaped me, it hasn’t, and neither has the possibility that maybe this is nothing more than an almost-stolen shot of some girl in a blouse trying to enjoy the free meal she is entitled to as a guest in some soiree.

But the petite joys photos like this offer people cannot be explained with real honestly without a little bumbling involved. I would have to apologise, I guess, for sounding so psycho. This is little more than a wordy way to acknowledge that your picture just happened to make my day (as in made me laugh a laugh-with-you-type laugh) on the day I saw it.

One, two, three,

Bow

P.S.: gusto mo’ng mag-Starbucks sometime? Just Friendster me, OK? Nytnyt! c;

afterword

After many more messages, ‘Bow’ and **** eventually met up for coffee. They went out regularly for three months before **** caught Bow sending similarly themed messages to a pretty, 16-year-old Malaysian who liked exposing her areolae to her webcam. By this time, as a result of poor circumstance and a willpower of a woman who has bought one too many useless items from infomercials, **** had duped herself into falling in love with Bow, who was, according to the opinions of many of his past acquaintances, clearly unlovable, and abominable both in morality and hygiene. ****’s love for him was a misfortune for Bow, because had **** not loved him as much as she did, she would not have attempted to stab him in the gut with a steak knife she had purchased from an infomercial. Surprisingly, the steak knife did justice to it’s otherwise irreputable marketers, who claimed it would fare well with any kind of meat whatsoever. The knife did fare well, though not with Bow’s gut, which would have been an interesting test of the knife’s abilities had **** not been a woman of challenged eyesight. She instead managed to clumsily guide the knife into Bow’s scrotum, severing any ties once shared between the two resident testicles. Had a pig farmer been watching the skirmish, he would have thought to himself, or, if he had had the tactlessness of all (censored!!!) combined, exclaimed out loud, that the whole affair would have reminded him of the first time he ever tried neutering a boar. When the mother of Bow heard this, she said ‘What a tragic way to spend an afternoon that could be spent ice skating in Megamall or, as a matter of fact, drinking Chardonnay!’

It is sad to know that, had **** not been so gullible and short-sighted, Bow would have been able to procreate eventually, at some evil time in the future, and our world of tomorrow would have been able to enjoy many many more assholes to come.

the way Eggers ends it

2007-02-19T17:36:00.000+08:00

This is my favourite story by Dave Eggers. He wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and many many short short stories, mostly published in this site:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/shortshortstories/0,,1178980,00.html

They are very good (at least I like them very much).

This particular story has two endings. One version is the on-line one, the other, printed in a little chapbook colloection. Here’s the on-line version:

What The Water Feels Like To The Fishes
by Dave Eggers
Like the fur of a chinchilla. Like the cleanest tooth. Yes, the fishes say, this is what it feels like. People always ask the fishes, 'What does the water feel like to you?' and the fishes are always happy to oblige. Like feathers are to other feathers, they say. Like powder touching ash. We smile and nod. When the fishes tell us these things, we begin to understand. We begin to think we know what the water feels like to the fishes. But it's not always like fur and ash and the cleanest tooth. At night, they say, the water can be different. At night, when it's very cold, it can be like the tongue of a cat. At night, when it's very very cold, it's like cracked glass. Or honey. Or forgiveness, they say, ha ha. When the fishes answer these questions - which they are happy to do - they also ask why. They are curious things, fish are, and thus they ask, 'Why? Why do you want to know what the water feels like to the fishes?' And we are never quite sure. The fishes press further. 'Do you breathe air?' they ask. The answer is yes. Well then, they say, 'What does the air feel like to you?' And we do not know. We think of air and we think of wind, but that's another thing. Wind is air in action, air on the move, and the fishes know this. Well then, they ask again, 'What does the air feel like?' And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. 'Think!' they say. 'Think,' they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that air feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. 'Do better, think harder,' they say, encouraging us. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed. 'Keep going,' they say. It feels like blood, we say, and they say, 'No, no, now you're getting colder.' The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like being pushed and pulled and yanked, punched and slapped and misunderstood and loved, we say, and the fishes sigh and touch our forearm sympathetically.

Ok, now, for the print version, take the last sentences and replace with this:

…The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older, we say, and they smile their big fish smiles.

Which ending do you like better?

the potluck

2007-02-13T14:33:00.000+08:00

Joseph brought grilled ensaymada he bought from Red Ribbon. I didn’t join in, because Red Ribbon is not my thing, but half the party went gaga when they saw the box. Tina jumped up and down—it’s that bad. So did Gen, but she does that all the time, so it didn’t surprise us. Everybody loves Red Ribbon. Why that is so always bothered me. It’s confusing. I would think it would be the ‘Red’, because red is the color of most passions, from the murderous to the lip-biting. Or, at least for girls [and boys] who feel the need to accessorize with girly things, it might have a little to do with the ‘Ribbon’. I think maybe the food is good there, or that it is a place filled with personal memories, the same way churches should be filled with grand, collective ones. I imagine nostalgia Sundays in Red Ribbon, with pancit palabok sauce grazing the side of lips, wiped away by the thumbs of mothers still kind in their youth, who are at the prime of their caring and who are still far from obsession. They spend their time smiling through days spent with a version of you still uncursed by pubic hair and ambition, or the lack of both by choice.

Marty brought skewered and barbecued pork entrails, five silver trays of, steaming like hot bodies just rising out of sex. All the boys were delighted: a glass goblet was produced, filled to the rim with dark vinegar. Jericho chopped onions and fought back tears. Half the party laughed at him. They thought he was joking. Half the people here have never once chopped an onion in their lives; they thought he was mimicking something he saw on television. They were amazed, and I thought that was sad. Emong picked chilli peppers out of his pockets and a pair of scissors from the counter, and snipped the pepper into little red rings over the vinegar. Afterwards, he asked Nica to help him take a piss, because his chilly-tainted hands would burn him down there. It came as a surprise when she said she didn’t mind. What didn’t surprise us is that she asked her twin, Mica, to join her. The twins were sweet to each other and always shared everything. All three went up the stairs to the bathroom, Emong to piss, the twins there to assist. We never saw any of them again.

Darius brought pasta to the party, and sauces of different color: the red was tomato, the green, pesto, the orange had something we’ve never heard of, mixed with crab eggs and lime. Nobody wanted to try the pink, it smelled of something raw, like a slaughterhouse.

Marge brought the cola, Larry brought some beer, Edwyn brought the shandy, and Francis brought old cheese. Bob brought the gameboards, and his wife’s Magic Sing. The kids were delighted with Loman, who brought sunshine and a lawn they could play on. Ely brought us mountains we could trek through when we sobered. Harold had his eagles, and Eggie picked some stars. We switched off the lights and watched them shine for a while. The eagles hovered around them like planets, and were scalded when they flew in too close.

It was such a grand party

even if Bebang and Mike were disappointments through and through. The former brought world peace, which nobody really liked, the latter, his undying love, which was soggy, overcooked. Sophia, in turn, brought a friend with the ears of a bat, we told her we wouldn’t eat anything that looked mutated.

Things picked up when Daniel came with his pig. We had fun chasing it through the sala and bedrooms, breaking laps we wouldn’t pay for. She was a quick little thing, and she didn’t want to die. Lucky Gino had his machete, and luckier still, Robert brought his throwing arm. Ronnie had a bamboo pole in her knapsack, presharpened, and Allan had a fireplace already burning in his. Driving the pole through the pig was harder than any of us imagined. Fancheska said we were doing it all wrong, but she didn’t help out. The smells the meat made made it all worth the while.

The pig was roasting in the middle of the living room, and the rest of us were singing hymns to the animal we have killed and will devour, when Apple decided to plant herself in a corner and sulk. She had a worm eating at her core, but she did not tell Chico, who approached to see what was wrong. Instead she said they should stop doing this. She pointed all around the room, at the bacchanal, its dancing children, the glass shards on the floor, then she buried her face in her hands. We should stop doing this. Chico patted her back and blew softly at her neck. He knew her sentiment, but couldn’t agree with her less. It is such a grand party, thought Chico. There were dark seeds growing inside him, just waiting to sprout life.

because the world is no oyster, it's a man with many guns

2007-01-27T17:55:00.000+08:00

She gave him a book that between its pages said: a man, when in bed with a woman, must take the position that is closest to the door. The book said it’s the symbolic gesture of the primal male guarding the entrance to the cave, keeping his cave family safe. The book said this simple act would make your woman feel secure, and therefore, loved.

When they entered the bedroom one night, circumstances led them to the bed, horizontal and beside each other, smoking cigarettes and sniffing each other for signs of life and signatures of heat. He took the side close to the window, which was right beside the bed. The door was on her side. In her mind, this was a violation of sorts. She felt they had just talked about this, and he had abandoned every word. God knows what could be turning the knob at any moment to break their sanctuary.

In his mind he knew doors could be bolted, be as fortified as the walls that surround them. But windows, they had to be kept open; they were necessary weaknesses, and had always to be watched. He imagined standing by windows with 7 mm rifle in hand, scoping for monstrosities to pass within 300 meters, so he could gun them down one by one in the expanse of many years. It would be the slow but steady decline of the evils of man. He imagined that if he would do this long enough—it wouldn’t matter how long it would take—every hooligan and sorrowful thought would be finally eliminated to places farther than memory, and if the two were lucky, it would finally be safe to unbolt the door, and simply step out smiling into a world that might, just might, be threatless as a bedroom.

They never talked about these little spats in their heads, which remained nameless soliloquies to the day they would fall. She was stubborn, he was irrational to the core. If they’d brought it up, it would have been a lovely little riot.

Kasama daw si Piolo Pascual dito

2007-01-23T11:34:00.000+08:00

Chromatext Reloaded at the CCP Main Gallery

Some sixty Filipino poets and writers from here and abroad, representing several generations, get together for a rare visual cum textual art exhibit billed as "Chromatext Reloaded" from January 25 to February 28 at the CCP Main Gallery. The show turns a page from the Chromatext I & II shows in the 1980s that assembled visual artworks by poet-members of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC).

This time curated by Sid Gomez Hildawa, Jean-Marie Syjuco and Krip Yuson, "Chromatext Reloaded" by PLAC & Friends celebrates the 25th anniversary of PLAC, with its founders Jimmy Abad, Cirilo Bautista, Ricky de Ungria and Krip Yuson leading the poet-exhibitors.

Their works ‹ from holographs to photographs, illustrations with poems to oil paintings, sculptural installations and video ‹ will be joined by those of other distinguished writers, among them National Artists Edith L. Tiempo and Virgilio Almario, Raul Ingles, Gilda Cordero Fernando, Tita Lacambra-Ayala, Sylvia Mendez-Ventura, the late Lilia Amansec, Ophelia Dimalanta, Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Butch Dalisay, Pete Lacaba, Cesare A.X. Syjuco, Jun Cruz Reyes, Juaniyo Arcellana, RayVi Sunico, Danton Remoto, Frank Rivera, Margot Marfori and Sid Gomez Hildawa.

From abroad, PLAC members and friends have sent in their contributions, such as from David Cortes Medalla in London and Eric Gamalinda, Nick Carbo, Luisa Igloria, Eileen Tabios, Zack Linmark and Melissa Nolledo-Christoffels in the U.S.A. From Baguio City, the participating poet-artists include Butch Macansantos, Babeth Lolarga, Del Tolentino and Frank Cimatu. Special guest artists who happen to be close friends to writers, if not writers themselves, include National Artists Napoleon Abueva and Benedicto Cabrera (Bencab), Danny Dalena, Pandy Aviado, Manny Baldemor, Rock Drilon, Fil Dela Cruz, Jean-Marie Syjuco, Judy Sibayan, Heber Bartolome, Beaulah Taguiwalo, Erlinda Panlilio, Bheng Dalisay, Marivic Rufino, Lorena Javier, Raul Funilla, Boy Yuchengco, Gerry Cornejo, Pancho Villanueva and Igan D'Bayan.

Among the younger generation of poets and writers joining the exhibit are Jovi Miroy, Vim Nadera, Fran Ng, Lourd de Veyra, Jessica Zafra, Sarge Lacuesta, Joel Toledo, Ana Escalante Neri, Ginny Mata, Carlomar Daoana, Mookie Katigbak and Angelo Suarez.

Performance art, readings and musical works will highlight the exhibit opening at 6pm on Thursday, January 25, to which the public is invited, as well as the closing ceremonies at 7pm on February 27.

Copies of the revived poetry journal Caracoa and special commemorative editions of CD albums featuring the recorded readings of PLAC poets will also be on sale for the duration of the exhibit. Gallery hours are from 10am to 6pm daily, except Mondays and holidays. Admission is free. For particulars, call 8323702.

the grandest things happen near water

2007-01-16T12:58:00.000+08:00

x-pat man was the devil to major lomos, because x-pat man is american. major lomos likes to tell x-pat man to get out of this country, and to stop raping our women and depleting our natural resources. last night, they were eating dinner in a restaurant that served hamburgers the size of little dogs, major lomos told x-pat man: “x-pat man, you are the devil, get out of my country. and while you are at it, stop raping our women and depleting our natural resources.” then major lomos took a bite of his hamburger that was the size of a small dog and said “x-pat man, please pass me the Heinz. my hamberger is tasting very bland.”

they were waiting for a jeep on the side of the highway, and their stomachs were full, when x-pat man told major lomos: “major lomos, i am in love with your sister.”

major lomos said, “you goddamn american motherfucker.“

x-pat man said, “fuck you.”

major lomos was a demi-vegetarian. he liked to be one because the word demi-vegetarian reminded him of the word demi-god. it means he did not eat meat except for the meat of fish and molluscs. major lomos was very annoyed when x-pat man said the hamburger he ate did not come from a mollusc, like x-pat man had said before they ordered. x-pat man laughed very hard.

x-pat man came home with major lomos, who lived beside a river where no fish ever swam anymore. at home was the sister of major lomos, who had purchased foot-long squids from a travelling seafood peddler. major lomos loved his sister, even more than x-pat man did. but when major lomos was to slice the squid to make a calamari dish, he couldn't do it: it made him think of slicing his sexual organ, and that made him queasy. he asked x-pat man to do it for him.

one must understand that x-pat man is, in fact, a woman of crimson skin that major lomos found very disturbing and most beautiful. major lomos liked x-pat man, even if she had skin that was rich to the eye and that reminded him of blood.

once before, major lomos and x-pat man were walking along the river side. x-pat man saw a hawk dive into the river to catch a fish—a very rare sight. little did they know it was the last fish to ever swim in that river. x-pat man said she never wants to leave this place anymore.

and major lomos said to her: "did you know that a pair of hawks are called a cast when they take flight together?"

and x-pat man said: "yes, i knew that. but, major lomos, we are not flying."

and major lomos wanted to say yes they were, even when they obviously were not.

The Maximalist

2006-12-28T12:51:00.000+08:00

The Maximalist spent three thousand and twenty-seven hours on an attempt to download all the songs originally played with more than one instrument and a singer with a hat. Then his keyboard melted and it took his fingers with it.

When he says yes, The Maximalist never says yes. He prefers ‘Oo ba, sobrang okey, Dude’ to ‘oo’, and ‘indeed… absolutely, yes’ to ‘yes’. His dreams are to kill David Foster Wallace before reading anything he has ever written, to repaint the Sistine Chapel to fit his admittedly moribund aesthetics [that reflect, he says, the rapid decline of civilized civilization], be dictator of any third world country but this one, and fuck and marry a dolphin before he dies. His greatest fear is to come across a blank piece of paper while minding his own business. For this reason, he carries a water pistol loaded with dark ink—to shoot at his eyes in the event such a thing would happen. Once, he entered a bookstore and crossed into the paper isle by accident. He went catatonic for a week, and his left eye could now see things through a perpetual natural filter of shadowy blue hue. People call him The Maximalist because once when he was young, before he lost his fingers to his liquefying keyboard, he was playing with his friends the self-explanatory naming game most parents employ when tutoring infants. It was during his turn that he pointed to an electrical transformer and turned into a giant metal-skinned gorilla before finishing what he had to say. Reader, if you do not get the significance [or ill-tasted humor] of this queerish event, it is of no fault of yours, but The Maximalist considers this experience to be his very driving force, the monumental source of his life’s avid philosophies.

Freestyle and your opinion

2006-12-19T12:47:00.000+08:00

Below is a yet unpublished writeup by an anonymous author (who is one of my cousins) about the popular Philippine R & B group, Freestyle. Their act, though not up there with my immediate general preferences, hits me with many questions with regard to the status of popular music in this country. The industry is confusing me as of now. I need insight, at least just to get my perspective in perspective. Freestyle, I think, is a good place to start.

I see the band as arbiter between club-regular-disco-gig and recording-artist success. The music industry today has been surviving on a myriad of acts that trace their influence through the lines that connect '80s new wave to James Blunt (with the Seattle Grunge and Mtv Alternative Nation freaks somewhere in the middle, and the Eraserheads and classic Pinoy pop-rock somewhere in the dead center). With the 1990s half a decade behind us, R & B seems to me to be a straggling force in the airwaves, at least from what I hear. But Freestyle is different. Their history, and subsequently their lineup, is more complex, their music comprises of well-renditioned classics as well as hackneyed dance jingles I would usually run from. They are a show band—their songsheets cater more to what people on the dance floor would like to hear than to what they have composed themselves—and yet the commercial success of their past originals is undeniable. They are mush, they are good musicians. And these days, I’m not sure where they stand, but I do know they still give a good performance. They're not ska (the only music I admittedly dance to), but people do dance to them.

A Minority Report: From a not so big fan of Freestyle

As I was flipping channels to kill time one weekend, I chanced on SOP as KC Montero was awarding Freestyle their gold album award from Viva Records. This brought me back to a gig of the band that I went to early this year at the Hard Rock Cafe. I never saw them perform before. But who could have missed their music videos and guest performances on TV? They were all over the place then. The turn of the millennium was their time. The Philippines was practically divided between those who adored them and those few ones who were simply indifferent towards them. I was part of the neutral team. There was no reason to abhor them really. What was there to hate?

“So Slow,” “Before I Let You Go,” “This Time” and “Till I Found You” were the kind of songs that would stop your fingers when you paced through the radio stations. Frankly, I don’t know why “Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang” sold. Maybe it was Pops Fernandez, but definitely not Top Suzara alone; it was Freestyle that made this song a chart-topper right until the period of videoke. Although Top Suzara wasn’t really your typical charismatic front man, his presence in the band made it part and parcel of why it was loved by Pinoys a few years back.

When I got an invite from my aunt for a gig of theirs last February, I felt excited for this chance to see them live. I knew though that I wouldn’t be seeing the same group. This new line-up in the beginning seemed doubtful. Top Suzara’s absence was awkwardly felt… it seemed like this spotlight from above shone towards an empty spot on the stage. I am ignorant about the issue and I wouldn’t want to give any cents that are not my worth. All I know is the moment Top Suzara came out with a solo music video, I knew something went wrong. Setting aside whatever reasons there were behind his demise, I didn’t think that seeing Freestyle without him robbed me of an entertaining night.

Being in the same table with their manager, Celeste Pacana, I asked who the new guys were. As their caretaker, I remember her boasting with much enthusiasm that one of the guys, Mike Luis was from Smokey Mountain, and the other, Joshua Desiderio, made the group sound much, much better. Of course I knew Rommel de la Cruz from Barbie’s Cradle. As I thought of the legacy of Barbie’s Cradle, Smokey Mountain’s good reputation and seeing the familiar Freestyle faces with Jinky Vidal, there was much hope, I thought that an enjoyable evening lay ahead.

Together with that cloud of doubt hovering above my mind about the band, one of the first things I noticed was the awful amount of space in the room. I knew of Freestyle’s success and how they’ve been able to form a pretty decent following at the peak of their career, so the lack of people I thought could be very much due to that missing person. Another striking thing was Rommel de la Cruz. His being in Freestyle was surprisingly delightful. In an industry where the borders across music genres are clear cut, seeing Rommel gave me mixed feelings. I don’t know if I was feeling more uncomfortable than what I thought he should feel. It was a different experience seeing him with a band from another end of the spectrum. No doubt his soul and genius was a good addition to the group. Frankly, I couldn’t help but look at him more often than not, out of suspicion more, I think, than curiosity. I guess seeing him move into Freestyle’s mode says a lot about this group’s reputation and their growing capability. Hearing the other two guys, Mike Luis for instance, sing Stevie Wonder and Joshua Desiderio’s “Half Crazy” by Johnny Gil marked a pretty good memory for me of this not-so-new band. With Jinky Vidal as consistent as the rising sun, I thought that after the storm that passed, there’s much that can be expected of them. Since their cover songs were exceptionally good, which really marks them apart from other show bands, I wondered how different and effective their original songs could turn out. I thought it was high time for their kind of genre to resurrect itself.
Unfortunately, it seems like the band thought it safe to jump on the revival bandwagon. It’s disappointing, only because there seems to be a lot of potential with this new line-up. Freestyle’s soul doesn’t seem like it’s been lost, probably altered only because it’s become more diverse and flexible, which is never a bad thing. This change in the band signaled great possibilities, but I guess I’ll still have to wait some more and hope that my confidence for them doesn’t wane as much as their confidence in themselves.

curious circumstances

2006-11-15T17:39:00.000+08:00

Mother will kill me because I could have been killed the other night. But I'm not sure of this really, and we’re still investigating.

Last week, after watching the evening news, Mother told me to steer clear of taxis. It was funny because, in the news, these two stories about hold-ups were aired: (1) a mugger locked himself inside the taxi he wanted to mug because an angry mob gathering outside was waiting to break his head; and (2) two Korean nationals mugged and wounded a taxi driver but were caught eventually. The Koreans said they were strapped for cash, so decided to pull a quick one on the said cabbie. The camera crew that covered the event benevolently provided us footage of the cabbie bitchslapping the apologizing Korean kids (Korean kids: “Sorry! Sorry!” Taxi man: “No sorry! [WHAPAK!!!] No sorry!”).

Last Monday, Glenn, alcohol-man extraordinaire, and I went drinking with some of our UST crowd behind the university. As per custom, we stayed behind after everyone left and had a last round. Then we got up and I took a cab home. The next thing I remember without difficulty was waking up on our couch, perfectly fine, with hardly a hangover, without a watch, and, after tearing apart the house, without a cellular phone. It was funny, really, because the last two times something like this happened, it happened to Glenn, and all I could think of then was how fucked that is. Now that it has happened to me, curiosity more than rage or regret is compelling me to discuss the topic right now.

My friends have looked over the facts and have given me their theories. Two of them are printable:

1) I simply fell asleep in the cab and dropped my phone and lost my watch somehow. Or,
2) Seeing as I was drowsy anyway, I was PUT TO SLEEP by the driver or an accomplice via some sort of chemical delivered through the AIR-CONDITIONING SYSTEM or a piece of cloth over my nose and mouth.

The first theory was the one I solicited because it's perfectly plausible. I was tired, drunk, and lacking a few days of sleep. But the rest of the investigative committee disagreed, stating that no taxi driver in his right mind would try to pry away the watch of a customer who just happened to fall asleep in his cab.

The second theory was therefore brought up, which was backed up by what Chuck claimed were factual stories of drivers who rig their air-conditioning systems to secrete a somniferous substance into the cab's interior. I would have guessed this plan would be easily foiled by anyone who’d think a taxi driver with a gas mask would look suspicious.

We will continue with our investigation, though not in the hopes of actually getting anything done.

many things

2006-11-14T14:24:00.000+08:00

Meggie looks at the horoscope of every newspaper she could find so she could pick the best one and follow it. I tell her these people, they fabricate predictions, pick them out of hats, those funny little fictions. She doesn’t care. It wouldn’t matter, at least not to her. She devours her days like a fat man through butter.

we are vigilant

2006-11-14T13:19:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time I lost the keys to the house. It was locked and the people inside were logs. I ninjahed up the wall, to the balcony, as quiet as I could. Two kids in basketball jerseys saw me and told Mang Nats, who was drinking down the street. He came, with a piece of wood, 2 × 2 inches thick and 3 feet long. He knocked on the door and shouted. We had to explain: It was just me. He looked at me and looked a little closer with an eyebrow raised. His skin smelled of rum. It would have been a sweet smell on a woman. On him it wasn’t, but otherwise he didn't seem drunk. He pointed and said, “Kilala kita, you’re the friend of the fat kid.” I wanted to tell him, I am the fat kid.

street street street

2006-11-14T12:32:00.000+08:00

You walk around Roxas district at night and you feel safe the way you do in a house of friendly drunks: nobody’s going to hurt you, and nobody will care if you do stupid things. You’re home.

Mang Nats lives up the street. He’s a friendly drunk. Buying cigarettes in the middle of the night, I bumped into him at the store. He smiled and gave me a good salute. I salute everybody, and people make a game out of saluting me. He was buying beer and left early. I ran into him minutes later and he asked me, and he wasn't kidding around, if I was fucking with him. I said I wasn’t. He said it was the look on my face. I was smiling.

Isn’t that funny?

I ask myself this question many times and maybe you should too: why do we occupy ourselves with shoving chemicals into our bodies? We stuff ourselves like turkeys with things that kill. Alcohol is my chemical. A lot of people make it a pastime. Sometimes I make it a pastime, and that makes me wonder. I won’t stop because it makes one feel like everywhere is home. That way you’re never homeless. I just want to think about it more and do it a little less. I want to do it with good people. And there are so few good people. When I think about how few good people there are, I throw up. Really, I do.

Antipode

2006-11-02T14:57:00.001+08:00

I've been happy yesterday, the other day, and maybe even weeks before. I want to write about it because the happy might go away soon, or might stay and lose its novelty (which wouldn't be so bad), but I can't write about it still, and I'm scared of it whisping away if acknowledged properly, so I post something unrelated instead. In other words, magsesenti ako dahil kahit na masaya ako, hindi ako sanay.

I do think of families as being somewhat pathological. That Douglas Coupland title [All Families Are Psychotic] is such a great one. They force you to be one way. You have to be part of a team. Then what usually happens is that someone in the family, sometimes a kid but sometimes a mother or a father, wants off the team.
-Zadie Smith, in an Interview with Powells.com

I agree with both ideas—that all families are psychotic and that sometimes people want out of them. I hate it when that happens.

I post this because I've started writing stories again and I need to keep sharp while idle. Best way to keep sharp, I figure, is to mini-write: post a blog entry while at rest from working on your story. One day I hope to write stories while taking a break from writing a (that) novel, but (speculative) ADD's keeping me from staying in one place (window) for more than two minutes at a time. Maybe I should hire a jailer of somesort—someone to forcefully keep me in my room and out of Friendster or Wikipedia until I produce a chapter.

Why I keep quoting author interviews in this blog, I have no idea. The cut and paste convenience offered by computers shoved aside, maybe it's because it's easier to catch little profundities from people (even those who don't have jobs that require the occasional bout with the profound) when they are making no attempt at any lasting cleverness or depth.

I dunno, but when reading a good novel with a loaded cellphone next to you, you sometimes catch yourself looking for quotes to text people—either to share bite-sized doses of the great cerebral experience the book delivers, or just to inform people you're reading something kickass. I attempted at least one such quote search when I was reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth about four to five months ago, and it was difficult. Characters are excellent, situations and histories both hilarious and terrifying etcetcetc, but no real quotables that could be crammed into the SMS network.

Found this Smith interview just now and just decided to post it. It's doesn't exactly posses the life changing depth I was talking about, but it makes me sad because, what it said about families, it happens. It happened to my family years ago, and it looks like it's going to happen again real soon.

I don't remember a time my family was nuclear in any way (standard definition of nuclear family: one consisting of father, mother, and kids; more connotative def: a family wherein everybody adheres to his or her social duty as a member, e.g. father: affectionate to wife, works hard, and puts food on table; mother: good housekeeper, takes care of kids, affectionate to husband, etcetcetc). As I see it, we were always a bunch of free-roaming molecules that just happen to live in the same house—or at least city—most of the time.

My family's setup is so modern it's backward. Mother left a household wherein she has kids, a cool job, and a husband more or less her age for one wherein her partner is a generation older (though he does have the youthful flare of a man who knows his way around and knows how to enjoy himself) and her new occupation would be as a housewife of a house with dogs but no kids. Father is in a relationship with a woman a generation his junior who is wonderful, responsible, and who has kids of her own. He has dreams of settling down as a family with her, but is having problems with his nagging religious upbringing and the fact that Catholic Guilt is written all over it. Both their setups took about ten years to develop, and they have both, more or less, found a little happiness in their own strange ways. But while they were at it, their sons, though still enjoying the benefits of food, shelter, and (albeit sometimes unwanted) education, had to raise themselves emotionally. Being a young middle-class coño-raised teenager whith separated parents who are still trying to find themselves, and are therefore emotionally (and during very few times, financially) incapable of supporting you, is kind of like being double dead chicken meat. Or, better yet, think: Dante in Hell without Virgil, or One Tree Hill without the hippness or the supermodels. We drifted to rock music, drinking, cigarettes and academic delinquency because, according to some underlying trend that American media have slipped into our consciousness, it was the only way to go given our situation. Brother Carlo and I both started the whole drink and be druggie lifestyle at 13—non that shocking, because a lot of kids have gone through it, but fucked up nonetheless. Brother Paolo, our youngest, was saved immediately from vice via weekend trips to our Aunt, who, as it happens, was part of a more-or-less nuclear family. But now that Aun't family has migrated to the United States, he's on his way to catching up at 16-years of age. All of us have endured through adolescence as one type of social recluse or the other, and our relationships with women, though colourful, were not entirely picture perfect.

These days, though, I think things are getting better (I sing the Beatles' song everyday). It's been a trend: when Father's life sucks, the suckey juices trickled down to us. Right now, he's doing well and I'm under hopeful hopes that some of the good stuff will find its way down here too.

I forget: I'm happy today, and I'm not used to it. Kaya siguro corny diary entry gawa ko ngayon. Just had a birthday last 31st, and it went well considering it lacked the presence of many friends. I will be buying beer at the Jade Valley tomorrow. If you want to drop by, drop by.

fictional amputees

2006-10-12T13:24:00.000+08:00

Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, the (only) Pulitzer Prize-winning political comic strip, gave a rare interview recently for Rolling Stone Magazine (www.rollingstone.com). It was about the US war on Iraq and about how he used to go to school with President GWBush, of whom he doesn't have a pretty opinion.

One of his characters just lost a leg in the war (in comic strip continuity) Trudeau has been protesting from the start. Doonesbury has been around for 3 decades, so for Americans, having one of the Doonesbury cast have something bad happen to her or him is a big deal. This particular character, DB, was also previously never seen without some sort of head gear, usually a football or military combat helmet. With the loss of his leg also came DB’s first appearance bareheaded, which was also a big deal. I’m posting an excerpt from that interview, and, even if this isn’t going to make much sense, imagine, at least for the first part of his answer, that Garry Trudeau was God:

RS
Some writers regard their fictional characters almost as real people. But you don't seem very broken up about blowing B.D.'s leg off.

GT
Well, the terrible truth about writers is, they create characters and then they put them in harm's way. That's what drama is about. As a writer, I don't have an emotional link to the characters. I have to summon them up -- I have to pull them out of the toolbox and put 'em to work. They don't live in my head. So I was overwhelmed by some of the letters that came in about B.D. It was so emotional. People wrote that it made them feel they had a personal stake in the war -- like someone they knew had been harmed. People were even more astonished when B.D.'s helmet came off. It signified his vulnerability and made it all the more difficult for them to accept. I was talking to a soldier in the hospital, and I said, "I draw this comic strip, and I have this character named B.D. who lost his leg." The soldier's eyes widened: "B.D. lost his leg?!" Here's this mangled, broken hero lying in his bed, and he's concerned that this character he knows had such a terrible thing happen to him. It was very moving.

Paranoid andriod on the new white

2006-10-08T16:51:00.000+08:00

Only chance in months I got to sit down and write something without busted PCs, typhoons, gigs, and fatigue getting in the way. I must apologize again. Hi again.

Why I like the phrase The New White: did you know that during the 1930s, US congress, desperate to stay racist, had to revise the laws that constitute who could be declared an American Citizen because the word “white people” would technically have to include Asians with pale skin? I think they started using Caucasian instead. The bastards.

The episode of the Discovery Atlas series of documentaries I managed to catch this morning featured the big-guns-subject: China, The People’s Republic of. We all know how western documentary filmmakers pee in their pants when someone mentions the Great Wall and the people behind it. China is all the hype because what’s happening right now in that big chunk of country and nation is massive. They are the oldest surviving civilization. And they will one day, with no doubt, dominate the economic globe at least. And from the looks of things, it won’t be too speculative to say they might have dibs on cultural and political dominance too. I am both fascinated by this phenomenon, and excited from a regional point of view, but also scared of the future it will/might bring.

So much of what we have perceived as familiar will be things of the past —imagine English, a language we have used and have spent years mastering, being secondary to the Chinese languages in terms of economic importance. Philippine westerness has put us in another little irony bubble: At least a quarter of our cultural identity owes itself to China, a country that at least shares one of its timezones with us, whose people(s) have been migrating to our shors and living peacfully with us for centuries. Still though, the people we’ve long considered the educated among our countrymen are those that have grown up with the language of America (and the UK, medyo lang) glistening on their lips.

Hey,

I am proud of our little Third-world eccentricities, the Philippine cultural mix and matches. To be an English-espokkenning Maynileño, spawn of VST, the Eraserheads, Pol Medina Jr., and Manila’s schoolyards and urban dredge as much as of Jim Henson, Nirbana, Star Trek, and the Beatles, and to be self-conscious enough to realize how absurd that could be if you think about it, is, I think, one of the best things in the world to be (I could imagine Singaporeans thinking the same way, but they’re more British influenced—whole different thing— and their city is too orderly to be absurd in a fun way). My only problem is I feel like kicking myself in the teeth when I realize that I, in 23 years, have never even considered learning Cantonese, Fukien, or Mandarin. Considering my unhealthy aversion to learning anything directly taught to me (I have put myself on a constant need-to-know basis), I figure if I start now, I’ll be fluent by the time I’m 64. You should try it, though. Learning French and German is nice and all, but they’ll only be useful for when you want to pick up mestiza socialites (or European investors) or if you’re planning on migrating to Europe.

Does anybody relate with this? I grew up watching British guys talk about Orientals on TV. Remember those old documentaries on Japan that discuss topics ranging from the way they grow their vegetables to the way their artists create magnificent innovations in rocket science using the ancient art of paper folding? I used to love the nice afternoon feel of those documentaries. I loved going to Baguio because it reminded me of those shows and vice versa. Baguio reminded me of some small Japanese mountain towns shot in the summer (and vice versa). Ever notice how our Highlanders look, dress, and act a lot like some Chinese and Japanese highland tribes? It makes me think of how maybe altitude has a lot more to do with who we are than we think (like: If highland people have rosy cheeks and mummify their dead at some level or another, sea-level people like building big buildings and putting their departed six-feet under?). I remember these documentaries because it was always fascinating how the filmmakers treated the Japs both like a society of uber-alien weirdoes worthy of excited scientific goatee-stroking, and a highly respected nation of people that should be admired for what they have achieved and are still achieving every day.

Those documentaries were quaint and comforting. In contrast, the episode of Discovery Atlas on China was huge in terms of both execution and topic. Think watching a volcano erupt from a distance: Beautiful, and beneficial to the soil and landscape, but you know that if somebody somewhere is at the wrong place in the wrong time, then somebody will be badly hurt.

Discovery Atlas featured the stories of a Chinese corporate tycoon out to conquer the world of development; a young female gymnast vying for a position in the upcoming Olympics; a probinsyano who sought fortune in Shanghai but only ended up with a menial and ludicrous x-game job as a skyscraper window washer; a police woman trying to prove her worth in a society still old fashioned and, therefore, patriarchal; the last artisan capable of crafting Imperial Chinese bows (his art was all but obliterated by Mao’s Cultural Revolution); the surviving communities of Mongolian horsemen who still try to preserve their traditions in the face of modern development creeping from the southeast, and a Buddhist temple that still continues to teach the 2000-year-old art of Wu-shu, or Kung-fu, as most non-Chinese call it.

Overall, the stories were fragments that contrasted and complimented each other to wonderful effect. The old and the new: a nation pulling their weight overtime in order to conquer a world because they know they’re destined to do so. Inspiring. Made me want to pull my weight so a British guy would make a similar documentary about the Philippine Islands (it is now widely believed among some anthropological groups that the Malay race migrated to the surrounding islands from the Philippines instead of the other way around as previously believed. Wouldn’t that be a cool introduction? Ethiopia of South East Asia?).

Particularly interesting was the documentary’s treatment of the Buddhist monastery where Kung Fu was taught for centuries. Two thousand years ago, the monks tried to live a peaceful life of meditation and simple monastic living. In order to do that, they had to devise a way of protecting themselves from pesky bandits that just won’t leave them alone. So they make Kung-fu and manage to preserve it, alongside their peaceful, meditative rituals. Today this particular monastery still promotes martial arts tempered with peaceful meditation, but its star student plans on pursuing what thousands of other young Chinese children want: enough Kung-fu skill to get them into a job as either a security guard, policeman, or soldier. In the cities, Chinese youth flock to Wu-shu academies—schools that teach the martial arts minus the philosophical baggage—for this same purpose. Discovery Atlas was kind enough to show footage of the vast training fields: Thousands of kids synchronized in Ka-ta, faces serious as hell, hardened muscles already developing. Now if you were as prone to paranoid speculation and gullible to movies as I, you’d think as I do:

-Doesn'rt this look a little like the birthing of a super army of kung-fu fighters armed with guns, tanks, and air support?

-Don’t the Philippines and China have ongoing territorial disputes over islands in the South China Sea?

-Isn’t the only thing that’s keeping the PRC from being capable annexing Taiwan and other surrounding nations their own gracious will, and the possibility of going head-to-head with the technologically superior US armed forces? Isn’t the only real edge of the USAF against China the capability to transport troops and arms with lightning efficiency? And If China is going to be the world’s leading economic power in 20 years, doesn’t that mean they’d be more and more capable of producing the technology capable of mobilizing millions and millions of troops, thus making them more than a match for the US? And, if the American trend of forcefeeding the world with its hypocrytical ideals using the barrel of a gun continues, would we one day want the Chinese to be capable of at least keeping possible US tyranny in check?

My God, I’m talking crazy again.

I love being paranoid. Philip K. Dick, sci-fi novelist, was paranoid of the Japanese economic machine taking over the world by the 1980s. He had died by the time that decade came about, and it didn’t happen exactly as he or other people feared, but one of Dick’s most celebrated novels, The Man in the High Castle, was partially brought about by this paranoia. Sometimes I playfully like to think of my little rants on this subject as seen from the point of view of a pre-Roman Empire, small, independent Mediterranean nation wondering what to think of the sudden progress the neighboring Latins have been enjoying lately.

The company I work for will be hosting a Philippines–China exchange program next month and I am very excited at the chance of meeting my first Chinese guy from the mainland. I have tones to ask him. Thing is, when I show a particular interest in people, especially foreigners, I come across as more weird and freakish than I already am. I mean, I was once kidding around with a Japanese teen, and he freaked out on me when I said bakero in fron of him. I was just kidding. Really.

My new motto as of now is: Learn to shut up.

Would you be reading this if you were addicted to porn?

2006-08-31T00:17:00.000+08:00

Take a good look at her.
Ok, now that you've done your business, check this:

She's TWELVE you motherfucker, and was eleven when a lot of her photos were taken. You perv. Scum of the Earth. wormwormwormworm man. Pero, oo nga, oo na, Opo na po, ako yung nag-post. I too am scum. But I did it because it's a pretty photo, and i did it to to make a point.

Admit it admit it, male viewer, you digged it,

And that’s well before I mentioned her age.

But now that I did, no hard-ons have hid:

If this were a mag, you’d rip off the page.

Point: We’re such sickos.

Pic above is of Saara Irie from Japan, born 1993. Pop star singer in little girl group called Sweet Kiss. She shot to stardom not entirely relying on standard triple threat talent—she took The Path of Spears, and as far as that goes, she’d be considered a prodigy. She’s a size F, which in Japan would be the equivalent of a C or D cup. And if you know the Japanese, an eleven-year-old posing in bikinis with weapons like that would be a fantastic, not-so-plastic, oh so pretty little yen machine.

Around 2005, at the height of political tension between the two biggest countries in Asia today over shit that happened some sixty years ago, some guy posted Saara’s photos in a China-based anti-Japanese sentiment site. With the pictures came calls for peace between the two nations (said something about Saara’s breasts rising up if ever the hatred ended and her not liking you if it didn’t). No real statistics to prove this, but word is it actually worked. Chinese forums gave Jap-bashing a break for a while and instead produced waves of praise for the chinky wee Lolita (redundant ba yung wee Lolita?). And just as the idea of Jap-product boycotts was easing up, the Sweet Kiss manager announced Saara’s retirement from posing in skimpy two-pieces, which lasted just up until the release of her latest DVD, "Little Legend". Promotions must have been a bitch.

Now, I’d say something about the exploitation of the young and all that blablablarrrgh, but you’re probably thinking it already (if you're not, then get a clue). Google if you like. You can’t make this stuff up. Just be easy on the image engine, boyow.

[Indulge me this stupidity, please. In a slump, and I’m down past the count. And I’m sooo sleepy without being able to sleep. You’re awake and you’re not. You can’t work or talk or write anything of substance. You know, some guy once talked about insomnia and tried to make it seem like a good thing:
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
-Leonard Cohen

Yes, that’s what he said. And he’s some bigshot Canadian poet/songwriter guy who got quoted in some Reader’s Digest issue somewhere, so he has to be right. But you know what? Not a superior-feeling bone in my body right now. If there is one, it’s in hiding, or it’s asleep. If I were sleeping I’d get more work done, I’d have better skin, I’d have brighter eyes and a funny little twinkle in them that says, “Hey, I’m not happy, but I’m sleeping, so I got the energy to at least pretend.” ]

SHITHEADS

2006-08-24T12:35:00.000+08:00

Surfing through American Republican and Democrat propaganda images, I came across a tee-shirt image that read ‘OUR COUNTRY IS BEING RUN BY SHITHEADS’—something obviously written by a Bush-hating Democrat. I'd have gotten one if:

- I were American
- I were filthy rich with a credit card (i.e., as I said, American).
- it wouldn't be easier just to silkscreen one myself.
- it weren't, even (especially?) in the case of our dear country, the equivalent of buying a tee that says ‘IT'S FUCKING HOT IN THE TROPICS’.

Shoot me if I'm just being cynical, but everybody's bickering: Congress, the opposition parties, activists, my next door neighbour, and now me. Help me. I've only just recently started paying attention to the news again, and, as far as recent events and the colorful personalities that abound them are concerned, I'm lost in the woods, and confused, and I'm getting really depressed. It's both bad and so humdrum it's getting boring already. I think I know the answer to this question, but: Was it always this weird?

God bless the funny papers.

PEN call

2006-08-23T12:05:00.000+08:00

The Philippine PEN is now accepting submissions for an anthology of short fiction in English to be published in 2007.

Filipino writers under 45 years of age are invited to submit one recent, unpublished short story of no more than 8,000 words to the

Philippine Center of International PEN
531 Padre Faura Street, Ermita
Manila
e-mail address: philippinepen@yahoo.com
cc to penfictionantho@gmail.com

Deadline of submissions is December 31, 2006.

Address all inquiries to the above addresses as well. Submissions must be typeset in double-spaced 12-pt Times New Roman. The title page must contain the author’s name and complete contact information. The last page must be author’s bio of no more than 150 words.

Hardcopy submissions must be printed on letter-size bond paper and be accompanied by softcopy in Rich Text Format (*.rtf) on floppy disk or CD. E-mail submissions must be sent as Rich Text Format attachments.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

VICENTE G. GROYONFiction Editor

Like shooting fish in a barrel

2006-08-22T16:57:00.000+08:00

I

JASON BONUS was on his back half the time I knew him. He taught me how to drink (though I'm not sure you could actually teach someone how to drink), and he used to drink prolifically—with no morrow in mind. And when he got drunk, he did it with his eyes closed and his back to the floor, or pavement, or parked automobile hood. So seeing him in his funeral last week wouldn't have seemed unusual, except he was wearing a barong and was inside a white box. Except that people around him weren't getting drunk, they were crying. And he was now a piece of meat. Friend, neighbour, guitarist, former child star, brother (to both his siblings and his friends, because he was kin in all aspects but that small matter of blood), and, as of the morning of August 12, 2006: inanimate flesh. Holy fuck.

When things like this happen, you sometimes go nuts: Outside the funeral home, where everybody smoked as if there was an unspoken communal desire to follow Jason ASAP, there were ants. You know how ants carry the bodies of their fallen comrades away? It would be nice to imagine ant burial rites, cremations, little ant Viking funerals, little ant crying ladies all dressed in white. But in truth, and you know this as much as I do, ant dead become ant food. If they were people, their morticians wouldn't embalm, they'd marinate. If I were a fucking ant, I'd be EATING Jason. Holy holy fuck.

He's alive, you know, in our heads, and we talked to him like he was there. We talked to him about how funny he looked wearing pink lipstick. I must have told at least a dozen people that Jason'll be pissed as soon as he wakes: Ba't ako naka-LIPSTICK!!! We pretended he was asleep and that there was no rush, he'll wake up sooner or later before this is all over. He'd be up before we have put him in a hole in the ground.

Here's a way to look at things: we are little more than ideas in the heads of each other. We exist, in society, as our fellows see us, and when somebody dies, her/his version of you bites the dust too. The me in Jason's head just died. It's hard, loony and very sentimental, and it would be very uncomfortable because he'll be very unresponsive from now on, but I don't want the Jason in my head to die too.

II

Jason used to go to our house everyday, to eat and use the bathroom whenever he felt hungry or too lazy to walk to his house and use his own, respectively. He was always welcome. He's one of the neighbourhood slackeyboys I keep talking about. He's the guy who had that conversation with Ate Elvi (see the entry ‘eabab sa yahab’) In fact, if you think about it, considering what I mentioned in same entry about that guy trying to get into my house, he, along with Chuck (another neighbourhood kid), probably saved my life. When people die, you think about these things.

Jason played guitar like a sickness: he infected people around him to want to play too. You know how passionate some people could get around a musical instrument, right? If there were a ten-point scale with 1 being passing glance at guitar, and 10 being ‘I'll murder you if you scratch her’, Jason would be a 9.9 (because I once scratched his Strat and I'm still alive). He'd fuck his guitar if he could, and he sometimes mimicked fucking it while performing. With him and Marufel Distajo, a guy I went to high school with, I formed my second high school band, which was never really named properly. It was my favourite one. I played bass and sang and Mafel pounded, Jason shredded. Even after we disbanded we still had a bit of a dynamic duo thing going on. We used to keep the people of our street awake with our drunken acoustic renditions of ‘Cast of Clowns’ by Wolfgang, ‘Under the Bridge’ (he's the only person i've heard play a perfect 'Under the bridge') and ‘Soul to Squeeze’ by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, ‘Plush’ by the Stone Temple Pilots, etcetcetc. Few people complained, so maybe we weren't all that bad.

We used to keep a studio minus the drums in my room. Two amps, my bass and his Strat. We once got in a fight and he barged in on me early the next morning to get his guitar and amp. Shirtless, barefoot and in my boxers, I followed him all the way to his house trying to convince him to reconsider. If I remember right, we passed by Meggie's (my ex's) house and were spotted by her mother, who had a good, long look at us bickering like the little half-naked shits that we were. Oh, the shame. But we made up, and the next time Meggie's mom saw us making a scene in front of their house, we were keeping Jason from killing another guy.

In the past months we didn't see much of him. He got married to a long-time girlfriend and moved in with her family somewhere in Antipolo. He was doing well: got a good thing going with Teletech, and he was in what we'd like to think was his dream band, Leash, an ala-Razorback blues rock outfit where Jason's retro sensibilities shone. The band had just broken into getting paid for gigs, and his wife, Angel, had just given birth to their daughter, Raven, when he died. It was a motorcycle accident at the foot of the Marikina overpass involving, according to some versions of the story, a very sadistic PUJ driver. Go to the spot and you could still see the skid mark left by his bike's kick-start pedal. His helmet wasn't fastened, so it flew before he hit the ground and cracked his skull. During the funeral, he had a visible cross-shaped scar on his scalp that would have been a good topic for conversation if it weren't so awkward to talk about it. Raven, whom people say is the splitting image of her father, was just seven days old and was sick in the hospital when it happened. Now, if that isn't a motherfuck, I dunno what is.

For those who don't know Jason, just dig into childhood flashbacks for that old Bearbrand commercial with the bear mascot and the Philippine nuclear family. He was the little boy. Everybody used to call him Beerbrand. Get it? Bearbrand? Beerbrand? You know… . Pota. We'll miss him.

Hell hath no fury

2006-07-31T23:49:00.000+08:00

like BATAMAN!!!

DADADADADADADA(… ‘60s Batman theme… )DADADADADADADADADA

BATAMAN!

My cat. She’s real angry today. I didn’t feed her anything nice for weeks (She loves the tuna: low fat, high in whatever makes you buy it for your heart. But FATHER hates it when I give her the tuna. He never says it out loud, but I know what he’s thinking: The cat gets all the healthy food, and we have to settle for crisp, golden—DEADLY— pork chops and chicken. She hates shrimp). Or maybe she's mad because I found her sleeping between my legs last morning and I threw her off the bed. God knows how many times I said sorry. She does that, you know, knowing that I move my feet all rhythmic while asleep. Doesn't want to sleep beside me, just between my legs—or on my head—where she gets in the way. Now she's mad at me. First she scratches me as soon as I get home, then leaves without saying goodbye. Goes out the window: into the rain. She’ll be back, sleeping between my legs by morning, or the next day, maybe just to annoy me. But the thought of her out in the cold, all by herself, or being sniffed at by some stray tom, eaten by the retrievers and pitbulls the neighbors let roam our streets like bandits. Now that’s just depressing.

We raised her—all four of us (FATHER, me, BROTHER JUAN CARLO and BROTHER JUAN PAOLO), like a goddamn four men and a baby flick, except not as pretty. When she got sick (pregnant for the 3rd time, baby never came out, festered inside her), we nursed her to health and made so many Kodak moments; when she feels she needs exercise, we offer our hands as sparring partners. When she feels neglected, we smother her with LOVE until it annoys her so much, she battles to get away. And now she’s out, parading the streets (she likes walking. She’s the only cat I know who demands to be taken on walks), spreading the dread of her relentless catty temper all over the Roxas District. God help them. God help us. She’s NOT with us, safe and sound and eating every minute. I call her BATAMAN to avoid confusing her with the superhero. I say it like it’s spelled, upper case everything. But her name’s Batman—I’d like to think she feels aggravated whenever we watch Justice League, with all that voice talent screaming her given name from TV speakers turned up too high. But she’s a cat. I scream the Batman song into her ears and she looks at me like I’m a tick. If I were thrice the size of one, she’d EAT me. Nothing fazes her except over-cuddling and drunk teenagers who think cats were born to be tortured. You know, she once chased a medium-sized dog away while protecting her kids. She didn’t just drive the dog away. She nipped him on the nose and CHASED him. Pota! Less than half his size. What a fireball. We all love her. All of us, friends and family alike. And here she comes. I hope she’s ok.

People might think (and I know a few will) that I’m trying to talk about something else discreetly by talking about something else (I swear there’s a shorter way to say that. What's it called again?). But I’m not. Maybe I am, but I assure you I’m not.

Proof na 'la talaga akong magawa

2006-07-26T14:24:00.000+08:00

Lemming talk: On non-sweldo days, walking down a Megamall hallway is usually humdrum (otherwise, it would be a solo speedwalk to the gooddamn bookstore). I stroll through the gut of the not-so-big-anymore white mammoth everyday on the way home with little more in my head than the paltry question as to whether to take a bus or the train. In case someone I know spots me, they'd find the living dead: Mouth novacained, eyes half open ala Garfield , hands in pocket ala Alanis song, and head lazily basking in dreadful lack of stimulation of any kind in a place screaming of advertising and (not so successful) shock marketing.

Then, yesterday: BOOM. I see this run-off-the-mill Levi's poster advertising jeans with the quintessential formula of pretty kid in cool rags not making love to the camera + one-line copy out to conquer a generation. We see millions of these things in our everyday and, unless particularly "talented" models are involved, pay them about as much attention as we do presidential promises (nakanaman!).

This particular poster had a male teen with all the nutritional requirements: low on fat, high on artificial irony and maybe something chemical. The copy read: I am not my father's second chance. And by god this got me blood runnin' (you're not your dad's second chance, yes. But you'll have to admit it sounds a little like a verbal middle finger gesture for all dads). Why pick on that? Do we have to go to places like this to sell denim these days? I've heard of how rock and roll starts to suck after the parents start liking it, but that doesn't work anymore seeing as most kids don't even listen to rock and roll anymore. As an ad, I guess it worked—got my attention–but I'm actually contemplating being a self-righteous prick and making it a point to not buy Levi's for as long as I live. I know a lot of people have problems with dads, and I'm probably one of them. But don't you think making the above line an ad phrase strikes a little bit too near the nerve endings of what could be very fragile domestic situations? Sure it's a hip generational gap thing, and I'm aware of the number of comedians who use their parents as the butt of jokes and yes I have also considered that maybe the line is meant to be a revved version of "Dude, this ain't your dad's Levi's anymore."

But it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I'm lucky enough not to have a douchebag father, and maybe the number of people who do justifies the ad. It just rubs me the wrong way, that's all. Or maybe it's just me.

I think I'll go back to Lemming mode.

LUCHA

2006-07-23T21:53:00.000+08:00

When the masked midgets appear and Jack Black (Nacho) and Hector Jimenez (Esqueleto) start screaming, you (I), in turn, start remembering Mucha Lucha, the CN cartoon about a possie of kiddie, masked Mexican wrestlers out to become the best luchadors (wrestlers, usually in masks and mandatory owners of patented signature moves) the tequila-drinking world has ever seen. The very idea could choke a man. Mexican masked wrestlers??! And I thought the WWE was weird! Check it, check it: If someone asks what Nacho Libre or Mucha Lucha is about, make sure he or she’s drinking something when you answer, preferably liquid that easily spurts through the nostrils.

The problem with Nacho Libre is it can’t be not funny (Mexican masked wrestlers??! And I thought etc., etc., etc. …!). Halfway through it, you know the facial expressions, accents, and the pot-bellied power stances should have gotten old, but you find yourself still laughing. You know, the people who made the damn thing could have done a better, crispier, job—it’s just they probably didn’t want to. A “better job” would have been beside the point. Minus the so-pretty-it’s-surreal nun, half the fun of the film is based on ugly-funny: Ugly old men’s faces (and an obese woman’s), ugly physical situations, ugly pot belly, and, in a way, ugly film making. Of course, by ugly, we don’t mean ugly per se. We mean different things: exaggerated physical features, cartoon violence set in live action, fat, and retro, respectively. Halfway through, you remember that the last person you asked about the movie said, “Puro kalokohan lang talaga. Pero laughtrip,” and now you know exactly what he means. The filmmakers (and you know I’m guessing here), wanted to make the thing look as crude and ill prepared for as possible in theme with the whacky third world setting. Think Hollywood film so far from Hollywood, or Hollywood film that hides Hollywood so discreetly in the masterfully choreographed ring battles like the one involving the ninjitsu midgets and Jack Black’s hefty torso as fireman’s pole. Besides that, the scenes are cut in a way that reminds you (me) of college films and bootleg copies of old Monti Python (Oh, but on that note, the whacko behind this movie was also responsible for Napoleon Dynamite. Well.Ü). It rubs off on me a little like an indie music video by a retro-getup Pinoy band with garage sensibilities and a mighty sense of humor.

Retro, retro, with a wee-bit nostalgia: To a Philippine viewer, Hector Jimenez, loyal sidekick, brings them in spades. Sure, he’s a Mexican theatre actor, but doesn’t he remind you so much of our old, local comedy heroes. All of a sudden my gut is craving for Richie de Horsey, Panchito, Rene Requiestas. Thank God for their emaciation, bad teeth, and exceptional ability to look/act blissfully stupid and to take regular head swipes when needed from their Vics, Joeys and Dolphies, at their expense and their viewers’ joy. And now that Jimenez has breached mainstream American cinema, maybe we’ll be seeing more of that in the future.

I’m looking for a copy of Starzan, by the way, or other movies like it. I know I probably won’t enjoy them as much now as I did as a kid, but if anybody could help out, I’m willing to pay. Oh, and while I’m at it, does anybody know where to get a Nacho Libre soundtrack? I’d play it everyday ‘till I poop salsa if I got one.

Short notes on Superman

2006-07-17T18:05:00.000+08:00

(Disclaim everything: So as to not look so much like an ignorant etits, I must mention that I refrained from visiting online discussions about the subject before coming up with the crap below. Maybe it's just me, but I figured visiting those things, though very entertaining and informative, is the best non-torture-related way to get yourself to feel bad for having an opinion. I visit after.)

If someone asks me how I thought the new movie was, I'd say:

-Routh wasn't that bad after all, but he made a better Clark Kent than a Superman. Something to do with how forced his Superman voice sounded, and how real the Kent awkwardness was portrayed. If anybody agrees with Bill (in Kill Bill vol 2), she/he'd say it's supposed to be the other way around: if anything, the Superman persona should look more natural, and the Kent's should look like the one being farced. I still thing Bana would have made a more appropriate Superman, but I'm very aware that less and lesser people are going to agree with me now.

-The special effects were good, but that's mandatory, meyn. I did appreciate very much, though, how they made saving a plummeting 747 without damaging it extensively enough to kill the people inside look harder than it does in the cartoons and comics—even for a man with near-infinite physical capabilities. I hated how they made some of the Superman-in-orbit scenes look so CGI, you feel your watching the intro of an Xbox game ( I'd say the same thing about Neo's flight scenes in Matrix: Revolutions and Legolas killing the cave troll in The Fellowship of the Ring. I guess it couldn't be helped half the time).

-non-hardcore fans, I think, wouldn't appreciate it as much. Some scenes and details—like the old Marlon Brando footage as Jor-El and the scene with the car (classic AC cover!!)—are tidbits meant for geekazoids and old fans of the old series.

-Kevin Spacey brilliantly portrayed a one-sided villain that would have sucked if he wasn't playing the role. He came across as a guy paying tribute to Hackman's version—still with the hint of comedic relief even when you thought that part of the Lex Luthor Character was obliterated by the more serious versions of him in more recent cartoon series. My biggest bet before seeing the flick was Clancy Brown, who did the voice of the cartoon version. If you've seen brown (check out Reverend Justin Crowe in the mucho astig HBO series, Carnivàle), you might have noticed too his slight similarities to the cartoon Luthor's persona, at least in terms of screen presence.

When people ask me what I think of the story, I say:

-It is a movie about superman. Making one of these is almost the equivalent of doing a movie about Jesus Christ. Revolutionizing the script would be sacrilege, and, as long as the special effects and cinematography have adapted to the times, it wouldn't really matter if they'd gotten some random 12-year-old or 12 middle aged men in suits who have never opened a comic book in their lives to draw the storyboard, as long as they retain the basic elements: Alien in tights with incredible powers tries to fit in in world while trying to save it one airplane crash, earthquake and extraterrestrial invasion at a time. While he's at it, he tries to make it with girl who hates him when he fits in, and loves him when he stands out (in motherfukin’ tights).

Someone told me it seems very un-nationalistic to be a major fan, especially now, given Supes' being the all-Am symbol of might.

To that I said the writers of recent Superman books, and the movie, are now recognizing this little fact, and are reacting in two ways:

-They're trying to make the man from Krypton go global. Hardly anybody uses ‘Truth, Justice and the American way’ anymore. If you noticed, Mr. Perry in the movie cut himself short after ‘Truth and justice’ and went for ‘…all that stuff’ instead. In the movie house I almost heard the collective deep breath of an audience preparing for the awkward moment ‘the American way’ will be mouthed. And, though the movie was set in Metropolis, it wasn't left out that Superman spent a lot of time doing his thing in other countries (there was also a mention of him spending an hour in Manila, though I suspect that if I were watching in Tokyo, that particular line would have said Tokyo instead.I'm going to have to check that out sometime.

-They use the current situation with the US to spice up an already dragging series. Hardy any supervillain of interest could stand up to super man in a good old fist-to-fist for more than a few minutes, so stories about Supes interfering in world events, acting the role of the world superpower and being constantly criticized because of this have been a trend (check out the For Tomorrow series by Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee).

As I see it, superman was an inevitable character. He's universal–no need to expound on that one. Somebody had to do him first. Just so happens the Americans did, at a time they were practically ruling the world even. Hell, if Nietzsche were a comic book artist, Superman would have been credited to him(in a way, isn't it already?). If we were ruling the world, Darna would be the World's Finest Superhuman. I just hope somebody won't tell me I'm being un-nationalistic for not watching Captain Barbel. You could hear the rip off from a mile away.

eabab sa yahab

2006-07-05T02:46:00.001+08:00

I’m supposed to be writing about this site about net video games with themes revolving around excrement. I checked out the site (check it out too. Hey, it’s about shit, must be fun [http://www.m80teams.com]) but my home computer’s too slow, and God forbid I play doodie games at the office—we just moved, and my new work station is separated from my boss’s by transparent material called glass. Gone are my days of surfing for information on Charles Manson and the torture methods of the Spanish Inquisition. I hereby welcome myself to the middle of another shallow third world lower-middle class dilemma: we got the computers, but they’re too slow to keep up with most things worth the while.

While my venture into shit-slapping fun has been delayed, I’ll keep myself busy with a subject on the other end of the spectrum.

We have no women at home, just my dad and two brothers living in a narrow three-storey dunghole where we drink, cook pasta dishes, watch TV and sweat profusely. The much hackneyed terms my friends and I used to use were frathouse and boy’s dorm. Inside it is a different century, a time when metrosexuality was a thing of either the distant future, or the dripping gay. I love the place, but census has it that it’s unsuitable for the female of the species. It is perennially dusty, humid like armpit, smells of leftover food, dirty dishes and nuclear socks, and it’s covered in male sheddings (pants and shirts on the floors and couches, discarded and left the way snakes do their skin). The house’s history of (human) female tenants is a short one: four cleaning ladies who came and left over the period of about eight years, all once proud bearers of the almost ceremonial and revered title Ate. There was Ate Elvie, Ate Anna, Ate Amy, and the other one’s name I didn’t care to remember—she left in a furious hurry after raking our phone bill to well above Php20 000. Of all of them, Ate Elvie was the most respected and missed. She had a superior air about her that kinda reminds you of a butler (I serve you, but I ain’t your servant, and I probably have more class). And by god she cleaned like a madman—hard as we try, we couldn't get the place as clean as it was when she maintained it (kept it inhabitable was one word someone once used). With her it was Art the way we use the word when we mean it. Couldn’t stand dirty things, so she cleaned them out of pure impulse. I used to come home from a bad day in high school (there were few good ones) and feel the chilling rush of 8-year-old Christmas when I go up to my room and find my electric fan spic and span inside-out. I used to forbid people from entering my room, but Ate Elvie, apparently, could sniff the dust from three floors down. If I had a lock, she would have broken it down with a broomstick. My dad and tito taught her too cook, and for a while she was concocter of the tastiest garlic-fried tapa this side of the galaxy. This, and her no nonsense ability to take no shit from anybody (she’d just as soon order us to wash our own dishes as serve them to us) earned her the respect of all my neighborhood friends, who’d come over regularly hoping to grab a free meal at about the time Yu Yu Hakusho aired on prime-time IBC. Her accent was as Bisaya as it comes, and for that reason, the once distasteful juvenile habit of taunting the Southern accent simmered down as a trend among the neighborhood slackyboys. It was normal fare for her to send my friends away with their tails between their legs when they come looking for me when I’m not around:

Friend: Cholo! (Clap! Clap!-signal)
AE: Wala siya!
Friend: Uy, Ate, may tapa ba kayo diyan?
AE: Meron!
Friend: Pa-Abusayap naman diyan o! (Abusayap: dekwat, kidnap)
AE: Hinde pwede! Wala nga si Cholo e!
Friend: Sige na, masarap e.
AE: Hinde!
Friend: Ate naman…
AE: Hinde pwede! Alis!

The scenario above would be when she’s in a bad mood—which was almost always (probably had a lot to do with the misfortunes of then mega-popular fictional Mexican belle Mari-Mar). They sometimes got in to terrorize our fledgling food supply though, but the tapa’s so good, nobody’s blaming anybody for spreading the golden garlicy love.

Cute story:
Once from a neighbor’s house I spotted a guy fiddling with the jalousies of our front window, trying to get his arm in to unlock our front door—he was tall, thin, smelled maybe of rotting teeth or crack, not sure which, and his baggy clothes looked as if they were worn less for fashion and more for concealing rusty weaponry. Young and stupid, I approached him unarmed and barefoot on the asphalt (I consider footwear to be a major decisive factor in any physical confrontation). I candidly asked him what he wants, and he approached me with the resigned look of a man about to stab someone, which vanished after two of my friends came up behind me (also barefoot, but shirtless and tattooed enough to scare, if I remember right. Numbers and a little intimidation were always considered more important than good shoes when it came to fights). Being the civilized individuals that we were, we asked him again what he wanted (I look back at this and feel like a wuss). He does the eyeballs-roll-to-the-upper-left-side-of-face and comes up with a quick one: he said he was there to visit Ate Elvie. Ate Elvie, at that moment, popped a sleepy head out the door and asked what the hell was going on, and why did she hear her name. We briefed her, and she crankily dismissed the notion of ever seeing the man before and popped back into the house to doze off. Loverboy, caught with his lying hand down his pants, made a run for it with an efficient pair of rubber slippers under his soles. Ate Elvi’s secret admirer was the butt of many jokes after that, but she snapped at us less and laughed with us more as it got older.

Ate Elvi left to get married to a security guard. Last I heard she's staying in pasig. We felt like abandoned children the day she split. She was probably terrified at the notion of her leaving a place that needs so badly to be cleaned (naw, probably not). We gave her a few of our kiddie pictures to remind us of her—pictures she’s probably thrown by now. We also gave her a shot of my dad running ala Baywatch hunk along a beach. She would have kept that one, many a woman have looked at me with disgust after seeing the Euroness of my dad’s physique.

I sat down to talk about a totally, more up-to-date subject. Harder than I thought. I guess I’ll work my way up to the now, little-by-little. Lots of women to talk about. Just realized how many of them I know, and how few of them I know intimately (keep them dirty thoughts to thyself, sinner. Hahoo!). Nevertheless, be it grandmother or ex, cleaning lady or sexy neighbor, most have had a significant effect, or at least, are interesting enough to talk about. Oh, and try to make sense of this: chronic lack = an abundance of motivation to pick at like a scab. What the..!?

rock en roll ulit

2006-06-09T00:27:00.000+08:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve rock and rolled. I’m going to have to apologize to Ned Parfan in particular. He particularly complained about my not updating this little baby here.

It’s been about two months, I think. Lot’s have happened. I’ll try to make a small lista. Just a few things:

– Joined the 2km barbecue grill fiesta at Alcala Pangasinan, where my lola grew up. It was with the mother’s side—big fat-greek-wedding-version side. It was noisy. It was fun. We had 18 grills in our charge and free meat and fish from Monterey. All the grills, lined up and tied up to make a long one looking to make it to the Guinness books, were lit at the same time with a motorbike, kerosene, and two very long pieces of cloth. I was hoping for big booms. Mostly, we got lots of smoke.
You learn a new thing every day. Found out that: 1) my family wouldn’t be able to run a fast food joint if our lives depended on it (half the meat burned to carbon); 2) Rusty Lopez (yes, the designer guy), is from Alcala; 3) Corn takes such a long time to cook. 3) Mark Logan (who was kind enough to cover the event), wouldn’t notice you even if you were the only guy grilling corn on a two km grill full of meat.

– Found out from numerous sources that I am a sucky writer and a sucky person altogether. Now trying to remedy the latter. The former, I think, can’t be helped (or is it the other way around?).

– Got a job. Hard one too. As a copyeditor. Doesn’t pay much, but basically they pay you to read and clean up scientific and academic papers which could be interesting during illuminating moments of luck. Now if only I could get good at it.

Besides this, all the so-so’s still happening, and a few really cool things that I just could’t seem to remember (“Oh my God, I gotta post this!” [three hours later] “Ano nga ulit yon? Porno na nga lang!”). Did get the computer at home fixed recently though. First time since high school we have the benefit of an Internet connection at home. I might be able to actually make something of this blog. Pero gabi na. Tulog na tayo.

It's a wonderful world

2006-04-17T15:30:00.000+08:00

What’s (un)cool these days:

-I just received spam blog comments! At least they looked like spam. Asteeeeg!

-Had diarrhea (on and off—but mostly on, unless I drank Coke without water) from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday: confirmation that God is tired of my toilet humor and wants to punish me. Speculation is I got it from this deep-fried mollusk dish called capiz that also managed to get my brother’s blood pressure up and drive two of my aunts to the toilet too. It was hell good though, the dish. I’d go through the whole thing again any day.

-had a drink with a few small-time shady characters lately. They have a pretty interesting operation going. They deal drugs, but, when they feel like it, they don’t and take the money anyway. They make it look like one of the chain-links in the red tape-process made for both parties’ safety got busted by the police. Just so happens, that particular link (runner or whatever you want to call him) is also the only one the buyers know how to contact. So when the buyers—usually rich druggy teenage girls extremely scared of getting caught—call up, all they have to do is pretend that they’re in police custody. I was right there when this guy’s client called, he said, “Nasa [name of police station] ako eh. Kung gusto niyo, puntahan ninyo ako dito.” All the while, he counts the P4,000-P8,000 or so of his hard-earned cash while his friends—grateful for the free drinks—drunkenly mimic gruff police voices which aren’t at all convincing. You have to hate them, but give them credit anyway: for their willingness to purge teenagers of the habit by teaching them lessons (nyek!!). No seriously, they got me thinking. Here they are, the scum of the universe, fucking and scamming and beating people up like an American movie set in Detroit, and they got money easily obtained with no apparent consequences. God, it IS like a fuckin’ movie! A friend of mine who was with me, equally ignorant (innocent?) as I was, jokingly stated that he should try it out sometimes. I knew I couldn’t do anything like that, even if I would want to. I wouldn’t have the balls, or I’d have too much of a conscience—take your pick. I could say I’m more educated and, in some way, I could see the bigger picture, so I decide not to pursue shit activities like that, but I’d be bullshitting you if I did.

The Good Weekend (a diary entry)

2006-04-05T15:27:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, Friday, I went drinking with Glenn and Gelo. The week before that and the week before that, were the busiest, most depressing, and exciting weeks I’ve had in a long time (and get this: I spent most of them alone), so I was tired. I was wasted, wazak, burnt-out, pow, bam, bugbog, and emo depleted. So that particular Friday’s drink really got to me. I went home drunk and fell asleep for a few minutes on our doorstep, when I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t remember half of what happened the night before.

But that day—April 1 (yes, April fools)—was a good day. Got up at 10 am, early, considering the night before plastered me, and did some lounging about the house. My dad had cooked spaghetti, the sauce was made up of real tomatoes, no tomato paste, mind you. We topped it with mushrooms, tuna, and bacon, and a shit-load of chili-powder\flakes. I had three servings and a giant—fat American sized—glass of whole cream milk. What you get when you mix large amounts of milk and tomato sauce is what I discarded from my system every couple of hours for most of that afternoon.

Masaya yown, meyn! Nakaupo ka lang sa harap ng TV, o nakikinig ka ng mga tugtog na gusto mo, habang kakakain mo lang ng masarap na chibog at umiinom ka ng maraming gatas, tapos maya-maya tatae ka nalang. Masarap tumae e, kahit apat na beses sa isang araw, basta ba’t di ka madehidrate.

Then, mid-afternoon, I went to a local net shop to work on an article assigned to me by a former classmate that now works for a gaming mag. I happened to like this particular person, so working with her, even over the net, was fun (dun ko lang natuklasan ang mahika ng gmail chat). We worked out the article for about three hours, I went home in the evening, and went through the same process again (three servings of spaghetti, two mega glasses of milk, four trips to the bathroom). Then I called up an old 'friend' of mine just to literally say hi. I ended up escorting her to Tomas Morato where she was to meet up with her comrades for a Gerl's night out. It ended up with me walking home from Tomas Morato, which turned out to be pleasant, because it's not such a long walk, and there were a lot of friendly dogs all about on the way. When I got home, a neighbor of mine, really good friend, asked me to drink with him, so I went to his house (right in front of mine) and got plastered again and barfed anything undigested from my afternoon binge. If only weekends were always this simple. I’d be a saner man. Gotta run!

The term trivia is widely used to refer to tidbits of unimportant (or trivial) information

2006-03-29T16:01:00.000+08:00

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Cholo!

Contrary to popular belief, cholo is not successful at sobering up a drunk person, and in many cases he may actually increase the adverse effects of alcohol.
Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake' - this is a mistranslation of 'let them eat cholo'.
It is bad luck to light three cigarettes with the same cholo.
If cholo was life size, he would stand 7 ft 2 inches tall and have a neck twice the size of a human!
Over half of Americans are officially cholo.
Abraham Lincoln, who invented cholo, was the only US president ever granted a patent.
Humans share over 98 percent of their DNA with cholo.
Three seagulls flying overhead are a warning that cholo is near.
The number one cause of blindness in the United States is cholo!
Cholo is the oldest playable musical instrument in the world!

This is what I'd like to call a blog extender. y'know, like in corned beef, they put in stuff that aren't really meat just to add to the volume. sometimes, though, if you're in the mood for them, the extenders could be tastier than the meat. never more nutritious, just tastier.

Found this little bit in little miss Banzon's blog. She just celebrated her birthday last friday. it was the best bday celebration i've been to in a long time, even if i only made it to the second half of the celebrations. only thing that could stand up to it in my memory was my birthday maybe two years ago, when my friends and I celebrated it by having a cheap pellet-gun war in the middle of the street, then we got drunk afterwards--we HAD to get plastered: cheap pellet guns don't mean painless pellet guns. I think that was also the year another friend of mine crashed a scooter and got his face all mashed up and bloodied. He was in bandages for the next couple of months.

good times. GOOD times...

(Fiction) Ambel of the Narra goves

2006-03-18T22:21:00.004+08:00

This is one of the draft chapters that're supposed to be part of a longer work based on a sci-fi story I wrote. Reason I'm posting it is because I wrote in a few things about the the Internet. I was never good at computers (I just use them), so, if the people who'd take the time to read this would see stuff that aren't plausible, or are just plain wrong, then comments and suggestions would be appreciated. Peace out!

Ambel of the Narra groves

Jethro Dong and I first heard of Ambel’s Nobel Prize-winning plan the year the 50th mass stellar migration rocketed over two million rich folk to the moon, from where they were to be ferried to their respective newly purchased or inherited properties all over the solar system. This was exactly a year before Magenta joined them, and about two months before I met her in jail.
The midnight Ambel lumbered into Jethro’s Binondo workshop, we were in the middle of discussing whether or not we should be smuggling actual cow beef back to Earth, given that a big window of opportunity has recently opened itself to the wanting hands of Jethro--and we both wanted to know what meat that isn’t worm-meat tasted like. Though we had already taken in some substances, at that point we were still borderline-sober enough to think borderline-logically, and were therefore lobbying a perfectly fine argument against the whole idea. It was still smuggling afetr all, and to get caught would be out of the question. We were nearing the path of conceding to its being a bad idea when Ambel arrived, prompting both of us to take a massive shot of whisky each to brace ourselves for his less-than-welcome company. Ambel’s entrance was as loud and obnoxious as he usually was. He anounced his presence with a mightyly annoying bellow: “I HATH ARRIVED, MORTALS!” Then he tossed me a memory disk and said something I haven’t heard since 2nd-year 21st Century History: “The Internet.” He said it matter-of-factly and smug, as if I’d given a damn and asked him a question.
“Ano?” asked Jethro, clearly pissed Ambel managed to bypass his security system again.
“The Internet! It’s in my disk. I found it! Well, not the whole Internet. Just a lot of it,” said Ambel.
“The Internet?” I asked.
“Yes! The Internet!” said Ambel, shaking with excitement and/or lack of sleep and too much drugs. “I found it!” Ambel’s nose started bleeding a little--definitely from too much drugs. Luckily, we also suffered from too much drugs--the alcohol was all it took to agitate our conditions--so no one was thinking straight. Being very much out of our minds, we offered Ambel a syringe. He didn’t ask what was in it; he just poked his neck with it and passed out. Jethro and I took deep breaths and more shots of whiskey.

[For the next 12 hours, while Ambel was unconscious, Jethro and I went on discussing the cows. By this time though, there were enough amounts of everything from alchohol to synthesized toad poison in our bodies to prevent our heads from functioning properly. Ultimately, we came to the decision that Earth did deserve its bovines back (though not necessarily alive and in one piece), regardless of the possible maximum 20-year penalty. When people asked us much later on about how and when we came up with the idea for Space Cows: The All-Time Beefy Grill, we told them Space Cows was born while Ambel dreamt of the Internet while high on drugs.]
***

When the Internet came up in group conversation, it was usually at Ambel’s motivation. He loved it when people asked him questions: “What the hell is the Internet?” or “Don’t you mean the Holonet?” or “No, I think he means Infonet, right?” or even “Wait, I think I’ve heared of that, wasn’t that an old movie starring Sandra Bullock?”
Admittedly though, I’d be proud of myself during those incidents: I’d be reasurred that I’m one of the attentive few who actually listened to our parents and grandparents when they babbling about life in B.H. (Before Holonet).

The Internet was the Holonet’s predecessor, conceptualized almost a century before. The main difference to a layman, much like myself, would be its being accesable through flatscreen instead of virtual 3D. It connected the world, or at least attempted to, without the advantages of neuro-computer tech. While today we benifit from information processed directly into our neural pathways via 3 dimentional mental images, back then people only accesed a portion of the available information (in the form of 2D images, text, and, sometimes, audio clippings) from an LCD and speaker system, much like accessing the Holonet through our mobile palm officess when we switch off the holographic function to go veiw-only. The only reason the Holonet was called the Holonet was because long-time Internet users didn’t welcome the idea of something called the Neuronet coming along and replacing what had been the bastion of information dissemination for the past century. They warmed up better to the idea of 3D images replacing the flatscreen than to the idea of ‘injecting’ information directly to the brain--something that made the Internet, held in high sentimental reguard by a lot of people, completely obsolete.
Ambel was bonkers about the whole thing. He called the Internet the most democratic and all-encompassing medium of self expression--which was what we used to call the Holonet before Ambel dropped three hours worth of talk on us explaining the distinctions. In a nutshel: the Internet wasn’t maintained by a single, or even three or four companies alone. Anybody, even anybody who wasn’t somedody, had the right to leave their mark on the web, for minimum to no cost at all. This went so far as to people actually starting companies with web-based operations. Compared to then, today’s information spectacle would be a four player game of Monopoly. Back then, said Ambel, it was loads cheaper than it is now. Back then, it was treated more as a medium to advertise than as a service itself. And back then, he said, it was possible to log into the internet and remain anonymous. These days, anybody may access your identity, even if you projected an image totally not your own.
When Holonet technology was opened to the general public 50 years ago, the younger internet users jumped fence like gazelles: “Enter a whole new world!”-- that’s what Neuroworld said, so that’s exactly what they did. As for the older net users, most of the few who tried shifting found they couldn’t take it. It was too big a leap. Holographic displays were one thing, the “Neuronet” was another thing altogether. For a guy who’s spent 40 to 80 years in the real world, a sudden conveyance into a virtual one--one compact and palpitating with information in 3D multi-spectral-color and hyper-realistic surround sound-smell-feel (and sometimes taste)--has been compared to the shock a man blind since birth would recieve should he suddenly be granted sight without warning while crossing a busy street. Old Net veterans stopped logging in after a few days. Some stayed, but a lot of them went nuts after a while.

“Imagine giving your granddad infrared eyes, or ultraviolet sight, X-ray. Or sixth-fucking-sense,” said Ambel, 12 hours later, still swerving from the concentrated Melatonin solution we gave him. He was mad as a bastard ‘cause we made him miss a job interview. He vented his anger by talking about the Holonet. “Imagine, you have a nice little world veiw backed up by 75 long years of toeing the line,” he said. “And all of a sudden, BAM, they slap you with a big fat wad of ‘all you knew wasn’t a fraction of what’s out there.’ It was never a problem for us, ‘cause we were doing it as soon as we were five years old. Our minds have been conditioned for bombardment from the start.”
(Few people know this: five-years old is the legal age for logging in. Jethro Dong, though, has been logging into the Holonet since he was two. God knows what it’s done to his head.)
Ambel always wore bright neon clothing, he said it was a revival of some era. He was a sore sight against Jethro’s conrete gray walls. And he was popping chemicals--our well earned chemicals--into his stream like an Arabian stallion. “That’s why we didn’t go crazy-like like they did,” he said. “We were practically raised on it. But for those Internet crones? Them old-folk? For them it was like Plato’s goddamn cave and shadows. For them it was motherfuckin’ Horatio.”

You’d hardly tell from appearance, but Ambel’s a rich hijo de puta. Sure he’s fat and tall, and his clothes, though ghastly, looked like they actually cost something. But there was a look about him--maybe it was the acne he never bothered to have removed, or the mustache he never trims but never really thickens enough to be called a moustache anyway--that gave him an unsavory appeal. Whatever it was, he often surprised people when they find he’s one of the old rich still hanging on to their ancient trillions. He wasn’t exactly Luminous, but his was a family that made do with what the Earth offered them--which in their case was a few thousand hectars of lumber farmland.
Last summer he’s had the privelage of traveling across most of North America, with authentic legal papers, after graduating--a trip fully paid for by his mommy and daddykins. I don’t remember meeting anybody who’s ever bothered to pay for authentic travel papers anymore.
Ambel’s father wanted him to enter the tree farming industry--the family business for generations. I try to imagine the soap drama when he told his parents he wanted to get into NIT instead. Just think: they’re in the family den, standing on polished wooden floorboards, with a goddamn authentic fire-place crackling in the background to refine the mood and to break the chill of the artificial negative-five-degree-Celsius room temperature. Ambel walks up to Mr. and Mrs. Whatever, both nursing chapagne glasses to celebrate their son’s graduation at the top of his high school class, then he drops the bomb. I’m not going to be a lumber harvester. A glass shatters. Then a moment of silence, a flat out refusal, then:

Ambel: Daddy, Neuro Infotech is the future! This is an exciting time of great innovation.
Mr. Ambel: That’s what they’ve been saying even before I was a university freshman, son. The future lies in lumber. Supply is falling all over the world and demand will continue to rise.
Mrs. Ambel: That’s right, son. Didn’t you know the demand for authentic wooden furniture is at an all time high?
Mr. Ambel: And market analysts are saying they don’t see the demand falling any time in the next decade. We’re bigger than the diamond industry for heaven’s sake. With you taking over the business, you’ll be securing your future and the future of your children.
Ambel: But Dad, who said I even wanted children?
Mrs. Ambel: (another glass shatters) Gasp! Don’t even say that, Ambel!
Mr. Ambel: You are not to talk like that in front of your mother! You will be a tree farmer, and you WILL give us GRANDCHILDREN!
Ambel: But Dad, tree farming is BORING!
Mr. Ambel: You will LEARN to love it, Ambel. Besides, you’ll have fun shooting at the rodents and birds damaging your crops. I had fun. It will be like a video game.
Ambel: You mean the wildlife? I’m not shooting any wildlife! It’s bloodyhell illegal!
Mr. Ambel: I don’t care if you shoot them or not as long as you kill them. And you WILL continue the family business!
Ambel: WHY?
Mr. Ambel: Because I did. Because your grandfather did, and his father before that.
Ambel: No!
Mr. Ambel: YOU HAVE NO CHOICE!
Ambel: NO!!
Mr. Ambel: ‘NAKNAMPUCHA! You’re no son of mine... (gulp, gulp, gulp)
Mrs. Ambel: Sob!

(end scene)

Nevertheless, Ambel still took up NIT. Short of ODing on brain stims, he graduated Valedictorian a year before schedule, and as a reward for the job well done he was given enough travel credits to live la vida loca in North America for six months. Word has it, he could have gone to the Frozen World tour of Europa, but he declined.
Ambel didn’t splurge on his vacation. Instead of taking the 32-hour luxury flight like any rich bastard, he fueled up his Flightcart and thrifted on just travel papers and skytrip snacks. Six hours after we saw him off, he was knocking door-to-door in the American slumlands, contacting every geek over 60-years old he could track down, from New Mexico to Washington State, from Ontario to friggin’ Alaska. The trail eventually led him to a place called Silicone Valley, the famed last stronghold of the Old Net nuts. According to Ambel, the place was more like a cluster of homes for the aged, and every house smelled of Cheetos and spilled Mountain Dew. There, he found what he was looking for. Here he spent the money his parents offered him so he could hotel-hop the whole continent. Ambel bought copies of old, sometimes century-old, archives--discarded and old personal web sites and old web logs, enough to fill a 21st century corporation’s 50-year demographic. Enough, he said, to map the cultural landscape of a time so crucial in defining where we are today but know so little about.
And as soon as he got hold of all he could afford, he hightailed it home and went straight to Binondo where me, Jethro Dong, and free drugs, were unknowingly waiting for him.
“Sure man,” he said over a mouthful of Jethro’s good Scotch. “when they traslated everything into the neuro from html, they got everything that counted. Every goddamn library in the goddamn world was jammed into the Neuro. But they forgot the personals man, the PERSONALS! What the hell happened to all the Friendster, My Space, Blogger, Wobbler, and CroMan accounts? What happened to the voice of the people?”
I gave him a blank look. Jethro fiddled with a syringe, obviously trying to remember what he had put in it.
“Nothing, man,” said Ambel, mouth frothing. “They were abandoned. Lost to the void. Replaced.”
‘History,” I said.
“Blagag,” said Jethro.
Ambel held up his data disk with palpitating fingers. “In this I have the thoughts and personalities of a long lost generation. Here lie the secrets of our forefathers. Here, in my hand, is history as told by the common man--and woman--of a century’s past.”
“Secrets,” I repeated, stoned. Jethro yawned. Ambel was always a little theatric to the bore.
“And you know what I’m goig to do with it, man?” asked Ambel. “You know what I’m going to do with it?”
I asked him, Ambel, what are you going to do with it? Then Jethro laughed--not really at anything--he just laughed.
“You’re not taking me seriously,” said Ambel, looking at the wall behind me. “You think I’m being crazy again.” Jethro laughed again. This time I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t laughing at Ambel.
“No Ambel,” I said. And I asked him: What are you going to do with it? I really wanted to know.
Ambel stood up, beated on his chest like an ape, and said he was going to raise the dead. He said he was going to raise the fucking dead. He said he’ll find the future in our past, or whatever the hell, and that we’ll see. We’ll all see. Then he pocketed a handfull of Jethro’s syringes and left for another job interview, plastered and dressed like a Caribbean cocktail. He didn’t shut the door behind him. Outside I caught a glipse of magenta clouds. It was a beautiful day. But I needed more whisky.
Jethro fell out of his stupor just long enough to tell me he wanted to show me something. He pulled from his pack a beaten down pair of gravity disruptors, and asked me if I was thinking what he was thinking.
I said yes, but it’s too risky. But we did it anyway.

What's in a name? An asshole by any other name would still be assholey.

2006-03-18T22:21:00.002+08:00

Thank God fer Wikipedia.org. Screw all association with the pogi Korean guy. Here's what the on-line info matrix has to say about mi nombre:

In the United States and Mexico, Cholo is a fairly offensive term implying a typically Mexican mestizo gangster. A cholo is stereotypically depicted as wearing baggy chinos khaki pants (or khaki shorts with white knee-high socks), so-called wifebeater sleeveless t-shirts, flannel shirts buttoned all the way to the top or unbuttoned except for the top button, and a shaved head or slicked-back hair. A popular "cholo" brand is Dickies. This same designation may also be associated with black ink tattoos, commonly involving gang calligraphy, or family names and art. A cholo might also stereotypically own a lowrider, like music like Zapp and Roger's "More Bounce To The Ounce" and "Doo Wa Ditty", and use the Chicano term of "Ese", in a way to call someone dude, like "What's up ese?" or "Orale ese!". Chicanos are said to be the first in starting the lowrider trend, as well as being the oldest established gangs of California.
It is this particular image that Cheech Marin drew on in the Cheech and Chong films. There is also a reference to "the cholo" in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976 film). In the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite, Nano and Arturo De Silva play characters simply referred to as "Cholo No. 1" and "Cholo No. 2".The usage was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than today, though the usage was still fairly widespread in some areas in the 1990s.
In South Texas, cholos are sometimes referred to as chongers.
In North America or the English-speaking world of the United States, the word is most primarily and heavily used in Caló slang, but it in turn has infiltrated into mainstream American English use. Most specifically, the term "cholo" when used in American English is likely to be done so by persons associated with American youth movements such as the Chicano/Mexican-American/white & black lowrider subcultures, African-American gangsters of the Western United States, or the hip hop scene in general.

Under the Caste System of colonial Latin America, the term Cholo originally applied to the children resulting from the union of a Mestizo and an Amerindian; that is, someone of three quarters Amerindian and one quarter Spanish ancestry. More precisely, the term was specific to the Viceroyalty of Peru and neighboring Andean regions of South America. In Mexico and Central America the term "Coyote" was used with a synonymous meaning. In El Salvador, the word cholo means big, large (grande).
During the colonial era a myriad of other terms (mestizo, castizo, chamizo, etc.) were in use to denote other individuals of European/Amerindian ancestry in ratios smaller or greater of Spanish to Amerindian ancestry. The term is most commonly associated with Peru and Bolivia.

In modern-day Peru and Bolivia, cholo is still a widely used term which continues to refer to people with noticeably greater amounts of Amerindian than European ancestry. Among Peruvians, the term mestizo (which in other Latin American countries is usually used for those of relatively equal amounts of Spanish to Amerindian ancestry) has also become increasingly common to refer to cholos in an effort to consolidate the population into a collective national mindset.
In recent years, the meaning of cholo has further shifted to include a vast number of people of exclusively Native American ancestry. In this latter context, the term often implies indigenous people who have attained to a higher social status by moving from the rural or interior regions of the country to the urban areas and cities, have taken up western (Hispanic/mestizo) cultural practices, are bilingual (fluent in both Spanish and an Amerindian language) but deny any knowledge of a native language, down-play their native ascendance and identify solely with their newly adopted cultural norms.
In that latter context, the usage is somewhat pejorative. It might be comparable to Yuppie.
During the presidential campaign leading to his eventual electoral victory, the current president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, successfully reached out to the largest segment of the Peruvian population - 45% of which is composed of indigenous Peruvians in addition to the cholos - by acclaiming his indigenous heritage and identifying himself as a Cholo. Spanish-language media played on this title, and referred to him as el cholo throughout the campaign and in the initial stages of his presidency. El cholo was especially favoured when contrasting him to the outgoing Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, nicknamed el chino (The Chinaman), although Fujimori was actually of Japanese descent.

In Ecuador, "Cholo" is also used to denote a greater affinity to Amerindian than Spanish heritage for mixed race people, however, unlike the way in which the term is used in other countries, the affinity spoken of is in a cultural context, not a phenotypic one.
Cholos in Ecuador are typically communities whose members are actually mestizos, of equal and often times greater Spanish than Amerindian ancestry. Fascinatingly however, apart from their apparent Spanish descent and monolingualism in the Spanish language, their garb, culture and customs, traditional occupations, and many times surnames, are typical of highland Quichua Amerindians, and not of their Hispanic predecessors. This trend is quite in contrast to the evolution of mestizo identity and life throughout the rest of Latin America, where the emphasis has always been placed solely on the Spanish side.
The most famous of these are the "Cholas Cuencanas", from the colonial city of Cuenca in the southern region of that country.
When not specifically referring to the above-mentioned mestizo communities, the term cholo may also have the same connotations of greater Amerindian ancestry than Spanish of a mixed race person as it does in other Andean countries.
The term as used in Ecuador is not held to be pejorative.

In Chile and Argentina cholo also conotes a person of unmixed Amerindian ancestry or predominatly Ammerindian appearance, however, who the word is applied to varies even if the phenotypic requirements are met.
In Chile the term is used almost exclusively to refer to Peruvians and Bolivians and the migrants of those two countries in Chile. It is usually intended as an insult. It may also be applied to anyone of unmixed Amerindian ancestry or predominatly Amerindian appearance, except if the person is a fellow Chilean.
Cholo and Chola are also commonly used as nicknames, especially by those who would be considered cholos. In many regions the word is not at all considered a negative epithet and may be known or used only as a nickname.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo"

Defense for the DOTA Boyz

2006-03-18T22:21:00.001+08:00

According to Steven Johnson, A pop culture expert and author who participated in this group discussion on new trends published in the March 20, 2006 issue of Time, video games are actually good for you. Other members of the discussion, an LA paper editor, a sports team owner and internet entrepreneur, and an author who writes about American family values, agreed with him. In a nutshell, they said Vid games (as well as other forms of fast paced pop culture like movies and TV) make us smarter in terms of “pattern recognition, problem solving, abstract problem solving, system thinking, system analyzing with complex sort of multiple variables, , visual intelligence, obviously technological intelligence, ability to adapt to new interfaces and find the information you need.” They said that these days, memorization and memory retention aren’t as important as they were before, when looking for information was harder. Now, you Google stuff, easy. Mark Cuban, the sports team owner and dot com guy, said: “We live in an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set."

This is great news for me, because I could use it as an excuse for being a dunst when it comes to memorizing. It’s also good news for boyprens who are under constant attack from their gelprens for spending too much time on on-line games:

Gerlpren: nagdodota ka nanaman! Wala ka nang panahon sa’kin!

Boypren: Hindi na DOTA nilalaro ko, babes, RF na,

Gelpren: Ganu’n ‘din ‘yon! Hmph!

Boypren: Ok lang yan honeypie. I’m doing it for us. Hinahasa ko ang utak ko para makakuha ng magandang trabaho… para maganda kinabukasan natin. ‘Di ba?

Gelpren: What are you talking about? Your so kaka.

Boypren: Pampatalino video games sweetycakes.

Gelpren: Owws… niloloko mo nanaman ako. Barbero ka talaga kahit kalian!

Boypren: Labopmylipe, naman. Time magazine ang nagsabi nito. Tignan mo, basahin mo yan.

Gelpren: Oo nga ano? How could I have doubted you, sweet? I labsh you!

Boypren: I labsh you too! Kishing-kishing tayo (bago ako mag-RF)!

Gelpren: Tara!

this is pretty kewl

2006-03-18T22:21:00.000+08:00

Cute fact I learned when I attended a family reunion/meeting of the Alcalanians of Metro Manila Assoc meeting:

The highest ranking Asian general in the U.S. Army is a Filipino from Alcala, Pangasinan, the town put on the map by that mini-SARS outbreak some time ago. When the general (sorry, I didn’t catch his name) came home after the possible epidemic was reported, his townsmen were snickering behind his back. They said it was the first time they saw a white man (a Colonel) playing alalay to a brown man. Pretty kewl.

(When I told my friend about this, he offered trivia of his own: “a species of monkeys greet each other by rubbing genitals.” Also kewl.)

(fiction) the breakupcakes co.

2006-03-03T02:47:00.000+08:00

The Breakupcakes Co.

All this, the organization, the jobs, the shadow, the hoopla, started with babycakes. To be exact, just one babycake. It was a chocolate cake, because everybody likes chocolate. I baked a lot of cakes like it, and gave them to friends just to be amicable. In the university I attended, it helped to be nice, because everybody was, and nobody would have had it otherwise.
The babycakes had these little messages written on the icing. They read things like: ‘good luck with the exams!’ and ‘happy graduation!’ and ‘Go Blue Eagles! Onwards to the Championship!’ Sometimes, when a friend went through a bad breakup, I baked him or her babycakes with clichés designed to make things feel cheerier: ‘still many fish in the sea, man,’ or ‘you deserve better, babe,’ sometimes even, ‘love hurts, deal with it,’ just as a joke.
A babycake: it’s not exactly a cupcake. It’s bigger, like a healthy, cubic slice of the average birthday cake. I call them babycakes because I used to affectionately call the person who started me baking them Babycakes. When she left me, I had to find a hobby to keep me busy, and I started baking babycakes to give away to dorm-mates and classmates. People have told me it’s a pretty queer hobby, but I never minded.
The cake that started everything had the words ‘It’s not you, it’s ME...’ written cursively in pink icing. It was supposed to be more of a joke than a solution to Rachel Tuazon’s earth-shatteringly pressing problem of how she was to break up with her then, very-wusslike, and very sensitive theater geek of a boyfriend, Kim. She said he was too sensitive for her. She said she wanted men to be men, not shopping buddies with penises. No he wasn’t exactly homosexual, but, according to her, he really was in character when he was playing the oh so macho-manly MacBeth in the Theater guild’s modernized adaptation last semester.
“I wish he could be that guy again. The one he was on stage,” she told me. We were in her family’s kitchen, which she let me use to bake my cakes because the one in my dorm was going through an infestation problem. She enjoyed the company, and she liked licking the spoon.
“He is a very good actor,” I told her. I wanted to say, “You fell in love with a homo playing a Scottish King,” but maybe that would have been harsh. Instead, I gave her my cake, with ‘It’s not you, it’s ME...’ iced on it. I said if she was going to have to break up with the poor wussie-boy, she might as well soften the blow with a few sweets and a cliché. She looked at me like I was a crazy man, but she went along and did it anyway.

Rachel and Kim’s break-up was the stuff of urban legend in our little corner of the university. She did it in public so as to lessen the chances of him making a scene - then again, seeing as Kim was a drama prince, it was a bad call on her part. They saw each other in the middle of the quad, at three, when a lot of the students were just hanging after class. Rachel made sure her tone over the phone pre-empted what was to come. She told him they had to talk, in person. By then, a lot of people had gotten hold of the news, Rachel not being the most secretive person around. There wasn’t any doubt that Kim knew exactly why his presence had been requested as well, and many people wanted to see the clash between two of the campus’ more notorious proverbial starbitches.
When the two spotted each other, a crowd was gathered, its desperate attempts to not look like a crowd was as obvious as day. Rachel stepped up first, walking slowly towards Kim’s bench. As soon as she sat she looked at him with the most sincere eyes she could muster, then she pushed forward the brown cardboard box I designed myself. It had a card which read, ‘Kim, I’m so sorry.’ Kim took a look inside and read: ‘It’s not you, it’s ME...’ There was a collected deep breath, then, to everyone’s amazement, Kim was laughing. It wasn’t even sarcastic laughter, or forced, or scornful; it was real laughter - the kind that happens when something cute or genuinely funny walks by.
Come to think of it, he was expecting the Inquisition and instead got the single vilest sentence in the English language comically iced on a cute little chocolate pastry. Rachel smiled back, laughed a little, and they hugged. Rumor had it the two had great goodbye sex that night. Some said Kim finally accepted his bisexuality and the two became best friends that perform steamy favors for each other from time to time. The latter was the more correct assumption, discounting the bisexuality and the sexual favors. Either way, my babycakes became an instant hit. It was graduation season, and, with the outgoing seniors making plans to move abroad or back to their provinces, or just plain move on to other things, having to break up was one of the many troubles that faced the student population at the time. Everybody wanted ‘It’s not you, it’s ME...” iced on their going away offerings. Rachel, the enterprising little dear, said we should make a little business out of it. And that’s how things started.

Of course, in time, we grew beyond the cakes. Sweets could only do so much. They had a good run though. The cakes made for a lively little fad. Those days, it was the only way to break up. Some couples broke up just to have an excuse to give each other break up babycakes, and then have steamy make up sex later on. Through all this, for some reason, nobody ever saw the babycakes as anything other than devices to end relationships in a fun way.
One day though, campus queen Mary de Leon walked up to me and asked for a cake that had the sentiments of a raised middle finger and a kick in the balls. She had caught her hubby of four years screwing the student body president in her own bed. She wanted to use a cake to break up with the bastard - because it was the fad - but she didn’t want it cute. She wanted it harsh. A company policy meeting followed. Rachel and I, along with a few other ‘apprentice’ bakers we recruited when demand rose, discussed the options we had. We had a few ideas, but was a negative babycake good for business? In the end, Rachel said it was no problem. We did, after all, turn out to be more of a break-up service than a novelty bake shop. And there were only so many people who wanted to break up in good terms. The bad ones, the steamy, dramatic, violent ones: that’s where the money is.
We ended up baking a fairly attractive mud cake. We did, of course, use real mud, and real dog pellets made to look like chocolate chips and sprinkling. It was also bigger than most of our other products, so its impact would be maximized. The only thing sweet about the whole affair was the icing , which read ‘GO TO HELL YOU FUCKING BASTRD! I HOPE YOU BURN AND THE DEVIL CHOPS OFF YOUR PENIS WITH A RUSTY SPOON!’
We charged a lot more for it because we had to extra-sterilize a lot of our utensils, and the staff wasn’t too happy about collecting doggie poo. Mary was happy though, and forced us to accept a sizable tip. Her boyfriend was devastated for receiving the first not so baby mud and shit cake, and the cake itself was the talk of the campus, and, by then other campuses. Customers doubled, and dogs had to be bought or rented and fed lavish amounts of Pedigree to keep up with the new demand for fetid break up delectables.
Mary de Leon, satisfied customer, also happened to be spawn of the old rich who wanted to get into new things. She approached me weeks after the first shitcake was made and said we had a great thing going, and she wanted to make it better. She said she wanted to take the service on-line.
“It’s going to be an on-line break-up service, like the ones in the States,” said Mary. Our eyebrows went up a little.
“There are a ton of them over there,” she said. “God knows I’ve used them once or twice.” Our eyebrows went up a little more. But the idea wasn’t bad. Rachel consented, and so did most of the baking staff, who didn’t mind moving to a bigger office in the de Leon family compound, and working with an almost all-female staff of web designers and computer engineers. Where Mary managed to find these people was a mystery to us, but we had an inkling it most likely had something to do with her new boyfriend, Jason Ang, who was reputed to be an excellent and infamous hacker. He was the head of the computer staff, and was obviously held in awe. Rumor had it he’s hacked into the Pentagon’s network and almost started a US national emergency. His biggest frustration, he used to say, is it isn’t half as rewarding to mess up local government sites.
Jason was responsible for tuning our service range up a notch. This came about maybe a year after we turned into a dot com. With the Internet service getting more popular by the month, with no small thanks going to Mary’s excellent list of contacts and marketing prowess (some of the staff didn’t even bother to look for real jobs after graduation), word of our little break-up service went beyond the university chain and leapt into view of the general surfing public. We flourished by splitting up yuppie couples and middle aged lovers. By then the cake option, though still the most popular one, was just one in many. Sometimes we sent customized emails or letters for less sentimental customers. For others, we offered to call up their soon to be ex lovers. Others requested we don’t bother putting dog bits on cakes and just deliver them in boxes straight to their spouses’ doorsteps.
Just when we were getting used to the idea of ending loves for a living, a teary 30-year old account executive from Makati came to us at our office with an unusual request. She wanted us to find out if she was being cheated on by her husband. One of the staff almost laughed out loud. Breakupcakes.com.ph didn’t exactly advertise detective services.
Mary was just in the middle of pointing out to the lady that we weren’t private eyes, when Jason stepped up and said we’d gladly do it. He took the lady aside and gently asked her to fill him in on a few details. She was crying still, saying she was afraid of emailing us or frequenting our site because her husband monitored what she surfs. She said if he finds out that she even so much as suspected, she’d be dead.
We all just shrugged at each other as Jason led the lady, not crying as much anymore, out the door. When he got back inside, I gave Jason a look. He said it’ll be easy, we should trust him. She offered to pay good money.
The next day, Jason printed out copies of 35 emails sent and received by the lady’s husband using a number of email addresses he suspected the lady did not know existed. He even highlighted the parts that served as evidence with a neon pink tech pen. Even a quick glance told you the print outs had a lot of pink ink. He also had information on the girl the husband has been seeing, the hotels they’ve gone to, how much they’d spent, the works. He put everything in a brown Manila envelope and headed out the door. Mary was busy talking to clients over the phone, so he told me to tell her he’s going to make a personal delivery, and that everything is running smooth as clockwork.
The lady did push though. She paid us a lot for Jason’s services. Rachel saw an opportunity here, and worked out with Jason how to turn Babycakes.com.ph into both a break up service and a private investigation enterprise specializing on marital cases and the like.
Of course there were things like licenses that had to be considered, but we didn’t bother, with Mary’s family connections, we were untouchable. We were seen as little more than a bunch of spoiled rich kids trying to have a good time by riding the dot com business craze. And, once again, Mary brought in talent from God knows where who made the changes to the company more than easy.
In a couple of months, we had a team of private spooks to back up Jason’s hacking. The most interesting of them was Hiro Takahara, a half-in-half Filipino-Jap who wore leather jackets even during the summer. He preferred working at night, and had a smell not one of us could really describe, but was slightly akin to that of rotting fish. He got results though. Nobody knew how he did it, but every night he was out, he came back with an incriminating note, a strange brassiere, or photos that one would have thought to be amateur pornography. Our customers, mostly middle aged women and some young men who weren’t sure if their wives were carrying their babies or someone else’s, were all satisfied whatever the findings of our investigations were; and, since the cakes weren’t our biggest source of income by then, they all got a free babycake to take home.
The routine was pretty simple for a couple more months. For the baking staff and engineers, they came in during the mornings. So did Mary (she lived in another part of her family’s compound), who was our face when it came to our more wholesome clients. Jason and Hiro came in nights, since their jobs were now more of the shady kind. They didn’t deal with clients directly if they could help it. Me and Rachel practically moved into the office; it seemed to be understood that since we more-or-less started the whole thing, every decision had to pass through us before they were to be implemented.
Then one night, I overheard Jason and Hiro talking. I was trying to sleep then, so I looked unconscious. I had no doubt they knew I was awake though, and I don’t think they cared. I even think they wanted me to hear. Jason was talking about that crying lady that came to us a few months back. According to him, her husband beat down on her when she filed for legal separation. She was scared of going to the police, so, again, she turned to Jason. Hiro was very serious and direct, asking questions like where does he live, and what kind of accident would Jason prefer, or would he want the guy to just disappear.

It was a good thing Elea entered the picture after a few years. She made the job a whole lot easier. By this time, we were offering ‘clean slate’ services. When someone approached us asking for the whole ‘clean slate,’ we’d have our people go into his or her spouse’s, boyfriend’s, girlfriend’s or whatever’s house and take everything that indicates the client has ever been there at all. This required a team of extremely stealthy, and well trained individuals Jason and Hiro easily came up with at incredibly short notice. Then Jason would take care of the Friendster accounts, the Email adds, and all on-line records. We were still trying to figure our how to take care of government and church records, but those were the least of our problems. Given the number of complaints we were getting, and lawsuits we were barely keeping at bay because of Mary’s connections, we started considering chucking the service altogether.
Then Elea Alderana came in with her meditation beads and knee-length hair, offering her services as a psychic. Jason checked her records out and said she was ok. Hiro felt her chi or whatever and said she was the real thing. She demonstrated what she could offer us by making one of the baking staff bark like a dog and eat a lizard. After Mary threw up, she approached Elea and told her she was hired. That’s how our ‘clean slates’ became really ‘clean,’ all traces of our clients were now easily wiped out from the lives of their former significant others, from their houses to their heads.
There were other things of course, and I didn’t approve of these other things our clients ask of us. But it was hard to stop things by then. Jason and Hiro always used to say: it would be rude for us to deny our customers. By that time, Mary has been mindwiped by Elea because she caught Jason in bed with the crying lady of a few months back. Jason reasoned that at this point we didn’t need Mary anymore. Her connections were outdated and trivial, we’ve moved into a bigger office, and we didn’t need her PR, since clients came seeking us out this time. And, as Babycakes, my ex-girlfriend, just told me a while ago (she replaced Rachel right after the latter had to be midwiped for throwing a fit when me and Babycakes got back together), Both the CIA and FBI have sweetened their offers. Now it’s all just a matter of who outbids the other.

By the way, I must apologize for the informality. I’m just a sentimental fool sometimes. And I want to make sure all new employees know the beginnings of our little organization, and as much as I am busy with other matters, I want them to hear about it from my mouth directly. I want to instill in you the pride we have in what we have achieved so far, and the glimmering anticipation for what we could achieve in the future. Think about it, it sounds funny, and a little farfetched, but with our network, our connections, our ambition, the collected pool of talent provided by our numerous agents, and, now, with you and your unique abilities coming into the fold, nothing would be impossible for us. Hell, think about it. Sometime in the future, we might even rule the world.

this is gonna look pretty gay. but i'm in geek mode, and this is my duty

2006-02-02T20:19:00.001+08:00

I'm supposed to be doing some research right now. Pilfered a few photos from http://www.supermanhomepage.com instead.

Here's Brandon Routh, the guy who's going to play 'ol Kal-El in the Superman Returns movie directed by Brian Singer:

I tried to get the coolest available picture they had of him in a superman costume. If you ask me, backstreet boytoyz still come to mind. Oh well. Hope he fits the part more when the pictures start moving.

Below is how Tom Welling, the Smallville guy, would look in the costume, according to master comic book painter, Alex Ross.

Not that ok a fit still if you think about it, but Ross made it look good. Then again, anything Ross does inspires epic background music. And Welling would fit the bill if you're young enough (or gullible enough) to think the Smallville TV series nostalgic.

Below is my personal pick for a bigscreen Man of Steel.

He's got the macho muscles, the straight-edge look, and has the facial expression range of the late Mr. Reeves. If I were a Photoshop wiz, I'd splice in a little spit-curl and the Big Blue getup just to prove my point. You're going to have to use your imagination. All I'm saying now is, Too bad the Hulk movie came first.

I'll try to post more steamy-estrogeny pictures next time.

The Great Bitchslapper: omnipotent asshole, or a force limited to our imaginations?

2006-02-02T20:19:00.000+08:00

Ok, I haven’t been able to update this thing for quite some time now. It’s been weird: my steady and consistent descent into the world of not being able to do anything I feel I ought to. We’ve all been there: I call it school (though school is something I haven’t been doing much of either, it’s just what I call IT. Other people have other names for IT). Here’s the thing that got me back to the weblog. I was surfing the Onion site and found this interview given by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Survivor, Lullaby, etc., in their A.V. Club section. The opening Q&A got me into a panic.

The Onion: Last December, you wrote an interesting article for Gear magazine, about transgressive novels and Kierkegaard's theory that seeing a possibility ensures that it'll be fulfilled. But the essay didn't quite make it clear whether you believe the theory yourself.
Chuck Palahniuk: I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.

Check it. Palahniuk’s answer. Kierkegaard’s theory. I’ve thought about that before, but my view of things was quite the opposite. I used to think that once we envision something, pre-empt the wrong that could happen, some higher power up there, or at least the part of the higher power dedicated to bitchslapping us around, will lay off because it'll get pissed we thought of whatever it is it wanted to do before it could lay it on us and surprise the Jackson Five out of our asses. This way, we could prevent shit from happenning. A "superstition" developed over the years of having the most unexpected of things happen to me every time.

I got around to thinking this loony a decade ago, the year I had my first shot of tequila and experienced my first sidewalk throw-up—which explains a lot probably. So what I did was try to mentally list down every wrong thing that could happen to any situation. Of course when you do that, you start to feel overwhelmed by the things that could happen which you wouldn’t be able to prevent anyway even if you tried. It'll turn out you’re thinking about every possible worst case scenario not because you want to prepare for everything—that’s impossible. Even a tight-assed American military installation couldn’t prepare for earthquakes. Instead you do it out of a quasi-superstitious belief stating that once you think of it, it won’t happen. But, of course, the whole process just left me paranoid beyond redemption.

For example: After me and a friend of mine got held up (this was beside UST, and it’s another story), I started imagining every possible way it could happen again and how to prevent it. I checked if I’m in enough shape to fend off one attacker with a knife, two attackers. A tactically sound three would be difficult, but a tactically sound one could be equally so, especially if he (or, God forbid, she) had a gun. I tried to figure the possible scenarios when getting mugged in an FX, and in a PUJ, and while walking. I’d figure what I’d do, whether I’d do anything, what tactics they’d use, what tactics I’d employ in return. I’m mostly cured of this whole mental fiasco now, but it got so bad to the point the mental pressure of a simple commute became so bad, I usually took cabs, which are insanely expensive for someone of my financial ability (I try to reserve cab money just for times I’m totally plastered, or when I’m close to home and I need to take a shit real bad and there’s no clean public toilet in sight). And even then riding Taxis like yuppie scum, it came to the point wherein I checked the trunks of the Taxis for hidden accomplices—a precaution I learned from former classmate and Agape bassist Joko Maymay.

That thing Palahniuk mentioned, about relationships—it scared me. ‘Cause it’s what I do, or what I did a lot. I thought of how things could go wrong with relationships. I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I was back to a place without the girl I’d be seeing. I chose not to become paranoid, so I tried to ignore the things I think about. But I would get scared. I’d list all the things that could happen: she could get hurt, leave me for some rich guy, leave me for some better-looking guy, leave me for anybody, just get tired of me, move away to Dubai or Germany, or even just Baguio. I wouldn’t be able to do much when things like that happen without looking too desperate, so I don’t do much at all. But the fear would make you look desperate anyway—and that drives people away. You start looking like the psyco you are. Either way, now I’m thinking about it, what Palahniuk said was true to an extent. I imagined everything that could have gone wrong. But Instead of my overly-prepared imagination driving away any possibility of shit happening, it instead jet set me into the path of making shit happen. And another thing, it’s my job to have an overly-prepared imagination. I want to be a writer, a creative writer. Imagining shit happen is my self-imposed duty.

Doesn’t that make me doomed? Doomed to prepare myself for things I myself set to motion? Does this include all of us who make stories for a living (in the case of this country, we make stories as a hobby)? All of us who imagine? Arthur Clarke, the Sci-fi guy, said it’s a writer’s responsibility to prepare people for what could happen, condition their minds for bold new futures. He was talking about sci-fi writers, but what’s the difference these days? Oh, and the Palahniuk interview was very entertaining. Always fun to find honest people in the world. Even if they are really fucked up. Check out www.theonion.com and www.avclub.com.

I need a drink. It’ll calm me down. You comin’? You look like you need one.

Why I think there should be more people writing sci-fi in the Philippines [part 1]

2006-01-18T07:22:00.000+08:00

It all starts with a man named Tom Cavanagh.

Tom Cavanagh, that guy who played Ed in the sappy but so effectively heartwarming TV series named Ed. He was a guest on the Dave Letterman Show the other day. He’s starring in a new series called Love Monkey. The plot of his new show is pretty much patterned after his old one: guy works for big company, gets the boot, starts life anew with smaller version of former profession and looks for woman to join him as significant other in new life. Difference is, in this new show, Tom (also the first name of his character. Last name’s Farrell) is a New York guy all the way instead of a small town’s prodigal son, and instead of chasing after one woman like some overly persistent heat seeking ballistic, he’s on the prowl in the city’s hipster joints, hanging with his buds and sniffing ass wherever it may be found.

Cavanagh told Letterman the little not so secret-secret to what is expected to be Love Monkey’s impending success. He said the show held the Holy Triumvirate of high ratings American TV: 1) It’s a comedy—people like to laugh 2) It involves “youngish” single people; the All American frosty and restless, and 3) It’s set in New York City.

And by God the man’s definitely on to something. If you think about it, we’ve all been duped, turned into TV Lemmings by a system so subtle it’s scary. The very notion of having a show or movie set in New York is probably as subconsciously alluring to us viewers as bitches in heat are to horny dogs (PC version: as ovulating girl dogs are to blue-balled boy dogs). I once had to ban the smuggling in of Friends DVDs into our college publication office because no work was ever done once one of them was plugged in and played. And now they’re doing it again: mix the safe cheese Ed factor with this novel by Kyle Smith about this thirty-something who’s leading the single lifestyle, give the guy a yuppie-scum job instead of the tabloid writing stint he had in the book, and put him smack in the middle of martini and stiletto-heel infested New York. Result is Sex in the City for da boyz fresh out of the oven. We’re doomed.

By now you are wondering what all this has to do with Sci –Fi, no? Admittedly, not much, but it does in a long meandering friend of a friend of a cousin’s uncle sort of way. Promise. Just too tired to write it right now, been up since yesterday morning.

To find out the meaning of life, join us again on the next episode of

Melancholy's the word. You can give your contribution. Here's a

2006-01-18T04:28:00.000+08:00

list of songs I’ve been listening to lately. Happy playlist to start the new year. You know what they say about you being what you eat and you being what you say and you being reflected in the company you keep?

Here’s you are what you listen to:

The list is comprised of really old stuff, from the mid to late sixties Beatles. Newest stuff would be from Barbie before she went solo. Halos lahat ng mga kantang ‘to wasak. I mean Wasak with the S. The Z variety seems to entail a certain playfulness to it that makes it positive (as in telling somebody that the wicked bacchanalian plaster bash of last night was wazak. Compare that to saying, “Wasak ako pare, nakita ko friendster ng ex ko, in a relationship na daw). Wasak.

Here’s the list:

Dear Prudence by the Beatles
Waltz # 2 by Elliot Smith
Between the Bars by Elliot Smith
Martha my Dear by the Beatles
Piazza New York Catcher by Belle and Sebastard
Landslide by the Smashing Pumpkins
Norwegian Wood by the Beatles
For No One by the Beatles
Crash into me by the Dave Matthews Band
Say Goodbye by the Dave Matthews Band
Pag-ibig by Barbie’s Cradle
# 41 by the Dave Matthews Band
Miss Misery by Elliot Smith
Everything Reminds Me of Her by Elliot Smith
A Day in the Life by the Beatles
Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles

I was originally going to call this the anti-porn music list, at least my anti-porn music list. I found out that when listening to particular songs while writing or doing research, you are lifted of all distracting, unproductive urges to surf for pictures of people (or in some cases, really gross monsters fabricated by Japanese sickos) having sex. Even Crash Into Me by Mang Dave falls into the category for all the lewdness of his lyrics—makes you think of sex in the P[ol]C[or] even if the song mentions a little voyeurism and bondage on the side.

Most of these songs though, while they undress you of all wasteful desire to watch porn and enjoy the little carnal pleasures of life, will leave you with an equally unproductive desire to kill yourself (which is probably why smoking is twice as pleasurable while listening to the crap).

The Elliot Smith stuff is obvious: the man stabbed himself to death. Anybody who’s listened to him wouldn’t be surprised.

The Smashing Pumpkins version of Landslide is a far cry from the comparatively pleasant original version of Fleetwood Mac. Whiny, waily Corgan just made it seem sadder that it was ever supposed to be.

Norwegian Wood is the song that best, as well as most subtly, exposes the idea of “the one that got away, sayang, how sad. Shet.” out in the open.

Eleanor Rigby is about “all the lonely people.” In the case of For No One, you’re just going to have to listen yourself. It speaks for itself so well I won’t touch it.

All the other songs are killing me too, but maybe that’s because I’m wasak already in the first place. Piazza New York Catcher would be a treat to listen to if you’re feeling fine.

And I’m supposed to be studying tonight. Touché!

So Scorsese's doing me huh? Astiginwowgosh naman.

2006-01-17T22:48:00.000+08:00

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

This is what i got when I did that "give (just) your name and find out what your movie should be entitled and who should direct it" thing. I hope the results aren't random, but they probably are.

That other test I took, the religion one, the one that ACTUALLY WAS A TEST said i should be a taoist. Not such a bad result either.

(fiction) The girl who blew me away

2006-01-14T16:38:00.000+08:00

Senti story coming up. still short. wrote it yesterday with the help of a few comments by my friends Keith and Ned.

When I showed this story to Dondi, this friend of mine who does whack art (I looked at some of his work,was blown away, and felt obliged to show him some of mine), he asked me what's it about and I said I guess it's about my ex, but not about her the way the character is based on her (his work, by the way, was about his). But in hindsight, I got to thinkin', besides the whole obvious girl theme of it, this one came from a little grandpa angst as well. I've always wanted a cool Lolo, the same way a lot of people do I think. And as a matter of fact I did have one, just didn't talk to him enough while he was there.

Shucks

The girl who blew me away

It was midnight when she did. She didn’t use a shotgun, but she did own one. A double barrel her grandfather gave her for her birthday. He’s weird that way. His name was Paciano, but he liked to be called Humphrey. He once called me Poncho and asked me to give him a neck rub with Ben Gay. When I did, he said I should marry his granddaughter. He said he could use a good neck rub from time to time. Two seconds later, he forgot all about me. Still though, her fiancé frowned when she told him about it.

She blew me away with a guitar. It was after her grandfather’s funeral, on the patio of her home, which was asleep, except for us, after a week’s worth of tears. Nobody was crying anymore, and neither was she. She decided to wear a rich crimson dress to the rite instead of black, and everybody understood. I was there because for two seconds, he wanted me to be family. That would have been enough for him, she said.

Then she grabbed her guitar—she was still in crimson dress—and played Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. It gave me shivers. I asked her if she wishes he could hear her. You know—right now. She said he’s never even heard the song before.

“I’m playing for us, the living. The people left behind,” she said, looking at me, still plucking the chords. “I’m playing because sometimes we need to justify sadness with something pretty.”

It’s like the whole thing about eating chocolate, I said. Right?

She smiled and said yes—and no not quite. She asked me if I loved her and before I could answer, she said she didn’t. She said it like she was telling me she liked banana ketchup better than tomato. First thing I think of was her fiancé, and I hated that. I remembered a clubhouse sandwich I dropped on a sandy beach once. I remembered picking it up and wanting to pick out all the grains of sand from the soiled bread, which is impossible. I tried to pluck a metaphor out of somewhere. Something pretty maybe—to justify. I asked her if she was talking about herself or me when she said she didn’t. You know, I said, love her/me. She said she wasn’t sure. Not anymore. She asked me if I’d hate her if she ate too much chocolate and got fat.

I shrugged and said no. Then she sang again, Julia by the Beatles this time. Funny thing is, that’s her name. Julia,

I would have wanted to call her ocean child, I would have wanted to call them seashell eyes. If there’d been a cold breeze, I would have tried to kiss her, but there wasn’t. Nothing in the air but the quiet of two people too many things to each other to be anything together. Instead I was blown away. By the idea, by something bigger than us. Her voice was a tempest rising.

#

Eulogy para sa celfone na wazak

2006-01-10T03:08:00.000+08:00

When you have a cellular phone with only half an LCD, and only half of your messages are legible, you seem to have more time at hand to waste. I waste it by worrying the hell out of myself over what people might be texting me.

Thing is I broke my phone about two days ago when I fell asleep on the living room couch. I must have moved around a bit and shoved my poor 3310 over the edge. LCD busted, can’t read my texts. When I send out texts, I can only hope that what I write aren’t typos na tinubuan ng mga mensahe.

It’s a very old phone. The only non-colored one in the family. It was passed down by my dad like an heirloom. His first Nokia. Prior to it he had an analogue and a Motorola beeper. Now it’s mine and its limited storage space holds all my contacts, important notes, and old sentimental messages from ex-loves and one-way beloveds. And shet I can’t read any of them anymore.

I used to be terrified of the notion of being held up because my phone is too important for me to lose. I’m afraid I’ll try desperately, in some adrenal spur of action, to defend it—all P2,000 worth of it—and end up with an ice pick in my gut. I lose money to taxi fare for this reason. These days, I’m not sure anybody would take it for all its obvious damage and obsoleteness.

Watching this BBC special on technological China just a while ago, I realized just how crippling it actually was for my LCD to bust like that. The documentary’s host was blabbin’ about how, in China, mobile tech is doubly important to its users because theirs is a culture where PDAs (the Public Displays, not the Personal Assistants) are still frowned upon. The new means to communicate made available by technology also offers an opportunity for the conservative Chinese to proclaim their affections for each other in more discreet manners. Imagine: your means of obtaining and expressing love, sitting pretty on the palm of your hand—a pretty little trinket prone to smashing and theft and technological outdating. The thought reminds me of big budget films where the hero and leading lady or gentleman are entrusted to either obtain or protect a fragile and very petite microchip which serves as the key to either the utter destruction of the human race, or its very salvation.

Point is, like many of us, this little observation of Mr. BBC about the Chinese goes the same for me. I might as well be a character in Legally Blond. I’m the guy who, when asked what I’d save first in case of fire, would answer without hesitation: my cellular phone of course. Because it is my window to loving, my social meal ticket. Half the time, it is the only way I actually communicate, the way communication is supposed to be a two way street wherein both parties understand each other completely. In real life, there’s so much noise and invisible layering. In real life, when we are sober, all we do is exchange numbers, email adds, blogs, and forgettable small talk. Then, while in bed at night, we spill our guts out to each other via finger work and wireless magic. Personally, I’m starting to miss people.

This isn’t true for everybody, but it almost is for me. It’s kinda’ sad.

(fiction) When the TV grew claws and venomous fangs

2006-01-05T17:38:00.000+08:00

Another story I also plan to publish. Also short. Posting it here, again, for the lack of things to say today. This bloglust will die down in a few days, I hope. "Blogged his life away" is not something I want etched on my gravestone.

This one was written during my 12 hours of TV a day stint that is still going on today as a 6 hour a day TV stint. Everything is true, except for the killing part.

When the TV grew claws and venomous fangs

We spent ten hours a day in front of it, and missed many things we weren’t supposed to miss. For example, a good day of work would be postponed when HBO had a good movie on. Or when we missed the primetime Monday sitcoms on the Star Network, we would watch the reruns the next morning instead of going to school.
Someone told me it is a little bit like an altar or a pagan statue, one we worship not with animal fat or virgin blood, but with something far more important. We worshipped it with Time, our Time, and lots of it. Entertaining that thought, we decided among ourselves: it isn’t that bad, and time is something a young person has in abundance. We decided to proceed with the daily ritual of entertainment and Lost Time.
But later on, after countless feature presentations and adventure show reruns, we realized Time wasn’t the only thing it taxed. We stopped talking to each other when basked in its narcotic gleam. We realized that when it was switched off, the only things in the air and in our selves were restlessness and contempt for each other—maybe because, in each other’s eyes, we were neither bold nor beautiful, nor funny enough to deserve attention. We saw what was left of ourselves when it was on: trite and worthless trinkets cheap as old salt; our mouths agape were tunnels to spacious places. And the little that was left was going fast. Pretty soon, we observed, nothing would be left. The only reasonable course of action was to turn it off, then pull the plug.
But before we could do any of this, it realized we were on to it, and lunged at our throats with an animal snarl. It ripped open our windpipes and gouged out our eyes and did so with amazing speed and efficiency. It had gone too far and had grown too powerful to let us meddling kids stop it now.

[Inspired by Neil Gaiman and a painting by Dondi Fernandes entitled ‘Hail to the King of Clowns’]

MONKEY!!

2006-01-04T17:58:00.000+08:00

I know it’s kinda late, but King Kong’s too big to ignore. Peter Jackson, with LOTR, gave us the biggest thing cinema has done in a long time. What he does next has to be talked about, no matter how crappy it could possibly turn out.

But since everybody’s had his and her say already, I’ll make mine quick.

I watched it with my brother, who has a thing for shouting “MONKEY!!” every time he sees anything that resembles the great apes, which, technically, aren’t monkeys(he sometimes shouts MONKEY!! when he sees me). Having someone to slide comments at while the long and excessively spectacular movie trudged along, and to have those comments answered in turn in an aesthetically brief and subtly profound manner (MONKEY!!), I enjoyed more than I would have otherwise.

My brother says MONKEY!! sarcastically wide eyed and pointing, shouting the way a surprised mild mannered man in pulpy 1930s America would in a badly directed black and white flick.

So, when, during the action scene-after-action scene roundabout in the movie’s middle, I told my brother I felt like we were viewing a Jackie Chan film, only it involved Jurassic Park escapees and a giant ape, he whispered—careful that the people around us would hear—MONKEY!!, and we had a blast. I tried to convince him to say it every time King Kong shows up on screen just to annoy the people around us, but he said it might get old.

Jackie Chan flicks came to mind because of a number of things:

1] Naomi Watts, after all that tossing and backlash while in the loving hands of runnin’ MONKEY!!, didn’t suffer from any apparent snapped spine, broken rib, or even strained neck. She even managed to do cartwheels afterwards for Mister Kong’s entertainment. She’s superhuman—like Jackie Chan.

2] The fight scenes were painstakingly choreographed and put Kong and the Lizard Triplets in places a man not on drugs or an adrenalin boosted creative frenzy wouldn’t think of.

3] The fight scenes were cool and, initially, extremely entertaining. But they ran on forever.

[At one point, I started noticing The Sweat starting to patter my brows. It’s the kind of sweat that comes during awkward or uncomfortable moments, or when you’re watching something that drags and you almost feel guilty for being with the people with you while they’re not enjoying themselves. I felt that way when I dragged my family to watch Finding Neverland. They were expecting a fantastically garlanded Peter Pan flick.]

4] The fights scenes were the movie’s crowd drawing trump card (well, besides the CGI and the fact it’s King Kong).

Awards should be given, by the way:

-To Evan Parke, who played token black guy, Hayes, for having a ready and memorized literary critique of Heart of Darkness available when asked for.

-To Jamie Bell, who played Jimmy the kid, for asking Hayes, the token black guy and Jimmy’s father figure, for his opinion of Heart of Darkness at an impeccably appropriate time.

-To Lobo Chan, who played Choy, the token Asian Dude, for having a cool first name, and for being the token Asian Dude.

-To Jack Black for the best last liner ever.

-To Andy Serkis (I really mean this one), who played the most expressive, most impressively portrayed, and interesting character in the film. Hell, Kong was so interesting, the crewmen who were surrounded by monstrous creatures beyond any imagination still had to have the giant monkey. Serkis, who also played Golum in the LOTR Trilogy, played both star ape and doubled as the ship’s cook for this one.

-To Naomi Watts, for being so pretty throughout the whole film, and for being wet and dirty through half of it (I REALLY, REALLY mean this one).

-And to Mr. Jackson himself. For one thing he managed to give people the extreme heebie-jeebies with that insect-super slugs scene. And he did so with CGI, a medium used so far to inspire awe more than to gross people out the way ‘80s movie magic used to.

And for all its worth, King Kong was a good movie the way family entertainment is concerned and the way these things have to be big, as in, Hollywood, McDonald’s Happy Meal contract big (in this case, I think it’s Burger King). King Kong is just too much of a classic Hollywood movie for it to be incorporated into a script anybody would call Sun Dance material. Besides, the film has excruciatingly hard work written all over its painstakingly detailed three or so hours. And have you see how much weight Peter Jackson has lost?

MONKEY!!

because these pictures are so cool (cute)

2006-01-03T03:04:00.000+08:00

I hope what i'm doing is legal. pinirata ko ang mga pics na ito mula sa journal ng kaibigan kong si macy (she's the one pointing at the decapitated stuffed deer head). she's a cute little photographer-cum-stage actress-cum-prod designer-cum-ewan who's gelpren to an artist who just sold out all his work in an exhibit held at the Marikina Shoe expo in cubao where free beer was served and everybody in attendance either had something pierced or dyed a neon color. it's all so hip it's almost liquid.

these're pics from this poetry forum we organized late last year. above are the speakers. they are a young group of brilliant poets, which is exactly what the forum called for. it was a 'poetry in the now' sort of thing. what's great is each one had a different opinion, POV, approach to the discussion, and overall physical look. you could say they were, in their diversity and youthful energy (or characteristic lack of it), gen whatever 'represent.'

held at UST, the place to be. in the museum to be precise. best place to hold a reading or a lecture: no white walls and fluorescent rods, just stuffed animals all around complimented by lighting designed for art exhibits. for the other set of pics: to the right in comic book panel reading order are me, gelo, joseph, kit kwe, me again, macy and a dead deer, mikael, camille and ned, a dead deer, the speakers, erik and allan and ronald and me, and the speakers. Thomasian Writers Guild members, alumni and honorary fellows. only person in the little collage who doesn't write literary text with the hopes of publishing (or so we all think) is macy, who is, as i mentioned, in the middle of something so hip, it's almost hopping. now if someone would teach me how to do the whole linking thing so i could link macy's sight so she won't get pissed i pilfered her photos, i'd be really grateful.

bow

(fiction) places in space

2006-01-02T23:35:00.000+08:00

here's another story. shorter, real short. only 244 words counting the title. wrote it in less than an hour. editing and all. wrote it when i was getting over a girl. no, TRYING to get over a girl. I'm under the opinion that we all try but we usually can't (this applies to anything that likens to the act of getting over something important the way air is important to deep sea divers)

I'll try to publish this one. I like it. probably in school. but i'll post it here first because when you have a new blog, you're kinda itching to use it, even when you know it'll be weeks or months before anybody will ever come around to reading it.

I gotta stop blabbin or my intro'll be longer than the actual post.

Places in space

“There are places in space, and even here on Earth, where time moves slower than usual. I know it sounds silly, but it is true and I am sure of it. It had been proven scientifically. I saw it on the TV. We’ve experienced it first hand too.
“Remember Joel’s room, where we used to drink for two hours at a time and come out finding that we’ve been drinking for five? That’s one of those places. I know another one: an old house down by the road. They say its first owners spent their first night in it and didn’t come out for twenty years. When they did, they were as young as when they first purchased the place.
“Maybe we should live in a house like that. Or that very one. We would be happy there, you and I. Maybe there, making love wouldn’t be as quick. Maybe, in that house, the orgasms will be prolonged. They might take weeks or even months--imagine experiencing months of orgasm, while the world grows and dies around us. Maybe, in that place, the happiness we share will take longer to shrivel up, and our binding chemicals will be harder to evaporate.
“In that house, you will never be able tell me we’re taking things too fast, because everything we will do, whatever it may be, will be slow. Slower than time. Slower than a tortoise burning to sand in the desert.”

(fiction) the bus story/chapter 1 of something

2006-01-02T21:25:00.000+08:00

here's one of the stories I didn't publish anywhere else. It was supposed to be a chapter of a novel or something, but I'm probably not going to get back to the project for a while.

Official school bus number 10 of St. Theresa’s College was a hulking contraption of rust and choking engine pipes. Everybody in Hyacinth St. knew what it looked like because Bus # 10 woke everybody in Hyacinth St. up at exactly 6:55 am every morning, the exact time in which everybody, on cue, would ruefully peek through their curtains, scratching their heads, their eyes squinted against the fledgling light, looking for the source of the voracious, abominable honking. Of course at 6:55 am, the majority of Hyacinth’s residents were too groggy from half-sleep to remember that the source of that abominable honking was the same source as it was yesterday, the day before that, and for as long as anybody could remember. When the residents of Hyacinth St., only halfway out of dreaming, finally single out the cause of the early morning disturbance, they will find out for the nth time that Bus # 10 was painted a dull black completely void of any shine, had huge diagonal yellow stripes running through its flanks with the black text “SCOOHL BUS” meticulously hand-painted on them, had an engine noisy as an angry mother-in-law and a clunky radiator that salivated like a St. Bernard.

The colors black and yellow, in the opinion of most of the Theresan students’ mothers, were unbecoming of a bus in the service of an all-girls high school. The colors were usually associated with a neighboring institution, the University of Santo Tomas, which is headed by an order of friars instead of an order of nuns. They thought the bus wasn’t appropriate because their daughters, even when just on their way to school, should look like they were being properly educated by the Theresan Sisters, and not by an order that is second only to the Jesuits for their history of political notoriety. The colors of St. Theresa’s, worn by its students through the official uniform, were blue and white, a combination that proudly symbolizes the traditional Catholic practice of Marian devotion, and the mothers felt that the bus that ferried their daughters should be painted blue and white- like the school bus service of the Ateneo de Manila, which is a school exclusive for boys and headed by the Jesuits. The many toddlers who lived in Hyacinth St. at that time who were all born in the same month of the same year and enrolled in the same preschool, associated the bus with bees, and would point at the vehicle and say “bheegth,” when they see it. The toddlers’ older brothers, who found that life was an endless cycle of drinking gin on the streets at night and eating salted nuts they would vomit later on, associated the bus with their tremulous hangovers, hating the vehicle almost as much as they hated the sun rising in the middle of their unfinished merriments. Some of them, just woken from roadside stupors, would pelt the bus with stones and empty bottles of Ginebra San Miguel, giving the bus driver the impression that the neighborhood he entered every morning was not one he would want to visit at night.

In the years between the deaths of Kurt Cobain and George Harrison, Bus # 10 passed by Hyacinth St. every school day to pick up the girls of the Elizano household. The oldest Elizano girl was Maria Rebecca, a young woman who’s idea of starting the day was being screamed at by her mother for twenty minutes before she gets up for school while her ride waits outside. Her mother, Mrs. Elizano, who does no act of violence other than occasionally roughing up her daughter into consciousness, would then go outside and bribe the bus driver for more time with a motherly smile and, sometimes, a glass of home-squeezed orange juice. The driver, in his thankfulness to find a good soul in this place of squalor and flying bottles of gin, would accept the kind woman’s gracious smile and occasional refreshment. He would forget about Maria Rebecca’s dressing up in a particularly slow pace which is the frequent cause of fantastic delays in his schedule and dreadful chokeholds on his career as a bus driver.

Jun-Jun De La Rosa, the boy who lives across the Elizano house, has his bedroom window right in front of where the bus stops. He claims to have had dreams every night of a massive, faceless monster with burning yellow eyes and innards that he says rumble like the earthquake of 1990. In Jun’s dream, the monster is devouring little girls in a fiery cave while he cowers in a corner, centimeters from the beast’s sweaty hide, scared of being caught, covering his ears so he wouldn’t hear the girls’ shattering pleas for mercy. He woke up every morning screaming and sweaty, with diesel exhaust flooding his room and heat from the bus’ flank warming his face. The screams in his dream would turn into pubescent girly giggles that would have been pleasing if it weren’t 7 am, and more so if Jun-Jun were a middle-aged bachelor with intimacy problems. Instead, Jun-Jun happens to be a pre-adolescent boy with misgivings about the little hairs suddenly appearing on his nether parts, and little knowledge of the world of sex besides that which could be viewed from a safe distance via TV-VCR setup.

After Maria Rebecca trips down their steps with just a waffle in hand for breakfast and boards the bus to leave for school, Jun, with tears from his nightmare drying in his eyelids, steps outside to see if Martin is standing in front of his house a few meters down the road, where he usually can be found after Maria Rebecca’s bus leaves. If Jun were lucky, he would be able to bum a cigarette from Martin, who was in high school and wasn’t scared of being caught by his father while in the possession of cigarettes. If Jun were even luckier, he would be able to join Martin for breakfast, as his household’s yaya, Ate Elvi, cooked the best tapa in the district. On occasions like this he would have little chats with Martin about video games, the NBA, and the latest version of his regular monster dream, upon which Martin would be highly unresponsive, distracted by something he didn’t want to talk about. Jun would never mind doing all the talking, thinking that he was gracious provider of conversation while Martin the generous benefactor of his day’s first meal.

During one similar circumstance, Martin surprised Jun by actually talking. Martin told Jun that he was in love with Maria Rebecca Elizano and that he was going to marry her someday whether she liked it or not. Jun was in no way equipped to respond to a declaration of that nature, as he was just in grade 6 and had no use for the females in his class other than ask them for intermediate pad paper before tests. Jun contemplated that the only appropriate reaction to that statement was a silence that, regretfully, would turn out to be uncomfortable. He ate some more, emptying the rice bowl into his plate and getting all the tapa but a small piece that he thought Martin might want for himself. He excused himself after finishing and got up to leave when Martin looked up at him and said that the Earthquake was in 1991, not 1990. Jun absorbed this information, making a mental note to correct Eric, who was the one who told him about the Earthquake in full, exaggerated detail. While on the short trek to his house, Jun thought about Martin and confirmed something that had always been bothering him at the back of his mind: Martin always looked sad, in no occasion—aside from the times vast amounts of malt liquor were involved—did he ever see Martin with eyes lit up and welcoming. He considered, for some reason, not repeating his daily visits to his house, but then considered the joy Ate Elvi’s tapa is to his taste buds. Nearing the Elizano household, he tried to imagine how Martin would look at a girl like Maria Rebecca. He considered the girl’s dark skin and long hair and white teeth. He thought of Maria Christina, one of the younger Elizano girls with whom he used to play with in their house. He smiled a little in comprehension of what Martin had just said and suddenly wished that he had taken up his classmate’s offer to let him borrow a copy of Playboy. Before entering his house, he spotted Eric, who was lying down on the street a few steps down the road. Eric had apparently joined some of the other older boys in last night’s rapacious drinking. Jun waved and called to Eric in his high pitched pre-pubescent voice and very nearly missed the empty gin bottle that was hurled at him and struck him the head.

As he was being rushed to the hospital, Jun-Jun, bleeding and delirious, dreamt of the horrible monster in his dreams. It was very nearly about to devour Maria Christina, who was dirty and in tattered dress. In this particular and peculiar version of the dream, Jun-Jun found himself with a formidable iron, European sword at hand, and he was rather dismayed that he had no idea whatsoever what to do with it.

first post yeba!

2006-01-02T21:18:00.000+08:00

at the rate i'm going, i won't be able to write anything without some place to publish regularly. the net seems like a good place to go. in some ways this could either be a kick in the ass or in the nuts (as in itutulak ako para magsulat, o i-hihinder ako), but we'll just have to see. hello boys and gels, tomorrow is now--or something like that (i just wanted to say something vague that could be mistaken for cool to start things off). and hi