Tarski

I woke up the other day and saw how Internet Explorer fucks up what's otherwise a beautiful thing called the Skirmisher. It was morning, and I had planned many other things: I was supposedly gunning down nasty Eastern Europeans on the PS2 game Black, retesting if my old coffee brewer would still work so that I could enjoy a rare treat of genuine caffeine, doing profound things like standing in a corner and gazing at the wall and writing down what strange things I was seeing on the same wall. And scratching what itched.

But I saw how the Skirmisher was exploding so I had no choice but to sit down and press the kind of red button I only press on certain doomsdays: the button labelled, "Fuck Abstrakt; load Tarski."

"Abstrakt" was the blog template I had been using for the past two months. I was smitten by its charms the first time I saw it. And like what one would do with one’s great love, I looked the other way whenever I’d see something I didn’t like; things like Php files that looked like patchwork, and the weird things its three columns sometimes did whenever I tried to implement what I thought would have been a cool idea. But the other day, I saw how ugly it was, and how patchy it had become. So I said to it in a who-gives-a-shit voice, “Frankly, my damn, I don’t dear a give.”

If you’d look at the Skirmisher now, it’s dressed up in the Emperor’s new clothes, whose creators say was inspired by 20th century logician Alfred Tarski (the Skirmish of Dark and Light’s theme was called Kubrick; fancy names, I admit, but who wouldn’t like dropping them?)

I had been keeping the Tarski template files in the bowels of my hard drive exactly for such an event. And I was just too eager to use it when the time came. Although it was relatively a breeze to install and customize, doing the whole shebang snatched two days of my very important life away from the empty things I love. And now, it’s sitting there like it never ever required some blood sacrifice. If it were a person, I would at least snap a rubber band on its nose to appease myself.

But now that the blog’s complete and running once again, Black beckons. How happily and childishly I answer the call.

Beginnings and Endings

There are books that for me are so terrific I just couldn’t find the courage to finish reading them. I don’t know, maybe it’s out of some absurd respect for what I think are great things. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, for example. Or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. You can quiz me about how it began, how the characters faced their individual extinctions, how they rubbed the little happiness they had with their little fingers. But I won’t be able to tell you how it all ends. I have no idea. I have suspicions, and mostly I make it up, sometimes to avoid embarrassment.

Some years ago, when I was in the first few chapters of reading Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis, I immediately knew this would be one of those books. I’d guard how many remaining pages I was left to read, and then I’d tack a sort of mental Post-It note in my head. When I chat with somebody about one of these no-ending books, I invent the endings. I make it wild enough to be exciting, but believable enough not to arouse suspicion.

I walk the earth with a head full of books that have no endings. At the end of the day, I console myself with an absurd pride; it’s not easy, after all, to have the self-discipline to divorce oneself from a page-turner. It takes immense will, like the kind of focus you need to bend spoons and forks and the Philippine Constitution.

Sometimes, I find myself wondering: what if one day or morning, at a café or somewhere on EDSA, I meet somebody who knows all the endings, but no beginnings? Somebody whose head is full of last chapters?

I’m pretty sure such a meeting would be like the hotdog meeting a donut. Or John meeting Yoko. The Red Sea parting in half. Or a story that finally finds its own reason to be read completely.

I have no idea if this makes sense. But one thing is for sure.

If I meet this amazing person one day in the far future, I will tell her:

Don’t you, oh don’t you goddamn tell me the motherfucking ending.

"White Light"

My short story, "White Light," appears live on Amazon Shorts for 14 days. If you're somewhat of a writer and have been looking for a good, growing online writing community, join Gather. And while you're at it, why not visit the "White Light" page and rate it. If you do, I'll send you Bogart, my carrier pigeon, strapped with a Thank You note and a strand of the Manny Pacquiao armpit hair I've been trying to sell (quite unsuccessully) on eBay.

Seriously, don't listen to my blather and please just rate it.

I wrote it one warm, brownout evening while we all sat in the shadows. I was trying to read Stephen King's On Writing on my PDA and when I gazed up to look at the candlelight, the seed for the story struck me: What if story ideas were specks of light fluttering like fireflies in the darkness, that any writer could pluck and, instantly, there's a powerful story in his head and all he needed to do is write it down without having to think it up. Easy.

I admit what motivated me to write it was laziness. I'm more of a slacker than a writer; the truth is, although I love telling stories, I hate writing them down in a coherent, disciplined, consistent manner. In the same way I hate classrooms and studying under a professor (see Exhibit A of my chronic folly in "Out of Place") in a coherent, scheduled, consistent manner. Maybe I haven't found my voice, yet, and maybe I won't. So you can imagine how seductive it would be for me to just go into a room filled with white specks of light/story ideas, "pluck" them out of thin air, and exclaim Voila! like what those fake Italian chefs do in tomato sauce commercials.

So visit my story's page on Gather and please rate it. I'm feeling saucy today I think I'll even give you my sister's puppy.

Dead Things and Empty Spaces

I was speaking with a girl some weeks ago, and the conversation made a turn toward teenage angst and suicide. The girl was young and had many personal issues; she’s one of those who had the habit of being sad and hopeless all the time, which was crazy because she had much going for her and she was pretty.

After a while, the girl asked me, “If you don’t believe in God and life is absurd and meaningless, why go on living? Doesn’t it depress you?”

This was a line of questioning that was always tricky. So I did what Jesus Christ would do: I told her a “parable.”

Two things, I said.

First, read my old blog post called, “Existential Song.” It’s basically a mishmash of all things Albert Camus and his jolly philosopher friends, but I made some of my points there.

Second, listen to this quite long drivel.

[Start of drivel]

I’ve always hated human death. It’s wrong. Nobody deserves to die, ever. It’s probably why I’m endlessly fascinated with things that promise to make death obsolete. Things like nanotechnology, cryonics, stem cell research, and the fine words that dribble out of Ray Kurzweil’s mouth.

It’s also why people who commit suicide sadden me so much.

A high school student was on the news some months ago. He slashed his wrists and bled to death because his girl friend had dumped him. I’m usually jaded that I couldn’t care anymore, but there are few things that still hit me at the center of things, and that was one of those few things. If you’re sick of incurable cancer and stewing in indescribable pain, maybe I’d relent, maybe I’d give you a lethal dose of morphine. If your testicles have grown into the size of those balls they use to demolish decrepit buildings and you just couldn’t stand the sight of them, maybe I’d push that button or pull that trigger for you. But if you were healthy, young, and free, that kind of stupidity is just… too much.

Besides, your time will come, so don’t rush it. Maybe you’ll die tomorrow, anyway. So cheer up.

Whenever I’m in one of my rare episodes of feeling down in the dumps, I usually think about that old fisherman in Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea, and how he hangs on to the carcass of the dead whale even as hungry sharks surround him. That guy’s cool—he hangs on to the carcass no matter fucking what—and that image alone is usually powerful enough to yank me out of my occasional depression. My little point is (and I’m probably making this sound so odd here), sometimes, salvation comes in the form of a dead, rotting thing, even if you end up with nothing but bones and a sad story to tell. Sometimes, vindication can look and smell so bad you have no idea what the hell it is until things melt into their right places.

Besides, whenever the thought of death brushes my brain, what I think about are the maggots. Or the loneliness of the grave. Or some silly pain. Or the unsavory possibility that the coroner might be gay and he might play with my penis. Imagine that for a second: I’m a goddamn object. He might draw cute smileys on my balls. He might check out my ass hole and decides I can be violated. It happens.

Suicide is a silly thing. And know this: Nobody really cares about somebody else’s sadness; what the world wants to know is how you’re facing it, how you’re kicking it in the teeth even if you’re also blind and bleeding. Yeah, life is like a vast field strewn with land mines, but you never, ever chicken out because you have nowhere else to go. We face it, gather our courage, and walk through it and pluck the things that we think are nice. You can never choose death without losing your humanity first. All those fuckers who choose to “die with dignity” are just a bunch of idiots; death is always, always ugly. Nobody dies with dignity, Gregory House said. You live with dignity; you can’t die with it.

[End of drivel]

So no matter how crappy things become—and believe me, you haven’t seen real shit yet—just go on living, I said. I’m usually not serious, but this is one of those instances when I am.

“Fuckin’ A,” she said. “Sometimes, you do make sense.”

“Because you frighten me,” I told her.

And you can’t die, I muttered to myself, because we haven’t even dated, yet.

[Image by Frozen Emotions]

The Manny Pacquiao Show

I’m not really a faithful follower of boxing, but I think Manny Pacquiao is the only boxer I’ve seen wearing a jersey so completely smothered with the logos of half a dozen sponsors.

The jersey was screaming: Motolite! McDonalds! No Fear! More exclamations!!! Now!!!

And with a shining bling, too, dangling from his neck.

Wow. If only I could wear things like that. He reminded me of Formula 1, or an old Wayne’s World joke. Or a dressed-up jeepney.

Yesterday’s match was also a marketer’s greasy wet dream: it should be included in the annals of target marketing. Where else in the world can you see this phenomenon: Manny Pacquiao is the personality in his very own show’s slew of advertisements. You have this globally famous boxing match, and in the gaps, the star boxer is also in almost all the TV ads, endorsing to death things like painkiller, canned fish, sport socks, Magic Sing, beer and liquor, a foreign fastfood, vinegar, ice cream.

That McDonalds TV ad?: Pa-pa-ra-Pacquiao, love ko ‘to!

Pure genius.

I’m quite sure products like Carefree, Modess, Creamsilk, and Lactacyd are also itching to dunk their hands in the Manny Pacquiao phenomenon, except that they’re still trying to figure out how to tie Manny with their brands. Maybe ask him to do a cartwheel and talk about his monthly period, ehrmm, I mean, monthly training period? Make him pick daisies, write his innermost thoughts on a diary, and make him say things like, “Nothing’s as fresh as Lactacyd in the morning.”

And don’t forget to emphasize the Visayan accent Jericho Rosales is so fucking proud of. Wait a minute, why not make Jericho Rosales do all the fake Visayan speaking, and just put Manny in the background, say, ten mountains away, nodding in approval? Or why not make Jericho Rosales just kill himself and spare us all the bloody trouble?

Manny Pacquiao has become a huge media and marketing juggernaut; he’s no longer just a boxer from the Philippines. He is the Philippines. Yesterday, it’s probably fairly accurate to say the entire country dropped everything and sat before a TV set. The joke was that thieves and swindlers cancelled whatever their plans for an otherwise happy fruitful day of petty crimes just for Manny’s sake. You could even walk on completely empty roads; everybody seemed inside their homes, watching the fight, bursting with all sorts of colorful expletives each time a punch landed on the right place, or dismally missed.

Maybe I should find a way to have a cut in the whole thing before he spars with Eric Morales some months from now. I’ll sell t-shirts with Manny’s shit-eating grin on them. Shave my black curly cat and sell the hair on Ebay, telling people it was from Manny Pacquiao’s armpits; all those dirty matrons would have a blast sniffing it.

Maybe I’ll shoot some flamboyant movie and call it, The Devil Wears Manny Pacquiao’s Sponsor-Overkilled Jersey.

Or I’ll “invent” a new kind of bread and call it, “Manny, the new monay!” (Monay is a Filipino bread that resembles a woman’s boobs, and it’s usually warm, too.)

Not bad. I think I like the monay thing so much I’m going to strike a deal with the baker right now.

The Notebook

“I have to take a dump,” Jessie whispered.

“What? You mean, now?”

Jessie winced; I saw desperation in his eyes. It made me shiver. It made me mutter to myself, Oh, shit, indeed.

This was in third grade. Our teacher, who was heavy with child and terribly cranky, was introducing a new math concept that required us to work with strange symbols. I was straining to understand the whole thing when Jessie, who sat beside me, tapped me with an icy hand and winced and said he really, really had to shit.

“What did you eat?” I was trying to keep my voice down, hiding my embarrassment over this shitty conversation. “Why now? Couldn’t it wait till the next decade?”

Jessie tried to speak, but he suddenly stood up with that strange gait as if he had a small animal coming out of his butt. He went to our teacher, whispered something, then off he went. He walked out the door like a duck in pain.

I felt guilty somehow. Jessie was, after all, my best buddy. I had other pals, but Jessie was my Heavy Artillery; he was one of those Luca Brasi types who were brutal to enemies and loyal to friends and a weapon you only unleashed to destroy countries like the former USSR. Jessie was very useful when, for instance, one of the nasty kids from another grade level wanted to smash my face because I had committed the terrible mistake of playing in the seesaw that the kid apparently “owned.” It didn’t help that I tried to give the corny explanation that only “God could own the seesaw.” I would have been dead had Jessie didn’t intervene on my behalf; he had that ugly scowl and those fists that would force the copious birthing of second thoughts even in the head of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Jessie became my loyal friend because he was sort of slow. It would take him a while to understand the lessons, and often he’d rely on me to supply the answers during spot quizzes. I was not really smart, but I was not daft, either. Maybe I just knew my way around little tricks. When you think about it, the world is just an endless Easter egg hunt; others stumble in the grass and use brute force to look for the eggs, while others just sort of feel the right places where to look. Jessie fell in the former category, while I probably belonged in the latter. Or maybe I was just lucky in some strange way.

But the point is, Jessie regarded me as some sort of savior for “academically” saving his ass so many times. There was one irritating moment when I was even tempted to call him stupid to his face, only that I suddenly remembered Jessie’s strategic role in the schoolyard’s system of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the wisdom that you never, ever call your “nuclear warhead” stupid.

So when on that shitty morning Jessie sallied forth to crap, I felt a pang of guilt. It was one of those feelings that suddenly blanketed you and made you remember all those shining instances when Jessie the Good Guy stood beside you to battle the schoolyard monsters. It was an ugly feeling, something I’d probably never get used to. So what I did, I also went out and followed him to the restroom.

I have to tell you about the restroom. It was a place where the word “rest” was as alien and awkward as Eddie Gil in Malacañang. It had that sticky stench that would cling on your skin and clothes, and its walls had ugly rust stains that must have been there since the Cretacious period. Entering the restroom felt like entering the maw of some huge beast that had severe halitosis.

I found Jessie in the last cubicle that the rest of the world usually ignored. I knocked softly on the door and, to lighten things up, said something like, “Did you eat over-ripe pineapples? Because your shit smells like The Sickness.”

Jessie opened the door a bit and stuck out his sweaty face and said, “I need water.”

“Water? You wanna drink here?”

“No, no,” he said. “I need to wash my—”

“Okay,” I said. I looked around. I tried turning the faucets but they coughed out air. There was a plastic drum in a corner, but it was much taller than me and there was no way I could get anything that it contained. Exasperated, I gave Jessie the bad news.

Jessie frowned. “I’m dead.” Then something flashed in his eyes. He said, “Get me some paper!”

“Toiler paper? I have no—“

“Any paper! It doesn’t matter,” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. All this while he’d been sitting on the toilet and sticking his head out the door. “Get me some scrap. Anything… Or get me one of my notebooks.”

My mouth fell open. His notebooks? You know you’ve hit rock-bottom when you’re beginning to sacrifice dear things like school supplies. Jessie loved his notebooks because they served like some sort of status symbol; while the rest of us kids had notebooks with pictures of local movie stars on them, Jessie’s notebooks were the expensive types that had pictures of the Transformers and Voltron, which were way cool. It was a mark of Jessie’s stature in our universe. Besides, he loved his notebooks so much he rarely wrote on them.

“You can’t be serious. You’re sacrificing them in the name of some crappy—”

“Oh shut up! Just get my notebook, okay?”

I said nothing. I frowned and decided he must be insane. But I had never been in the kind of shoes he was in, so maybe I just didn’t understand the magnitude of his dilemma.

I ran out and went back to the classroom, only to find the class in the middle of a spot quiz. Everybody was in the heat of answering their papers. I quickly forgot all about Jessie and how he must have festered in that cubicle for an hour more. I only remembered him and the notebook he needed to wipe his butt when the quiz was over. But then, it was too late. Jessie appeared at the door, an uneasy smile on his face. When he came over, he even thanked me.

“Because you didn’t come,” he said. “You just saved my notebooks from my desperation.”

I stared at him. “Don’t be corny,” I said. "You're making me want to take a dump, too."

Later that school year, Jessie would crap once more, and it would be worse because he’d do it right on his seat—right beside me. I would be so ashamed of him that it would mark the end of our “friendship”; in the budding self-consciousness of people in the third grade, there were few things you could get away with, but defecating in the classroom was not one of those things. Literally shitting in class marked you for life in our small town. And by “life,” I mean, until high school.

“I used all my paper money,” he said. “Say, can you lend me some money for my fare home?”

Sure, I said. I felt so tired and sick to my stomach. This whole business was making me wish I should have flushed Jessie down the toilet bowl—if only I had water.