The Skirmish of Dark and Light

The Spinal Tap

2008-10-20T09:40:00.001+08:00

Just a quick note. I've got me a new "personal" blog: The Spinal Tap.

It will be more frequently updated than this one.

The Dude

2008-03-06T21:00:00.002+08:00

My sister owned a single morbidly obese female guinea pig (which I mentioned some years ago). It remained that way until one of the neighbors (who also happened to own a bunch of guinea pigs and had a guinea pig population boom problem) saw our single morbidly obese female guinea pig and kindly offered to donate one more. And because we’ve always been kind to neighbors with a guinea pig population boom problem we said, Sure, okay, that’s fine, what’s another useless mouth to feed, eh?

Now we have two small mammals, both fat females, who prowl the small yard in front of our house like two fur balls gnawing at whatever wooden thing there was. They live in this neat little cage whose door was always kept open so they can go in and out of it as they please. The cage also has a little handle, which might come in handy just in case a nuclear war breaks out and there arises a sudden need to quickly transport the guinea pigs to a safe, bomb-proof place.

All was well. The two matrons of our yard lived a nice, well-fed, protected straight-out-of-Disney existence. They sometimes threw sarcastic remarks our way whenever we tried to feed them my smelly fingernail clippings. But overall, life was good. At least, until the puppy came.

Well, the puppy, let’s call him Dude for convenience, was a little mischievous fellow whose sole purpose in life was to be an ultra-efficient poop-and-piss processor – place anything in its mouth and the puppy, a marvel of nature, quickly turned it into either (a) poop that stank; (b) pee that stained. Based on this alone, we suspected the puppy was probably a Filipino politician in his past life.

Suffice it to say that Dude, we had decided, needed a little strategic housebreaking. And this being the modern day of the internet, we used, in the wise words of George Bush himself, “The Google.”

However, as it turned out, trying to find accurate information on what we really wanted to accomplish was no easy feat. The following were the exact search words we used – all in the order of increasing desperation.

“How to housebreak a dog.”

“How to patiently train a dog to shit in designated places.”

“How to FORCE the dog to shit in designated places.”

“How to strike fear in the heart of dog, so he shits ONLY in designated places.”

“How to COMPLETELY STOP dog from shitting.”

“How to turn goddamn dog into fine paste using only household utensils.”

“How to instantly vaporize goddamn dog using laser built from readily available computer components.”

I don’t have to tell you that for some reason, nothing worked. So at this point, to protect our house from further poop-trefaction, it had become a cardinal rule to closely watch the puppy for the tell-tale signs of it answering the call of nature. If and when one of us humans witnesses any of the said tell-tale signs, it was our responsibility to swiftly rise to the occasion, leap into action, and whisk the Dude to a more poop-receptive place -- hopefully right in the nick of time.

One morning, as I worked furiously on my PC chasing a deadline, Dude came out of nowhere walking with that strange gait -- and the thought flashed in my head: the puppy...oh, shit! My knee-jerk reaction was to dash for it. However, somehow I tripped on something, and I fell down in dramatic slo-mo like some doomed redwood tree, my left knee hitting the concrete floor hard. I swear I heard a bone crack.

The dog came galloping up to my face and nervously stuck out his tongue, panting like crazy.

Dude: Now, I'm gonna tell all my friends what an idiot you are!

Me: Dude, you have no friends.

Dude: Well, let's see about that when I grow up and finally become a hot bitch!

Me: Dude, you're a male dog.

Dude: Nevertheless!!!

Of course, this meaningful exchange didn't actually take place. What really happened was that the dog yawped and barked and heartlessly tried to eat my hair as I lay there writhing in mind-numbing pain.

My left knee would swell and bruise and blacken and I would spend the next few days glaring at the dog. Meanwhile, there was work and more work and there was less and less time to leap into poop-related action.

Later on, Dude found a new way to amuse himself: by sexually harassing the two female, morbidly obese guinea pigs in our front yard.

Somehow, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. The universe actually aligned itself for this unspeakable development to find fruition.

First, there was my sister’s stuffed toy, which looked like a little monkey with the same body size as Dude, but for some reason Dude thought it was another dog he could actually have sex with.

Second was that the “poop-receptive place” I mentioned several paragraphs ago was actually the front yard, and the front yard, as everyone at this point realizes, was where the two fat furry garden matrons ruled and rooted.

And so Dude meets the two guinea pigs, resembling the stuffed toy he had been humping, and all hell breaks loose. Sometimes, deep in the night, you could hear the guinea pigs screaming the hopeless, painful screams of the royally fucked. We humans tried to prevent it whenever we could, but whenever we let the Dude out to answer the call of nature, he would chase the screaming guinea pigs as soon as the last piece of turd squeezed out of his asshole. And to add insult to injury, the puppy began to really, really fancy the guinea pigs’ own droppings. Look what we have here: Dude trying to rape the guinea pigs and literally eat their shit, too. Ain’t he a sweetheart!

I haven’t written a single piece of fiction in the past several months, and I feel guilty about breaking the dry spell by writing about the Dude. My left knee is still swollen. And as I write this, the Dude has just begun trying to eat my brother’s shoe. The house smells of shit. I turn on the TV, and the news also stinks of crap.

Maybe later, I’d go out and visit the two “rape victims” in the front yard, see if they still have the same old, fiery sarcasm in them. Meanwhile, the Dude walks with that strange “I’m gonna poop” gait again, but I’m wiser this time. I’m not going to fall for that, you bastard. I now know when to recognize genuine, true-to-the-core poop. But…

Oh, shit. You win.

"And they're turning us into monsters"

2008-02-19T23:40:00.001+08:00

“Wow! Ang galeng!”
– Steven Spielberg

“Amputs! Ayuz! Parang tutoo!”
– Spike Lee

“Sobrang ma-Force-y! Grabe!!!”
– George Lucas

“Asan ang b**bs?”
– Larry Flynt

My brother Marvin and I made this little video. Alright, it was Marvin who actually did most of the work, while I just reacted in my usual anal-retentive way over his shoulders. It’s our own take on the fun happenings currently changing lives and giving a 2010-boosting exposure to everyone concerned at the Philippine Senate.

Marvin did the editing using Swishmax and Sony Vegas version 5.0. Credit goes to all the unnamed sources of the images. The song is “Kids with guns” by Gorillaz. And when you think about it, it’s quite hilarious. Darkly hilarious.

‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’ — Nietzsche

2008-02-03T21:52:00.000+08:00

For those of you who wake up in the morning, access your blog, and think, "Hey, ain't it awesome if I post the lyrics of my most favorite song in the world ever on the blog and wow my friends? Like, today? Haller?!"

And so you do. Over and over and over again (ooops! that's a song's line right there!). Well, I'm your patron saint. Not only I'm going to post the most truly awesome song lyrics ever made in the world, I'm also posting it while actually singing it aloud and dancing that Marian Rivera dance while wearing my favorite hot pink thong. Can you beat that?

Here it goes!

***

"Around the world" by Daft Punk:

Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world

Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world.

***

Hah! Now I feel better. There's nothing more exhilarating and profound than posting song lyrics on my blog. I love it! And I'm sure you do, too! If I were gonna choose between peeing on my laptop and post song lyrics on the blog, I'll always definitely choose the latter (despite the obvious tastefully edifying possibilities with the former).

In other news of the past two weeks: been very very busy. (check). Been burned out (check). Lost a chicken (check). did something evil in the past two weeks (check). watched No Country For Old Men, reaffirmed that the universe is fucked (film's characters), and some people are very aware of that to the point of genius (Coen brothers) (check). read Amsterdam (Ian McEwan), reaffirmed that human beings are both heartless and infinitely stupid (the novel's characters, many people in the planet, me) and incredibly brilliant (Ian McEwan, the author) (check).

Three weeks ago, I was standing on an aisle in a very huge bookstore. It was 10 am when it suddenly hit me. It began as a sensation in my chest, that crept up my spine and made me wanna pee. It took seconds to articulate the thought: life is utterly short. I can ignore others when they tell me, "Hey, man, life's short." But this, not this. This is different. This has a feeling, a sense of foreboding that hasn't gone away. A sense of painful urgency, like a deadly knife stab from somebody you thought was your friend. I was standing there with that trickle of early birds like myself hovering about those books, and I was thinking, "Look at all these that I'll never ever read." The stories I'll never know. The sensations I'll never feel. Simply because human time is not enough. You're already swamped with the sheer business of living. The little time that's left after: (1) sleeping, (2) eating, (3) communicating with other humans and animals, (4) fornicating or attempting to fornicate, (5) making new enemies and friends, (6) earning a living, (7) eliminating all you've eaten, (8) pretending to be smart -- the little time that's left after fulfilling all these necessary human activities means it's not possible to consume all the good literature you can identify in one's lifetime.

Later, at home, I surveyed all the books I've bought in the past year. I looked at them with the pity you feel when somebody's going to die, and you know. So i picked some up -- Dave Sedaris, Amelie Nothomb, Thomas Harris, Dave Eggers -- and I stayed in my room just reading them. But after merely finishing Nothomb's Fear and Trembling (which was easy) and halfway through Sedaris' Dress Up Your Family In Corduroy And Jeans, I found it impossible to resist proceeding with: (1) sleeping, (2) eating, (3) communicating with other humans and animals, (4) fornicating or attempting to fornicate, (5) making new enemies and friends, (6) earning a living, (7) eliminating all you've eaten, (8) pretending to be smart.

So by now, you know I've given up. And I'm sure, that's how the rest of the world live: by just getting by. By taking whatever they can take. Enjoying the little morsels floating by them and shutting off that creeping awareness of those so many things forever out of your reach. Chuck Palahniuk has the word for us: "the all-dancing, all-singing crap of the world."

That's you and I, man. Around the world. Around the world. Around the world.

"Susan and the Infinite Sadness"

2007-10-27T19:10:00.000+08:00

I had been cleaning up my hard drive when I found an old story I had written several months ago. It’s called “Susan and the Infinite Sadness” and I sort of wrote it along the usual plot lines of the Maalaala Mo Kaya classic Tagalog drama. Except it’s written in English, a language I constantly use to subtly hide some vomit-friendly plot twists I tend to make.

Be forewarned, though: the story’s so sappy no print publication agreed to publish it. As the old-timers used to say, it’s not only corny, it’s cornichon! Today, however, I’m posting it online in celebration of the World Sappy Short Stories Day, an awesome global event I invented two minutes ago.

So for avid readers of incredible tearjerking pseudo-romance stories (cleverly sprinkled with gratuitous and entirely unnecessary sex scenes), you may read the full text of “Susan and the Infinite Sadness” here.

Great Moments In Government Employee Hotness

2007-10-17T20:03:00.000+08:00

Dante's Moustache and Beard Beauty Parlor featuring 2007 image model Comelec Spokesperson James Jimenez.

Testimonial:

"I'm very happy with Dante's state-of-the-art moustache-twirling service, beard rejuvenation and scrotum laser-resurfacing, now I have the drop-dead gorgeousness of my idol Dante Varona! Everytime I look in the mirror, I faint! Gosh, I'm that hot! No one will know I'm not actually an Earthling!"

-- James Jimenez, famous Filipino celebrity, teenage heartthrob, and incumbent Comelec spokesperson

Overheard At The Supermarket #1

2007-08-15T22:07:00.000+08:00

Supermarket somewhere in Manila. Two guys debating right by the shelves of fruit preserves and jars of processed honey.

Dude 1: alam mo, hindi nilalanggam ang honey.

Dude 2: nilalanggam rin iyan.

Dude 1: ang orig na honey, hindi nilalanggam. yung honey na may halong asukal, yun ang lalanggamin.

Dude 2: baka ang tinutukoy mo, nagki-crystallize. honey na may asukal, nagki-crystallize, yung orig, hindi. liquid forever. kahit malamig.

Dude 1: pareho din yun. ang honey na orig, walang halo, hindi nilalapitan ng langgam, hindi nagki-crystallize.

Dude 2: [pause] ano ka ba. kung betlog nga nilalanggam, honey pa? e mas matamis yun.

Both dudes leave. I grab one of the jars of honey and throw it into my cart. I'm thinking, maybe I'll smear some of this shit on my testicles and wait for the ants, see who's right. It's okay. All for the sake of science. Then I'll post the findings of my randomized, double-blind experiment later, just to rid the world of debates like that one.

Koko Pimentel Removes Koko Krunch Off The Shelves; Pichay Blames Everybody Except His Mother

2007-07-31T19:09:00.001+08:00

Disappointed that not even years of clever subliminal advertising could win him a Senate seat, Koko Pimentel recently ordered thousands of boxes of Koko Krunch breakfast cereals taken off supermarket shelves. If not even the subtle resemblance of the breakfast cereal's character to his own face could endear him to the hearts of voters, Koko said during a press conference, then screw this country.

"From now on, I will deny thousands of Filipinos who actually can afford to eat breakfast the pleasure of eating Koko Krunch.”

When pressed about the future of Koko Krunch, Koko Pimentel said they're not completely killing the product. "We're just considering changing it into something more effective, like Koko's Balls, because balls are so hot right now.”

Meanwhile, Prospero Pichay is considering suing his advertising agency for coming up with the stupid "Itanim sa Senado" campaign. Pichay said that although "Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo" bullshit was brilliant, he thought his own creation, "Pichay, isaksak sa baga ng Senado" would have given him a better chance of winning. Instead, his not-thinking-out-of-the-box handlers insisted in adopting the ever-corny "Itanim sa Senado" slogan. Hence, his tremendous loss.

"Anak ng puta, sinong gagong taga-syudad ang boboto sa akin sa itanim, itanim na iyan. Sa mga magsasaka lang at marijuana planters bumenta iyan e. Pati yung mga mascot na ginamit namin, hindi naman nakakatuwa yung mga yun e. Kung si Doraemon ginamit namin, patok sana. Tutal kamukha ko naman yun," Pichay fumed during a tete-a-tete with Amay Bisaya at Cafe Lawton.

You may remember that Pichay's "Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo" inspired tambays and common kriminals everywhere to come up with their own versions, like the following:

Smelly kid: Pangarap ko, makakain ng hotcake. Kahit one bite lang.

"Pagpag" hotcake street vendor: Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo!

Underpaid construction worker: Pangarap ko, makatagpo ng mumurahing babaeng mayayari.

60-year-old Doroteo Jose prostitute: Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo!

Senior high school student: Pangarap ko, makabili ng isang bloke ng jutes sa presyong abot ng allowance ko.

Marijuana dealer: Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo!

Manileno: Pangarap ko, magdilim at maging grabeng boring at corny ulit ang Maynila.

Alfredo Lim: Pangarap ko, tuparin ang pangarap mo!

Spells That Should Have Been in Harry Potter

2007-07-31T18:48:00.000+08:00

Nut-tus Crackus - effective only against male Death Eaters.

Knickerus Disappearus - The spell everybody's reserving for Hermione once she gets legal.

Homo Detectus -- Harry's version of the "gaydar."

Biggus Dickus -- Dumbledore's favorite spell. Works like Viagra.

Articles of Faith

2007-07-24T09:13:00.000+08:00

[I feel somewhat guilty for not posting anything here for a long time, so here's one of my old essays. Previously published, I just don't remember where.]

ANODYNE MONDAYS

Somebody is raped, murdered, sodomized, robbed, mugged, destroyed. They are strangers all, and I find their stories in one morning, machine-printed on many, many pages of broadsheet. Their fates mar the serenity of my well-ordered existence—like dye stains on an otherwise exquisite arabesque, they disturb me with the magnitude of their senselessness, with the breadth and depth of how they crush my sense of order in the universe.

Every morning I die. Every morning some recurrent darkness overcomes me. There it is, the newspaper, settled innocently on my table, its silence ominous. The newspaper reeks of screams of mindless bloodshed, so thick you can perhaps cut the screams with a knife, pun unintended. And as soon as I muster enough courage to untangle the stories about the previous day, it shatters the fragile shell that weakly holds my sense of ought-to’s.

Each time I open the newspaper, I lose hope. And losing all hope, like what Fight Club’s Tyler Durden realized, is freedom. Hopelessness is freedom. You have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear about. You just go around and run down the asphalt road, finding comfort in the fact that it matters little whether you are all-wheel-drive or not, whether your brakes are okay or not, whether you’re bulletproofed or not. Because in the end, life is just a matter of walking through a room bristling with Damocles’ swords; that because you have little to do about it anyway, it’s better to just let go.

In a way, it’s magical when terror actually becomes anodyne, relief, some sort of painkiller. Read all the bad news, and the senselessness of it all begins to turn around and becomes something that calms you down. Depression becomes euphoria. And Mondays become good days.

And when night comes I dream, and when I dream, I am actually shedding off all those useless and potentially harmful information that would have otherwise undermined my mental health (that is, if I can still be considered ‘mentally healthy’). I dream about social order because there’s no social order. I dream about god because there’s no god. I dream about peace on Earth because there’s no peace on Earth.

In dreams, my poor brain expresses the things I can never articulate in words. Other writers who came before me—intellectual giants who’ve won cool accolades like the Nobel or the Pulitzer or, in a lesser sense, the Palanca—have succeeded in doing so, but only to a certain dismal extent. Language is inert, it is dead, and words are cheap, wanting; there is so much in human experience that can never be explained in mere words, that can never be captured with the cold syntax of oral communication.

Maybe I will disappear without understanding what the world is really about in my waking life. I will understand it only in dreams, only in the blur of everyday images and sounds, only in the blink-of-an-eye flux of my sensory experience. In other words, the only way I arrive at The Truth is through the fluff of what can be considered as illusions.

But sometimes, epiphanies come when the right moment finds the right place, allowing me to slip through a shortcut to The Truth. I once found one such epiphany in a tragic part of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch 22. Yossarian, the main character, discovers the entirety of human existence when anti-aircraft flak blasts his comrade, Snowden. Yossarian holds the dying Snowden in his arms, stares at Snowden’s entrails slithering down to the floor in a soggy pile and screams in horror. He sees Snowden’s liver, lungs, kidney, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten for lunch and right then and there, Yossarian realizes human beings’ real worth: “Man was matter... Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”

The newspaper spills out Snowden’s secret each morning. And each morning, I struggle to find a place to inhabit its truth, no matter how bitter. And each morning when the magic comes (when terror becomes relief), I wait in my corner and watch the rest of the week fly by like mindless pelicans.

And after that, you know what I do?

I go home.

HALCYON SUNDAYS

There is a strange new smell from somewhere, wafting through the half-open window. There is another crease on my mother’s forehead, and my father’s laughter has lost yet another almost inaudible strain of surety. And on a wall in my room, there is a spidery crack that I never noticed before.

I go home to a house that, like a long day, now feels rolling towards sunset. It is the house I’ve grown up in, my cradle for almost two decades. I know its every crevice, every flake of peeling paint, every chipped concrete off the wall, every amber-colored layer of age on the furniture. On idle days I walk about and make random taps on the walls or look closely at jambs and awnings and wonder how the house would look like long after we are gone. The house feels like a wife you know will outlive you, and you spend nights thinking about the next man she’ll love, the next man who will sleep with her in your bed. Would he be gentle with her, would he understand why she keeps trimming her nails and frowns when it rains? Would he patiently wait when she takes too long in the bathroom? Would he be brave enough to pretend delight when she botches a recipe?

I tiptoe up the stairs and touch the handrail as I would brush a woman’s skin. I turn the doorknob with the same gentleness I would hold the hand of a loved one. When it’s my task to clean the rooms, I pursue every lint and piece of dirt with the decisiveness of an avowed savior. I go out in our little backyard in the morning, the sun crisp on my skin, and look at the house’s crumbling lines and tangents and think, this house is a human being, the sixth member of the family, the silent witness when long ago I discovered I’ve inherited a biochemical defect that dooms my neurons and condemns me to be genetically stupid for the rest of my life.

The house has voices that echo about the walls when every other sound has died down: the ghosts of children’s laughter, good-natured banter of friends that came and gone, worried murmurs, Carlos Jobim from the phonograph, the long-ago hum of Sunday afternoons. When I enter it sometimes I am greeted by an odor that brings back the sweet smell of my mother’s bosom—the scent of some baby cologne she once shared with her kids, the scent that reminds me of when my mother was 31 and slim and beautiful and I was small and the de-facto defender of an even smaller brother.

The house is a squeaky stage where the five of us players continue to cling to our roles in our own little soap opera. Often, my role is inescapably escapist, the Prince of Denial, the last to believe when a sad fact descends—like how I still refuse to believe that my mother is now hypertensive and my father now struggles with his memory and judgment. When talks veer toward ‘necessary upheavals’ (weddings and us children eventually leaving the nest, for example), they are often attacked by nameless fears and a deepening sense of things getting narrower and shorter. And during such times, when my mother’s blood pressure shoots up and my father stammers for the right words to articulate his pain, I tell them everything will be all right. Then I go to my room and try to sleep, painfully aware that at such times, even the old house, our sixth member, loses its power to reassure and calm; that without us, it is after all an empty shell.

Sleep the sleep of the just, so they say. And now I think the crack on the wall is longer (an earthquake of enough intensity might soon tear my room in half). A song from somewhere rises thinly in the air like vapor. The song, Tracy Chapman’s, plays tug-of-war with what I’m thinking. “Sometimes a lie is the best thing,” Tracy sings. “Sometimes a lie...” I begin to hum along as I drift off to sleep, waiting for the magical anodyne twist, waiting for the mad laughter to kick in, waiting for the old house to come alive and tell me everything will be all right.

Talking with an online scammer

2007-02-20T21:53:00.000+08:00

I don't usually pay attention to emails appearing in my inbox trying to convince me to turn over personal financial information, enlarge my penis and boobs, or sell me a house in Antarctica. But this week, I have been receiving a 419-type scam email that caught my attention and curiosity because, unlike earlier versions that were mostly set in South Africa, this one was Asian.

Now, for those who don't yet know what online scammers are, they are bad people, kids. So don't take whatever lollipop they're trying to give you.

For context, below is the said scam email:

Dear Sir/madam,
I am the GBM (Chairman) of Chen Hsong Holdings Limited (http://www.chenhsong.com.hk/index.aspx). This Company was Established since 1958. After half a century of endless efforts, Chen Hsong has grown from a small machinery workshop to one of the largest manufacturers of injection moulding machines in the world.Chen Hsong Holdings Limited, Produces, Exclusive circular platen (patended), ichen shop- floor Networked management system, Ductile iron casting and machining, Jetmaster minijet series, Jetmaster MKIV series, Jetmaster large series, CHEN-PET Two-stage preform moulding turnkey system, jetmaster C Series, E.T.C. Due to long association with our suppliers and our thorough understanding of the working condition in the Industry;
It iS upon this note that we are writing you this mail to seek your assistance in representing our company in your locality as our RECEIVING AGENT/REPRESENTATIVE.One who will act as a medium for our clients in those locality to be reaching us with their payments and so on. Note that as a receiving Agent of our company,You will be entitled to TEN Percent Payment of any amount you receive from our customers We seek your Sincere cooperation and assistance to establish a cordial relationship with our clients.To facilitate the conclusion of this proposal if accepted,Please send us the following Information
1)Your Full name..............and present occupation............
2) Telephone number..............and Fax..............
3) Contact address................
4) Age................
Thanks in anticipation.
Regards,
Dr. Chiang Chen
GBM (Chairman)
Chen Hsong Holdings Limited
(http://www.chenhsong.com.hk/index.aspx)

So around three days ago, when I had received for the third time the same email, I thought maybe I should have fun and "respond" to it. So I fired off this response:

Dear Esteemed Sir:

I'd be glad to be of service to you, but only after you send me first your full name, address, telephone numbers, and a high-definition, DRM-free video of yourself happily sucking your dog's cock, preferably in 16:9 aspect ratio.

Very truly yours,

Your future business associate

Then I forgot about it. I thought the scammer got the message. But late that night, I found this response in my inbox.

Hi

what is 169 aspect ratio? please send contact numbers and name please.

This got my juices flowing. There's a person on the other end of the line, and he's probably not as smart as I thought he was. So I replied:

Dear Esteemed Sir:

It's 16:9 aspect ratio, which simply means if you can help it, send me the kind of video i can watch on a widescreen TV. I'm sure in the headquarters of your fast-rising company, of which you are Chairman, there are lots of teevees lying around. If it looks squarish, that's 4:3. I don't want that. I want widescreen. To make sure the TV is wide screen, you may perform this standard operating procedure: stand in front of it, place both your arms on both sides of the TV, and if you can smell your armpit or you can see armpit hair peeking, that is widescreen. If not, proceed to another TV because I am sure it's just 4:3.

But going back to the business matter at hand, I hope you know where to locate your dog's important penis, and that you are well-versed in this normal human behavior. If you have not yet learned how to do it properly, please refer to that wonderful online website called YouTube, where you will find, as many of my own business associates have, tutorial videos of girls practicing the act by sucking on their thumbs.

Thank you and I hope this helps.

Very truly yours,

your future business associate

The scammer's reply:

Hi

sorry, please and stop calling me sir. i am women. please also send your contact where we can contact you and phone numbers please.

I replied:

Dear Esteemed Madam:

I deeply apologize for having assumed that you're a man. I shamefully forget that women now make up a significant part of the modern work force, and for that, please accept my apologies.

I would be happy, as always, to indulge you on your business request, but may I reiterate that I require you to send me first my own request. Let me put this simply: you give me something, I give you something. "Squid pro row," as my long-time business partner Austin Powers loves saying.

You being a woman only makes it exciting, but perhaps you may spice up the video by straddling a white picket fence and licking on a large, round lollipop in the sun. Smile to me please.

I hope I have made it very clear.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Your future business associate

The scammer replies again in less than an hour:

Hi,

I ask to Serious please and please send us contact address and phone. we send money for the TEN percent of agent deal. tHanks.

I replied:

Dear Madam:

I assure you I am seriously considering doing business with you. And to prove my sincere business intentions, let me direct you to my business' official website and see if it pleases you:

Link to my office address.
[note: if you're reading this blogpost, you may not want to click on that link. I'm posting it here only to illustrate how fun it was "doing business" with this scum. it's a link to the infamous goatse]

Thank you and i hope to do business with you in the soonest time possible.

That last email was about two days ago, and I have yet to receive a response. But it's okay. Although I wasn't able to convince the scammer to make his own video version of Monty Python's the lumberjack song sketch, it's still nice to know that there's a real, live, scammer person at the other end of this civilized exchange. I only hope I could find him one day and personally hand him the business end of my titanium baseball bat.

Great White Time

2007-01-24T18:00:00.000+08:00

I was telling this person some months ago how somebody like me could become a blackhole.

ME: Is it possible for a human being to become a blackhole?

FRIEND: Quite possible. Happens all the time.

ME: No, what I mean is, to be BORED, really BORED, paint-drying-on-a-wall bored, Eddie-Murphy-screws-his-wife bored.

FRIEND: Watch porn. I watch porn when I’m bored.

ME: I also watch porn. But I’m bored with it.

FRIEND: Maybe you're just in some fucking existential limbo.

That's not the first time somebody told me I’m in limbo. I only have a vague idea why. People think I'm in limbo because (a) I've been single for the past two years; (b) I've been showing signs of erratic behavior, like saying the best way to fatten up chickens is feeding them with KFC or exactly the same thing my brother eats; (c) Because I still think The Vagina Monologues is one very sad, unwatchable piece of porn.

It's annoying when people have opinion like that. Because if there's anything we know in this silly world, it's that people's opinion is always entirely wrong, but it hits you just the same. It's like getting hit with rabbit dung and telling yourself, there, it's just rabbit dung. Rabbits eat nothing but grass and they’re cute, little furry things that stand for everything that’s nice and never bite back, so their crap must be so squeaky clean you can lick it. But you see it's still dung and you don't want to even touch it.

I’ve grown jaded to all these crazy everyday things that I’ve learned to selectively do the things that matter. And in my world, the things that matter are words. Words and why it’s not always possible to find the best of them. Here I am, trying to perfect and polish sentence after sentence after sentence of something I'll subsequently dislike. It's like crap. Like eating something good that the gods would eat, and you take a dump and it just smells shit, like the rest of them. You tell people, this is it, the shit, THE SHIT, you hear me? It's going to blow away their minds. But you sit down and look at what you've cobbled together so far, you see the gaping void in all the right places, and it just makes you cry. Somehow, you've missed it again. Because now there are holes where there were none before. Somehow, you’ve managed to prove, by some stroke of luck, that you're a darned idiot.

Because there are only two types of writers, as there are two types of people: those who arrogantly believe that they know THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, and those who are aware they have NO FUCKING CLUE about THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, but are arrogant just the same. I tend to believe I'm more of the latter type. Mostly the arrogance is buffed up by sheer jadedness. You have nothing to say? Just bitch; it doesn't matter. People listen, make choices, decide—not because they've thought through it, but because they want to move on and keep on running. People are just kids running around in circles, and they have attention spans as brief as their lives. So they hurry and do as many stuff they can possibly cram in a little lifetime, so they can die happy.

If life is completely bullshit-free, everyone would begin saying they are walking blackholes, that they are Just-Getting-By people, that the glass is not only half-empty, it's also poisoned. We've created, whipped, baked, served ourselves the daily golden platter of shining bullshit because it's exactly what we need—to NOT see that indifference and pointlessness are not metaphors but bleeding truths of the universe. But then, how many people would have the heart to be honest and have the strength to endure life without all the entertainment?

What I’m trying to get at is this: I’m a blackhole. I’m what Radioactive Sago Project would call a “bad motherfucker.” But I also happen to be a writer, an indefatigueable bearer of bullshit. On the other hand, what ordinary people need to avoid not becoming a blackhole like myself and remain ordinary is a constant supply of crap, so that they can all continue dancing and singing.

Can you see the irony? The world is full of bullshit. People become blackholes because they’ve rid themselves of bullshit in their personal lives. But in the process, they become writers, creators of all the bullshit that coats this planet in the first place. Some of us make the sacrifice to become blackholes in order to keep up the illusion of everyone else. Isn’t it a beautiful, awe-inspiring vicious cycle?

I guess the reason why people like myself end up writing is exactly the reason why bacteria divide and propagate. Because we want to see mirrors of ourselves infecting the world. When you get down to it, it’s all about the desperation to have people mention—not spit out—your name. Like making back-ups of your own thoughts and implanting them in all those around you so that when you lose your own, you can get it from others.

But only if it were that easy. I like getting the things I want and desire for, but it's not easy to dodge the subsequent low point. I like people loving me, but it feels heavy and the love [and hate, for that matter] is inexplicably frightening. Whenever I say I’m a walking blackhole, or a ready-made, do-it-yourself quantum crap kit, it's never easy to meet the inevitable cascade of follow-up questions.

Such as:

1. Why don't you take things seriously?

2. Why don't you believe in God?

3. Why don't you have a regular, office job, like everyone else in the

Philippines

4. Why haven't you come up with a decent novel?

5. What the hell is that blog about?

6. Why is this soup so salty?

7. Did you just fart?

Which I try to sincerely answer, respectively, with:

1. "Seriosity" is a suicide pill.

2. Belief in God entails a very demanding lifestyle, which I've gladly ditched.

3. The Office is the One Singular Cause of the Downfall of Man, and it's a factory of slime-covered chickens who may resemble humans but aren't.

4. Because a novel is so much longer than my patience. But I’m getting there.

5. It's therapy.

6. I have no goddamn idea.

7. If you didn't hear it, did it really happen?

In the end, all everyone wants is to ask themselves, in their heart of hearts, and I’m paraphrasing the late great Amelita Malig here, the question: What do you really want?

And to answer it with: To wake up enthused. To be happy.

Without flinching and ducking and pretending it doesn’t matter. Because it fucking does. Watch Little Miss Sunshine and you’ll see.

A Heartbreaking Blogpost Of Staggering Genius

2006-11-24T21:40:00.000+08:00

When you come home from a far-away place, everything hits you in thick, choking impressions. The smells are strangely familiar, yet they’re new. The faces harder, the shadows darker. People try to strike a conversation, but subtly -- nobody notices it -- I recoil -- their voices are like coming from an answering machine that got recorded a long time ago, and only now you’re hitting that Play button. What I mean is, you see new things, not necessarily good things, or not necessarily bad. Just same old, but different.

It always happens this way. Given a long-enough time, everybody you’ve known in your life becomes strangers – old drinking buddies, former sweethearts, even your parents. People you knew become people you don’t know, or wouldn’t like to.

I’ll tell you about jamais vu. It’s dejavu’s opposite.

Some years ago, when I was still in the thick of a long-term relationship, I woke up one night – I remember I saw 2 AM on the bedside clock – and I was disconcerted to find a woman in my bed. I remember the feeling of genuine shock. Who is she? And why is she not wearing anything? And where am I?

Another time, I was in a shopping mall with the same ex girlfriend. And because it takes her ten fifillion years to buy a pair of shoes, I let her try on one pair after another while I browsed CDs in the record bar. 30 minutes later, somebody taps me on the shoulder, smiles at me, and says, “Look, aren’t these shoes so cute?”

For a good five seconds, I didn’t know who she was. But as swift as the nonrecognition were things falling back in the same places. Oh, it’s her, alright.

Four years ago, when one of my childhood buddies suddenly died of leptospirosis, I was at his wake, I was staring down at his dead face. I remember feeling nothing. There was nothing. I was empty. This was a person I had so many fights with when we were kids. I used to “assassinate” him with a handful of dried dog turd on his way home from school. He used to lay siege on our house, howling by our gate with a baseball bat, calling me names that were both annoying and funny at the same time. But he was a good friend when we were both on our good side. But he was dead, and I felt nothing. And I realize it was because I don’t remember him.

This non-remembrance cuts both ways.

I often speak with friends or with my brother or my sister, about something that happened a long time ago, and they wouldn’t have any recollection of it. More and more I realize if I’m the only person who remembers something, and nobody else remembers it, did those things really happen? Did they take place? Didn’t I just imagine them? Is there really more fiction and less fact floating in the space between people?

My ex girlfriend calls me up one day. We chat. I don’t talk about the past. People move on, I say. We all should. But when things are not going well on her side of the world, she calls me up and drags me with her to the past. It’s all silly. The sad thing is, the things I remember, she doesn’t. While the things she remembers – all of them – are things I perfectly remember, too.

This continues to disconcert and hurt me. I’m a walking sack full of memories, and I resent having to own them all. I didn’t invent them. I confabulate a lot, but I have stuff that are sacred, that I want everybody else to recall. I tell somebody, “Remember that one time, I was trying to peep at your sister taking a bath …?” And when they don’t remember it, I’d drown in some ardent urge to slug them with a lead pipe, and beg them to remember the goddamn thing, dredge their own memory, bring it back and admit that they, too, remember. Because it’s not fair, isn’t it? I feel so unbearably lonely. Am I the only one who’s supposed to “cherish” memories I’ve shared with other people? Even if you console me with some nice patronizing explanation, such as other people have less-than-perfect mental faculties, I’m still taking it badly. I still find it disturbing.

But recently, I’m learning. I’m beginning to grow my own zen-like wisdom. I’m finding myself saying, “What’s that again? Did I call you shitbag? DID I CALL YOU SHITBAG?” Or, “Funny, but I don’t think I remember I screwed you. But I do remember sniffing that dog's butt.”

I’m finding myself becoming like everybody else, or worse.

But then the thought hits me: what if we’re all just pretending to forget? Pretending to not, well, remember? That we say the things we say, do the things we do, not because they’re real, but because it’s some sad form of self-protection. Like some exoskeleton we use to deflect the daggers thrown our way.

And if it is, isn’t this world so beautiful – full of people who are empty and dead, long before they actually die.

Cheers. It’s fucking nice to be back.

Manny Pacquiao's New Killer Combo Moves

2006-11-14T21:53:00.000+08:00

Manny Pacquiao personally emailed me the killer combo moves he's going to use this weekend to put an end to Erik Morales's silly affectations.

The killer combo moves Freddy Roach "invented" for Manny are:

1. "Magic Sing" Fatality Strike: Down, Up, 4
2. "No Fear" Torso Punch: Forward, Forward, 4.
3. "Darlington Socks" Torso Explosion: Forward, Back, 3
4. The "Ronald McDonald" Decapitation: Forward, Forward, 1
5: Ripping Out Erik's Spine Using the "Magnolia" Combo: Up, Up, 4
6. Impale Erik With The New "Alaxan-Datu Puti" Arm-as-sharp-stake Combo: Up, Down, Up, 4

Fuss Over Laos

2006-11-14T11:50:00.000+08:00

The womenfolk in my AOH (area of habitat) were squabbling. The cute daughter of one of them was joining in some United Nations parade, and the kid in question was assigned to represent the country Laos. That won’t happen, the mother was saying, because what would people say if they’d see on the kid’s sash the humiliating words, “Miss Laos.”

It turned out, nobody had no idea what kind of country Laos was, and they thought the teacher was making fun of the kid. In the local language, “laos” in English means something like “washed up” or “has been.” It’s the word you use when you're describing Nora Aunor or one-year-old cell phones. “Miss Laos,” therefore, was very bad for the kid’s self-esteem.

So I came out and pretended I was just walking by. Then casually, I just blurted, “You know what, ladies, Laos is a very rich, highly advanced country.”

All eyes turned to me.

“Laos is so rich and advanced, they have colonies on the moon,” I said. “Laos donates billions of dollars to Japan every month, and Japan is already rich!”

“But Laos sounds… funny,” said the mother.

“No, Laos is not funny. Laos is in fact much better than the Philippines. Half of all the satellites orbiting the Earth have been launched by Laos.”

“Not only that,,” I said, “Laos invented the elephant.”

The ladies chuckled.

“Yeah,” I said. “A bunch of scientists from Laos gathered one day and decided the world could not live on horse alone. They needed something bigger. So they invented the elephant. Which makes “elephant” an original word from Laos. Check the encyclopedia and you'll see.”

Nobody said anything; they just looked at one another and maybe pretended thinking. This is what happens when you’ve somehow earned a reputation as the resident, self-proclaimed know-it-all; people begin to take your words seriously. They see me pounding on my shiny computer, solemnly shaking my head at a wilting plant, mouthing Latin-sounding names that are at least five syllables long, seeing that I actually subscribe to fancy science magazines, and they begin thinking you couldn’t possibly be wrong, ever. Several months of serving them scrumptious megadoses of truths and half-truths that now I can dance on the wide open space of the Bullshit Highway. Now, it would be difficult for somebody else to convince them that Bullshitum ad infinitum is not exactly the scientific name of the Philippine president (or any politician, for that matter).

For example, I told somebody a while ago that the original title of Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels was The Woman Who Had Two Navels...Yeah, Baby, Yeah! And she believed it. I told another that the first English translation of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere was Don’t Touch Me Here, But Touch Me There. That those groundbreaking titles were unfortunately scrapped by uninspired editors in favor of banal, conventional ones we now know today.

“Laos,” I said, “is a very cool country. So if there’s somebody who makes fun of Miss Laos, tell them, ‘You ignorant baboon, Laos is where all rich Americans go to retire and enjoy the good life.'”

I have no idea what happened after that. I just realized later nobody was talking about Laos, anymore. I gather that the kid was very happy about the parade. I would ask the kid about how parading around as Miss Laos felt, but she’s smarter than everybody else; she’d know it was I. And who wants that to happen?

The Filipina Named "Nyah"

2006-10-06T14:31:00.000+08:00

Last week's typhoon made me do things I wouldn't have done under normal circumstances. My usual arrogance had made me think that if things would go bad in my den, I'd just "escape" and continue working in another cave. I've been pretty much hit-and-run, SOT (sit, operate, transfer) in the past several months, anyway, so I thought, Let's see how Milenyo could actually "damage" me.

But the goddamn typhoon made sure escape wouldn't be possible; at least, not within the large island of Luzon. And with all the almost incredible destruction anywhere I'd turn, I was just too petrified right on my little spot.

So there I was, pickled, sore, and angsty in all the boredom a massive blackout could lavish me with. I read books, schemed, slept, ate, and schemed some more -- activities that are not very different from what trapped small animals do all the time.

Worst, sheer boredom forced me to actually read a Paulo Coelho book.

The book in question was Eleven Minutes. It was insufferable, as usual, save for one little funny detail: there's a cameo of a Filipina prostitute in Geneva, who Mr. Coelho, in his wonderful wisdom, gave the heart-stopping name of "Nyah."

Nyah. Genius. That just made me stop and think and kick the neighbor’s dog. I’ve never met anybody with a name like that. My little theory is that Coelho probably was browsing around and found Nyoy Volante’s website. He probably thought “Nyoy” would be a cool Filipino name, except that he needed something for a woman. No problem, he thought, just feminize it. Make “Nyoy” into “Nya.”

But wait. Nya lacked something. Coelho researched some more, until very reliable online sources enlightened him on the Filipino habit of putting “H” into their pet names, in which “Roger” magically becomes “Rhogher”, “Pitoy” becomes “Phithoy”, and “Joe Bert” becomes “Jhoe Bhert.”

In the end, Paulo Coelho decides to name the very minor Eleven Minutes character, “Nyah.”

But that was just me and my “theory.” I was still rankled with a deep, almost desperate craving to squeeze some answer from the author himself. So on that sweaty blackout afternoon, already like a dog in heat and stir-crazy from my lack of online access, I did what Lex Luthor would have done: I paid people to buy me several meters of copper cable and hook me up with some power source, insisting that I didn’t care if they had to step on somebody’s toes or make a government official cry.

And you know what, talk to the right kind of thief, like Oskar Schindler used to do, and you’ll remain on top of the brutal food chain.

There’s probably a God somewhere clucking His ethereal tongue disapprovingly of the filthy things I have at my command, but I’m ready to send people to kick the living daylights out of the Almighty Himself for sending something dirty and very inconvenient like that typhoon.

When I finally had power (I had electricity while the rest of the darned town groped in the dark), the first thing I did was fire off the following email direct to Mr Paulo “I Have The Hots For Filipinas Named Nyah” Coelho.

Dear Mr. Paulo Coelho:

I just finished reading your exceedingly fascinating 2003 novel, Eleven Minutes. I just have one minor question, though, that I hope you won’t ignore. I’ve been a Filipino in the past 30 years and I personally know about 50 million Filipinas, and none of them has this strange, outlandish name, Nyah. I’m wondering, why not Ginalyn? Or Edmilyn? Or Inday Badiday?

Therefore, I’d just like to ask:

Were you shitting all of us?

Sincerely, your number one Filipino fan,

Nyoh

Two days later, I received this response:

Dear Nyoh,

Thank you for your opinion about Eleven Minutes.

I value your opinion a great deal.

It is very gratifying to know that you understand my book as it was
meant to be understood.

Always follow your dreams and fight for them with faith.

Sincerely,

Paulo Coelho

When I read it, the thought in my head was, “Shit. He bought Scott Adams’s Automatic Bullshit Generator and he’s using it to answer all fan queries!”

I knew then that in order to reach the man, I had to resort to my old tricks. I called up my friend in Brazil, some thug I met in Rome more than a decade ago, and asked him, Do you know where Paulo Coelho lives?

The person on the other end grunted. “He’s in Rio de Janeiro.”

“I’m just wondering,” I said, “Can you kindly please beat the shit out of him?”

My Brazilian thug gasped. “You mean, all his shit? And out of him?”

“Not really,” I said, “just keep him alive enough to answer my email in the nicest, most helpful way possible. This is very, very important.”

My Brazilian thug grunted once more before the line went dead.

I’m pretty sure Paulo Coelho’s happily personally answering my email right now, as my good Brazilian thug lounges on a couch nearby, persuading Mr Coelho with the oft-repeated tale of how, a long time ago, he “accidentally” dropped a famous, impossible-to-bother writer out of a seventh-story window.

Big Deal, or No Big Deal

2006-09-07T13:30:00.000+08:00

A special edition of Kris Aquino’s show features some of the country’s finest pond scum.

Kris Aquino: Growing body count of dead kiddie activists, big deal, or no big deal?

Jovito Palparan: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Naked Oblation runners, big deal, or no big deal?

Raul Gonzales: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Samson Macariola slipping bombs through Davao airport, big deal, or no big deal?

Rodrigo Duterte: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Guimaras oil spill, big deal, or no big deal?

GMA: No big deal!

Petron: No big deal!

Guimaras resident: What, now you want my opinion?

Petron’s oil tanker hull insurer: Big deal!... And screw you!

Kris Aquino: 60-day suspension, big deal, or no big deal?

Peewee Trinidad: No big deal!... And screw you!

Kris Aquino: Juan Ponce Enrile supplying my imprisoned dad, Ninoy, with hookers at Fort Bonifacio, big deal or no big deal?

Cory Aquino: [sarcastic] Big deal!.. And scre—er, let’s all just pray.

And the winner is…

Nobody.

How and Why I Won a Philippines Free Press Lit Award

2006-08-26T12:47:00.000+08:00

…Is a goddamn mystery.

Last Wednesday, my story, “Blind Spot,” landed on second place [which I’ve uploaded on the Skirmisher for the uninhibited reading pleasure of the morbidly curious] in this year’s Philippines Free Press Literary Awards held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Makati. I wasn’t there, but my sister was.

It’s one of those genuine surprises that only rarely come. It’s like those times you’re facing a horde of Eastern Europeans with a silver MAC-10 Elite ready and loaded in your hand, only to be instantly shotgunned to death by somebody who had sneaked up behind you [Black]. Or running across no-man’s land and storming a bunker, grenades ready in your teeth, and suddenly you kick the bunker door open and Lo! There’s the smoking muzzle of a machine gun with a sniggering Nazi behind it, who proceeds in blasting you to a thousand little yucky pieces [Call of Duty: Finest Hour] [I’ll try to come up with pleasant similies next time once I get to play pleasant games].

The surprise of winning felt more or less like those things, only in this real-world instance, it felt good. Really good.

I never took “Blind Spot” seriously. I realize maybe all writers who win something always say they didn’t take their winning works seriously, but I’m stepping out of the shadows to say I really didn’t take it seriously. But so what? Big deal. It won. It probably has something that I’m just too blind to see, which is bad for me: this means I can never be trusted when it came to judging literary worth. Which means I’m a chronic hitter and misser, mostly misser. Which means this is one gaping, bleeding tsamba.

The first surprise was when Paolo Manalo emailed me several months ago that “Blind Spot” was in the short list. I didn’t even know it was accepted and published. I had emailed it I think in February 2005 without even bothering to tighten it in places. When I received no reply from the Philippines Free Press (which usually is either the bad “Oh no, please, no” or the good “We’re publishing this something, something, something”), I just shrugged it off and moved on. Last week, Paolo emailed me again and this time, it was a shotgun blast to the face: he said something like, You won, dude.

Usually, I’d gush. What Paolo didn’t see was that I was laughing my head off in genuine disbelief.

I have two reasons why I’m so happy winning in the Free Press. One, it’s the shit when you’re a guy with nothing to do but write down some daydream that hit you while doing some non-amazing household chore. Oh, did I say “chore?” Replace that with “mission.” That’s better.

Second is, aside from being one of this country’s most respected, most desired, oldest annual literary competitions, it also pays pretty good prize money – 40 grand for “Blind Spot.” Forty thousand bucks for some daydream you wrote one boring afternoon is like shit hitting the fan and discovering yeah, you can eat that shit and even like it. Ask anybody around and they’ll tell you forty grand is forty grand is forty grand. And there’s the trophy, made of glass, which my sister says is so cool it’s almost “sacred.” Like you could kneel before it and pray ten Hail Marys and feel guilty about the profanity. What makes it cool is that it says something about me having made a “great contribution to Philippine literature.” Say something like that to Gina my Guinea Pig here, and she’ll bite your testicles to make you swallow back whatever nice things you say about me. That is, if Gina were human and allowed to have some scrap of an opinion. I’m saying this because I know my pet detests me so much; whenever she sees me, she suddenly stops chewing her food and glares at me. I also stop chewing my food and glare back at her; we’re like Newman and Seinfeld greeting each other in mutual disgust. But we both know I’m boss, so I tell her things just to rub that fact in like, “One day I’m gonna sacrifice you in the name of science,” or “You know, in Peru, they fry their guinea pigs alive.”

The feel-good is double because for many Filipino writers, or maybe this is me speaking for myself, writing fiction is like fishing – you do it in your spare time. You do it when you’re through with the bathroom, when you’re done with the girlfriend, after all the day’s crap and real work. You do it when that very rare moment actually arrives where there’s only you and a blinking cursor, a tumbler of iced tea/mug of coffee/beer and old Brazilian jazz. And that’s rare. Which even makes the feel-good triple.

After I was told I won in the Free Press, my head grew so enormous you could see it from outer space. I realized it got very large and swollen when I tried walking out the door moments after reading the wonderful emails from Sarge Lacuesta (Free Press incumbent literary editor) and Paolo Manalo (Free Press former literary editor); I couldn’t go out because the sides of my head wouldn’t fit through the door. When I managed to somehow slip through by using many jars of KY Jelly and a handy chainsaw, some girl at the fastfood was so shocked at the size of my goddamn head she ran out screaming.

The old lady in the line with me tipped her eyeglasses and looked me over. She asked, How’d your head get so swollen like that?

How big you think this is, I asked, because I had no idea how grotesque my head had become.

She said, I think that’s even bigger than the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

I shrugged, in that awkward, tottering way anybody with an enormous head could be able to shrug. I told her I’m a chauvinist male pig and that when my ego gets inflated, it’s literal. I told her I just won in the Free Press.

Free what?

I said never mind.

I later tried the time-honored cure of getting my ass kicked in Fight Night by the likes of Erik Morales and Muhammad Ali. I haven’t discovered the strategy with this game yet. So I always end up a bleeding pulp on the canvass, the world spinning all around me, Mr. Padilla the referee counting, “8…9…10… You’re out!”

I took a long, cold shower. I paid Gina my Guinea Pig a visit to annoy her by scratching her nipples. She hates it. Touch her nipples and she flies up in the air, squeaking and grumbling like an old lady.

I then checked the blog, and checked the progress of my other two “top-secret” web projects whose content will be “magically” supplied purely by algorithm, just like Techmeme.

Then I asked my sister “remotely” for pictures of the event.

She said she forgot to bring the necessary gadgets. She told me there was Up Dharma Down’s female vocalist, who’s very pretty in person, but who would believe her without at least some pictures that she could email me?

My sister’s the type who impulsively gets off the bus on Roxas Boulevard to take snapshots of dead fish and ugly birds on Baywalk. On ordinary days, she takes pictures of her friends straddling some lamp post in Luneta and pretending to be hookers. You send her to an important event at some swanky hotel, you tell her it’s some fucking big deal for me to vicariously see it, and she doesn’t even bring at least a camera phone. She should’ve at least sketched the whole thing on a napkin. She should have stolen some ashtray, or one of those gold-plated metal things you always see on tables of respectable places (my office drawer in my former job was half full of Eastwood City silverware from those years of doing PR work--slash--stealing shiny things on tables—slash--convincing my female officemates to do the same—slash--assembling pirate ship made of stolen silverware inside a bottle). But no, nothing.

So I asked her, Did Cristina Hidalgo bring with her that niece or daughter or whoever that was with her at Jorge Bocobo Museum some years ago, some girl who oozed with so much hotness she gave off her own sunstorms? A girl who looked so good she probably sometimes fainted whenever she saw herself in the mirror?

She said, Who’s Cristina Hidalgo?

I said never mind. Then I either went back to Gina to snap a rubberband on her nipple, or tried reading Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I just don’t remember which. My head was fast deflating back to normal size, and I felt dizzy and depressed and acutely caffeine-starved.

The Philippines Should Go Web 2.0

2006-08-16T20:35:00.000+08:00

If Iran’s president could blog, why not Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?

He’s boiling nukes in his backyard, Bush (who everybody knows is such a terrifying badass) lovingly thinks specifically about him as the American rancher so carefully reads Albert Camus’s tale about “killing an arab,” he’s unloved by Western governments for his exciting views on the Holocaust and Israel — Mahmood Ahmadinejad must be a terribly busy man.

Yet he can blog. Not only that, his blog is also using icons by the same designer as Styleboost, with some AJAX bling thrown in. Cool.

So I believe this is a fairly legitimate question: Why not the Philippines’ president go the web 2.0-ish way?

Eliminate the middle man. Chuck the press secretary. All the kids in the Philippines — yes, those “pesky activists” — will be able to read her innermost thoughts and undying hope just moments after accomplishing one non-achievement after another, and maybe eventually, there’s a morning when all these non-admirers begin seeing her way. The blindly blazing, sugar-crusted, over-self-edited, web 2.0-ish way.

If she’d blog about her diarrhea and alcoholism in lurid, juicy details, I’m subscribing to that feed.

The Email Conundrum

2006-08-11T19:07:00.000+08:00

I’m a guy with a short fuse. There are many things that could suddenly piss me off, and my reactions to these things have become sort of “legendary.” So when I began using email six years ago, I discovered to my disappointment that email plus my temper could be a bad mix.

Very bad, indeed.

There have been countless times when I’d check email in the morning, I’d see something that gets my goat, then I’d mindlessly fire off with whatever garbage that comes to mind. It’s so easy—you just make some mouse-clicks and there you go. The problem is, I’d usually end up regretting the stupid things I’d send.

Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall said in an interview several months ago that emails are the most dangerous form of communication because of its peculiar character: email “compels” the recipient to send an answer immediately, and with usually a huge number of emails waiting in our inbox, we usually end up saying things we wouldn’t say in person or on the phone.

“I remember when I worked for Lewis Leakey,” Jane said. “He was very impulsive. He’d get a letter in the mail, and he would open it, and it would be perhaps something from a scientist he thought was quite ridiculous. You could hear him muttering ‘Bosh! Rubbish!’ The poor bit of paper would be scored with his marks, and he’d turn to me and say ‘Get so and so on the phone!’ I got very wise to his moods, so I would pretend the number was engaged, or the man wasn’t there, and then an hour or two later, he was rational again.”

That kind of distance, that sort of emotional buffer, is banished in the form of communication email provides. Everything is instant. That’s the ugly thing. The first human reaction is usually the honest one. But the human brain has built-in prejudice. Compound that with the so-called Reptilian Complex, add some temper into the mix, and you get a fair picture of how ugly impulsive human reactions could be.

Unfortunately, the technology around us panders to such impulses. There is probably profit to be earned in keeping people from digesting things and allowing them to think first, before swiping that credit card or clicking that Send button to fire off some angry missive. If Joseph Dobbie didn’t use email to confess his love for Kate, for example, he wouldn’t have found himself in deep shit (on second thought, maybe he didn’t really mind).

In a way, email and all these new ways to “communicate” have even made it harder, more confusing to reach out to the Other. We’re all engaged in a daily balancing act of sending thought from one place to another. And while the “tight rope” seems to have gotten easier and faster, it has also become much more fragile that it can snap at any moment—leaving us tottering in an insecure place where we might just find ourselves destroying bridges in a zap, instead of building them.

There’s a Close-up TV ad that drove home the point of technology having made us more connected, but not necessarily closer. Although we usually enjoy it and we don’t mind, technology probably is smothering us more than we care to think.

But it’s also utterly foolish to pine for the good old “innocent” days. Personally, I’d still choose technology over throwing the proverbial sabot. But maybe, what’s required of us is to face these new, increasingly ubiquitous things with a sense of control and a greater presence of mind. Like avoiding checking your email every 10 minutes, or sticking to a schedule. Or remembering that not because “it’s there” that you can access it as often as your impulses demand.

These days, whenever I’m checking my mail, I make sure there’s something posted near my desk that reminds me to take things easy and never react as swift as lightning to “provocative” emails. Something like a Post-it note that says, “Back off” or “Take it easy,” or “Count 100 electric sheep” or “Stupid mails can get you fucked”—and I realize these small things can make a whole world of difference. These small reminders buy me enough time to think it over first. And they help me make sure I won’t be burning the things that are increasingly becoming more and more fragile.

Like the few bridges I haven’t destroyed yet.

Reverse Superheroism

2006-08-10T21:48:00.000+08:00

I think the happiest people on earth are the “bad” guys, the super villains. You see them on TV, in movies, in comic books. You know that they’re fine specimens of persistent optimism because they always laugh, even when they’re plotting against superheroes who they know, in the pit of their guts, they’ll never ever defeat.

I can’t think of any villain that doesn’t have that peculiar laugh. My head is full of memories of villains chortling on screen. There’s the Joker, the Riddler, Lex Luthor, Dr Evil, my old professor in advertising. I don’t have a long list with me, I don’t remember every name, but I recall faces and always that laughter. Always that unsinkable optimism.

Take Penguin. The guy would scheme an elaborate plan to blow up Gotham City, and when I say elaborate, I’m talking about Rube-Goldberg-machine elaborate. Of course, we all know he fucks up each of his attempts. But that’s okay; he has his birds, his monocle, money, liver. When the shit hits the fan, he just laughs and escapes and vows to return…again and again and again.

Something tells me a guy like Penguin should instead be emulated by kids as some sort of “idol.” He’s the champion of the fat and short, the patron saint of the ugly and miserable but happy, the de facto hero of people who never win but who never cave in. Penguin should be mentioned by authors of self-help books. Oprah should guest him. Bush and Blair should have photo-ops with him as some sort of reinforcing hope in hopeless situations like Iraq and Michael Jackson’s face. Somebody should whisper to Fidel Castro’s ear as he’s lying on his deathbed (assuming that he did come close to lying on a death bed, and that somebody actually wants him to remain alive), “Remember the Penguin.” Celine Dion and Charlotte Church should mention the Penguin in one of their saccharine songs.

Penguin and Joker and the Riddler—that’s some holy trinity, if you’d ask me—should be the poster boys of shrinks so that shrinks could talk about them with patients. “Look at them fabulous wankers,” the shrink would tell some manic-depressive during rare lulls in a session. “They always fuck up. Is Gotham City destroyed? No. But are they giving up? No, no, and no. They’re still at it in all these years. Shining examples of positive-thinking, never-say-die individuals. And here you are, all you think and talk about is your aches and pains, your Xanax, your Prozac, your ‘they don’t understand me’ bullshit.”

Maybe the shrink would never say “pain” to a patient’s face, but you get the picture.

The funny thing is, these villains are mortals: they go about their honest business of trying to destroy the world by the sheer power of their wit, cunning, and humor. I remember jumping up and down at home chanting “Lionel Luthor! Lionel Luthor!” after the guy survived for the umpteenth time in a Smallville episode, then realizing a piece of wisdom I’ll pass on to my great grandkids: Lionel Luthor is very die-able, yet he survives. Superman is invincible by default, and of course, he will always survive. Between the two of them, who do you think I’ll give my candy?

Which brings us to the subject of Lex Luthor, who is also awesome. Does anybody have any idea how tough it is to travel all the way to the Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica, in the middle of fucking nowhere, just to snoop in on Superman? If there’s anything we know, it’s that going to Antarctica when you’re bald and a weakling is a fucking superhuman feat.

Shoot a bullet through Luthor’s head and he’ll die; do that to Superman, and he’ll just flash a Colgate-y, American Dental Association smile. Which reminds me of a line in the film Angus. Angus’s grandfather tells him one night why Superman is the biggest coward in the world. So Angus asks, How is that so?

The grandpop says something like, It’s because Superman does not know fear; he’s immortal, indestructible, kryptonite notwithstanding. He has no capacity to be brave. Courage is the territory of guys who can feel physical pain, who can be hurt, who can and will in fact die; courage is doing something you know will kill you but you do it anyway for the sake of something you believe in. Not Superman. He’s forever out of the whole bravery business.

Grandpoppy words of wisdom you’ll always love to live by. But here’s my question:

Who’s the dumb motherfucker responsible for Superman’s outfit?

And why?

The best answer gets candy, too.

Julius Babao Demonstrates How to be a Real Jerk Without Anybody Noticing It

2006-08-03T14:58:00.000+08:00

Cheryl Sarate, a 16-year-old girl from Davao, Philippines joined Lord and Lady of Utopia beauty pageant, but her fairytale-inspired costume caught fire from a candle on the catwalk. She burned as everybody in the hall stared in shock. Three days later, the girl died at the hospital.

And today, on early morning TV, I’d find Julius Babao asking the girl’s mother very “emphatic” questions.

Julius: Cheryl seemed a young girl with high ambition. What were her dreams before this accident happened?

Mother: [some standard lines like Cheryl wanted to finish college to go abroad, etc, etc.]

Julius: And now, what do you think will happen to those dreams?

Let’s all pause to ponder the wisdom behind these questions; this is the part where you have to scratch your head.

Time for some flash back.

[Flashback; music: “Maalaala mo kaya”]

July 16, 1990 earthquake: a reporter shoves a microphone to somebody pinned down by a huge rubble from a destroyed hotel in Baguio. The reporter asks awesome questions like, “What do you feel? Is it painful?”

The interviewee couldn’t even answer; there’s a huge boulder on his back and he’s gasping. It’s clear as daylight that he’s “fine and well and happy” in his situation. His face surely says, More Questions Please.

He’s dead many hours later, still trapped under the boulder. Oh, the reporter wove that into a touching narrative, too.

March 1996, Ozone disco fire: a smooth-skined reporter asks one of the burn victims, whose face looks like a horribly melted candle that sort of reminds you of Audrey, Jr. from the Little Shop of Horrors: one look at him and you know his life will never be the same again.

The reporter asks, “How do you feel now that you’ve been burned [implied: “and you look disgusting”] and your life will never be the same again?”

The interviewee tries to speak, but nobody could understand him. It’s tough to mouth out words when your lips have melted and you have no mouth to speak of (and to speak with). So the reporter interprets the burn-victim-with-no-lips language for the benefit of the audience eating dinner in their homes.

[end of sentimental flashback and music]

Julius asks the mother: Now that she’s gone, what do you think will happen to her dreams?

It’s a “very important” question; one that Julius had to ask. A question that instantly made me dance around the room, yapping: yeah, rub it in, baby, rub it in. Until it’s raw and there’s no blood left. Drive it home for her the fucking magnitude of her loss. Make her actually say it, you shitbag.

Julius Babao’s “innocent, malice-free” questions make me sorely miss the vocation I’ve chosen not to take. All those good old days of “journalism.” I say, Bravo! I say, continue doing all that shit in the name of “uncovering” truth and justice and inserting fingers in somebody else’s deepest wounds. I say, more of these in-your-face MTV-like interviews with the dying and grieving for the benefit of us millions of insulated, safely-distanced voyeurs. We absolutely love that. We crave for that kind of stimulation every now and then.

If there’s a day in the future I might choose to be a “journalist” again, just to see for myself how far I could go with my own stunts, there’s nothing more reassuring than the likes of Julius Babao to keep me inspired and full of faith and hope for humanity. And yeah, throw in some of the Tulfos, too.

Tarski

2006-07-30T15:47:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-21T21:05:00.000+08:00

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"

2006-07-18T12:47:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-14T21:02:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-10T16:32:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-10T16:28:00.000+08:00

“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.

Crossing the Rubicon

2006-06-07T11:05:00.000+08:00

I’ve packed up and dragged my dripping paraphernalia across the Rubicon last week, which is just my pretentious way of saying I’ve bought a domain for the new Skirmisher blog. I got tired of Blogger acting more and more like a petulant spinster landlady throwing her weight on me when all I’d want was some more breathing space and the freedom to splatter my sidebar with dancing naked chicks. What’s wrong with that?

Before anybody arrives at the fair-enough conclusion that I’m an ungrateful bastard (which I usually am, but not entirely in this case), I’m grateful for Blogger because, after all, it’s free. But in the past month or so, I’ve had growing needs that Blogger couldn’t anymore feed. I wanted to do this and that, but Blogger kept shaking its head and saying, “No, no, no, you silly twit, you can’t eat that!” So I stopped and meditated on the wisdom of setting up my own home and tweak some Php. Which I did, but only after much bloodshed.

The Skirmisher, at its heart, is also a “thought experiment in motion,” much like the old Skirmish of Dark and Light blog. But I’ve created it because I want to spread the idea’s wings a bit wider. A small bunch of “like-minded individuals” are also helping me out in the daily posts, which also means the blog will be “buzzing” every single day with nice, filthy things to crap about. There are just so many interesting things into which I’m sinking my fangs these days that you have to open the door a bit further to let more sunshine in. There’s so much garbage you have to haul. So much blood you have to spill. So many throats you want to open with your teeth. And exactly the reasons why life, despite all its crap, is so fucking beautiful.

Our transition from a Blogger blog into a full-blown “online disease” is best summed up in the Monty Python words: “We’re no longer the knights who say, ‘Ni!’ From now on, we’re the knights who say, ‘Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-p'tang-zoo-boing-goodem-zu-owly-zhiv.’”

I’m still trying to figure out a way to let other people who are not my cousins and friends to register and pitch in their stories and integrate everything into the whole framework. Yes, I hear it can be “easily” done (so say the geekier among us), but I want it done in “a beautiful way.” Currently, I’m tinkering with Scoop, while Wordpress is already sitting there like a queen and taking care of the blog’s smallest concerns. The Devil inside me says Scoop is The One, but I try to ignore it and listen to the other gremlins that my own host says are “equally cool,” like Drupal.

I don’t know, I still have yet to sink my fingers into these sandy, fuzzy things.

After all, it’s already a major feat for me to be able to kick the Skirmisher out of the door and into the world; you know, it’s not my only life, thank you very much. I still have to watch House MD [many thanks to Caloy], deal with people I work with from another part of the globe, do silly things like writing what my grandmother considers “an ugly version of Madame Bovary,” shoot the shit.

For the kind folks who’ve been stumbling in the darkness of this blog for the past few months, thank you. I’m playing my flute once again. Update your feeds and bookmarks and links and follow me to the new rabbit hole—the Skirmisher.

There's a world going on.

"The Skirmish" on Bloggy Award

2006-06-07T11:01:00.000+08:00

Bloggy Award slathered some nice words on The Skirmish of Dark and Light.

The free lunch shouldn't be far behind.

Primetime Soap

2006-05-24T16:38:00.000+08:00

It’s not hard to imagine that the people who actually reach the summit of Mt. Everest experience a brief moment of crystal-clear lucidity. It’s perversely easy for me to see them standing there in the middle of all that ice, holding their country’s flag, then that crazy question suddenly popping in their heads:

“What the fuck am I doing here?”

“Why am I standing here, holding this stupid goddamn flag, at the summit of some goddamn mountain? What’s my point? What have I achieved? What have I solved?”

Truly frightening, bothering questions. Especially if you’d remember you’d risked life and limb just to get to that point. Especially if you’d peel off all the layers of “motherhood statements” politicians back home had been slathering on the climb. You listen to them and you’d be seduced into thinking that climbing this mountain is all worth it; after all, in a country with almost no staggering scientific or cultural achievement, we’ve always been edgy to glorify every bit of scrap that comes our way, even pedestrian ones.

I have nothing against climbing mountains per se, but I have something about people climbing a really tall mountain and not admitting they’re doing it just for the heck of it, and not for some country’s glory.

I’ve always maintained that mountain climbing in itself is patently, baldly stupid. In my personal book, I can always agree to climb something that might kill me—but only if you’d show me the point. I won’t climb that just for the heck of it. At least, give me a goal besides merely reaching the summit and skirting avalanches. You want to reach the summit, for example, because you’re contacting alien life forms from Cygni 66. Or because you’d get your grandfather’s millions only if you could prove you could bring home Jimmy Hoffa's frozen dick.

On the other hand, I think it’s equally perverse to make that climb and rationalize it to death; as if these climbers are in a panic to lend their act some semblance of a panacea, to dress it up to make it seem like a solution to some unbridgeable abyss, some impossible problem.

Why couldn’t they just do a George Mallory and admit they’re climbing it “because it’s there,” period. Why do we always feel like we owe it to some invisible majority to rationalize every stupid, personal, and selfish thing we do and embellish it with cloying lines like, “We’re doing it for the country.”

Come on. Although I’m sure there’s somebody somewhere who would be glad to buy that crap, I’d still choose the classic route: Sell that to the marines.

And why am I going ballistic on a Wednesday afternoon?

Because last week, three Filipinos reached the summit of Mt. Everest amid much fanfare. And although the whole event was not as dramatic as the TV networks would have wanted it to seem, I believe the truth is more colorful.

The first two climbers were backed by a local network called ABS-CBN; the third one, Garduce, was backed by a rival network called GMA.

I’d often find myself laughing whenever the two TV stations would report on their bets in the early days of the preparation. ABS-CBN had my favorite hobby-horse, Abner Mercado, reporting from Nepal; and GMA had Jiggy Manicad. The funny thing was, for ABS-CBN, GMA’s Garduce didn’t exist; nobody would even mention the guy. I don’t remember Abner Mercado even saying something as bland as, “And here's the latest news on the 'other' climber: Garduce was caught wearing split-crotch panties!"

On the other hand, for GMA, the group called First Philippine Expedition was a funny myth you told your campmates around a bonfire to warm things up.

[Everest Poster Boy: "The Power of Handsome"]

Simply put, the two networks mutually denied the efforts of each other. If that’s not ugly, revolting, and cheap, I don’t know what is. In fact, they only began “acknowledging” each other’s boys when Oracion, for instance, reached the summit first.

Besides, I really don’t see the point of all the fuss. If a man without legs could climb it in a flourish, what are our three Filipinos (one of which is called “robot” because, friends say, he’s “superhumanly indefatigable”) and their backers so happy about?

If you took a knife and cut the whole thing down to size, what you’d see are the two rival networks pushing these happy people around as part of their little “ratings war.” But I have to be clear that I have no problem with Big Corp “pushing pawns”—because if I’d work for them, I’d also do the same; I have no conscience. But what I’m harping on is that they could have done it better; they could have injected a little more drama.

Here’s what I think should have happened with the Everest adventure:

Garduce reaches the summit as the third one to do so. He’s already secretly bitter about it, but it turned out to be worse because upon reaching the mountaintop, he found a small note from the two ABS-CBN boys that says, “Garduce! You’re Third! LOL!!!”

So Garduce fumes and climbs down faster than an avalanche. When he finds Oracion and Ermata at base camp laughing about “that note” and the fact that nobody really cares about third placers, Garduce totally loses his marbles. He looks around, sees the legless New Zealand guy holding his spare metal leg, grabs the metal leg, and uses it to slug ABS-CBN’s boys in the head. Abner Mercado, seeing that GMA’s Jiggy Manicad is about to join in the fray armed with his rolled-up “reporter’s notebook,” jumps on the whole bunch and uses his full weight to trap everybody under his armpits.

Everybody realizes that violence is bad when they all get a mighty whiff of Abner’s evil effluvium.

The end. They all go home to meet with Carlo Caparas for the movie rights. I leave it to Carlo’s genius to come up with an amazing movie title. Or maybe the two networks’ hacks could turn it into primetime soap, which I think is great, although it’s tough guessing where they’d fit Angel Locsin in the whole thing.

THREE FILIPINOS CLIMB MT EVEREST

LEGLESS MAN CLIMBS ON TOP OF THE WORLD

Knopf

2006-05-22T20:34:00.000+08:00

There’s this guy, let’s call him Knopf, who was running on the info superhighway Bill Gates used to call the “Interweb” back when he didn’t think something like Netscape could actually hack it. Back in those innocent years the Web was nascent and Gates treated the jerks who took the Web seriously as nothing but a bunch of geeks much geekier than El Geeko himself. And that, if anybody knew Bill Gates (which is somewhat doubtful), was the apex of hard-nosed snobbery, the Mt. Everest of spite, the Mother of All Bullshit that was ever produced by Acme Corp.

But wait, I was talking about Knopf. So let’s go back to Knopf.

As I was saying, Knopf was running and running until one day, he stumbled on this blog and fell flat on his face. Then the next thing I knew was Knopf flashing cash in my face. Vicariously. Through instant messaging.

I went into a trance, where I seemed to see Knopf standing in a shining doorway, a cigar stuck between his fat fingers, smoke lazily curling everywhere. I seemed to see him saying, “There are few things we have to learn about this planet. The first is how to conquer it.”

Knopf was saying, “Show me the Skirmisher.”

And I just snapped. I almost burst a blood vessel. I was gulping down a tumbler of fruit sherbet and I almost choked with that question.

I was telling him there has never been any Skirmisher, that this blog has never been real. Okay, it’s real because for some strange trickery, you can read it. Heck, you’re actually reading it now. But it’s not real in the sense that I couldn’t honestly say a human being has been writing these posts.

That was the first volley of crap I served Knopf’s way: You will never find the “Skirmisher.” All the shit this blog contains is a thick fucking illusion. It’s a tangle of lies and complex deceit.

“I don’t understand,” Knopf said.

I said, “Let’s pretend for a moment the character I’ve been calling ‘Skirmisher’ is actually five different individuals, all leading their crappy little lives, contributing these stories you read once or twice a week.”

“No, let’s stretch it,” I said. “Let’s imagine ‘Skirmisher’ is the pseudonym of a secret organization whose job is to go around and do nasty little things and blog about it. Say this secret org is actually the protector of the yet-to-be-famous Holy Spit, as opposed to the fact that Audrey Tautou is the Holy Grail and Tom Hanks with that roadkill-toupee is her knight-in-a-boring-movie.”

“Let’s take it further, just to be really crazy. Let’s pretend the one who’s doing this blog is in fact somebody like Keyser Soze, the ‘usual suspect,’ the sum total of everybody’s suspicions.”

“Or he’s a web bot, a spider that crawls the world wide web to ‘understand’ the darker side of the zeitgest, then ‘composes’ useless bits into a blog post that roughly seems comprehensible. That all these things you read here, even this very post, is not a product of a person, but merely the sputterings of a very sophisticated code.”

“Can you shut up already?” Knopf said. “I know you’re intriguing, but I just realized you’re actually a first-class, high-up-in-the-clouds retard.”

“Oh, don’t put me on a pedestal.”

“I shouldn’t have contacted you.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Jesus,” Knopf said. “A retard who loves saying ‘exactly’ to prove a non-existent point. What can be worse than that?”

“Let me try this,” I said. “Worse is a retard who says ‘Sure’?”

“&^^%^%$#*()#!!!” Knopf calmly said.

“By the way, why do you ask,” I said. “What are you, a publisher?”

“Let’s just say, yeah,” Knopf said.

“New fucking York?”

“Let’s pretend that, yeah.”

“Oh my… Gaaaaaa!!! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Nah. Never mind.”

“No, no, no, let’s talk. I’ll be serious now.”

“You know what,” Knopf said. “Wait a gazillion years, grow up a little, then maybe when I’m in the mood, we’ll talk. But right now, I’m having a headache. I think I’ll go home and stupefy myself with hard liquor.”

Then the guy disappeared, signed out, kaput.

I was left staring at my computer screen, full of regret.

Regretting that I didn’t tell Knopf I also have the habit of walking down peopled roads with my hand dripping with wet, warm dog turd, then flinging the poop at weak-looking people who’d meet my gaze. Then I’d run; I learned to run fast that way.

Too bad I didn’t tell him that. It would have been fun.

The Da Vinci Joke

2006-05-17T12:05:00.000+08:00

I realize the reason why Da Vinci Code, the movie and the book, has been getting more flak than, say, The God Who Wasn’t There, is because it actually dignifies the belief that there was indeed somebody named Jesus Christ who once existed.

It’s okay if you’d just dismiss the whole Christian thing in the same way grown-ups dismiss Santa Claus. Nobody would mind if you’d assert that Pastafarianism is “more real” than what Paul supposedly met on the road to Damascus—but you’d be opening the gates of hell if you’d bend over, pick up the core dogma of Christianity, and sink your dirty fingers into its butt and weave a novel out of it.

The faithful are furious. I can imagine people having the same fury if a Santa Claus movie fleshed out the idea that the old guy molested his daughter and the daughter grew up to become Martha Stewart. And who would forget the rage and mindless violence that inspired the burning of embassies and the boycotting of sumptuous Danish dairy goods—all because a bunch of cartoonists tried to equate Muhammad with the high-faluting, unforgiveable infidel concept of “humor.”

But it’s all so amusing. It’s fun to hear the god-folk say big words like, “crumbling,” “eruption” or “battling the onslaught of…” Those are words you hear in Star Trek or the Star Wars, usually when there’s an empire crumbling behind the lead characters, or there’s a green blob with hairy nostrils swallowing a girl. Only in this case, we’re talking about a movie that says Jesus was horny enough to have been human (or human enough to have been horny) and to have had a wife. And that, says the nice neighborhood schoolmarm, is bad.

But I think it’s exciting. To be fair, if anybody would take Dan Brown really, really seriously, who allegedly once said (I’m using “allegedly” because you can’t afford not to be paranoid, these days, can you?) that he wrote Da Vinci Code not to blaspheme but to inspire "discussion and debate" that will ultimately lead to a more solidly defended faith—all while earning millions off the little yarn—then the faithful should in fact be thankful.

After all, Brown himself is a self-proclaimed Christian.

But you might be thinking, “But you’re missing the point of the protests. Who cares about that bastard? We’re talking about Jesus Christ having kids LOL!!!”

This very well reminds me of the same public outcry over The Last Temptation of Christ about two decades ago. And the funny thing is that Last Temptation author Nikos Kazantzakis was a man more religious than the common Bible-toter—he spent years and years trying to understand what God really meant in people’s lives. He actually thought through it, rather than just accepting at face value the comforting sureties invented at the so-called First Council of Nicea.

I can understand the protesters, but theirs is a laughably losing game. I feel that they know that; that this protest is simply nominal, like those Japanese who one morning looked up the sky and saw the atomic bomb gliding down and all they could do was point at the bomb and ask, “Wasn’t that the Emperor?”

The movie opens in theaters today. Nothing cerebral, nothing earth-shaking, just one of those things you’ll forget afterwards. But it’s presumably a good hell of a ride. So stop being such a grim-faced lot and just enjoy it, okay? I’m sure your God will understand.

[Pope: "Hmmm. That naughty Danny boy deserves a good spanking."]

Loops and Tangents

2006-05-11T12:14:00.000+08:00

“What did he do?” the Guidance Counselor asked my teacher.

My teacher, let’s call her Miss Suni, simply said, “He stabbed his classmate with a pencil. The victim’s bleeding in the clinic.”

The Guidance Counselor stared at me from head to foot. She stared at the strip of Bandaid on my knee, at my shabby white uniform. She searched my face for remorse. She looked away when she saw nothing there.

The truth was, I hadn’t yet realized the magnitude of my stupidity. I stood there beside an expensive-looking vase that was as tall as me, directly in the air conditioner’s blast. Things felt surreal. One moment, you were just one of those kids copying whatever shit was on the black board, the next moment, you were “special.” All thanks to that kid who sat in the row behind me.

Let’s call the kid Eli. He wasn’t even in my circle of nasty friends, I’d rarely even notice him. But earlier that afternoon, he had this bunch of rubber bands and he was using them to annoy his girl seatmate. When the fun with the girl wore thin, he gazed beyond his horizon and found my ear jutting out of my head right as I sat in the seat before him. Eli probably thought, “Nice ears.”

So what Eli did, he pulled a rubber band and snapped it on my ear.

I was usually a nice kid. Okay, I admit, I loved hanging out with the boys who did nothing but piss off the girls. I loved it when a girl crumbled in tears; it made me strangely feel as if she liked me. The little pricks who were my friends firmly believed that a girl who hated you actually liked you; it was some sort of a secret language. It was how girls communicated to the world, my friends would philosophize; girls spoke a strange, convoluted, and arcane language—exactly why we loved and hated them.

But how I reacted to Eli’s invasion of my blissful privacy was so typical of my behavior: when he snapped a rubber band on my ear, I just turned to him and glared; I thought my “frightening” scowl was enough. Then I continued writing on my notebook. But Eli happened to be like one of those people who, like Luca Brasi, begged to be killed. So he snapped my ear again, and even laughed out loud like a hyena. The second time he did that, I whirled around and brought down my angry fist on his leg so hard the pain froze his face.

I coldly gazed at him as he began crying. He was holding his leg so delicately and with such shock on his face that you’d think the leg had been lost and he just found it again. As if he was some goddamned Romeo and the leg was his Juliet.

I felt nothing; I knew he’d stop anyway when he’d realize nobody cared about him. Then I continued to write on my pad, only to discover something that stunned me—my pencil’s sharp lead was missing.

I wheeled around. Eli’s leg was all blood, his face was all tears. It flashed in my head: I was holding my pencil when I pummeled his leg with my fist. The truth went through me as terrific as a shotgun blast:

I had indeed stabbed him.

The first thing that hit my head was: Eat the pencil!

Eat the pencil so that there’s no evidence. Then charm them with your naïve smile.

But everything went blinding white. The next thing I remember, I was with Miss Suni and we were walking past classrooms full of kids singing or reciting the alphabet. I caught a whiff of my teacher’s perfume, mentally compared it with my mother’s cologne, and instantly I decided my teacher smelled like a dog. I didn’t care then that she had great boobs and that my height allowed me the privilege of being able to stare directly at her butt; I didn’t know those things, yet.

Miss Suni dragged me to the Guidance Counselor’s office. She had always had a flair for drama, and she proved that by shoving me into the middle of the room and declaring:

This. Kid. Stabbed. His. Classmate.

That stopped everybody’s conversations. All eyes burned at me. I returned the stares. When I realized I was all alone, I melted like a candle and squirmed quietly in a corner, waiting for whatever shit was in store for me.

Ten million years later, I’d meet Eli on some dusty road. We were then high school seniors, and I barely could remember him. But he walked to me and said, “I haven’t forgotten what you did to me.” And I don’t know, I just stood there; I was probably waiting he’d pull out a pencil and bury it in my chest. But all he did was give me his fiercest, blazing gaze. He walked away.

I was left there wondering about what just happened. I felt empty and confused, as if Eli just took something from me. I felt a powerful urge to chase him and kick the living daylights out of him, just for closure. He must have wanted closure. He couldn’t just let me get away, not like that. You don’t wait ten million years only to say some queer line like, “I haven’t forgotten you.”

I was so sad I wanted to give him the nice things Muhammad Ali gave to Frazier’s face; I wanted to beat him up until he’s angry enough to fight back. Until the dog in him wakes up and bares its fangs.

You don’t let your enemies walk the earth; you destroy them. You destroy them because that’s a favor you do for your friends. Because life teaches us to love and protect our friends and destroy our enemies. You don’t love them both, you don’t hate them both. It’s always about drawing the line somewhere.

He should destroy me; he should close this. Or at least, he should also make me bleed somehow. Just like the old days. But why must I be the one to nudge him on that?

But I swallowed it all and in a small moment, I suddenly decided I should ask for forgiveness. Maybe forgiveness. Maybe after a million years of silence, saying sorry would still work.

Maybe. But then he was already gone. We lived in a small town where you could always find who you were looking for. But on that afternoon, Eli probably made a turn somewhere and vanished. On that afternoon, I scoured the streets looking for him, trying to sense the trail of his ancient anger, but he was gone. I never saw him again.

Flashback:

I’m standing in the corner of the Guidance Counselor’s office, shivering from the air conditioner’s icy blast, awaiting the death sentence.

Miss Suni’s back with Eli behind her. I see his leg has been bandaged, but he’s walking with a limp. Miss Suni says to me, “I’m letting your mother know about this.”

In my head I’m hating her, telling her “You’re stupid,” promising myself that when I’m big enough and smart enough, I’ll come back and fuck her in the mouth until she remembers everything, even the middle name of Chiquito’s pet monkey. But I actually say nothing; the secret words fester silently in my mouth.

I just ignore them. I peel off the Bandaid on my knee and discover that my old wound has healed. I run my palm on the scar; it feels dry and insignificant. And hopelessly empty.

***
For similar posts, see Backtracks and Fast-forwards.

The Skirmish of Dark and Light

The Spinal Tap

The Dude

"And they're turning us into monsters"

‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’ — Nietzsche

"Susan and the Infinite Sadness"

Great Moments In Government Employee Hotness

Overheard At The Supermarket #1

Koko Pimentel Removes Koko Krunch Off The Shelves; Pichay Blames Everybody Except His Mother

Spells That Should Have Been in Harry Potter

Articles of Faith

Talking with an online scammer

Great White Time

A Heartbreaking Blogpost Of Staggering Genius

Manny Pacquiao's New Killer Combo Moves

Fuss Over Laos

The Filipina Named "Nyah"

Big Deal, or No Big Deal

How and Why I Won a Philippines Free Press Lit Award

The Philippines Should Go Web 2.0

The Email Conundrum

Reverse Superheroism

Julius Babao Demonstrates How to be a Real Jerk Without Anybody Noticing It

Tarski

Beginnings and Endings

"White Light"

Dead Things and Empty Spaces

The Manny Pacquiao Show

The Notebook

Crossing the Rubicon

"The Skirmish" on Bloggy Award

Primetime Soap

Knopf

The Da Vinci Joke

Loops and Tangents

Screwing the Penguin Suits

Out of Place

Birdie of Jesus

Cojones Grande

Extra-territorial Pissings

Platoon

Feeding the Cat

Clenched Fist

Patterns from the Cold

V for Vindication

Gab @ the Speed of Light

Strange Brew

Judas the Armadillo

Traipsing in the Dark

Trouble with the Debutante

Kubrick's Apes

The Smallest of Things

A Riddle for Kübler-Ross

Friday Evening Kitsch

The State of the Art

Wrongness

Destroying the Beautiful

Goodbye, and Thanks for all the Crap

Jesus Sings Sinatra

Turn me on, Dead Woman

Take Two