Bohol, Manila , and the Two Faces of Nature

September 26: The day started with the unmistakeable conclusion that we were unlucky. Chemae, my girlfriend, and I woke up at 6:30 in the morning, still groggy from drinks we had the night before with friends. An airplane headed for the beautiful province of Bohol was waiting for us at the airport, ready to fly at 8:30 AM. We had reserved that plane five months in advance. We thought we’d never make it, but we did. It turns out we were lucky after all.
           
Outside, the typhoon that would unload the heaviest rainfall on Metro Manila in four decades, and that would take away hundreds of lives away through raging floods, was approaching…

Bohol: Awe at Every Turn

The plane kept shaking because the weather was bad but we still made it to Tagbilaran Airport after about an hour and 20 minutes of flying. I was still dizzy when Val, our tour guide, fetched us at the airport and drove us through the capital. Val’s service included a complete tour of all the tourist spots in Bohol for just Php 2,000.

First, we went to Baclayon Church , the oldest Catholic church in the country built in the 15th century. Chemae and I went inside the old museum next to it and looked at some intricate antique pieces of church items, such as Bibles, idols, and candle holders. Then, we went to see the longest living python in captivity in the country located at Albuquerque . It was mind-blowing to see more than 23 feet of snake muscle twirled inside a cage.

Unearthed

Typing sleepy. Wanna ponder the world. Pondering is all one can do after a few paychecks. They just soften you. Make you gay. Now you don’t even care if you’re branded a homophobic. It’s just another difference in this stained glass global population of Asians, blacks, men, transsexuals, daughters under 18, daughters over 18, the handicapped, cool, nerd, goth, obese, soccer moms, sucker moms. I’m just one of them. A statistic with beliefs. I rome the Philippines restricted by a foreigner’s table indicating specific allocation of profits. I get his cents, my mother gets part of the cents, so I can eat part of the nutrition-drained meat she cooks. People don’t understand me. They don’t understand a single f*cking thing we’re saying and we’re proud of that. This sets us apart, baseless pride. Pride that has an actual measurable base is uncool, pathetic. Scums only have measurable bases of pride. And usually that means they have a lot of money. But I don’t have any, so I’m cool. I’m not a scum. Still, that doesn’t make me any less slimy. Now with all the negative adjectives you’ve rained on yourself, you wonder who’s the bastard who put this into your head. You can’t think of any because you can’t trace any effect into a single cause today. No God nor science now. Just this random incessant desire to make a difference that’s already there. Like I said, it’s a stained glass window of an existence. My body, my work and my dreams are a huge stained-glass window inside an empty church, glimmering red, blue and yellow on a hot, August night. So we write and take pictures of ourselves and scatter them all over the Internet to feel all right. We gotta make people read the next chapter in our lives. We’re protagonists and they are readers and vice versa. There’s a constant peeping going on and we’re all indecent exhibitionists to some extent. Imagine that, in the Philippines? This place was innocent a hundred years ago. Now, it’s just an extension of the latest Hollywood flick, only grimier because the MMDA is inept. We’re like Americans. Everyone is like Americans, more or less. The Chinese are like Americans except they have a bloody history of Communism and they’re more mysterious. Arabs are like Americans, only they’re learning how to be like them in a very painful way. The North Koreans are also like Americans, fate sees them getting there. And of course, Filipinos are like Americans, only their MMDA is inept. What the flying f*ck are those urinals for? Who’s the big dunce? The head of the MMDA? Yeah, maybe we should blame him. We can always blame the President but everyone’s hatin’ her already so that’ll just make us lame. Let’s just hate the MMDA head. Let’s see ourselves ranting, talking political, putting in our two cents worth a thousand bucks when we’re drunk. ‘Cause when there’s nothing less boring to talk about, politics is a sure bet. Gives us a sense of power. We’re all Filipino citizens, anyway. We wear t-shirts with yellow stars and a sun. We make a lot of money from it, especially the Chinese. Pirates love us.

Of Poets and Basketball Players

“Should I tell her I love her in the poem?”

“Yes. You’ve already made the ridiculous decision of writing a poem for her, telling her about your feelings. So why stop short and not say that you love her?”

“Yeah, I realize that. But everyone says ‘I love you’ and this is not a high school kind of poem. Like I’ve told you, this poem is an adult poem, an adult love poem.”

“I somehow have this feeling that all love poems are childish. Ask her out. That’s what adults — men do.”

“But I don’t wanna be just like any other man. I want her to understand that I’m intelligent and creative and deep and I can write good love poems.”

“You can also achieve that by buying her a drink and then talking to her.”

“Yeah, but this is still much more special. If I get lucky and she allows me to date her and we get together, we’ll always have this poem written on a piece of crumpled yellowish paper. And whenever we feel like lying on the bed on idle weekends, cuddling, kissing, she’ll stand up, get it from the drawer and read it to me. It’s so cheesy that we’ll both laugh and remember how good were those first days.”

Fantasy Genre

He got up from the chair and did some jumping jacks. The morning people stood up when he walked briskly in front of them and did the robot dance followed by a slick moonwalk. His boss, cussing, ran outside his office when he stood on his table and did a tapdance, then consequently screamed his name to the blank blue ceiling.

He ran as fast as he could toward the elevators, pounded the arrows until one of them broke and his palms were raw. The doors opened and he leapt inside to the shock of everyone. There’s a harrassed pretty girl inside and he winked at her saying, “Fuck yeah!”

Off to the other floor where he kicked the first monitor he saw and sent it crashing to the ground. He ruffled every hair with his excited hands. Someone tried to stop him but he turned around and bit his arm. Then he grabbed someone’s bag of chips and poured it into his mouth.

Before the guard could catch him, he escaped by pushing everyone aside, grabbed a colleague’s boob in the process shouting, “Good morning, woman!” A split second before he held the doorknob, he spat on the guard’s record book and slid down the hallway on his knees. His saliva blotted the record books’s cheap blue ink.

His feet went down the fire exit like two cars racing against each other. He tripped, fell down two staircases and busted his lip. Blood gushing out of his mouth, he discovered he left something behind. His yellow tooth was on the dirty cement as well as his troubles.

Behind him 10 people tried to catch up. He burst open the ground floor door and threw some coins at the scandalled receptionist’s head. Through the screams of terror and dread, he let out a joyous laugh, which led him to the door and to the street outside.

So he ran and he ran and he ran and he ran. He ran until he remembered he hasn’t drunk one drop of water since last night. He fell on his back, surprising pedestrians, looked up to the blue sky then wrote the name of his love in the air.

Tripping on Your Shoelace

I’ve got a sinking feeling
That I’ve got a really big problem
My eyes made the mistake again
Of falling on the wrong face again.
And now all I do is turn you to
An addiction of sorts, bittersweet food.
Christ, why does this happen
In every new room that I enter?
Now I’ve got to wait ’til you snap and say “Never!”

Personal Taboo

You might as well have been f*cked from behind and you wouldn’t have done anything about it, as well.That feeling is what I’m talking about. That sinking feeling of silent grieving over your inadequacies morphing into shackles that leave you trapped. You can’t even claw your way outside, act suddenly all ferocious and volatile because, well, you’re not. In the first place, that’s probably why you’re standing there as the world unloads truckloads of cum on your mom. Yes, it’s also that. That typical perspective is what I’m talking about. That typical perspective of malicious, dirty and sick thoughts that forms a crust all over the mind. Bubbling, popping each second, the viscous dark green liquid submerging the brain, turning it into an ugly revolting monster soaked in phlegm. So you begin to talk about moms getting unloaded with cum, fetuses boiled in Chinese soups, bosses’ necks tied with a rope, their backs whipped raw, their big mouths stuffed with anything filled with muck,  youngsters brutally raped and murdered. That’s it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That kind of perspective which could only come from the most restricted of all beings, the most repressed and compressed. These thoughts are the pieces of garbage, the decaying materials that we just wanna hide and extinguish. But they can’t be extinguished as long as there are people who might as well have been f*cked from behind without ever any fairy nor wizard coming to their rescue. No happy endings to expect, no saviors coming down from the blue heavens which probably scorn our phlegms of existences anyway. It’s all these people can do, watch a freak movie in their heads while other people laugh and spend. Because at times, I think, some of us, we share that tranquil feeling of being run over by a speeding truck, our beautiful guts splattered on the roadside. We share those amusing but disturbing smiles as someone else derives physical sweaty bliss from our tortured state. I’m talking about that because we share that. But few have the time and talent to describe how complex that natural process is, so I did it myself; that complex natural process, a work of genius, of being slapped, tapped, and unloaded on. There’s no solution. You just turn the experience into the myth of the day, and tell every expectant face at home that you’ve had a blast of a time from the moment the alarm clock screamed “Time to live!”

voting

My Vote for the 2009 Bloggers’ Choice Award (National)

I vote for Altanghap
Bloggers’ Choice Award
2009 Philippine Blog Awards

When Care Becomes the Fad

Genuine care for others — I think that’s one of the things people must really have to be more prepared for another disaster like Typhoon Ondoy.

The headline on a local newspaper yesterday said that donations for typhoon victims are overwhelming. That’s great. That’s awesome. That is perfectly how it should be. Many of us feel proud for showing our fellow Filipinos that the spirit of “bayanihan” can still be revived in this modern age. I take my hat off to that.

But it’s easy to get over melodramatic over our present achievements just by watching the endless TV marathons about the typhoon donations and heroic acts many of our fellow Filipinos have done to try to fix the disastrous situation. We are riding a surge of patriotism so powerful that every corner conversation, every TV station, every Facebook update and every tweet is all about volunteering and sending out donations to victims. But we must ask, “Where did all that care come from?”

I Love the Everyday Stuff

When you’re young and you’re fiery and you have tanks full of excess energy, you can’t help but be idealistic. Especially if you come from a prestigious university, you are automatically led to think that you have a great background and you have a great mission before you. Everything you see is great and therefore everything you do is perceived by your eyes as having tremendous effects in the society you live in (if you’re philosophical, even the universe). You’re big. You think gargantuan ideas. You live mammoth dreams.

But time has taught me the importance of seeing the value in the tiny, everyday stuff that occur to us.

A Song In My Head I Wish Interpol Would Play

Bed Bug
by Interpol*

Everytime
It gets me
Everytime

Everytime
It gets me
Everytime

Now I think about a lot and I do a lot of acts
But I really can’t know what goes on in this
Show
Cause it

Gets

Me

Everytime.
Yes, it gets me
Everytime

You’re over there, I’m underneath, it’s incomplete
I’m completely
Silly
Silly
Silly.

So what is worse? Go get a nurse
And rub some salt against these wounds
To—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Everytime
I feel it. Anytime we’ll kill it.

We’re waking up the other day, we couldn’t guess
What’s waiting for us
When the rain doesn’t show up.

‘Cause when we plan we write things down
On biodegradable sheets of paper
We just found on sticky tables.

Yes, we write things down, and we talk things over
There’s a plan to carry this over and under
The sheets. Our mouths going

Blah, blah, blah. Ba-blah-ba-blah

Then I turn away, and I pull my hair
And I think of a girl who will knock me out
For tomorrow.

There’s a need to catch up
Let us all play catch-up
There’s a need to botch up
This fake blood of ketchup

Three minutes ’til five, a thousand steps to home
Why I can’t I leave this chair and slip out of my bones
Oh baby

Everytime
It gets me
Everytime

Everytime

It gets me
Everytime

_____________________________________________________

* This is not a real song by Interpol. I just made it up because I like Interpol and I think they’ll sing the song in my head perfectly. LOL.