The Festering Isolation

The Skirmish of Dark and Light

2006-05-01T13:35:00.000+08:00

For those who might be wondering why this blog seems "dead," I've created something else, and since March 2006, it's the new place where I unload all my crap.

The blog's name is The Skirmish of Dark and Light.

Usually, I won't say something to frighten the kids, but I'll say it anyway. The Skirmisher's blog is nothing you'd wanna show to your mother. It's not exactly evil, but it's jaded at best, and at its worst, it's downright nasty; it's not for everybody.

It features a number of common threads or categories, like "Bullshit Meister" [where I make potshots at conventional wisdom], or that simply evil thing I call "Sacred Cows 2.0" [it includes, among other unspeakable things, a revision-in-progress of the Bible. Hah! I told you it's not for kids].

So, just in case you happen to surf by and find this blog as dead as a doorstop, do visit me in my new hang out. I hope you'll enjoy all the creepy, crawly things you'd find there.

JB

Thoughts To Provoke Your Thoughts

2006-01-06T11:10:00.000+08:00

Thoughts To Provoke Your Thoughts

Toilet Humor

2005-09-25T19:40:00.000+08:00

My sister’s been bugging me to help her out with her project in humanities. They’re being asked to produce a clay sculpture of some kind.

I tell her do a Rodin’s Thinker.

She rejects it, saying it’s too “common.”

Do it differently, then. Make the thinker sit in the john, instead of stone.

She still doesn’t buy it.

You know what, I say, exasperated, Do something irreverent. Debase something sacred.

Her face lights up. “You mean, Jesus Christ?”

I shake my head. “Too risky. Try something local and safe. Somebody like Lapu-lapu.”

Sitting in the toilet? Doesn’t make sense to me.

Then try somebody a bit more modern. Somebody like… Rizal.

Aw come on, are you serious?

I sigh, like I have never sighed before.

I tell her that in my life, I’ve only done two kinds of figures: dinosaurs and a naked woman sitting on stone. In my “really lazy” moments, I’d usually opt to do the female figure; it doesn’t take much inspiration to make one, anyway. I can do a nude with my eyes closed and while wiping my drool. In highschool, I did a papier-mache by shredding old issues of Manila Bulletin, mashing it up with starch paste. I did it twice because the first time I completed one, I woke up in the morning and found a swarm of red ants feasting on my masterpiece; the little fuckers were eating the starch in my obra. The second time, I crammed the whole piece (it was a prehistoric valley where dinosaurs—three triceratops and a tyrannosaurus rex—roamed beside a “volcano” that was only as tall as the animals. I tried positioning the two triceratops in the act of copulation, but thank God I received last-minute wisdom and didn’t go with it) in the freezer to protect it. When I submitted it to the teacher that afternoon, she was so strangely “excited” that she asked me if she could keep it. Too eager to please, I said yes, sure, absolutely; I didn’t tell her that by tomorrow, those goddamn ants would reduce the dinosaurs into shapeless carcass.

I tell my sister, Make Jose Rizal sit in the toilet, then tell your professor it’s Rizal’s final night and that’s supposed to be his last time to take a dump. That’s why Rizal is thinking too hard.

I tell her, “Rizal probably thought of writing “Mi Ultimo Adios” while he’s shitting. I usually get most of my ideas that way. So maybe he took the same road.”

My sister still isn’t buying it. “But didn’t they use latrine?”

It doesn’t matter, I say. It’s actually brilliant.

How do I make it look like Rizal?

Do the hair, baby. People recognize Rizal by his hairstyle. Part it in the middle, make it a little wavy. And don’t forget the jawline.

And I add, “Maybe you should give it a dramatic name.”

I think for a moment, then offer the name before she can say anything. I tell her, Call it Mi Ultimo Echas.

She grimaces. She says, Corny, corny, corny.

I shrug. I tell her that in other countries, people oust a government with this kind of subversion.

This kind of idea, I tell her, wins a Clio Award in other countries.

But we’re not “in other countries,” she says. And it’s corny.

I say nothing; I just grin. I’m thinking of more evil things, but sometimes you should know when to stop. But when she does decide to use it, should I stop her? When her resistance crumbles and she begins molding it in her hands, should I admit, finally, that it’s cruel, that it’s probably in bad taste?

Nah. Maybe I’ll think about it.

League of Monsters

2005-09-24T16:59:00.000+08:00

“I don’t buy drugs, but if you really want it, I know people,” I tell him.

I’m not really into paying women for sex, but if you really want it, I know people, too. I can show you the way. I can even hook you up with my ever-bugaw cousin.

Point the way; that’s what I usually do, even if somebody’s asking me the path to Hell. Point, point, point, point the way to directions I myself wouldn’t take.

“But you have to realize you step into this world,” I tell him, “coming back unstained would be very difficult. That is, if you can ever go back at all.”

I’m cool as I say this shit. I feel cool. I feel cool to treat these nontopics as if they were dining-table stuff.

He says nothing, but I read his mind.

His mind says: You. Are. Such. A. Monster.

When I saw Sin City, I realized these are the characters that live in my head. For the longest time. Maybe Frank Miller has seen me in a nightmare. In a burning mirage in the desert. Maybe I’m one of the demons that jump up and down on his chest as he lies staring at the ceiling, waiting for the Dark Muse.

Anyway, the truth is, I’m really a clean-living fellow. I don’t even smoke. I get dizzy with my third bottle of San Mig Lite. My only issues are my very minor character flaws, like my furious arrogance, jadedness, my quick impulse to mock other people who somehow hold beliefs that differ from my self-proclaimed weltanschauung, my megalomania, my heartfelt empathy for fellow perceived monsters like Adolph, Pantagruel*, Napoleon, and Benito.

And, of course, my incurable impulse to ogle at women’s white and smooth armpits. Ah, skin, the death of me. Show me a hint of cleavage and I drop on the floor and die. Show me flawless legs or thighs and I just become rabid. And I haven’t even mentioned anything about boobs, yet.

His mind says: You. Are. Such. A. Monster.

I say nothing; I pretend I don’t actually read minds.

Because I usually sit on the fence and let evil take its course, in the calculations of some people, I also have blood on my hands.

Because I’m usually the only fellow left on the crossroads when Vladimir and Estragon arrive asking for directions to find Godot and wait endlessly for the fucker to arrive, because I’m the fellow who points the way, even to one that leads to their deaths, in the reckoning of some people, I’m accomplice to murder.

But what I want to tell this fellow is this: God stands there silently in the corner as somebody is raped. God walks on the roads of Iraq as mothers and their kids get blown up. And in the face of it all, God does nothing; God and I are not really different. God and I are two kids sitting on a fence, blowing the dandelions in our hands as carrion litter the ground around us.

But of course, I don’t dare say that. It’s an invitation to tragedy; religion is one of the three unspeakable things people like customer service representatives shall never discuss with clients. And I’m a good businessman, so I also know that

And besides, trying to find the truth is such a big headache. That people like Poncius Pilate, in Mel Gibson’s much-hyped film, could only say in utter defeat: “Veritas? Quid es fucking veritas?”

Not wanting to choose is already a choice; people like myself become monsters out of sheer apathy. Or indecision.

The myth of “making a difference” faded in me so early in my life. These days, I just spend time killing small animals, spit my blood on the pavement, howl during full moon.

I ask him, You want to know a bigger monster?

I tell him about this girl, sixteen years old. She’s pretty, she looks like one of those Korean stars you see every night on primetime TV. She uses casual sex as a weapon. She knows how to wield it as if she were born with precocious awareness of the power of her sexuality. She’s like the vagina version of Joan of Arc. Place her in a world of men, men who are so stupid they would give all their money just to see a woman take her clothes off, and you’ll see how she becomes God.

God, all powerful, all bursting with energy to make horny men suffer.

A world of men. Our world. This stupid planet.

To give proof of her existence, I open my laptop and show him her face.

I can give you her exact address if you want, I tell him.

That’s what I do these days; point, point, point, point directions, to paths I would never, ever take.

I close my laptop and stop reading his mind.

Somewhere in that small head, a seed has been planted. He will leave now, but he will come back, resolved on his inner issues, asking for directions. And I will dwell in the fleeting power of one who holds information. I will enjoy it. I will up my rate. Tomorrow, this power will jump to somebody else, and this fellow will cease needing my help. But I don’t mind.

There is always a need to be filled in the future. The crappy, same ol’ future. The world is crawling with fools asking for directions. And I’ll always be standing there, waiting for more Vladimirs and Estragons**, pointing to them the way to their absurd, horrible ends.

*Pantagruel’s one of the lead characters in Francois Rabelais’s 16^th-century series of novels.

**In Samuel Beckett’s play, Vladimir and Estragon don’t actually die; I just want them to. Besides, on some level, I think waiting endlessly is also a form of terrible death.

Aqua Vaticanus (Part 4)

2005-05-09T11:57:00.000+08:00

Back at the hostel, I share my room with three people: an African American who looks like Mike Tyson, an Arab kid, and a South Korean who is my age and who keeps on telling me his house back in Korea is probably worth two million in Philippine money and that he’s so rich, oh God, and I’m so poor.

I am so tired I just drop on the first bed I see and immediately doze off. Unfortunately, it is Mike Tyson’s bed. When he arrives and finds me sprawled on his bed like there’s no life left in me and rivulets of my drool running down his pink pillows, his fuse snaps and he begins jumping around the room like a gorilla that just lost his bananas. The Arab kid is so frightened he leaves and drags his belongings and goes to the hostel’s administration to transfer to a more peaceful and loving room. The Korean, who probably knows a thing or two about Teakwondo, has the guts to stay and wake me up.

I open my eyes and the first thing I see is the blur of this huge beast kicking the walls and yammering about the mess I made. I don’t say a thing (I’m still too sleepy to understand the magnitude of my situation); I just groggily crawl to my own bed. He could have easily squished me like a fly, yet he doesn’t even touch me; he really is Mike Tyson, all sound and fury, yet, nothing. I come to my senses in the morning and I tell him, Sorry, dude. He nods and bellows Don’t do it, again, don’t do it again. I offer my hand and he gives me a firm handshake—so firm there’s actually a tear that popped in the corner of my eye—he’s crushing my goddamn hand. But I don’t let him notice that. I just grin. Sure, dude, I say. I walk back to my bed and realize my crushed fingers now look funny.

By the end of the week, the hostel begins to stink, thanks to the folks from the African continent and some Europeans who, we suspect, have not taken a bath since we all got here. Only the Asians—us Filipinos, the Thais, and Shoko and her Japanese retinue—come to the mess hall each morning fresh from their morning baths. For example, on the first day, I spotted this cute doe-eyed French girl. Four days later, I lose all admiration because she begins smelling like a common agwador at the Zapote market.

In my room, it takes me three days to realize I’m the only one who takes a bath twice a day, especially loving the warm showers. The Korean guy doesn’t even flush the frigging toilet; there were two instances in the week when I entered the restroom after him only to be greeted by the thick stench of his heaping, kimchi-flavored crap.

One of the Thais develops a huge crush on Neth from Baguio, but Neth has a boyfriend back home who waits under the pines on a mountainside, strums his guitar, and sings Ilocano kundiman songs every sunset. The memory of him makes Neth feeling guilty each time she gets cozy with this Thai. I tell her everything you do here does not count, so go ahead and give that lovestruck Thai a kiss he’ll never forget in his life and a great story he’ll tell friends as long as he lives. Neth playfully slaps me on the cheek and says Actually, I’m interested in somebody else here, but he’s so busy with some Japanese who can’t even pronounce the word “gobbledygook.” She gives me a wink and struts out the mess hall. I look around and wonder and wonder if she thinks the same evil thing I’m thinking.

In the mornings during breakfast in the great glass-domed mess hall, we usually have a great time chatting. We exchange war stories and pet peeves and it is crazy hearing all of us speak in a multitude of tongues. After the breakfast, I tell Jocelyn take all they can. We all stuff oranges, apples, and bananas in our jackets, and the mess hall manager stares at us on our way out, probably wondering why we look so suddenly bloated. Outside, we run and laugh like there’s no tomorrow. You’re all jologs, Kent The Rich Kid tells us. I just laugh and say don’t take this seriously, man. Anything we do here does not count. You’re still jologs, Kent insists with that snotty air. I glare at him, shake down his jacket, and when bananas and a muffin tumble down from his pockets, we all laugh. Yeah, right, I say. We then run to our shuttle buses.

On the bus, I tell Daniella, our pretty scoutmaster, about my mission in Rome: to get a vial of holy water from St. Peter’s Basilica. She shakes her head vigorously: we only have a day left, and our itinerary is full, she says. We are supposed to visit a vineyard, and the foggy remains of an old Roman village in the outskirts of the city.

Disappointed, I stand up and go to Kent The Rich Kid. I have to get holy water, I tell him. This trip to the vineyard is boring, it will kill you and bore you out of your skull. I tell him if he wants some hell of an adventure, he must come with me. He asks, To where? Back to Rome, I say. Let’s buy more porn… So are you in or are you out?

Kent The Rich Kid makes a wide grin.

-JB

Aqua Vaticanus (Part 3)

2005-05-05T12:29:00.000+08:00

It’s raining, but Shoko is smiling as if the sky were blue. Everywhere there’s this bluish glow that one only probably finds in Europe; back home, the dusk looks different, smells different, feels different.

In the middle of the drizzle, we are walking and I’m very thirsty. We carry empty bottles with us and we refill it everywhere. We drink water from fountains or public spigots. Now, that’s my regular peeve. Almost all fountains are abstract spouts, and when in human form, they come as some little naked boy peeing, like cupid or something. Always naked boys. What evil, sick conspiracy is this? Why haven’t anybody here made a fountain using the naked female form, like a girl peeing? Or a fully-grown woman, with nice nubile curves, standing on a fountain and, well, spouting water from her orifices. Why not?

Now, I ask Shoko about the fountain: why male kids? Can’t anybody fashion something else more exciting, some lovely goddess like Venus squatting and peeing with crystal-clear water spurting out from her divine gash (thanks to Larry Flynt for the word “gash”). Well, they do it all the time using cupid or little boys, it’s time for men to take up arms and sculpture women on fountains. Now, I bet most men will line up to get a sip.

The Mexican brunette who suddenly materializes beside us says to me That’s why I don’t trust you—you’re a raving mariachi maniac. I say the “raving maniac” part I understand, but I don’t even know what the hell mariachi is (and if I had known Rex Navarrette in 1996, I would have told her, “And are you a brunette because you’re from Brunei?”).

Later, too, just around the edges of St. Peter’s Square, I go to the stalls that sell playing cards that when you heat them or hold a card over the little flame of a cigarette lighter, the supposed playing cards turn out to have pictures of naked women. (In Quiapo, street vendors also sell cards like these.)

The old Italians who man these stalls have that glimmer in the eyes when you ask for “naughty pictures,” as if they recognize you that amid such holiness, we are still part of a secret brotherhood of virile voyeurs that have survived the systematic onslaught of tight-lipped Catholicism. All I do is stand there in front of the stall and look about the various versions of plastic and steel crucifixes, and when the old stall owner sees my disapproving gaze, he nods and offers me to come inside. He then shows me stacks of Italian porn magazines gathering dust and must have been waiting for the raving mariachi maniac in shining armor to save them all. I snicker and nod. The old Italian also snickers and nods; he reminds me of that hapless old man in that Hollywood film Dennis the Menace.

Happily toting my magazines, which I have deftly concealed inside a paper bag (on which is printed the somber face of the image of the Virgin Mary), I walk back to Shoko, who, as always, is smiling. What is that? She asks. Tourist guide, I say, because we’ll look for a fountain that features the peeing female form. Shoko smiles again. I realize now if I tell her it’s actually good old Italian smut I’m hiding in my paper bag, Shoko will still smile, come hell or high water.

-JB

Aqua Vaticanus (Part 2)

2005-04-11T11:03:00.000+08:00

Much later, I’m in a sunlit room in Universita Lateranense with a bunch of other young people. Daniella, one of the Italian scoutmasters who have been shepherding us around Rome, tells me that there are around 600 kids from 133 countries who are now in Rome for this global conference on world hunger, thanks to the machinations of the United Nations. She says their responsibility over the safety of all the delegates is giving them a big thrill and also freaking them out because most of the young delegates are what Ethel Booba might call “pasaway,” and it’s a maddening thing guiding us kids around a city notorious for its pickpockets, softcore porn, swindling, and other petty Catholic crimes.

I tell her I’m not “pasaway”; although I grew up godless in a very Catholic country like the Philippines, my parents are a stickler for mindless obedience. You see, my father, an eccentric duke of a duchy called Bacoor (that’s in uranium-rich province of Cavite) is a fanatic of the Isaac Asimov novel I, Robot, and he has always seen to it that his kids always behaved exactly as he would command. And by the way, I say, Do you have a boyfriend? Daniella is surprised by the question and she laughs and hugs me and tells me Don’t give me crazy questions like that because I’m light-years older than you and will you please go in that room now, the discussion is about to start.

So like a dutiful kid, I enter the sunlit room and sit between the Quiet Rwandan (more about him later) and that ravishing Mexican brunette who has been letting all the others score with her except me.

The thing is, I’m with three other Filipinos: Kent The Rich Kid, Neth from Baguio, and a high-school senior named Jocelyn who has been regarding me as her big brother since I unwittingly rescued her from the predators at NAIA. Only Kent The Rich Kid is with me in this group; both Neth and Jocelyn are in a separate room with another group discussing the dynamics of rice and hay.

It turns out that the talk is so boring I decide to play the Devil’s advocate by trying to bash some other kid’s idealistic argument. For example, a Nigerian girl tells the group that in her country, farming is being neglected (and thus contributes to world food shortage, says the girl) because the youth in her country these days would rather go to cities and get employed in urban jobs. Nobody wants to stay in rural areas, anymore. I raise my hand and Daniella the Italian scout who already knows what evil I represent points at me with sinister glimmer in her eyes. I then tell the group that the choice is probably more economic than personal; the educated youth’s decision to flee the countryside is probably a symptom of a dynamic that’s much more complex than just simply saying “the world is hungry because nobody wants to be a farmer, anymore.” That’s not as simple as that. After all, we live in societies that are invariably tugged by invisible strings that limit our actions to certain ends. And that while I offer no solutions, I can only offer my own insight that maybe our old agricultural answers are no longer entirely applicable in a world that gets more and more dependent on ideas rather than on tangible commodities—ideas like Yahoo.com and, years later, Google.

Then Kent The Rich Kid stands and quotes something from Hobbes that’s so irrelevant, and the exact line I don’t really remember except that I recall thinking, That’s baloney, man. Enough with the bullshit already. Of course, I don’t actually utter that; Kent and I are the only Filipinos and the only Asians in that room, and it wouldn’t look good if I play the Devil’s advocate against him. So instead of sneering, I clap my hands and tell him, “You’re brilliant man. Ming Ramos should hire you.”

After the boring talk is through, we all go out in the sun. I skip the usual path because I want to walk around the periphery of St John in Lateran church, and on a side street, what do I see? A topless Italian woman on the church’s steps breastfeeding her baby. Those huge white Italian breasts full of milk stun me so much that I stand there for long minutes gaping in awe. You don’t find these things everyday. Have you seen a beggar in Baclaran church that looks almost exactly like Gina Lollobrigida in her prime?

I get so excited I drop a five-thousand lira note on her lap and run over to Kent The Rich Kid, who’s buying some toys from ambulant gypsy vendors, and tell him “I’ve seen huge white Italian breasts full of milk.” Kent snickers and runs with me. I warn him that it’s going to cost him at least five thousand lira. He says Okay, that’s fine. We run to the steps and when he sees the woman, Kent’s jaws drop in fascination. Why does she beg, Kent asks me. A beauty like her doesn’t deserve this. And why in hell don’t we have beggars like her in Baclaran church?

I say, I have no idea how fates are handed down to people. Heck, I don’t even believe in fate.

Let’s save her, Kent suggests.

From what?

From this festering poverty, this freezing sty of homelessness.

We can’t do that, I say.

Why not?

Have you ever watched National Geographic? Ever wondered why the staff never ever interfere when a lion savagely devours some small, cute and cuddly mammal? Because it’s an ethic: you should never interfere with Nature’s course.

I don’t see your point, Kent says.

Well, this is Nature; those huge white Italian breasts full of milk is nature in its blazing glory. You can’t deny all future visitors to St. John in Lateran the sight of those; it’s one of the fringe benefits of being a Catholic with loose actual morals. It’s there from now till eternity.

Kent ponders it and nods sagaciously. He then solemnly hands me the five-thousand lira. I give her the money but she doesn’t even look at me; she just wordlessly breastfeeds the baby and hums a song I recognize as “O Sole Mio.” We hear Daniella the Italian scout screaming in the distance, in heavily accented English, “We are missing two people! O Dio, anybody seen them?” But we ignore Daniella and remain standing there, watching Nature in all its blazing, exciting glory. [To be continued...]

-JB

Aqua Vaticanus (Part 1)

2005-04-07T10:37:00.000+08:00

Shoko (left) at St. Peter's, with another friend whose name I don't remember.

(This series of stories happened in November 1996 in Rome, Italy. I’m telling this anyway because anything “Vatican” seems in vogue these days.)

I stand in the middle of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the sheer magnitude of its interior dimensions humbles me. Some Japanese tourist by the entrance said, in halting English, that this is the largest Catholic church in the world. And when I got inside, I discover not only he’s right, but there are actually no words to describe the sense of human smallness you’d feel when you’re under the towering spires and the Dome. Even the crush of thousands of tourists swarming its space is not even enough to banish your sense of smallness.

My personal mission here is to get a vial of holy water—if possible, blessed by The Pope himself. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m a hardened atheist. While I don’t believe in all the horseshit of most religions, I still believe in giving my old mother back home some good old-fashioned hope, like, say, handing her some representation of her faith and telling her it will cure all her aches and pains and make her so fabulously wealthy if she uses it correctly (user manual not supplied, unfortunately).

I stare at the ceiling and the Dome Michelangelo designed, and it makes me wish I can be God, so that I can be omniscient (all-seeing), so that I can watch all those billions of fornications that happen each day all over the planet. Now, I wonder why God stopped allowing the Pope and his priests to have sex since 972 AD (when somebody with a wonderful idea pushed celibacy in the erstwhile exciting lifestyles of the Catholic clergy)? Ah, no wonder most people think churches are boring places in which to hang out.

But this one is different; St. Peter’s Basilica is fun, accented in the corners by the bright and colorful uniform of the Swiss guards. Now, if you’re in Vatican City and there’s anybody you must never cross, it’s these Swiss guards. One of my friends back home told me that if the Swiss guards get angry enough, they’ll impale you with those halberds of theirs, draw and quarter you, and leave pieces of your festering carcass hanging on gibbets for the crows. They’re supposedly so loyal to their Pope they’re willing to come to the Pope’s aid even if they’re in the thick of their pusoy dos or tong-its matches. In 1527 during the sacking of Rome, for example, they protected Pope Clement VII to escape to the Castel Sant’Angelo, where only 42 survived of the 189 guards.

Now, why am I here “besmirching” this supposedly holy place with my evil presence? A month earlier, I had won in that national essay tilt and before I knew it, Salvador Escudero, the Department of Agriculture secretary (this is circa 1996) is handing me the trophy, some prize money, and that all-powerful go-signal to his staff that I be included in Fidel Ramos’s scheduled sortie to Italy and add more musculature to the President’s already bloated retinue—after all, what can send a more positive political signal than a “brilliant and nice” youth like me, the hope of the future, hanging out with crusty old politicians? If that’s not pogi points to wow the OFWs in Italy, I don’t know what is.

At St. Peter’s, it’s easy to lose your mind in all the excitement and the overwhelming sense of awe. It’s very tempting to just lie on the marble floor and take snapshots of the paintings on the enormous dome—which is what I actually do—I lie on the floor and snap pictures from all sorts of crazy angles. It takes two seconds before somebody is shouting at me in angry Italian and from the corner of my eye I see the blur of some uniform rushing at me. I jump and run outside St. Peter’s and hide in the crowd.

I laugh on the steps of the Basilica and I see Shoko Fukami, the Japanese girl I had befriended two days earlier, waving to me.

Outside, on the steps, is the bewildered herd, the Desperati. And most of them are Japanese tourists spending their powerful yen and enjoying the good life. I don’t really mind because some of them are pretty Japanese girls, so cute and pretty they seem like flowers on a sunny field you’d want to collect, stuff in your pocket, and bring home as pasalubong to all the horny student editors of the Adamson Chronicle.

I became friends with Shoko because I had told her I’m in Rome because of some nice, happy essay I wrote about world hunger; it turns out she’s in Rome, too, because of some nice, happy essay she wrote about world hunger for sashimi.

Now, Shoko is waving to me as she talks to other Japanese who are asking for directions. I pull her from the all-smiling and all-bowing Japanese crowd and tell her This is so fun. I’m doing my crazy antics right in the eye of Western Christendom and I can pull it off. Shoko doesn’t understand me; like most Japanese, she loses me when I speak too fast or I get beyond the “dog-cat-boy” kind of English. So often, instead of saying “My ass almost got kicked over there,” I have to make split-second verbal recalibration and instead only say “He in the uniform wanna kill me, sweet Jesus.” And also, like most Japanese, even if she’s confused or annoyed or just doesn’t care, she invariably smiles and makes those little nods that remind me of how Yoko Ono must have intrigued and seduced John Lennon one night some thirty years ago.

Sometimes I get so naughty I just say “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” because there seems to be something about the word “fuck” that it instantly sends her into fits of hysterical laughter—especially when you say it amid the solemnity of Vatican City. I felt so powerful when I first discovered it, like uncovering some amazing control button or beating Sauron to getting the One Ring. So when things get out of hand or she gets bored or sad, I just say “fuck” and she laughs and laughs and I think she even wants to marry me. We lose our way on the streets and I say “fuck Rome” and she looks at me and laughs. I drink water from a fountain and I say “fuck, it’s cold” and she laughs. We stand on the platform in the subway and some European skinhead suddenly turns to me and cusses me (apparently mistaking me for somebody else) and I say “Fuck that skinhead” and Shoko laughs and laughs and tells me You’re so faack-king funny, Joe. I snicker and wonder why she keeps on forgetting the other half of my ever-corny name and wonder if I can take this to another romantic level. [to be continued…]
-JB

2005-04-07T09:57:00.001+08:00

Fleeing the light fantastic.

BeKnighted

2005-03-26T11:58:00.001+08:00

I call him Jooney Gamboa. In the real world, he is an eye doctor, one of those folks you go to when there’s something terribly wrong with your vision like, say, you see naked women all the time. In the real world, too, Jooney Gamboa dons a white robe and tells me he also has a branch in Laguna that’s so state-of-the-art he can actually perform laser eye surgery and give those snotty Americans a good run for their money.

But here in his clinic in the heart of Makati, amid the corny muzak of the Carpenters and Kenny Rogers (good grief!), he is Jooney Gamboa with his long white hair and piercing eyes and I can even swear he’s hiding his evil staff somewhere (like in one of his roles in a forgettable fantasy Tagalog flick).

Jooney promises me the good life. He mumbles his diagnosis as if in prayer, like a crusty old Druid, and tells me to brace myself because, after he’s done miracles with my shortsightedness, I will finally be tapping the motherlode of the universe’s pleasure navel. He says You’ll have more sex, more booze, and all those finer things in life only those born into position, wealth, and privilege usually enjoy; people like Jinggoy Estrada and his pet poodle, for example.

I tell him I come not for miracles, but simply for a pair of eye contact lenses. I had been wearing eyeglasses for the past five years when somebody told me that we’re actually living in the 21st century so why in hell am I living in the Middle Ages? I arrive at the fabled clinic and I see other patients strutting out of the door with that dazed, sated look as if they just had the best sex of their lives and the sight of them intrigues and mortifies me.

After I realized I was getting myopic, I suddenly found myself telling the oft-repeated tale of self-remorse soaring to the heights of archetype: 1996, Ermita, a student writer crossing Taft Avenue, a trailer truck nearly misses him, the student writer ducks to the sidewalk, he questions the existence of God (like “if God exists, why does He allow a ‘bad’ person like him to survive this happy, happy planet?”), enters the cinema and realizes he couldn’t clearly see the steamy bed scenes from the rear of the balcony.

I suddenly missed the good things in life that I previously were taking for granted, like watching car chases, gunfire, beatings, pornography, and other visually compelling things on TV. I suddenly realized that not only I live and speak like a writer should, but I’ve also begun looking like one with my requisite corrective eyeglasses and the newly-acquired habit of muttering the word “futile” every three seconds—which was very bad for a kid who had always dreamt of playing the knight in shining armor saving a damsel in distress from the clutches of a horny, smelly dragon.

Now, I find salvation in Jooney Gamboa’s clinic. He drops anesthesia on each of my eyes, inserts the contact lenses, and tells me that before I open my eyes, we should say a little prayer.

A bit dazed from the strong lights, I mumble something like, Sure, yes, anything.

Okay, he says. He breathes heavily and assumes a solemn countenance and says, Repeat after me:

O God of ultra-thin contact lenses and overpriced multiple rinse solutions,
We, who are about to see better and wink better,
Salute you.
O grant us the power, the opportunity, the ability
To watch Katok Mga Misis and Eat Bulaga again with perfect, 20/20 vision
And while you’re at it, oh God,
Give us more sex, more booze, and more of those finer things in life that
Only those born into position, wealth, and privilege usually enjoy,
Like Jinggoy Estrada and his pet poodle with the shiny bling-bling.
Today and in the coming days,
Amen.

By the door, he exhorts me to emerge into the world and relish its new brightness. Smell the roses and the napes of teenage Scolasticans, sip overpriced iced lattes, kiss cute babies. And so I sallied forth like a newly-knighted Uruk Hai.

When I emerge from the Primo Building, I discover he’s right: I have regained my peripheral vision; there is no more of the old tunneled sight. So I run on Ayala Avenue like a newly-unleashed kid on the first day of summer, board a bus to Leveriza, and, with a voice quaking in overwhelming sense of power, order the wide-eyed bus driver to take me to the nearest, fairest, most helpless damsel in distress. I am going to kick ass, I tell him, “like an individual beam of light rising from our collective darkness.”

The bus driver yawns and tells me to sit in the back, as far away from him as possible. Shocked at his total lack of romantic sense, I mutter This is futile, futile, futile. Then I sit in the back, as far away from the sore dude as possible.

-JB

Ocean's 2

2005-03-22T10:44:00.000+08:00

I point at the target through the grilled iron fence. That’s it, I say. That’s the bird.

Through the fence, the mynah sits like it’s in some tropical island, with all the bells and whistles; believe me, it really has bells and whistles.

We’re stealing the fucking bird? Robin from the Bat Cave still could not believe it.

Yup.

That’s absolutely crazy. What if it tells on us?

I look at him as if at a specimen of a mouse doomed in Frankenstein’s lab. Do you believe that crap? All this bird can say is “Panget! Panget!” It’s never gonna tell on us. It’s absolutely safe to steal. We have to get it. I want this bird.

But don’t you have a martines?

It’s dead, dude.

But we can’t just steal this bird.

I look at him; he suddenly reminds me of the days I was still a functional member of Philippine society and the people around me wondered and wondered because they didn’t know what I was doing; they just thought I was strange. I tell him, Listen, I have a fever. And the cure is stealing this fucking bird. I gotta have this fucking bird.

Then buy one, goddamn it. Why do we have to steal it?

Because—I tell him with all of John Paul II’s Vatican-Two patience—it is not fun. So go there and do a stealthy reconnaissance now.

Robin stumbles off into the distance and I watch him from under the shade of a mango tree. What has become of this world? You offer your good old friend some piece of adventure to spice up his cubicle-petrified life, and he resists. Can anybody believe this? Robin is one of those people who believe that solving old problems through avant-garde means is a distortion of God’s Plan and almost certainly haven’t read Jean-Paul Sartre or even watched any Andy Kaufman postcolonial flick. I can easily picture him in a room eagerly raising his hand when God asks the question: “Okay, who wants to be the next ‘only-begotten son and savior’?”

Robin staggers back with an impossible scowl on his face.

It’s the fucking owner, he huffs.

What?

It’s the fucking owner who chirps the “Panget! Panget!” The mynah’s a decoy! It’s fucking deaf and mute.

Are you crazy?

No, the owner is.

I mull it over for a moment, then say, Let’s steal the fucking owner.

Have you gone completely nuts? What if the owner tells on us?

He will not. All he says is “Panget! Panget!” remember?

Robin laughs. This is a fucking Twilight Zone denouement, he giggles.

I frown at him. Listen, I have a fever. And the cure is the owner of this deaf-and-mute bird. I gotta have this owner.

Robin laughs and laughs and I laugh with him because my martines is dead and I just lost my great avian hope.

-JB

2005-02-23T13:38:00.000+08:00

Eternal Sunshine.

Explosive Corrosive Joseph

2005-01-24T11:33:00.000+08:00

It all began when my trusty old Epson inkjet printer said goodbye to the world in the uncinematic and unexpected way Fernando Poe, Jr. left us: Conking out right in the thick of things.

In my panic, I send text messages to friends to point to me the way to the Epson headquarters. Somebody answers back: Go to Marvin Plaza on Pasong Tamo. My friend adds: There’s supposedly a printer swap promo at Marvin Plaza. Go there and have your stupid printer replaced with a brand new one.

In no time, I’m standing in front of Marvin Plaza with the dead Epson in my arms. Somebody in a gray uniform with a military man’s gravitas stands by the entrance and jumps on me the moment he sees me.

This is the Canon headquarters, the man growls. Why in hell are you bringing in an Epson printer? The seemingly military man motions to the guard beside him and says, “He’s an industrial spy. Or a saboteur. Shoot him.”

I’m speechless. I look around, trying to figure out how in hell I entered the Twilight Zone. The last thing I remember is jumping out of the jeepney and the driver screaming at me for not paying the fare (I forgot my wallet and I only have some coins I intend to spend for my fare home). Now, this must be what Madam Petra of Quiapo would call “karmic return.”

I panicked. I said—in a single breath—that there is supposedly a printer swap promo, and that anybody with a defective printer, of any brand, can swap for a brand new printer, and please, for the sake of everything that your own mother loves, stop acting like we’re in one of those darkest scenes in Heller’s Catch-22.

I’ve never heard of such a promo, the man growls. I look at the nametag on his chest: “Explosive Corrosive Joseph.”

Is that your real name?

Who gives a damn? Explosive Corrosive Joseph says, You and your crusty cojones. This is Canon, Canon, understand? “And besides,” he takes out a round looking glass and smoothens his hair on the mirror. “I’m so guwapo I kiss my own ass in the morning; don’t forget that.”

I won’t, I say.

Well, now that you’re here, I will make sure you don’t lay a filthy hand on anything with a Canon label, understand?

I nod in assent. He leads me through antiseptic-smelling corridors. We walk on tiled floors so shiny you can see your own confused, frightened face on them.

We are going to take over the world, Explosive Corrosive Joseph says without looking at me. If Hewlett-Packard and Epson have an official ass, we will kick it big time.

How about Lexmark?

Explosive Corrosive Joseph lets out an explosive corrosive laugh. What? Who needs Lexmark? It’s a non-printer. It’s one of those things Crispin Beltran smashes on his head for stress relief each time he makes one of his great fuck-ups. All those blokes who are foolish enough to buy a Lexmark printer already have their souls burning in hell. Stupidity is one of the seven cardinal sins that God will never forgive, ain’t it? Visit www.vatican.com if you don’t believe me.

When we reach a reception desk with a lady that looks like a character fished out of Monsters, Inc. or Joy Viado in one of her foul moments, Explosive Corrosive Joseph tells her: Here’s another sucker for that printer swap promo. How do you want me to deliver him: sautéed, minced in soy sauce, julienned and soaked in vinegar, or in flakes in traditional olive oil?

Oh, the lady snickers. The 2045th victim. I bet HP and Epson are frantically pressing all the SOS buttons to save their hide. Both the receptionist and Explosive Corrosive Joseph chuckle like hyenas whose tails Miguel Arroyo’s 400-pound foot just stepped on.

But—

You are lucky, the lady tells me. We also have another promo: the 2045th victim is spared. You can run now.

But—

And take your filthy printer with you, Explosive Corrosive Joseph says. If you wanna enjoy that printer for the last time, go to Jones Bridge and plop that thing into the Pasig. Make sure you hear the plinking sound; it is consolation for some people.

I emerge from Marvin Plaza reeling from all the megalomania and sheer madness. When I reach Pasong Tamo, I find the jeepney I had earlier fled parked on a curb, the driver holding a lead pipe in his hand. When our eyes meet, I realize he’s not in his best mood. I run like hell, like a maniac bumblebee on meths, my dead Epson squeaking in my arms.

-JB

Mischief, Mayhem, Soap

2005-01-22T13:11:00.000+08:00

My friend thinks he's Tyler Durden. I, on the other hand, think I'm Jack. We walk around the alleys and byways of Makati one night to look for Marla Singer.

Marla Singer. The faker, the tourist, the festering sore on the roof of your mouth that never heals. She's the one the real Tyler Durden humps at the house on Paper Street, the girl who commits suicide everyday and screams about how bored she is out of her skull and how she has become this monster who deserves to die, die, die. She fascinates us so much that we set out one night to look for somebody just like her and maybe, thanks to the basic goodness of our hearts, hump her out of her boredom.

My friend, who knows by heart every Tyler Durden line, says Makati is crawling with Marla Singers, and we must save all of them. He says All of them in the same dead serious tone Oskar Schindler used when he talked about saving a thousand Jews and when he realized his accountant was gay. He says we must bang on every door, ask for the once-innocent little girl who now embraces her own festering corruption, take her to the nearest hotel, and screw the beejesus out of her. You'll know the type, he says. She paints her nails black, chain-smokes, and knows by heart all the subtle nuances of the different flavors of instant cup noodles and instant coffee.

I tell him There is no Marla Singer in Makati. I tell him Manoling Morato and Etta Mendez still scour the streets at night in their Speedo wiener pants and eat every speck of immorality with the gusto of swallowing endless batches of bratwurst. I tell him we should not be so very verbose so that I can cut my essay for the Festering Isolation down to a length someone with a job, a life, and a modern vocabulary would actually read. But my friend says it’s impossible that Marla Singer doesn’t exist; Chaos Theory predicts that the universe must prolifically breed such twisted souls every millisecond. And, he says, screw the reader; wordiness is King, verbosity is the New Black.

So we wait outside RCBC TOWER for our first Marla Singer. A gazillion girls from those dozens of call centers emerge like ants from a, well, anthill, chain-smoking out their pent-up angst and boredom, and we look at their faces one by one for the telltale signs: the bored gaze that stabs through human pretense, the greasy raven hair, the bloodless lips. But there is none: they’re all good Catholic girls somebody with a 9-to-5 job will wanna make into his wife.

I tell my friend the sad news: The world has moved on. Adventure is dead. Free love is a fairy tale.

We end up at this sleazy Boni joint talking dirty instead with Jackie Brown. Each time we’re frustrated, we lower our standards even more. By 4 am, we are talking about Pasay at the other end of EDSA and the girls at the entrance of Hiyas Royal Inn whom anybody with a prick can have for something like P300 pesos. They’re no Marla Singers, my friend assures me, but they’re good just the same. Just think of it as our own way of helping them have food on their tables by tomorrow.

I stop and ponder what he’s saying. It’s called transvaluation—making something generally regarded as bad into something positive—and it’s a process so subtle that when you do it correctly, your mother may even have tears of joy even if you’re actually telling her you have screwed the eye of syphilis itself.

Faith, hope, and charity. Those are what we’re giving these hookers whenever we are their patrons, says my friend. We give them faith and hope in their own ideas of self-worth. And it’s a charitable act to actually commission their services. Heck, I don’t relish paying for sex, but if it’s the only way to help these girls, I wouldn’t really mind.

We laugh. We laugh like Adolf Hitler would laugh on the balcony of his Berchtesgaden mansion. We laugh like mutant pitbulls. You are brilliant, I tell my friend. Joseph Estrada should hire you.

Plying Coastal Road at 5 am, our eyes heavy with frustration and lack of sleep, my friend shakes his head. It’s one sad night for altruism, my friend chuckles. So sad, so sad. But in one corner of Bacoor and Zapote, a girl flags us down: greasy raven hair, fake smile, bored eyes. My friend snickers and says, God works in mysterious ways. Show me, I say. Show me. My friend lowers the window, looks up at the girl’s face, and begins telling her the unbearable, indescribable lightness of our being, and how in a dark crumbling room, men like Tyler Durden humped the Marla Singers of the world—completely free of charge.

-JB

The No-no Breakfast

2004-12-14T13:12:00.000+08:00

My former colleague at the student paper, another Nietzsche fanatic who actually regards himself as The Ubermensch, tells me about the No-no Breakfast. What is the No-no Breakfast, you ask me? Well, the recipe is as follows:

1) Take two slices of any ordinary white bread, although I’d recommend the Gardenia brand because its bakeries feature a fully automated and computer-controlled integrated production process from ingredients handling, to the mixing, proofing, baking, slicing and packaging of the bread. This state-of-the-art bread manufacturing plant follows strict emphasis on quality baking in a hygienic and sanitary environment. Believe me, I just accompanied my five-year-old niece to their factory in Laguna, and I’m not, in any way, connected with the company as their PR man. Promise.

2) Choose a person you despise. Say, Boy Abunda or Kris Aquino. The amazing thing is that you’re free to choose.

3) Using the eternal sunshiny power of the spotless mind, shrink that person until that person becomes two or three inches small.

4) Carefully place that shrunk person in-between the two slices of bread, and as you dramatically open your mouth to make your first big bite, that shrunk person will hysterically scream like that lady in King Kong’s calloused grasp, “No! No! No, don’t eat me! No! No!”

5) Enjoy you’re first No-no Breakfast.

In case you’re wondering, the creation of the first No-no breakfast took a tremendous amount of culinary genius, sheer hatred of humanity, and the guidance of kind people who always say Mom-like things like “There, there.” It has yet to receive a Philippine government seal of approval, but we bet our precious subscription to Barely Legal and Cumfiesta that the No-no Breakfast is going to be a hit in fastfoods, trendy restaurants with gothic themes, and at Maan’s along Zobel around the idyllic environs of Adamson University.

I offer a hypothetical question (my former philosophy professor loved saying these two evil words). What if your No-no Breakfast has an implanted RFID tag that makes you a target of armed Predators, cruise missiles, and other remote-controlled weaponry? You know, some people more evil than we are might actually do that to end our miserable lives on earth.

Like a bait? My ubermensch friend makes his ubermensch laugh. Not gonna happen. As official ubermensch, I will detect it.

Another hypothetical question. Considering the scientific difficulty of actually shrinking a person, not to mention the fact of that recent news about quantum mechanics on Wired magazine saying that humans are years away from establishing a stable method to derive any practical applications from it, my question, then, is: Is it better to use Peter Pan peanut butter, or Lily’s peanut butter with the No-no Breakfast, or can I instead choose buco jam?

As garnish? My ubermensch friend makes another ubermensch laugh. Don’t be stupid, my friend. Modern science maintains that it is always best to dip it in kapeng barako.

We both laugh. Why didn’t I realize that in the first place? Am I losing my common sense?

I’m hungry, my friend complains. Want some food we can actually eat?

Sure, I say. I’ll prime the coffee brewer, and you go out to get some people we’ll shrink and eat.

Who do we hunt, then?

I ponder my options, and say, I think Eddie Gil’s delectable for a Tuesday morning.

He laughs in the way Benito Mussolini would laugh. And then he went, my big, bad, quixotic friend.

-JB

Microwaveable Revolution

2004-11-26T14:25:00.000+08:00

I’m eating microwaveable TV dinner at a friend’s house when the TV flashes with the latest story on Hacienda Luisita.

I wonder if Patricia Santo Tomas could have done better if she had sent Sandara Park and Hero Angeles to pacify The Great Unfed raising hell at the heart of the mostly-tolerant region of Tarlac. I hear Sandara’s deadly “Otso-otso” never (and I mean never) fails to melt even the hardest of hearts. Or they would have listened more to Nora Aunor appearing as an apparition in white, beseeching (now, that’s a word. “Beseech”) them to go home, “Walang himala!” What’s more, Patricia could have turned the tide to capitalism’s and her favor by sending an assault of brand names (instead of sardine-scarred soldiers dragged out of their warrens) that the common people patronize in the first place: Surf, Mr. Clean, Lucky Me Pancit Canton, a brand or two of bottled distilled drinking water—all colorful banners of these products surrounding the rallyists in their moment of truth. Patricia could have saved the day for the Philippine advertising industry.

One friend suggests Noynoy should have given all those welgistas free movie passes to Because of You. If Noynoy doubts the immense power Tagalog flicks have on Filipinos’ minds, just tell him to go and ask his sister Kris, or better, turn on the TV during primetime and he’s free to mull over both the boon and the bane—and decide which he could actually use for his ends.

One friend says my idea is not only ridiculous; it’s a bald-faced insult to the cause of the Great Unfed. Call me evil, but even in the direst circumstance, I see the glass as half full. These days, it pays more to adopt a strategy that differs from the French’s guillotine or Bush’s “Shock and Awe.” It’s a seamless blend of target marketing and social engineering. Now, if you don’t believe me, go and ask the creators of Google.

From where I sit, the only good thing about rabid demonstrators is that they give us another face to reality TV with the occasional blood, tacky “underground” poetry that makes you smile (“kinikilibatutan ako,” as my sister often say), and dozens of instant martyrs, instant heroes, and instant myths. Maybe their rage is pumped by fear, frustration, stupidity, and adrenaline. Maybe not. Maybe that’s what happens to a formerly rational person after seeing, through Lenin’s pink looking glass, how real capitalism works—which might be as traumatic as seeing your own parents having sex, so once said by one Guru of Sarcasm, BarTel d’Arcy. Or again, maybe not.

Now the low-hanging fruit has been picked. What’s left is the “really” low hanging fruit, if you want to believe PMAP’s Lumbao being his usual asinine self, or those senators joining in to crucify my dear Patricia for posterity’s sake.

In my self-complacent den, I don’t really see how or why the leftists hate the rightists, the rightists hate the leftists, and how and why both despise the neutrals. While the neutrals (like me) all think about is the wife and the six kids. On top of it all are people like my mother, who thinks and decides, like that character in Arundhati Roy’s great first novel, in terms of how much she’s going to borrow next from the friendly neighborhood bumbay and how these demonstrations and deaths are going to affect the furniture.

I tell my friend I really have nothing against these people who want only food on their tables. In fact, if I had Manny Pangilinan’s bank account, just give me a few minutes to go to the nearest ATM and I’ll pay off all these people’s fucking troubles myself.

Dios mio, you’re a saint and you don’t even know it, my friend says with a grin.

I’m serious, I say. But give me Manny Pangilinan’s bank account first.

Why not start with your own money?

Hey, will you stop giving me those non sequitur responses, I say and laugh. I go to the kitchen to thaw more microwaveable food. When I come back, my friend’s watching Mulawin. We begin discussing how big Angel Locin’s breasts look in that avian costume, and how her sex appeal could have stopped that violent crowd in that far, far crazy place called Tarlac.

-JB

2004-11-23T11:05:00.000+08:00

Afternoon Angst

The Usual Suspects

2004-11-23T10:02:00.000+08:00

I have a big problem. I want to be totally evil, but all the kids in the world want to be nice and slug nothing but those little spiders and little budge dragons scurrying about on the carrion-littered savannah. And the unbelievable thing is that they’re actually happy doing just that.

I’m talking about my life in Mu Online (register for free at www.mobius.com.ph). If you’re already an avant-garde PC gamer by 1996, you’ll know the experience when I tell you it’s like Blizzard’s Diablo, only better because it’s a Philippine-based multiplayer game, which allows you to battle the evil horde with kids from different parts of this country fighting by your side.

In Mu, you choose to assume the character you like (I have chosen to be a dark knight), and you set out to kill monsters. The more monsters you kill, the more experience points you gain, the more powerful you become. But killing innocent evil monsters, whose only mistake is stand under a dead tree or walk around like George Bush minus the Texan brain, easily bores me. So I decide I want to murder other players too—played by those kids who must have been renting in dark cafes and squandering all the money their hardworking mothers give them. But killing other players’ characters earns me the fearsome tag of a “Killer,” and other players will actually see that tag hovering above my head as I trudge Mu’s dungeons and savannahs. Some of them may actually desire to hunt me down because in Mu, if you kill a tagged Killer, you become a tagged Hero, with all of Devias parting in half when you enter town.

But I don’t want to be a hero. I want to be The Big Bad Wolf. I want to be like Saruman without the stupid mistakes, with my horde of uruk hais without the congenital stupidity.

I spend days trying to plot a strategy to accurately determine which players are on a level that’s lower than mine, so that I can safely kill them. Often, you need to strike up some innocent conversation first with your victim to make him unwittingly reveal his level. It’s called social engineering, and it’s a process so delicate I’ve printed all the spam emails in my inbox to provide me with unassailable clues. If I make a mistake, if I cross might and magic with somebody so powerful he can annihilate entire armies with a single mouse-click, I’d end up the loser and that is something my mighty ego can never accept.

So I walk around the grasslands trying to find some kindred warriors. I meet an advanced fairy character and tell her Let’s start a big bad guild. She declines. I tell her to bug off and next time I meet her, when I’m already level 200, I’m gonna decapitate her sorry excuse of a character. She runs off thinking I’m really a higher-level dark knight and not some upstart who’d usually run at the sight of a skeleton with a rusty sword. In Mu, bluffing works half the time.

I descend the dungeon on the outskirts of Lorencia, where I meet this colorful party slugging it out with a band of skeletons. I join them and the party leader is so happy he’s actually telling me to take extra care with the giant demons and just ask the resident energy elf for some healing if ever I’d get mortally wounded. But his happiness doesn’t last because soon I’m ordering him around. Let’s go deeper into the caverns, I tell the erstwhile boss. Let’s hunt the giants with the blood-soaked blades! You go there and I go here with the rest of the guys and lets meet at the exit, et cetera, et cetera.

The leader hates it but endures it until we finish off the entire dungeon (not without my big help). He kicks me out of the party and tells me if I ever join a warrior guild or start one, he and his guild and ten million of his descendants will wage war against me and my kind. I scream at him that I am going to my mamma right now and she will help me kick his sorry ass, just wait and see. Then I run off before he realizes he can easily kill me and become an awarded Hero in the process.

Then I meet another character, a dark wizard, and ask him to join my party. I assure him that when I create my own guild, he’ll be the second highest in command in my powerful bureaucracy.

Wow, he says.

What’s your level, I ask him.

Just a newbie, Level 1.

His answer makes me smile: Oh, my good Saruman! A tabula rasa! My mouth waters at the thought of actually molding this baby.

Join me, my friend, I say. Look over there, what do you see shining in those distant hills? That’s power! That’s immortality! Take it, it’s yours!

He gives me a series of smileys and accepts my offer. Our two-warrior party sets out on the dark, dangerous continent of Mu slugging it out with budge dragons and spiders, and when this baby actually grows up, maybe I’ll let him kill a player or two and lead his own little evil platoon.

[If you want to join me in Mu, my user name there is magnusx. I particularly need an energy elf to constantly heal me and my terribly violent party.]

-JB

Weapon of Choice

2004-11-19T14:28:00.000+08:00

I am at a friend’s house and suddenly the room comes alive with Lithium, Kurt Cobain screaming on the FM radio. One of the guests, a pretty teenager, pouts, walks to the radio, and switches channels. Hey, I say, Why’d you do that? Are you out of your mind? That is The Kurt Cobain.

She says So what?

When you’re faced with such a pretty but hopelessly doomed annoyance, it helps to hold onto your sense of humor. If we were in Mu (www.mobius.com.ph), I would have ripped that tender face apart to show her the terrible things a powerful Level 300 Dark Knight can do to somebody who desecrates the sacred memory of the God of Angst. But I instantly forgive her because, One, we’re not in Mu, and Two, it has taken natural evolution billions of years to come up with a face like that. So like a hermit crab that suddenly finds dioxin and ten thousand carcinogens in its meal, I retreat to my corner and pray she doesn’t actually stop at that insufferable station where the DJs twitter “Kelangan pa bang i-memorize iyan” after every equally insufferable song. If she does, I will throw up all over the place. I promise.

Back in the good old days of Kurt Cobain’s reign, I’d listen to the tracks in Incesticide and Never Mind and Bleach with the avid hunger of a dotcom hopeful listening to every news bit on pre-2000 NASDAQ. I bought In Utero sometime in early 1994 and at Odyssey, I told the guard that In more exciting societies, angst will make you very, very rich. I would go back to the guard a few months later to tell him that The very angry but very rich is very dead.

When Kurt sings:

He’s the one
He likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means
Don’t know what it means
And I say yea…

I think it’s about me. Yeah, it’s as vague and hazy like the rantings of the old blind fart who wrote the New Testament’s Apocalypse. But such disjointedness is its very power: it lends me the prerogative to mangle the songs into beasts of war and use them as weapons, weapons I’d wield for protection, reassurance, and hope in a world awash with fake boobs, primetime telenovelas, and the revolting threat of diminutive Mahal’s nude video that purportedly exists.

Nirvana’s entire repertoire is like a Rorschach inkblot test with which I offered my own interpretation. I’d walk Adamson’s twisted side streets and trudge down the Falcon Walkway with my head buzzing with the Last Song Syndrome and it would usually be a Nirvana track. I’d eat lunch at Mang Roger’s Maan’s and see other folks wearing black Nirvana t-shirts and I’d tell myself I’m home, oh God, I’m home with the cool, kind people who understand all the shit because they’re all wading in it.

Like other kids and other people, I invest a great chunk of my beliefs in music’s capacity to change lives or express truth. Like Frank McCourt, I believe what a nice world it would be if you can have your own songs and people understand and respect the fact that these are your songs.

But now, when the teener says By the way, who’s Kurt Cobain? That’s when I realize I’m a thousand years old.

Well, at least you know the The Foo Fighters?

Yep.

Dave Grohl’s Kurt’s former drummer, man Friday, and occasional buttwipe. If Dave Grohl’s Hector, Kurt is Achilles.

Oh, she says, and keeps turning the knob. When the radio crackles with “….pa bang i….morize iyan?” That’s when I know I’m doomed.

She laughs when she sees I’m wincing.

Have fun, I say. I smile, stand up, and go to the kitchen where my friend thaws frozen pork and ask him Do you have some yards of bubble wrap I can pop? He looks at me seriously and gasps and says Oh my, Kurt Cobain is dead?

-JB

Iced and Oiled Last Part

2004-11-18T11:29:00.000+08:00

In case you’re wondering why this series is entitled iced and oiled, it’s all because of The Floor Show that floors us all. The joint serves us a rather Borgia-esque antitoxin for our pent-up perversions: naked girls emerge from the bowels of hell itself with bodies glistening from all those gallons of baby oil the floor manager must have bought from Aling Tess the Sole Purveyor of Avon products in these parts.

So we sit there like real men and sip our beers like real men and watch these oiled goodies gyrate and cavort on the stage like glistening eels fished out of the mucks of Bacoor, Cavite. Out of divine guidance, perhaps, one of the girls approaches our table, goes straight to my good seminarian friend, and looking him in the eye, lifts our ice bucket and dramatically pours all the crushed ice on her body.

We sit there stunned. Not because she isn’t as pretty as Diana Zubiri to actually get away with such a stunt. Not because we suddenly realize presumptive a-go-go dancers are the reasons why prostitution isn’t gonna be legalized in this joyless country. Not because under the table all our canvass shoes are freezing and wet.

What stuns us is the fact that the naked oily girl has just broken the time-honored, kid-tested, and mother-approved dictum by which all red-blooded disciples of Danding Cojuangco’s agua de pataranta live by: Thou shall not waste thy beer’s ice.

What sweeps over us is Margarita Go-Singco Holmes’ version of Kubler-Ross’ five-part dogma (denial, anger, acceptance, John Holmes Classics Volume 1 to 10, Quezon City Scandal). In a place where nothing can salve the pain of wounded men burdened with the knowledge of they’re not going to bed with the likes of Aubrey Miles or Amanda Griffin, the girl’s stunt with our ice is like decapitating us with a broadsword, capping it off with a faint, apologetic Oooops!

Our good seminarian friend stands and shakes his head and mutters to us quite solemnly: Lord, great is thy sting.

And that is when we realize we’ve just failed dismally in our attempt to save his soul from eternal, bottomless, excruciating boredom. But the upside: we hope he’s going to entrust us all his precious, precious Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint literature.

-jb

Iced and Oiled Part 2

2004-11-10T17:07:00.000+08:00

Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuses. – R. Heinlein

My friend is so confused one sunny day he goes out on a cigarette hunt and doesn’t stop until he reaches the doors of the SVD Seminary in Tagaytay. The next thing we know, he wears a muddy brown cassock and wakes up in the morning with God on his lips.

Those remaining in my little clique, all devoted sexist pigs like myself and are faithful unquestioning servants to the One Single Beatitude of our individual pricks, are so worried we call up an urgent caucus via videoconferencing. One says It’s crazy, how dare he turn his back on all those precious years of horniness? Another shakes his head in utter melancholy and reminisces about the good old days when they were letting the boys in the neighborhood climb the kaimito tree near their bathroom to watch his sisters take a bath.

Deciding to save his soul from perpetual disillusionment, we ask him to join us on a trip to Babylon. Miracle Number 1 is when the prick actually says Yes. Miracle Number 2 is when we are inside this filthy, cheap joint in Kabihasnan, Parañaque and we see our good seminarian friend frothing in the mouth, and that relaxes us because we know the good old days are back. Oh, thank God for such miracles.

We have a table for ourselves, a bottle of cold classic San Miguel for each of us, and at the center the requisite saucer of fried peanuts. The gay floor manager approaches us with a big smile on his face and asks us What else do you want? I stare up at him and wonder where in hell he got that gleaming 1940s denture? One of my savvy friends tell him We want, err, girls. The gay floor manager nods solemnly and murmurs We’ll see, we’ll see, then his gleaming 1940s denture disappears into the fusty dark.

In this place, as everybody and his cousin knows, when the girl sits beside you at the table, every inanity that comes from her mouth has to be washed down with overpriced lemonade they call Ladies Drink. When you’re lucky, she may let you run your hands under the table and up her skirt and God knows where else, after which you can come home to your father and tell him your war stories and make him feel so frigging proud. But when you’re in acutely bad feng shui, she may arrive like a bitch in heat and leave like a cold fish in a rainy day and you sit there wondering and failing to ask a Shakespearean question more profound than “Why must I be a horny man?”

[To be continued...]

-jb

Iced and Oiled Part 1

2004-11-07T09:52:00.000+08:00

I often tell friends that when some rich oil tycoon or a corrupt Philippine congressman commits the unredeemable mistake of giving me P1 million, the first thing I’m going to do is establish a prostitution front that the police cannot raid because I’ll actually give it the business name “The Prostitution Front,” and have it printed and blinking on 12 feet by 12 feet of state-of-the-art panaflex signage.

It was actually the Egyptian god Osiris who called me up on my cellphone yet again and gave me the idea. He said (in the vulgar ancient Egyptian language with a Lower Nile slang), $#*!!#^**((!!!8*#^! (If you cannot correctly read the hieroglyphs on your computer screen, you may need to download Java from a third party provider like Sun Microsystems because Bill Gates has stopped supporting hieroglyphics since the fall of ancient Egypt’s 27th Dynasty). When I expressed doubt, he sent me this police-proof scenario through a dream.

In the dream, I am actually the owner of the spanking new The Prostitution Front, with dozens of girls in my stable freshly imported from the dark alleys of Cebu. In the dream, the greasy owners of Pegasus and Miss Universe are begging me to close shop because I’m getting all their erstwhile loyal customers (read: mostly local politicians and rich Chinese). My father is very proud.

I am surveying everything in my stead and finding it good and beautiful and aspartame-free when suddenly the blue folks with the guns and girlie handkerchiefs tied around their heads arrive and tell me my happy days are over.

The blue folk with the biggest belly barks at me and says Somebody tipped us that you’re running a prostitution front here, Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph, and we’re here to make you see the error of your ways and raid you.

But we’re really The Prostitution Front, can’t you read?

The policeman with two navels and three bellies looks up at my neon signage and tries to read it (or at least goes through the motions of reading it), but he shakes his head and says, Nah, you can’t trick me. You and your yummy girls are all arrested.

You can’t do that.

Why not?

Because The Prostitution Front is a duly registered business establishment under all pertinent laws of this beautiful tropical country. Go and ask Congressman (name withheld upon request) and see for yourself who holds the frigging strings.

The policeman doesn’t buy it, orders me to bend over, and does a thorough cavity search. When I say thorough, I’m not kidding.

And my nightmare ends because somebody mercifully pops my bubble.

But this is not really about The Prostitution Front. This is about one of my evil friends who has entered the seminary and leaving us oh-so-worried about letting him spend his entire life stealing glances at the breasts of the girls swallowing the Eucharist and wanking in the dark dungeons of some obscure little parish church. When we first learn about the whole seminary thing, we all unanimously decide that This folly must stop and we must call Oprah or Marilyn Manson or Juan Ponce Enrile to save our friend’s black, black soul.

[to be continued…]

- jb

Paper-Skelter

2004-11-06T08:04:00.000+08:00

I’m faced with two choices on what to do with the remaining ink in my inkjet: Print counterfeit money in P1000 denominations, or print Diana Zubiri’s heavenly posters.

What happened was the online version of finding the Holy Grail. I had been surfing the web and searching for remote-controlled ways to murder Tim Yap and stop all the chichi things that come from his/her mouth when an unholy light shone from my screen and out comes the ultimate Get-Rich-Quick site. I’m so happy there were actually tears in my eyes, the kind of tears sadomasochists hope for on a wild, wild romp on the semen-stained carpet.

The website outlines the following procedure:

(1) Bleach P10 notes until the notes are nothing but blank, white sheets.
(2) Scan both faces of any newly-printed P1000 note using a high-quality digital scanner.
(3) Edit or enhance the images using Adobe Photoshop.
(4) Print the images (using a high-quality HP inkjet printer ) on the bleached P10 notes.

It’s difficult to detect because the paper feels (and is, in fact) real, unless you run it under a UV lamp, which will show the embedded symbols that tell the paper’s real worth. It’s so easy I wonder why nobody in my circle has done it.

I send frantic text messages to my friend, Robin, to tell him prepare the Bat Cave because we’re on a roll. To fire him up, I follow it with the requisite Hooh-hah!

Robin asks What if they use UV lamps and detect it?

We’re not going to the high-tech stores to have our money changed. We’re going to the small stalls manned by innocent salesladies fresh from the hinterlands of Samar and Leyte. These girls wouldn’t notice the difference.

Who’s sourcing all the P10 notes?

You are, I text back.

But what if we make printing mistakes in the first few outputs? Sayang naman all those bleached P10 notes.

That’s to be expected, I say. Trial and error is an integral part of research and development. And to show him how serious I am, I follow it with a smiley.

But I’m paying for all those P10 bills?

Yup. But that’s okay, I say. It’s all in the name of quality output. Haven’t you read about the Six Sigma? Don’t you read Jim Collins and Jerry Poras?

Robin takes a long time before he texts No.

What “no”? You don’t know the Six Sigma or you haven’t read Collins and Poras?

I said No, I’m not dunking my hands into this, Robin texts back.

I say Let’s do it.

No.

I say Let’s try it first with a single P1000 note, before you decide if we should go on with the business or not.

No, Robin sends back. No, no, no, no.

Why, why, why, why goddamn you.

This is not human, anymore. This is bestial.

Okay, I say. Okay. If you don’t wanna do it, stay in your pink room and play with your sister’s dolls and check if your asshole is still tight every once in a while and sing Milli Vanilli and Cher songs all night long. And while you’re at it, read chichi Tim Yap.

I stop texting and stare at the screen and think This is what happens when more than 50 years pass and there’s no World War: everybody becomes sissies. Everybody loses the urge to dare, loses the taste for adventure. Without war, without blood and carnage, without carrion littering the streets and forcing on you powerful self-inflicted questions on mortality, existence, God, and country, everybody becomes the soft little things that thrive in those cute, caffeine-induced office cubicles. Now, I think I will evict Robin from my Bat Cave and have Alfred the butler throw him out.

Damn. I will print the goddamned money if it doesn’t rain today, I tell myself. If it rains, I will print Diana Zubiri’s red-hot posters instead. Whatever happens, I leave my fate to God and His Infinite Wisdom. It’s a fantastic, beautiful, guilt-ridden world.

-jb

Hello, World

2004-11-05T08:15:00.000+08:00

I wonder why she doesn’t get bored with all that little talk.

She’s a nice woman and all but there is only so much patience a person can have in listening to how she lost her expensive umbrella (worth P300), how her manicurista borrowed her little faux rattan bag (P50 only in Divisoria) and never returned the filthy thing, how delicious the three sumans she ate this morning (P5 each). I should have told her a long time ago that I don’t give a damn over these little things but she’s been so nice and she has a nice, fragile face that it breaks my heart to disappoint her. Instead, I slip away when she’s not looking and leave my mother telling her I’m sorry to hear that, Aling Tess, but tell me more.

Aling Tess is my mother’s supplier of Avon products. My mother still thinks Avon has discovered and monopolized the fountain of youth and therefore she should get hold of anything new from this company to keep her skin smooth and wrinkle-free. Not to mention the fact that she can pay for it all in three installments. The downside is that Aling Tess, the peddler of cosmetic youth, never leaves until she has unloaded all the little painful details of her day.

And she’s not the only one.

In the dismal lack of big things they can get their hands onto, people in my little neighborhood talk about small things all the time. Housewives, out-of-school-youths, pretty teenage girls who could have been models had they been born to better parents (who sadly end up in cheap, sleazy videoke bars under the Zapote flyover), gazillions of slipper-less, shirtless kids. They have no idea how to spend their day or their lives, how to extract any meaning, how and where to find the goddamned all-consuming, all-shining existential purpose. They congregate at sari-sari stores, cluster along dark alleys, stand on the periphery of the neighborhood basketball courts, and they ask one another: What’s it all about, man? They talk about the prices of little things, and the shapes of little things, and the smell of little things. A price increase hits us and they talk again of the increase in the price of little things and the shift in the shape of little things and the added stink in the smell of little things. If all of us were a jpg image on a computer screen, you can zoom out the view and see the same shit festering in all parts of the country. God in air-conditioned heaven or any alien from Mars may see our earthly patterns of aimlessness and fuck-ups down here as something like a beautiful tapestry, like an exquisite arabesque wayward ants write on the sand, but down here it’s all a smelly mess and unbelievably hellacious, thank you very much.

I see all of them and I resolve never to engage—ever—in small talk. I resolve never to join them. I resolve to hunt the all-consuming, all-shining grand purpose of my existence. I resolve never to join, as Tyler Durden puts it, the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. I resolve never to become the fool who sits and stands and thinks in his permanent defeat: What’s it all about, man?

But Aling Tess now sobs. She says her husband hasn’t come home for the past week and who’s to feed the kids? Whatever she earns from Avon is never enough. My mother nods and, like me, she will never have the heart to tell Aling Tess to shut up and go home because there’s only so much Avon deodorants and moisturizers we can buy in a week and we’re already dying of surfeit from all those primetime telenovelas that bleed of fake blood and fake tears. Instead, she offers the same ancient words of reassurance our cross-dressing ancestors invented ten thousand years ago.

After Aling Tess is gone, I sit by the window and wonder about where the grand purpose hides. I sip my coffee and think, like a true-blue member of the world’s all-singing, all-dancing, all-wanking dung heap: What’s it all about, man?

-jb

The Bloody Nonsense

2004-11-04T07:30:00.000+08:00

The lesbian receptionist at the British Embassy looks at me suspiciously. The pulis patola who acts like her boyfriend chimes in each time the lesbian receptionist makes me do things I don’t want to do. She tells me to leave my cell phone because, you know, you can never tell, and of course the Brits are just trying to be so careful. Never mind the fact that the Embassy is protected with layers of high-tech detectors that can even tell if your soul is black or white or if you even have a soul. That, plus the dozen of bomb-sniffing dogs that the soldiers bring even to the restroom, vicious dogs as tall as me that sniff your butt while you’re helplessly immobilized peeing in a urinal.

The door opens at the other end of the hall and a regular Brit comes out. Immediately, the lesbian receptionist becomes so animated/agitated she begins treating everyone else like shit (read: Me). She says, “O tabi, tabi, may dadaan!” I keep quiet as the Great White Father passes by and the lesbian receptionist and her pulis patola boyfriend hold their breath and smile obsequiously at the Great White Father.

Why are you here, anyway? I tell her the Brits called me up for a job interview. I wait at the lobby and out comes an elegant British lady who tells me she’s Katie and may I please come in and it’s a good thing I came here just on time. Inside the hallowed halls of the Embassy, Katie and another sexy Brit named Hedda speak with me about the job and where I stand in the scheme of things. It’s a nice, lighthearted chat and I realize these people are such lovely people. When it’s time to go, Katie accompanies me outside lest their guards bite me. I remark how “efficient and tight” security in the Embassy is, and she says, you know, you can never tell, especially with the global situation right now.

I come out and I know the receptionist and the pulis patola have seen me with the elegant British lady. I come out and they treat me like I’m a Brit, too. The pulis patola snickers and tells me “I didn’t know you’re a linguist, Sir.” Now, he’s calling me “Sir.” I am about to say, What in hell’s a linguist and how does that fit me, but suddenly it occurs to me that in this place, every Pinoy who speaks English and rubs shoulders with the powers-that-be must be a ‘linguist.’ I begin wondering how simple the world is for the pulis patola and her lesbian receptionist girlfriend. It sends shivers down my spine but I don’t resist the temptation of acting out my part. I borrow the odd British accent I’ve learned from Janno Gibbs and Mark Abaya, and I say, I’m not a bloody linguist and what in hell’s a bloody linguist anyway and will you please stop the bloody nonsense.

And as I walk out, I turn and casually ask:

By the way, where’s the bloody lavatory?

-jb

Beautiful Pussy

2004-11-03T07:56:00.000+08:00

I have written about many things and I will write tons more on this blog but there are still much, much more I can never tell you.

I have dark secrets I will take to my grave.

I will never tell you, for example, how an ancient Egyptian god named Osiris bypasses the eons, hijacks a certain microwave channel, and calls me on my cell phone. I answer the phone and I immediately get into a trance, my eyes turn white, and my fingers then automatically tap on the keyboard to find the right words (although it’s really hard to do that when the other hand holds the phone). Osiris supplies me all the fart that I write about, all the crazy literary antics, all the war strategies I use to defeat the GLA in the PC game Zero:Hour.

He tells me things about my future and other people’s future. He tells me how Eddie Gil will die a most gruesome death in the hands of love-crazed Madam Auring, he tells me the exact circumstances of how Diana Zubiri will find me in her dressing room one day sniffing all her underwear, he tells me how Adolf Hitler’s grandson will find me and hand me the magic swastika ring that will give me power to rule this stupid, stupid, stupid land.

And there are more, more dark secrets I will never tell you lest you foil my plans.

Like for example, I will never tell you I am the guy who sends out all those spam emails inviting you to enlarge your penis or how to become an instant millionaire and why you should send this stupid chain letter to a gazillion number of people because if you don’t a poor child in Rwanda will die of cancer of the curly hair and whose black soul will pester you till kingdom come. Yep, all those millions of unsolicited emails you find in your inbox come from only one single person: Me. But of course, I will never, ever tell you that.

And perhaps, the darkest secret I will never tell you is this: I am the one who shot that beautiful black pussy cavorting on my neighbor’s roof with a plastic pellet gun. Yeah, I am the one. The folks in the neighborhood sari-sari store call it pusang lampong, and I hated it because when it’s in heat it makes all those crazy whining noises that grate my ears and push me to the edge so much that I couldn’t hold on to my secrets any longer. But you can’t tell it to the barangay because I never told you any of my secrets. After all, I will always be a very, very secretive person.

-jb

Bird of Jesus

2004-11-02T15:01:00.000+08:00

“Don’t hurt it because it’s Jesus’ bird.”

So says my niece, her face pressing on the wire cage. She comes to our house with her father with that eager look that reminds you of prairie puppies released to the, well, prairie. The niece, barely six, goes straight to my birdcage and admires the bird. The bird is a jologs sparrow that, in more posh circumstances, will be worth nothing. But the niece is so happy she’s making babytalk and dishing out to my little sister one clever hypothetical question: What if it’s my birthday today and I ask for this bird as a gift? My little sister is speechless and looks at me.

I had been so guilty looking at the empty cage after its former occupant, a martinez, died of pneumonia and boredom. The martinez, anyway, was supposed to be able to talk but it couldn’t, not even a single human syllable. When I realized it couldn’t talk I got bored with it and it got bored with me and then the bird decided to finally leave this boring world.

So I bought the jologs sparrow from an ambulant vendor who also sold colored/painted ducklings and quails and 10-year-old, frayed-on-the-edges GI Joe action figures to rid myself of the guilt of looking at the empty cage. I asked for a sparrow with neon green feathers because why in hell was he selling pink ducklings and blue quails while the sparrows were left alone with their boring gray-brown coat? The vendor said buy my pink ducklings. I said I want sparrows. The vendor said buy my blue quails. I said I want the goddamn sparrows. I don’t have neon green sparrows, the vendor said, but you can do the painting yourself, it’s easy and I can teach you. I said never mind and bought the bird.

Now this little niece who rarely comes to our house declares her unspeakable intention to have my little birdie. Kuya, she’s asking for the bird, my sister says.

“You can’t have this. I’ve sentenced it to die,” I say just to imply there are things in heaven and earth she can never have, and to annoy her, I poke the cage with my pen and say, in the way all those maniacs in Hollywood B-movies scream, “Die! Die! Die!”

My little niece screams and proceeds to jesusify the bird: “It’s Jesus’ bird and now you’re dead because you’re trying to hurt Jesus’ bird. A lightning will strike you.” She tells me I’m a bad, bad, bad person and I won’t go to heaven for trying to kill, kill, kill Jesus’ little birdie. I’m so stunned with her handing me eternal damnation that I gape at her and say, Actually, there is no God. She looks at me and says You’re Lucifer. There is no Lucifer, too, I say. And to punctuate it, I laugh with a mad gleam in my eyes. This time she backs off a few steps; now she’s convinced if I am not Lucifer, I must be something worse. I must have created Hell itself.

My little sister, so used to my antics, just giggles and tells the niece it’s all right, that I’m just kidding. But the niece is now so frightened she clings to her father’s shirt and tries to hide and repeatedly says He’s Lucifer! He’s Lucifer!

When they’re gone, I tell my little sister There’s no God. She just laughs and laughs. I say, No, seriously, there is no God. She laughs and says Who cares? I’m stunned. She’s 11 years old and she’s a genius.

As for the bird, it died three days later of pneumonia and boredom.

- jb

The Grand Prophecy

2004-11-02T14:57:00.000+08:00

The Grand Prophecy

I told Lynnette about The Prophecy: that according to the lines on my palms, I'm destined to fool around with women and sire illegitimate kids. And that my temper's so mercurial it's very possible that people will die when I'm angry.

Thanks to Aling Bing, my masseuse from Gen. Trias, Cavite, now I know how "tempting" my future is. Aling Bing even told me not to take her words lightly; she never misses.

Foremost Example Number 1: a handsome client is told he’s going to commit suicide over a botched up romance. The handsome client laughs, telling her it's impossible. "I'm so handsome why would I give much fuck over a single woman?" Aling Bing says just be careful. The handsome client hangs himself some months later over, yes, a botched up romance.

"I usually see dead people," Aling Bing said while she loosened my tendons with strong, prehensile hands. “But with you, I see illegitimate kids running around the place, the pitter-patter of their little feet will be thunderstorms in the ears of your real wife.”

I didn’t laugh when she said it because she’d take it on my muscles if she’d sense my doubting. I just closed my eyes and imagined the faces of the “other” women I’m going to “impregnate” with my “broadsword.” It’s funny. Aling Bing’s such a dirty-minded old woman.

And now, while massaging Lynnette’s back (because she now thinks she has this lower back problem, and because I think I’ve browsed enough websites on shiatzu massage that I’m now the real deal when it comes to shiatzu massage), I’m telling her about The juicy Prophecy. I press the right buttons, stroke her in the right places, and I see she's almost half-asleep.

“Do you think it's okay?” I ask.

“What is?” she mumbles.

“Me having three other women?”

“Hmmmmm.”

“Is it?” There is a naughty smile on my lips because I'm thinking she will say yes.

“I'll castrate you,” she whispers with her eyes closed, “slice off your balls and feed it to Rainier and Mark (her father's two askals that look more like dog versions of Dick Israel and Romy Diaz). Let's see if it's enough to thwart that hag's prophecies.”

I say nothing for minutes. I realize Aling Bing must have failed to take into consideration one little factor: The Infinite Destructive Potential of Lynnette’s Animal Rage. In the face of it, the lines on my palms recede, my supposed destiny takes a different path to accommodate her whims.

“Nah,” I coo afterwards. “You are the only woman in my life. You don't have to be nasty.”

“Well, it’s good you KNOW that.”

Then she sleeps the sleep of the just.

- jb