how it all began

it came so naturally. almost like an instinct. this acute sense of what was wonderful, of what was beautiful. this when i was yet an unconfused kid growing up in our island where i thought everything began.

i remember foregoing early evening dinners just to catch fireflies at the mangrove clumps behind the new road. i and a friend, another lost soul.

we each would lug along a big empty mayonnaise jar and crinkly cellophane sheets that we had randomly perforated. we then would pick as if berries the lightning bugs teeming the pods of the mangroves drooping like green stalactites towards the brackish marsh water. gingerly, we dropped each of our gleaned glowing bugs -smoldering flying embers - into our jars and quickly topped them with our finely punctured plastic lids.

and when we would harvested enough, we would trundle back home in the dark with only our improvised hurricane lamps aglow with the phosphorescence of the whizzing bugs.

i thought then, while looking at the jarred bugs, that this must how things started, how it all began. the way our grade four science teacher told us almost like a secret. in a burst of fire.

and i thought then, that to keep these bugs, these fire starters, the progenitors, perhaps, of everything in this world, that would be the most wonderful, the most important thing to do. like anytime soon, i would see new things, new beings generate inside the lambent jar.

but then a neighbor, one already in high school, told me and my friend one day that only sissies do things like collecting fireflies. and big boys could never be caught dead raising a bug farm. big boys only play ball, basketball.

and that was it for me and my friend. suddenly, as if a spell was lifted, i became blind to the beauty of lightning bugs, of saffron sunsets, of mundane things from the natural world. only the artifice of sports, of adolescent relationships seemed to evince wonders.

yesterday, after another lackluster night on the village, greenwich village,i.e., a friend offered to drive me home all the way to the bronx. instead of the scenic west side highway, my friend decided to take the more claustrophobic fdr.

just before fordham road exit, an suv, a gmc envoy, sidled to us. driving alone was this beautiful young man who looked lost.

the glow of his dashboard made his face luminous, like an object d’'art in a softly lighted sconce. he must have felt the heat of my stares as he stared right back at me. just in time, i was able to look away.

after we managed the exit, i could still see the beautiful man’'s car now seeming to careen towards the opposite direction in the highway we just left. from afar, the softly bright inside of his car looked like the firefly jar of my childhood. and i thought, despairingly, that if only i were in his car, i would have seen wonderful things magically happen.

what i know for sure

a wry comedienne (or was it a disgruntled author not chosen for her book club?) predicted that come time a group of warmongering aliens invade our planet and demand from the average joe or jane to take them to our supreme leader, he or she would lead them at once to the household of oprah winfrey.

this couldn'’t be funnier if it doesn't have any grain of truth to it. oprah indeed matters to a whole lot of sane people and inordinately most of the times.

a former editor of mine in manila emailed me yesterday. this was her first after not having had any form of communication with this highly erudite woman for almost five years now.

and in only her second paragraph of her rather curt email, the only piece of americana that she wanted to know from me was the all important question of "have you been to the oprah show already?"

let me try to set things straight here, although i'’m afraid i really couldn’'t. first of all, she knew i am not working in chicago where the oprah winfrey show is being churned out. and two, this woman teaches investigative journalism in the state university in manila. what gives?

last saturday, i whittled some of my precious downtime at the union square barnes and noble, in its unruly magazine section. in my fifteen minutes or so there, i swear to god, i saw at the very least a dozen people, women and men, picking up the fifth anniversary issue of O, the oprah magazine. i was so taken by this phenomenon that i couldn’'t help but grab myself the rather hefty issue.

it'’s not that i'’ve never seen any episode of her show. i have. a disproportionately lot of times, if i may admit so. but still i am shocked at the cultish adoration of this tv personality by her minions which, most unfunnily, include my esteemed hard boiled editor.

why does oprah matter? and somehow, matters a lot to a whole lot?

centuries from now, social anthropologists would still continue to debate the sociological preeminence of this tv personality in the academe or, unsurprisingly, on tv. but until a definitive tome get published about oprah’'s importance to the world, including straight men, most shockingly, i would just be content with speculations the way people find comfort in them conspiracy theories.

in fact, i have this feeling that oprah and her singular phenomenon works much like a well conceived conspiracy theory.

we humans have this deep need to explain the unexplainable, to have this semblance of control over the uncontrollable. that’'s why there’'s a plethora of conspiracy theories floating around. hold on, i know i am about to lose you now on this. but just hold on.

but conspiracy theories, in a way, give us the faux power to rein in what are inherently unmanageable. the way oprah, perhaps, gives her followers some semblance of control over their seemingly ungovernable lives.

"understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. use it. dwell in possibility." so said oprah, the unofficial pope of millions, a pope without the shackles of any conniving religious hierarchy or confining tenets.

as a thank you token to their millions of subscribers on their fifth anniversary, the editors of O decided to republish oprah'’s end page columns into one sleek freebie paperback.

the best of oprah'’s what i know for sure. to the uninitiated, what i know for sure is how oprah calls her column. and her editors urged the readers to keep this freebie close "“for when you need a bolt of energy or a dose of wisdom."”

in a world of uncertainties, it’s comforting for millions somehow to know there'’s this loquacious woman who can dispense this zing of vitality and, most importantly, this dollop of unalloyed enlightenment to their drifting, desperate lives.

there's a certain slant of light reprise

i can't take this anymore. this guilt.

you see, an indecent percentage of my blog'’s page hits lately could be traced to my overweening literary pretensions. i started blogging, slipshoddily i’'d say, last year. and back then i had this presumptuously arrogant tick of posting favorite poems and tacking to them my lame stills.

a pet poem by the belle of amherst - there’'s a certain slant of light - filtered through my roll of blog posts. and lately, many visitors were waylaid by the web’'s various undiscerning search engines to my niche all because they were looking for one of the most lyrical and not so typically confounding poem by emily dickinson.

i imagine most of these hapless visitors to be unforbearing middle school kids, too restive to finish an english assignment and wanting to just gloss over some sort of cliff notes on the poem so that they could go back at once to their spanking portable sony playstations.

well, kids, let me do my good deed for this week. to atone for this guilt. hold on, i’'m not going to "“explain"” the poem for you. for really, how can you "“explain"” a poem? it’'s like asking a half crazed ornithologist why he breaks out in sobs everytime he claims he had a confirmed sighting of the extinct ivory billed woodpecker. or asking your still love crazed mom why she married your not so cool dad.

so, what is this good deed i am contemplating? i'’m really not cozy with discursive stuff. that’'s why, let me just tell you why i was first and continually seduced since then by this formidable performance of a poem in a length, i would hope, that you could possibly allow to pore over in a given impatient night of homework.

i was in high school then and this rather patient english teacher was reeling us into the poem by its beautiful sound (heavenly hurt) and striking imagery (weight of cathedral tunes). that didn'’t work for me. what worked was, for the first time, there was a poem short enough to be memorized for extra points. which i gladly did.

yet as i memorized it over and over, the poem completely resisted definition in terms of a logical, comprehensive statement.

but i can still remember how impossible it was to recite the lines without feeling this sense of tragedy, this deep rooted but hard to trace sense of melancholy. and for a moody teener, poetry, and dickinson specifically, suddenly seemed irrevocably hip and cool.

i was born and raised in a winterless island. hence, my complete bewilderment in the poetess'’ profound affliction in something normally regarded as, well, sunny - a ray of light. but i totally got the image of the light slanted as appropriately explained by afternoons despite the poem’'s insistence on winter afternoons which were totally absent from my then palette of experiences.

but try as my english teacher to let us soak in the poem’'s striking images, i could not. in fact, the poem came to me initially as visually vague.

sure, she was pointing us to an outward natural scene. but exactly what it was, she was typically coy. was I supposed to be looking at a ridge of a blue mountain or the lip of a dark chocolate forest? was i to gambol on a thin sheet of snow on the ground? or was it snowing to begin with? it was winter, after all. and did the sun break through the clouds in one piercingly poignant slant?

but strangely, the poem insisted on appearing painterly to my then young system. my attention was riveted outward and not through the inner landscape of the poetess who adamantly refused to refer to herself as taking action.

the poetess, unlike julie andrews, rollicked not in the hills. nor did she climb -heavens no- out of the window just to soak in the slanted light. she did not even sigh. all she did was simply look.

and for someone entertaining vague ideas of leading a life giving birth to things, that was more than enough. to look is everything.

why hip hop matters?

why does hip hop matter?

forget about the bullshit about hip hop and its tremendous "potential to “instill political consciousness and initiate social activism"” among the young and the not so. this almost crippling blab that hip hop is not just some form of music but rather this capital t truth telling truths.

please.

hip hop matters because of this very earnest looking boy i was sitting behind in a bus this morning. and what it does to this young man unafraid, raring to take on the world.

the boy had his official neighborhood gear on: a throwback 1997 basketball jersey (#34 charles oakley) over a white triple x henley. low sagging denims, needless to say. and a crisp, he-can-hardly-afford custom fitted new york yankee baseball cap.

yes, hip hop is about fashion, too. and a whole lot of other things. but first and foremost, it is about that someone who decides to go retro, and takes up - horror of horrors - the almost forgotten passion of taking a pen and scribbling down anything truthful to oneself.

the boy, who finally disembarked at the stop by a car wash near fordham university, was writing, furiously at times, pentametric lines, it seemed to me and, with melodramatic flourish, crossing out those he deemed out of flow with his rhythms.

hip hop matters because at the very least it is a vibrant, living form of innovative music, never xenophobic to influences far and wide.

but at its best, hip hop matters because it goads people to become the best writers that they can ever be, telling possibly all their truths in a language all their own but universally understood.

and for as long as there are people honest enough to write down their own truths, the world could only be fine. it has got to be. for as the french nobel laureate albert camus grandly claimed, the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

and that'’s what’'s up.

fat tabby

everything begs to be noticed, it seems, in this season.

the normally stocky, black, really drab birds that bead the power lines behind my building every morning, just before they are sent scurrying up in the air when cars start streaming out of the parking area, suddenly acquire this iridescence, this shimmering green in their plumage.

and as if that’'s not enough, these birds, these european starlings, the current day swarming descendants of the only 100 individuals released into central park in the 1890’s, decide to change, with the ease of a chameleon, the hue of their long pointy bills.

from the drab grey of their winter get-up, they now sport these traffic stopping yellow beaks. really, they look now like a swarm of flying sharpened mongol pencils.

my indifference is no match for this knockout display of beauty.

even the sun. it bores in through my heavily shaded windows now. no, it'’s not intrusive at all. not yet, anyway. i have summer for that.

but it spuds in to my system like a genteel, noble cologne, worn, perhaps, by a really stunning boy who doesn’'t know he looks it.

and so what am i to do? what does someone wanting in grace to absorb all these beauty to do?

i was supposed to return this really long overdue book to the library this morning. i had to forego doing that, again.

instead, i drew my roman shades into this very unsophisticated sectional raise and just let the sunshine through.

and then like a fat cat, i sidled to where the patch of sunlight splayed on the floor, curled up in it, and blissfully fell back to sleep.

she looks dead already

the signs are up.

at the local mikey d’'s, at the newsstand run by lebanese immigrants, on my apartment building door, covering the weblike blemish wreaked last summer by a drunk who punched raw the shatter proof glass.

and they’'re not pretty. the signs, that is. they don’'t even look official. it'’s so ghetto, a friend described the one stuck on our building door.

on it, was the mug shot of the woman who was apparently pushed to her death from the rooftop of a five floor tenement in our neighborhood last week. must be from her heydays of doing tricks for heroin.

the woman looks dead already in the picture.

a $2,000 reward is offered for anyone who could come up with a tip that could lead to the resolution of the homicide.

that'’s it. only two grand. how much is that junkie hooker on the window? another friend coldly made fun of the reward pot to the tune of a doris day ditty.

in a society that flaunts its so called compassionate conservatism, this is just how much a life apparently amounts to. how am i supposed to respond to this insult? maybe, i am not supposed to.

but how can i not? in a huge way, my trifling daily pursuits are already altered by this woman’'s death. cops now regularly patrol not only my neighborhood but even inside my building.

last night i went home late as always and although the cop on duty in my building kind of recognized me, i still felt stupidly guilty. of what, i don'’t know. maybe, i, and the rest of this hypocritical society, is guilty of her death.

this morning as i went out for my breakfast, i noticed the sign on our building door was unglued, maybe by the surprisingly strong gusts last night. the sign was now treed among the low lying branches of the blossoming dogwood in front of our building.

the dogwood is stunted and visibly diseased. but this spring, it managed once more to be generous with its flowers, the way it was prodigal, as well, last year.

the white clumps of blossoms enwreathed the woman'’s picture. and i dared not pluck the sign from out of the branches.

the science of popcorn

all these erudition. when can i possibly put them to good use?

on a lazy afternoon yesterday, my posse, otherwise known as the old maids of central bronx, were resigned to the fact that we would have to squander a great sunday spring afternoon just to watch a bootleg copy of this unabashedly hongkong chopsocky slapstick. who ever said gay people are not into martial arts don’'t know a shit or two about them queer folks.

and so the question of what to eat watching the film popped up. still dulled from the previous night’'s carousing, everybody just went for the uncreative pop corn. the colorless, microwaveable sort.

not even midway into the movie, right where the fat woman scurried back to her apartment after a bespoke suited goon squad came to terrorize her neighborhood, a friend popped a very innocuous question.

how is it that, despite all the technology we have in this country, not all kernels can be popped in a freaking bag of popcorn?

and this was where i would have gotten into the picture. gladly.

because it just so happened that the other day, i was hooked by this sidebar in my weekend paper about the latest research on the chemistry of the pop-ability of, well, popcorns.

researchers have found out that the key factor in influencing the popping quality of popcorns is the chemical structure of the pericarp, the fancy term for the kernel’'s outer hull.

during heating, the corn pericarp locks moisture inside like a pressure cooker. the heated moisture builds up pressure inside until the kernel eventually ruptures, magically turning the kernel inside out and conjuring the white fluff that we enjoy.

in the best popping kernels, the pericarp is composed of stronger cellulose molecules than those in poorer performing varieties. these stronger crystalline structures maximize moisture retention, leading to fewer unpopped kernels.

i was about to launch into this high flying explanation but just in time, in about a new york minute, i found back my bearing. i mean, honestly, what good would it do me if i'd flawlessly explained this concept to my friends? and in the end, would my friendship with these wonderful people be richer with my dazzling explanation of the pop-ability of popcorns?

beware you be not swallowed up in books. an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge. so wrote john wesley, the methodist pope. and you all well know this was coming right at you, this quote from a holy man right smack on a sunday post.

whew! all this erudition. i’'m telling you.

i held on fast to my show off horses and just laughed along with this group of warm people as dumb and lame comedy set pieces burst from the movie one after the other. and honestly, i felt wiser.

oh by the way, scientists call those unpopped kernels “old maids.” i kid you not.

cat on a wet tin roof

i used to just be roused from my sleep slightly before the cusp of daylight. not to pee or from a bad dream. just some strange undecipherable working of my body clock.

i thought then it was my body'’s quirky way of telling me to pore over my homework for the day. i was then in high school and to be on the honor roll was not looked down as the geeky pursuit that now it is. in fact, it was sort of hip to be on that roster.

and so i dragged myself out of my torpid sleep and hunker down to mostly my algebra problems. in the early morning light, i remember the x's and y'’s squirming on the page like scared wrigglers in a trough full of standing brackish water.

i have no recollection when this punishing rote stopped. must be when i started doing late nights. mostly from dipping into books i am not supposed to read. yet. nothing illicit here. just titles not on the required reading list.

i don'’t know why i have to burden myself over and over with stuff insignificant and better left forgotten from my childhood. if and only if they were left that way, irretrievably lost in my memory. but nothing ever is, somehow.

this morning, on a weekend morning that i am not supposed to be doing anything, here i was all tingly from my wakefulness. raring to do something.

outside, the rain, the lazy rain that started last night has persisted. and the slight, somewhat slick film of rain water that has accumulated on top of the garage behind my building undulated from the soft morning wind.

and for a moment there, i thought i saw a piebald cat, no a calico, thrashing in the rooftop pond. it couldn'’t be, i assured myself. cats abhor water.

maybe, it’'s just a memory of mine. a memory of first reading annie dillard. of her old fighting tomcat who would jump through the open window by her bed in the middle of the night and land on her chest.

on some nights, she wrote, her cat would knead her bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.

and on some mornings, she would wake in daylight to find her body covered with paw prints in blood; i looked as though i'd been painted with roses, she wrote.

these days, i am not flagellating myself to be on any honor roll. i am just happy enough to eke by a day without any mishap or taking any slight unforgotten to sleep.

and yet, somehow, my body, my system, puritanically raised by my arch achieving mother, is waking me up once again. rousing me to do stuff, dangerous stuff, i am not sufficiently skilled to do. not even the foolhardy moxie to try. like writing half as good, perhaps, as annie dillard.

in my dreams, i’'d say.

all i could come up is a post as hastily done as this, devoid of any compelling, literally visceral images. i wish i could just stop now. this delusion to write, this illusion that somehow i could come up with anything of import and beauty.

i wish i could just get back to the safety of sleep. and be awakened later by the mundaneness of the urge to empty my groaning bladder. or the more pressing need to retrieve the weekend paper by my building's door before some larcenous neighbor decides to appropriate it for himself.

final plunge

a woman flew off the roof of a five story tenement in our neighborhood yesterday morning. just three buildings removed from mine.

one can’'t make up stuff like this, you know.

today, a local tabloid described the dead woman not so mercifully as a junkie hooker. to somehow atone for its patent insensitivity, the tabloid, in the last few paragraphs of its story, touched cursorily about the woman'’s previous stint as an adjunct grade school teacher until heroin got the best of her. indeed, the good is oft interred hastily with their bones.

oh, but what sweet mess the dead woman’'s roof plunge brought to our neighborhood not so used to this much excitement. and i am not talking about her mangled body on the pavement.

as soon as the ems vans came wailing, the neighborhood seemed like the perfectly egalitarian american society the founding fathers must have dreamed it to be.

the first generation italian pancetta maker across my building was talking to his mexican helpers like they belong to the same friday night poker club. a heavy set tamale peddler was being inundated with questions by the slight croatian cashier of an italian pastry shop like they were long lost bosom friends.

it seems like nothing brings racial harmony quickly than the realization among peoples of different ethnicities that we all belong to the only phylum of humans that matters still - those who are still alive.

coming from work, i noticed a sizable crowd milling at the back of the tenement right in our neighborhood, right in the very heart of what tour guides inflatedly call the little italy section of the bronx.

i never gave it a second thought at first. i reckoned it was just a stray tour group herded by their schedule stickler of a tour guide through their itinerary early in the morning.

just before the tenement is a newstand. a huge sign outside its doors announced there were still no winners for tuesday'’s megalotto drawing. the pot was now a dizzying 205 million bucks.

i went inside, forgot about the new york times, and bought me instead ten dollars worth of quick pick megalotto numbers. i couldn'’t keep myself from reading out loud the crudely written sign pasted by the storekeeper on top of the lotto machine "“hey, you never know.”"

as i got to the crowd scene, i realized something big was really going on. i, who until now has yet to master any adult social skill, got myself quickly into a grown up conversation with a neighborhood old timer, the owner of the local dry cleaners.

he told me the crack whore, his words, was probably knocked out of her shoes after her head was smashed against the rooftop air vent. her pair of dingy moccasins was left on the roof.

the police probers has quickly labeled the case a homicide. the dead woman'’s alleged pimp is now the number one suspect.

as the dead woman’'s body, now wrapped in a slinky body bag, was being wheeled into a waiting van, the thick crowd of rubberneckers parted smoothly like a well greased zipper.

i caught the whiff, the metally, acrid smell of the blood from the dead woman as her body bag passed me by. i quickly groped for a handkerchief in my jacket pocket.

i couldn'’t find one. all I could come up to cover my nose was the megalotto ticket. the smell of the thermal ink on the paper stung as much. only that it felt better sniffing it, like i won something already.

long tongued moth

my friend, the one who dissed my tupac post, has softened. somehow.

this after he read about the post about my mother'’s man troubles. but not as much.

but this is not about you, he emailed me again. what about me? i im’'ed him. you and the true things in life. you and love, he im’'ed back.

now this why it never pays as much to befriend a fellow writer. especially one who makes a living at writing soaps.

but somehow, i am baffled by the flurry of all this. he is a dear friend and maybe this is why i sort of feel shamed questioning this implicit assumption thrust upon me. the fact that he writes for a top rating soap in manila somehow gives him the mantle of infallibility as to matters of things true and beautiful. of love.

so, i emailed another friend, not a mutual one. and he wasn’'t kind at all with my soap writer friend.

what does he know? this catty friend wrote back. he churns out escapist fares.

but our people just love them, i emailed him back. he must have tapped into something primordial, something original and thus true in the hearts of the viewers.

my bitchy friend has yet to email me back. he is not into this, the minutiae of what he disdainfully call the writing life. he writes zippy copies for an ad agency.

what are the true things in my life then?

i am stunned by this question. honestly, i don’t know that this is a valid question i can ask myself.

i always believe that even my lies, my prevarications, my facades, they are real, they are true to me. and to force me to winnow my life choices into my friend’'s fascistic binary catalog - the true and the untrue - well, it seems nothing but phony to me.

and so i decided to watch on the filipino channel the soap that he writes for. and just ten minutes into it, i was reminded quite rudely why i was never into pinoy soaps. well, soap for that matter.

drippy lines. hokier music that wells up almost every time a character looks straight into a camera. nothing comes as true to me.

i flipped back to my basic american cable. nothing much in there, either.

so i settled for this nature show, the kind that public television affiliates cram into their after school hours programming.

the presenter, one in ill fitting bush jacket, was really wired over what he raved as a 150-year old scientific breakthrough.

it all started 150 years ago when the great evolutionist charles darwin was presented with this strange looking orchid from the isolated island of madagascar. the orchid had a twelve inch nectar spur.

confounding his fellow scientists, darwin boldly predicted then that for this unusual flower to exist and thrive, somewhere in madagascar there must also be a moth with a 12 inch long proboscis.

this made his colleagues snort. no such thing. and for the next 150 years, no enterprising scientist has ever found any evidence as to this moth with an elephantine tongue necessary for the pollination of this strange flower.

not until last year when a scientist from new orleans brought with him to the island an infrared night vision camera and captured in action that never before beheld freak moth.

i couldn’'t wait for the show to get over. as i was filled with things to write, more melodramatic, more maudlin, i don’t care, that my soap writer friend could ever think of.

this is how i planned on starting my new letter to him: you’'re asking me to write about the true things in my life? about love?

here is my truth. i am a strange orchid with a very long nectar spur. and even if somehow i have the hardest time believing it myself, i kind of feel there is a moth out there that has a very long tongue. and i can, no, i will wait for it. patiently.

stories we tell ourselves

oh, the fictions we tell ourselves. to make the living of our piddling lives sufferable.

i wonder what my mother tells herself. my mother who, until this very late in her life, never seems to get any wiser as to men.

first she hooked up with my dad. big time philanderer. messy break up. then, her current husband. used to be this guileless church guy. turns out, same fish.

no dirty, disorderly estrangement, yet. i don’t think there would be any. the only thing mother has learned all these years, it seems, is to just slog through this.

we never talk about this openly. i mean, this talk about her chronic marital woes.

the closest we got was when i was still in manila and crazy in love with this intelligent but recusant boy who hardly believed in anything. including exclusivity in relationships.

she called me up one time. she didn'’t sound harried. just a bit peeved. annoyed that until that time i have yet to show any signs of interest as to processing my immigration papers to the states.

i, who has yet to come out to my mother, told her everything was sort of copasetic with my life in the city. and she paused.

you’'re in love, is that it? she asked. i didn’'t answer her headlong. and she respected my reticence. a familiar family trait.

she told me that it would be wise, no, kind for me then to come home, visit her now that i am not really into deep preparing my visa.

and so i did. despite the fact that it was the height of her husband’'s affair with this woman.

everyone in our neighborhood seems to know about it. an irrepressible one, manang lila, asked me if why i came home was to console my mama in this time of deep anguish. i told her i was doing nothing productive in the big city.

nothing productive either for me to do back home. my friends were all working somewhere else. i hardly knew anybody around. nothing much to do but watch soap with mother.

mother, and i, eventually, particularly cared for this one that featured a washerwoman married to a physically abusive, good for nothing cockfighter. and despite the abuses he heaped on her, she cleaved to him like sweat stains around the arm holes of his favorite shirt.

one night, while mama’'s husband was once again on a late errand, we watched how this washerwoman was just humiliated by her husband publicly.

one of the other characters, a friend of the stupid washermoman, told her to just dump him like a soiled wash water. he is a sickness, she told her.

the washerwoman told her friend she couldn'’t. but why, her friend asked back. because,she told her she, too, was sick. sick with this incurable love for this man.

the character then took these typical melodramatic steps towards the camera. teary eyed, she gazed right through it and spoke her lines. something about no other cure for the sickness of being desperately in love but to love more.

i heard my mama cleared her throat after the woman on tv spouted these mawkish lines. i felt so uneasy that i just had to say something. so i asked her what were we having for breakfast tomorrow.

without taking her eyes off the tv, she told me, in between the lines of the soap characters, that we should have something good. i told her i hope so.

our voices were as grave as those coming from the tv like we were kindred characters in this late night soap my mama watched while waiting for her husband to come home.

spring stuns

spring stuns. not so much with its colors. but with its persuasion.

suddenly, everyone is in agreement. everything must be right. all should be perfect.

he is the jay-z wannabe next building. the one i thought never got game. today, he is blistering. he spits rhymes as he awaits his school bus. he freestyles. tight enjambements. masculine rhymes. about this bitch at school. this girl who never gives him respect. his word.

my version of his story, the prose in my mind, says, she doesn'’t love him.

i pass by him as i make it home from work. i am shamed by his tight rhymes. i am reminded of my dismal posts. my slack prose.

i vow to make it good today. i will try. for spring is here. and spring is compelling.

i get into my apartment. and all too quickly, my resolve is down. i see plates upon unwashed plates in the sink. unread magazines, stale weekend paper carpet my floor.

i give up.

i open my emails. a friend, a writing partner, is nasty. he disdained my tupac post.

why are you wasting your time? do you think by that (tupac post) you could say you could write about anything?

i am stunned. by his ferocity. by his vehemence. but i agree with him. most easily.

you want to write about stuff of import? he asks. i nod, reading him.

write about true things. write about love, he commissions me. easy for him to say. he writes for an abs-cbn soap in manila.

i look around my apartment. i don'’t see love. no love comes knocking at a filthy flat.

i walk back towards the next building. the young rapper is gone. could be half dozing already. in his first morning class. daydreaming. of tighter rhymes. killer beats.

i take the first bus. to where, i don'’t care. i take a seat behind a couple. gray hair, liver spots. retired people.

they insist on holding hands. like our bus is about to collide. to ram into a raging amtrak.

i ask them. can i take your picture? they don’'t refuse.

i am stunned. at first. i see the trees outside. they balance sunbeam. in their branches.

then i remember. it is spring.

2pac on the 6

there has got to be a 1-800 number for tupac shakur sightings. just to make things easier for everyone, you know.

for everyone like myself, perhaps. because this morning, in the lull before the midday crush, i swear to god, i saw tupac on the number 6 train.

he wasn’'t wearing his defiant bandanna. no low slung sagging jeans. nothing in him reminiscent or imitative of the prison culture he used to rhapsodize.

he was, of all things, sweltering in a rather confining suit. salaryman’'s navy blue, of all hues. and of all days, a waspish tweedy kind of suit. this on a tepid spring day.

as i was straphanging across him, i could very well see the books he was cradling in his lap.

james baldwin, george orwell, two slim volumes of poetry by nikki giovanni. the winnie mandela autobiography. there was something about method acting and another one about tai chi. tai-chi?

and on top of this voluminous pile, he was scratching like a mad man on a yellow legal pad. i leaned over and gasped to realize he was working on a draft of some sort of thug dictionary.

thug. n. one who has nothing but is willing to hustle for anything.

hustler. n. someone putting to good use what his mama gave him to make a go at life.

playa. n. a promiscuous person who has a harem of women. he is never exclusively available to any of them.

mac. n. a superplaya. one who lives off the largesse of his bitches.

and i got giddy just trying to keep up with his scribbling that i decided i find an empty seat to steady myself.

as soon as i found one, union square stop came and out he went. i scampered after him but he was gone.

for my generation, the still unsolved murder of rap giant tupac amaru shakur is our version, hip hop’'s version, of elvis lives looneyism.

sure he was seductive like a hip hop marvin gaye. but what baits me deeper and deeper into his mythology was his addiction to death, his arrogance and bravura, his lyrical eloquence, his narrative complexity, his religious sensibilities. a riveting complexity and a resolute refusal to be described, to be categorized, to be catalogued just to be any one of these constructs.

as much as i refuse, even until now, that it is already over for him after mere twenty five years of vicious life.

so much so that it is easier for me to wallow in the gunky pop culture realm of amateur criminology and overamped conspiracy theories.

my favorite, by far, is that tupac is still alive, chilling out from the vicissitudes of thug life in capitalist free cuba with his adopted godmother assata shakur.

and sometimes, when the weather finally clears here in east coast where he was born, he would just fly in.

and he would continue to edit, rewrite, and polish the draft of the forever evolving mythology about him being a misogynist thug, a failed black revolutionary, a conflicted son, a lyrical street poet and a beautiful, hard to let go urban legend.

sky at my feet

funny how a million things need to be done desperately when one is stuck to a sick bed.

day two of this surprisingly stinging intestinal flu. and my list of stuff to be done just got longer and harder to contemplate being accomplished.

drive to atlantic city for the regine velasquez concert. steep that strange herbal tea. drop off that chest high laundry pile to the only laundromat open on a sunday. inform anybody with a stake on one’'s finances that one is not feeling too hot. do a draft of one'’s will. fly a kite.

from my window, i could see the sun outside just showing off. what an ostentatious prick.

and on the next block, one near the italian mortuary, one skinny boy, harassed by an occasional kibitzing adult (his father? his molesting uncle?), was flying a kite, a small, haphazardly put together, box kite.

despite his obvious tyro flying skills, the boy was able to get around them kite eating power lines. and despite the light wind, he was able to high launch his glider first by propping it up against a low standing road sign then reeling in his line hand over hand like a manic fisherfolk.

as soon as his glider gained altitude, the boy was up there in the sky with it. he was beaming, he was yelling unintelligibly, he was babbling. he was king of the world.

as in most of life'’s profoundest pleasures, the rewards of kite flying depend not so much as to the understanding of the science behind it.

kites fly because the trifecta of mutually opposing physical forces of lift, drag, and gravity (no gay words, here) conspire to work together.

as wind moves across the sail of a kite, a necessary pressure is created. from this, lift is deflected along the face of the kite.

the wind then pushes up on the kite like an all reaching hand, cradling it up in the sky. at the same time, wind blowing over the top of the kite creates an area of low pressure, a vacuum that effectively pulls the glider from behind.

i have a feeling that invalids and shut ins are the most envious of creatures, painfully desirous of the advantages of the well and vibrant.

for i was, looking at this kid. i was jealous of his vim, his vigor, his youth, his smile, his happiness. most of all, i am green with his ambition.

to fly, to be airborne, to be aloft. to give in to the restlessness inside. to leave behind all our confining presents.

to joy in kiting is to revel in this exquisite sense of extension. this almost foolish sense that somehow the sky is within our grasp, that the sky somehow strangely starts from our feet.

at one time, the boy’'s kite took this flashy dip and almost grazed my window.

i was breathless. like somebody just told me a secret, a life changing one.

spring fever

nothing like being sick on a zippy spring day. well, nothing as worse, perhaps, like being sick on a dazzlingly beautiful summer day.

some kind of intestinal virus. or maybe, just my body'’s normal compensatory reaction to my gluttony last night.

oh, pork rinds in shrimp paste. nothing like the frank fisherfolk fare i was used to growing up. not to mention, artery choking, too.

but this is not a healthy living post. i don’'t know what it is either.

and so, i’'ve been sitting here by my window since eleven this morning and not an iota of me wanted to eat or read something, two of the only things in life i basically wanted to do all the time.

oh, i'’m sorry i lied. that, too.

as such, i was this close to republishing a previous post (march 30, 2005). that one about my friend'’s love child, a winsome boy, sired by a soon to be man of the cloth.

okay, so i copped out. but i reckoned i got valid reasons.

one, of course, is my being unwell. two, i’ve read recently, much to my consternation, a study that found out that most blog trollers hardly read any previous posts. those prodigals, i was fuming. three, and most importantly, finally she wrote me, i mean my friend, the mother of my godchild in absentia.

and as i was to upload that stale post, with some few trifling brush ups here and there, blogger.com stalled me like forever.

it'’s like emperor constantine seeing the sign of the cross emblazoned across the sky. or it could very well be just my soporific medications.

and so this dismal post about nothing.

well, about perhaps, this naked tree two blocks away from my building.

from my window, this still bare tree insisted on putting a most dazzling show for invalid me.

its seemingly prehensile branches clutched sunbeam and played it, like a multi stringed instrument, a light harp.

only for me.

the light riffled through my unwashed window and i sat there unable to explain the ambivalence of my feelings.

on one hand, i was aggrieved over things, people, loves i'’ve lost all these years.

on the other hand, a big part of me wanted to celebrate my still being around in this world. sick perhaps, but still around.

from where i was sitting, i tried to catch the light with my fingers, grateful to receive fragments, shards, broken pieces of a brittle artifact most of us dismissingly call life.

the fish that fell off the sky

i always told tall tales growing up. and it never got me into trouble so much as when i told true ones.

my favorites usually involved me and my often rehashed encounters with a very unoriginal black hairy giant smoking a cliched enormous cigar.

and my friends, those very earnest boys, just lapped up my kapre stories like they were the dark virtuoso pieces of the brothers grimm.

annoyed though, but my mother simply brushed off my taradiddling. essential part, perhaps to her thinking, of my growing up.

until one afternoon, i brought home for dinner a fish, a big silvery one, that i claimed simply fell off the sky.

tweaking my ears, my mother demanded that i return the fish she thought i stole from our neighbor fisherfolks.

but i never stole nothing from nobody, i insisted.

this made her livid that she made me kneel on a bed of salt. she threatened to keep me there, even for a day, until i find back my scruples and return the fish to its rightful catcher.

crying now, i told my mother that the fish simply dropped from heaven. this infuriated her more that my usually bated mother was now screaming in my face.

from then on, i realized how dangerous it was to really tell a true story.

before the salt could pickle raw my knees, i relented. i made up this story about how manang alet, a neighbor two houses removed from ours, gave me one of her husband’'s catch as she was really fond of me.

fond? why? my mother asked.

because i resembled her dead son, i told her.

my mama's mien quickly blanched as if the ghost of manang alet’'s son just spooked her.

she helped me get up and scraped out the salt crystals caking in my knees with the hem of her skirt. i still remember until now the pink and white flower prints of her skirt blossoming in my knees.

that evening, we had one of the juiciest fish steaks we ever had. and mama, in her prayer before the meal, thanked copiously the lord for surrounding us with friendly neighbors and enveloping the new me with the mantle of integrity.

on my way to bed, she reminded me to ask the lord for forgiveness for my transgression earlier that day. and when i only nodded, she called me out again, enunciating my full christian name like a curse.

saying my prayers that night, i asked the lord for pardon many many times over for my made up manang alet story.

and all throughout the rest of my evening prayers, i tried, i really tried, to suppress the memory, that magical memory of how earlier that afternoon, this majestic kingfisher bird, indigo crested, straight billed, just lost its grip of its day’'s catch and tossed on my way a silvery reef fish as i made my way home along the coastal road that was never straight and narrow.

a love story

here’'s a love story. not mine. i hardly have any to tell lately.

this is that of a friend, one i only thought of then as someone given to bruising bouts of cynicism with this world.

and it all started, perhaps, with a sleep, one of those loathsome slices of death, as longfellow described it.

this friend, a veteran of really screwy relationships, has understandably given up on finding the beloved. no trolling on the net, no saturday parties, no cruising. one of the straightest fags i’'ve ever known.

then on a gathering of mostly married couples two months ago, he and another faggot were there, lost and confused. both of them ended up quite sanely in his apartment. his bed in his apartment.

now, he knew of this guy’'s reputation beforehand. a gay lothario. and yet he insisted on taking a chance again, taking a chance at being hurt, i suppose. and he knew very well what most of us felt about his latest foray into heartbreakville.

but i'’ve seen him quite differently, he told me once. in his sleep, he is this honest.

i was too yellow to tell him then this was only a myth, a new age pablum that one can have access to another man’'s soul through this vaunted transparency during sleep.

and in the end, there was not much story, love story, to tell between the two. the ill fated couple has decided to break up last weekend. i only knew of it today after another friend, tingling with unalloyed schadenfreude, called.

at first, i deemed it was bad taste for me to call my still grieving friend. but i was never one beyond the pale of things. and so i did.

what were you thinking of anyway? my very impolitic question to him.

well, i thought he had changed, he answered. after all the bad relationships he, too, had, i thought he was ready for a change himself.

faggots, arguably, are the most optimistic species of this universe. despite the odds against us finding the beloved, we, by some quirky chromosomal design, insist on this prize like a royal birthright.

i once went out with him. not as in a date but went out as in mandate, i mean, a date between two fairy friends. we went to this japanese restaurant and, brushing off the bitchy maitre, seated ourselves at this fabulous window table.

as soon as we sat down, we noticed a little red box left, perhaps, by the previous patrons, on the edge of the table. i quickly hailed one of the waiters to inform him somebody left something in our table. this friend stopped me.

there could be a gorgeous diamond ring in there, he said. are you crazy? i told him.

a waiter came and i told him about the red box. my friend pleaded with the waiter to open it first in front of us before he takes it to the manager. there were shredded paper inside it.

see, i told him, nothing precious there.he shrugged and said nothing. feeling victorious, i needled him as to his apparent poor judgment.

why would you even think there was a ring in there? i asked him.

i don’'t know, he said as he pored over the menu. i just couldn’t imagine that was just a plain red box with nothing in it. there has got to be some diamond ring in it.

that was not a love story. it's a story of someone who truly knows how to love.

resisting the evil

five minutes into the train ride, i was glad i didn'’t smile when i first saw them. these two old pinoy fairies sitting across me in a train lumbering to a little township near pennsylvania.

me, there because i agreed to help welcome a college classmate in a party thrown by another friend who lives in this quaint hamlet requiring some three hours of train ride from where i live. them, i don’t know. looked like they were just out for a day trip people, old ones, take out of whimsy now that the sun is out more frequently.

and ever since the train pulled out of grand central, the two never stopped talking. i mean, this pair of aging pinoy queens just twaddled on. i worked the night before and i planned on catching some two hours of sleep in the train. and there went my plan.

first they talked about their respective employments. but that was only when our train was still underground. as soon as we surfaced to glorious sun, they were tommyrotting about what they unabashedly called their papas.

oh my boyfriend, he doesn'’t want me to smoke anymore, the one in high waisted pair of denims told his companion. his friend made a face before answering, oh, your phantom boyfriend.

really, he insisted, he said that after he finished with university. his friend, the one with three thick yellow necklaces, each with credit card sized pendants, cut him off midway. oh, your scholar.

the one wearing those mommy jeans was miffed. faggot, you’re just bitter because nobody wants to be with you not unless you pay them.

this made the multi-necklaced fairy to snort. faggot, my jimmy, we'’ve been together since i left for the states. and when i get to manila next month, he'’ll surely be there waiting for me.

of course, his irritated friend said, dollars for a lousy bang, which hustler is fool enough to say no to that? even to a geriatric queen like you?

the two looked steamed at each other now. and for a while there, i thought they would stop talking to each other the rest of the way. or at least until my stop comes.

but as soon as a beautiful boy walked by, they soon were toshing again. each one claiming in their artful ways that it was him that the gorgeous guy was eyeing and trying to hook up with.

not that i don’'t believe in young boys hooking up with old faggots. but the guy who just walked by looked like one of those perpetually unclothed abercrombie models and the two of them, well, they'’re prunes, pinoy pitted prunes.

i made a show of fidgeting in my seat hoping this would at least pipe them down. but to no avail.

i consoled myself with watching the rural landscape asserting itself now more forcefully outside. houses got to be sparser as farm barns appeared more frequently. half an hour before my stop, we passed by a township that had these numerous deserted industrial looking sites, all chainlink fenced. like former nazi death camps.

two weekends ago, i went to the 66th street barnes and nobles to scout for a neruda omnibus collection. this friend we'’re welcoming, he’'s a huge neruda fan.

while there, i chanced upon this cookbook purportedly written by women who died in nazi concentration camps during world war II. it was just mind boggling. the idea of these women about to be thrown to their deaths compiling dream recipes.

it didn'’t make sense to me at first. but later, much, much later, i realized that by conjuring up good stuff from their gentler past, these women, through their dream recipes, were resisting boldly the great evil that was hell bent in obliterating their culture, their identities.

i looked at these two old fags and it was horrifying to see how time ravaged them. i could not even allow myself at first the thought that there was a time that both of them were young, vibrant and was desired truly by other young, gorgeous men.

and little by litte, as my stop nears faster and faster, i gave in to this huge need to listen to their prattle. this need to listen to witnesses to identities, to lives that ultimately, like mine, will be blotted out.

giggles

is she asleep? the voice on the other line is now as familiar to me as any of my co-workers’. that of the boyfriend of my patient in XXXB.

soundly, i told him. he was not content. did she ask for more demerol? i told him she was good with her oxycontin at bedtime.

we had similar midnight phone conversations ever since his girlfriend, a frail woman of only 22 years, was admitted three weeks ago for intractable, generalized pain.

nobody really knows what'’s going on with her. not even her attending doctor. all we can see is this sapless woman given to bouts of debilitating pain. pain she could not localize. sometimes, it’'s from her joints, most of the times, it’'s just the back.

and the pain is so enfeebling that the girl, basically a kid, has been reduced to a hemiplegic, her left side. no stroke here, no cardiac arrest, no nothing. all pain. crippling pain.

last week, it has gotten worse. when eating, food, processed, pureed food, now just dribble from her mouth.

i’'ve worked in acute care for a time now and yet the sight of this woman cut in her prime by this mysterious pain still ruffles me.

things only get better when the boyfriend is around. not that she magically gets well when he is here. no, the pain is ever present.

it only gets better for me. just looking at this young man, strapping and looking like he could get it anytime, anywhere, insisting on feeding his infirm girlfriend. just being with her. i couldn'’t help but be more believing with this world.

one time, i chanced upon them during meal time. he brought her what looked like homemade tripe soup.

i was shocked. the lawsuit weary nurse in me quickly told him she could choke. don'’t worry, he told me. i over cooked this, he said while pulling the sweetbread by hand into thin, easy to swallow shards. this is her favorite, you know. how, in the world, can i argue with that?

last night, she rang the call bell. i immediately went to the narcotics box to get her demerol before scurrying off to her room.

but she did not want any pain med. all she wanted to know if something'’s wrong with her phone because her boyfriend hasn'’t called her up yet.

oh, i forgot to tell you, i told her. he called up earlier but i told him you were asleep. she smiled then asked me to dial his boyfriend's number. she also asked me to cradle the phone between her right ear and her right shoulder she shrugged sharply. she looked so pained in this position.

as soon as she began talking to him, i thought i would see her agony diminished. but her face was still contorted from pain. and yet she went on with their conversation. about nothing, really. some talk about how stupid this sitcom was earlier on tv.

i made this hand sign telling her i’'ll be back later for her pain med. she mouthed something like thank you. she looked like she was in labor.

an hour later, i did rounds and i found her soundly asleep again. as i left her room, i suddenly heard this tinny giggle.

she was giggling. in her dreams.

a giggle from a girl, all giddy with the almost summer weather, blushing from daring to wear this really short shorts, going to the corner store to first buy this cherry flavored soda and then sipping it at the curbside while waiting for his boyfriend to pick her up in his beat up hog.

ghost deer

i saw my first ghost deer yesterday. i think.

bored from waiting for a promised call very long in the coming, i was not that surprised when another friend, one who never thinks of me whenever he has a good time, called me, instead.

he was beat from watching recorded reruns of sex and the city. me, bushed from lazing in my bed the entire sunday morning, waiting for that blasted call. all these on a weekend when the weather was quickly surpassing that of baguio's during summer.

my yes came rather quickly when he asked me if i was in for a ride. where, i asked him. anywhere as long as it was out of the city, we both agreed, sort of.

as soon as he picked me up, i quickly foisted the idea of driving all the way to this abandoned army depot upstate that apparently now has the world's largest population of white deer. native americans call them ghost deer.

i've heard about them, he said. you saw that, too? national geographic channel, right?

so he hit the interstate which, according to his rudimentary star scout map reading skills, would take us there. but some forty five minutes into our ride, he realized that stretch was leading us somewhere else. upstate, yes, but somewhere upstate else.

he threw me the map hoping i could find the right way. the map looked like a hansel and gretel forest of candy colored thin trees to me. great, i could read his mind, another cartograph-illiterate fairy.

in my most cheerful of voices, i egged him to just drive on, maybe some half hour more. who knows, we could get to some signs, signs that even a fourth grader could read and understand. or better yet, we could chance upon a busload of gorgeous, young, athletic men also on their way to that buck camp.

half an hour went by and not a sign. worse, only slow cars driven mostly by geriatric men we saw ambling along the wide interstate.

then as we got more desperate, suddenly we had this road epiphany. along the route, a highway sign announces an outlet mall two miles ahead. he didn’t have to ask me. he quickly veered right and off we exited on the ramp going to that upstate outlet commons.

to the uninitiated, an outlet commons is an inner city dweller's shopper's paradise, a massing of all conceivable name brand outlets in one out of the way sprawling mall, dispensing fifth avenue goods at non-manhattan prices.

in a legend among the chickasaw indians, a young warrior, blue jay, fell in love with the chief's only daughter, bright moon. but as in any other love story worth listening to, the father was not so smitten with his daughter's brash suitor.

so the chief tasked him to scout for the hide of the white deer, a dowry the scheming old man was certain blue jay could never pay.

like most native americans, chickasaws believed that white pelted animals possess magical qualities. the white deerskin is still the favored wedding dress material among them even today.

blue jay went on to his vision, i mean, pelt quest. but three weeks went by without a sighting of the illusive deer. then, one full moonlit night, the white deer drifted within his shooting range.

blue jay then sank his sharpest arrow deep into the young buck's heart. but instead of sinking to its knees, the mystical deer charged towards the brash warrior, the deer's antlers ablaze in fury.

blue jay never returned to his tribe. and in her sadness, bright moon never married, harboring this secret. everytime there was a full moon, bright moon was the only one who could see this white deer, an arrow still embed in its chest, running around their camp, taunting her. and she lived, loveless and vengeful, cursing the deer to finally fall to its death so that blue jay would return.

my friend and i, we sort of lost it at the outlet that his car's trunk was not enough to hold all our purchases. i dread seeing my credit card bill later this month.

we dumped at the backseat some of the stuff we bought. and as we neared the bronx exit towards my place, we hit on this road bump. from the rear view mirror, i checked out our shopping bags. my gleaming new pair of nike hitops was booted out of its box. its white hide flashed in the now falling light like a bride's uncreased gloves.

the sweetness of things

weekends in new york. these has got to be the most dreaded of days among the unattached, straight or otherwise.

but somehow, for a single, gay dude (trust me, there'’s no redundancy here.), saturday nights attain almost these mythical proportions.

miss it, and one suffers from these vague hunger pangs throughout the week. fjord in it, and almost always, one carries this gnawing sense of disappointment the rest of the weary weekdays.

and then, there are those times, those really sweet times. the stuff made for hard to erase memories. memories that could undergird one’s shriveling ego throughout the next winter.

okay, so i'’m rambling. only because i just got back, all heady, from knowing (no wink, wink, here, if you know what i mean.) this guy.

first, some short sociological treatise on the proclivities of pinoy gay men here in the big apple. a sort of an abbreviated field guide to a very predictable species here in the gotham savannah.

it’s a rule, almost an iron clad one, that if you are a gay man who has at least 10% pinoy blood larking about in your fabulous circulatory system, then one is drawn to, almost without fail, to the fair skinned, blonde haired, preferably blue eyed, and most likely khaki/chino wearing dude.

in other words, the kayumangging bakla (brown faggot) almost always is a potato queen. although it doesn’t necessarily mean that all white gay men are rice queens, much to the consternation of most of my gay friends around here.

but that is not where i was going for. what i'’m saying is i am an anomaly of the species (story of my life, huh?).

for i am, almost always, not drawn to the white boys. and, horror of all horrors, i always have this jones for the fellow flips, the kapwa kababayan.

there, i’'ve said it. now, i can take the snidest of your judgments like a real man.

having said that, i guess, it would not come as a surprise to you if i now gush about this fellow pinoy dude i was introduced to in a private party downtown last night.

but come to think of it, i better not. memories like these are too precious for my arid life. i better keep them all to myself, all tightly capped in my canteen of life savers.

all i can tell you is that we talked and talked and talked. and apparently, we shared the same passion about a whole lot of stuff: those tone poems by taiwanese director tsai ming liang,(actually they'’re tedious movies to the uninitiated), the gourmet qualities of the crispy pata, the loveliest of our manila memories.

sure we talked about life, our piddling lives, and we both insisted that they must have meanings. meanings that we, despite our seemingly unliftable baggage, are still willing to afford them.

sure, we talked about living our own truths. and we both sighed after admitting that we both have no capabilities to speak of them.

and sure, he told me, after all these giddy talk, that he was leaving in a week. going to this music scholarship in stuttgart, germany.

sure, that is so not a problem with me, i told him.

writing down this post, i'’m reminded of this cruel line from a work by the french poet jean-paul toulet.

beware the sweetness of things.

for i could get used to them, right? sure, i know that.

pride and prejudice

i would be the last person to admit that i particularly care about the royals, those foppish britishers, especially.

not even the systemic schadenfreude in the media from the royals'’ interminable gaffes interest me, at all.

but today, hearing about the news that finally that fumbling future king of england married the woman he has loved for more than three decades, i couldn'’t help feeling a bit toasty myself.

so much so that i tivoed whatever there was on the telly about the couple’s wedding, or civil ceremony, or whatever they call it there in those isles of the bloodiest of weathers.

unembarrassed being awashed with this vague feeling of warmth, i watched as these two “boring old gits” (as the notoriously mean london tabloids routinely described the two lately) got all spruced up for their early saturday morning civil union.

without surprise here, i didn'’t initially catch the irony as the couple recited parts of the traditional marriage text from the 1662 book of common prayer.

we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, recited charles and camilla earnestly.

almost everyone with tv these days know their love story. they first met as students in the 1970s and carried on with this illicit affair through the prince’'s marriage to his equally adulterous first wife, lady di.

charles, have you resolved to be faithful to your wife, forsaking all others so long as you both shall live? the archbishop of canterbury asked the star-crossed lover-prince.

that is my resolve, with the help of god, the prince said without flinching.

camilla was asked the same and publicly stated her resolve, as well. then the choir burst into a lusty bach cantata.

today'’s event, though, was a far cry from the prince’'s first marriage.

although both of charles'’ photogenic sons were in attendance (prince william standing as the fidgety best man), most of the other crusty royals, those incestuous royals of europe, weren’'t there. and they didn’'t have the decency to invent some lofty excuses to skip the ceremony.

charles'’ father refused to postpone a trip to, of all places, germany. and one of his distant relatives, sweden's crown princess is too busy opening an ikea store in japan.

in that lavish royal wedding a quarter of a century ago, prince charles wore this elaborate military dress uniform, complete with an anachronistic sword.

this time, armed only with a lasting love for his not so radiant wife, the prince wore a kind of a dull morning suit.

but there was no mistaking it. shedding the foppish uniform he wore the last time, the prince looked this time like the real mr. darcy, a mr. fitzwilliam darcy with balls.

the new planting

i went out early today intending to do something: buy a newspaper other than my subscription, wolf down a big, greasy breakfast, hope big time on a single megalotto ticket.

anything, just to be out early. early on a tingly spring morning.

there are just times, like this morning, that i want to acquire things, accomplish stuff. and i want to obtain them, tick them off my list while there are hardly anybody around to see me achieve them.

for i don’'t relish a lot of fit, gym gaga people see me pigging on cholesterol crazy, crisp bacon and two runny whole eggs. nor do i want my fellow new york times book review readers see me poring over the dish page of a local tabloid.

i believe there is a word for this although i can’'t come up with it now. nor will i, voluntarily, if it dawns on me later. but it is something tangential perhaps (or is it?) to the incestuous concepts of pretense, façade, and snobbery.

and, somehow, there is no shame here.

you don'’t believe me, of course. you say, then why do it on the sly?

and you got me there.

somehow, all i know is i just want to savor my aloneness, my illusional singularity in privileging these appetites over what the rest canonizes in this city of sixteen million judgmental eyes.

somehow, i want my aloneness to register, albeit a faint voice, of protest against the world'’s rampaging, flattening opinions.

somehow, i want my detachment from what most of the world approves of to put me in contact with someone i can have the most pleasant of start-of-day chatter, someone, perhaps, like my self unfettered by the confining parameters of what’'s hip and cool.

somehow, i want to enjoy my solitude so I can fully grasp the measure of my so-called independence the rest of the day .

on my way to the diner, i saw and subsequently followed a stooped, old man, that morose, miserable man from the next building, doddering towards the little plot behind the communal parking lot in my neighborhood.

he was lugging what looked like a hoe, a no-nonsense garden tool. this in the concrete jungle of the bronx.

i had to stop by the newsstand while he continued walking. walking alone to his plot.

somehow, i want my aloneness to be like this big, but fine toothed rake, scratching the now unproductive topsoil of my self pelted with the constant acid rain of orthodoxy and mob mentality.

and somehow, i want my rake of solitude to turn me over like a parched land ready for the new planting.

open the universe

ten years before his death the other day, that great gossip (as the caustic john gardner described him) saul bellow was poisoned by eating a toxic fish in the caribbean.

the poisoning rendered him immobile for a time giving him fulminant pneumonia. after his recovery from a boston hospital, mr. bellow’'s nervous system was almost rendered kaput by the toxins that he could hardly write. there was a time even when he was hardly oriented as to time and place.

in hospital parlance, he would have been described during endorsements as a patient AOX2; awake, oriented only to his person, but not to time or place.

that would have been the greatest tragedy had he wallowed in that condition.

as paeans poured in from all over the world since the nobel laureate'’s death tuesday, the phrase master of universe invariably creeps into a good number of these encomiums. in a way, he really was.

from among the american, nay, make that english, writers of the 20th century, he was arguably alone in this unstinting coverage, this hyper orientation to almost every time, every place this writer wants to wade in, this generous inclusiveness of his work. he seamlessly rambled between society's high and low, the colloquial and the mandarin. all these without patronage or condescension.

but as to the full and balanced measure of his legacy, that would take some time to tell. and some really nasty arguings in the academe and what’'s left of the still contentious literary world.

in the meantime, let me, a reader, a third world reader, one who belongs to a culture that some of his critics claim he never particularly cared for, revisit some of my own private bellovian memories. this is my puny way, the only way i am capable perhaps, of honoring, of celebrating this most american of all novelists of the 20th century.

i remember this shame, this embarrassment after having one of my pieces, who i was hoping then to be printed in the op ed pages of the broadsheet i worked for in manila, slammed by an admired editor.

it was a spin off from my reportage the previous week of a fluvial procession tragedy somewhere in cavite. some good two dozens of devotees drowned after the fluvial float they crowded in sank.

in my attempts, admittedly stupid, at being pretentiously literary, i inserted a line somewhere saying more die of heartbreak (bellow’'s 1987 novel) than perhaps these tragedies that occur like clockwork in our safety averse society. this brought howls in the central desk. and for a week i chose to make myself scarce from the newsroom.

i remember, too, reading about this dog in bucharest yowling in the night, in the long night of the soviet domination of romania. this from bellow'’s 1982 novel, the dean'’s december.

i remember reading feverishly that book during the months leading to the heady edsa revolution. and i shudder as dean corde, the archetypal bellovian hero, imagines these howls, these barkings as a protest, as a plea.

"for god's sake, open the universe a little more!"

help is on the way

two doves have been taken with my window ledge the way illicit lovers, perhaps, with an out of the way traveler’'s lodge.

this is just a preliminary observation, nothing scientific here, but it doesn'’t seem like the two of them are lovers anyway. no amorous cooing here. just plain annoying pedestrian gurgling.

another thing strange is their incessant pecking at the glass pane. at first, i thought it was just reflex bellicosity. seeing another dirty dove in the glass, you know, brings out their innate combativeness. hence, the nebing at my window.

but then, this exercise seems to have a deliberate, almost martial, quality to it. like the two are really sharpening their beaks. but whetting for what?

yesterday afternoon, i found again these two scraggly birds laboring on with their bills like renegade ronins, religiously honing their samurais, waiting for the time another reputable shogun will commission them once more.

i shooed them away. but when they were gone, it felt so disquieting without their ruckus. alone in peace, i felt trap by the cold, the seeming desolation of my apartment. i decided to catch the tail end of the local newscast.

nothing in it really except, perhaps, the one about the delivery man from a bronx chinese restaurant who has been reported missing for the past three days. he was finally found. alive but hungry.

all this time, he was trapped in an express elevator in a huge residential building. he spent almost half a week in a 4 by 6 foot car before his rescue yesterday.

when asked how long he has been trapped, the dazed delivery man kept on pointing at his wrist watch, swirling his finger around the dial several times. the fujian native hardly speaks a decent sentence of english.

as soon as an interpreter arrived, the still shaken man said he was perplexed at how nobody could hear him banging the elevator walls throughout his captivity.

just in time for my dinner, the two came back. first, they finished off the moldy crumb of a baguette they brought with them. then, they went right back to pecking at my glass pane.

first, the buxomy one, the one with the dirty white coat, initiated the pecking meter. tak-tak. then, the zebra dove followed through with a staccatoish ta-tak. tak-tak, ta-tak. tak-tak, ta-tak, tak-tak, ta-tak.

this went on for some time that i decided to crack the window and drive them away more forcefully. as soon as i did that, the birds stopped their pecking but did not fly away.

they just cooed there and did their fidgety, jumpy, circly, birdy moves. i was transfixed at their dervish dance that i really thought they were banging my windows to let me know help is on the way.

no one to tell

i ha’ve always been a sucker for stories like hers. so much so, that i thought she was telling me my story.

last night, i attended another one of those garden variety gatherings. the usual for a pinoy party around here. the mahjong table peopled mostly with windbags. the spread of greasy victuals. the endless prattle. the grapple to wangle the karaoke mic.

only thing striking was talking to this woman who spoke mellifluously the same bisayan patois that i do. like myself, she grew up in the periphery of the bisayan speaking basin back home. but surprisingly, she and i, we took to each other'’s linguistic idiosyncrasies swimmingly.

and when she was into her fourth imported san mig can, she was loose with her story about the great love of her life.

no, she wasn'’t drunk-bawling. she was just sad and heavy with this longing. i could almost feel the cushion in the settee we were sitting settling down deeper for a good half a foot more.

i wish I could tell you her story. but she asked me, after all the details she spared me not, not to tell any other soul about it. she had this immense pride of ownership of this extremely wistful thing.

waking up this morning, i wasted a good deal of time in bed mulling on how prodigal for me not to tell you her story. if there was one thing, sophocles once said, that frees us of all of the weight and pain of life, that is love. her love for this man is potentially liberating to perhaps some of us. it is to me.

but then i remember the beauty of her story. and that makes me keep my promise to her that most of the time i loosely give around and break. beauty somehow is sacred to me.

then where does that leave me and this post?

i'’m not sure, either. maybe, somewhere around a year after losing this great love of mine.

the edsa elevated rail was just a month into its operation. and there i was getting off at crossing station. and from afar, i thought i saw him with his new boyfriend.

and for a moment there, the house sparrows nestled atop the street lamps across araneta coliseum broke out into a winged bouquet of feathers in the smoggy cubao air.

silently, the doddering lion, the one with the moth eaten elbows in malabon zoo, shook hard its mane. the terrified mother of a brat quickly hauled away her son towards the more pacific exhibit of rare birds.

meanwhile, on a fishing rig near tubathaha reefs in palawan, a lonely crewmember atop the viewing deck just spotted a mating couple of dugong, leaving him stunned and breathless with no one around to tell.

the sacred and the profane

besides the obligatory mention of the pope’'s death, it'’s all nora aunor these days among the kababayan around here.

for nora, the only living filipino actor who could be nominated straighfacedly to become national artist, was arrested late wednesday by the los angeles international airport police on suspicion of possessing a redneck narcotic, the lowly shabu.

airport screeners reportedly found some 8 grams of methamphetamine from the fiftyish actor’'s carry on bag. they also allegedly found what was described as a crudely put together glass bong not so subtly wrapped in a t-shirt in her bag.

let me quickly succumb to this facile impulse and point out the obvious. classic sacred and profane mix. this happenstance of the death of the supreme pontiff, a beloved figure in our national soul, and the arrest and inevitable ruin of nora, a much more adored figure.

nothing discordant about this coincidence. this for the true blue pinoy raised in a country of the headiest mix of the numinous and the impious. the virgin madonna and the harlot. the mourning and celebration, being not mutually exclusive or incompatible during the philippine holy week observance.

on instant messaging, i asked a friend back in manila how the electronic media was covering this incident. i only had nora'’s story in mind.

my friend stunned me with his reply. he described how the current highest rated newscast in the country (24 oras of GMA 7) treated the headlines of the day.

first, it had the entertainment news presenter, in body hugging knit blouse and skimpy skirt, talking about the reaction of nora’'s former husband, another actor, on her arrest.

thereafter, the same presenter announced with much fanfare that on that very same night, just an hour after the newscast, a new teleseries will debut in their network, a reworking of mars ravelo’'s campy comics classic darna.

from there, the perky presenter handed the baton to the somber lady anchor, wrapped in a schoolmarmy black suit. she then talked about the pope'’s funeral plans. all in a day’'s work at a philippine newsroom.

la aunor (the adulatory moniker her fans insisted on calling her) was initially booked at the van nuys jail although she was quickly released early thursday after posting a $10,000 bail. she will be arraigned april 21.

i can see in my mind now an enterprising pinoy documentarian drafting like crazy the storyboard of his new work recording for posterity the downfall of one of the last true stars from the golden age of philippine cinema (was there ever?).

first, the documentarian'’s establishing shot, a pan across st. peter’'s basilica square overflowing with mourners.

then comes his tasteful recreation, an indoor shot somewhere in the papal apartments. this would feature somebody acting as the camerlengo, the chamberlain of the holy roman catholic church, calling out the christian name of the deceased pope.

overheard: karol wotyla, karol wotyla, karol wotyla. after these calls and without any response from the now lifeless pope, we shall hear the camerlengo say, in italian, of course, the pope is truly dead.

then jump cut to the los angeles county airport courthouse. the bailiff would then call out la aunor by her real name. nora cabaltera villamayor, how do you plead?

from there, in rushes a slew of clips of nora aunor'’s memorable lines from her illustrious filmography.

my brother is not a pig (from minsan may isang gamu-gamu). i did not kill anybody (from the flor contemplacion story).

inevitably, it would end with that indelible rant from ishmael bernal's classic himala.

walang himala...walang himala. tayo ang gumagawa ng sarili nating himala. (there are no miracles; we create our own miracles.)

the road to damascus

i was twice an anomaly growing up in our remote island.

first, i was raised by a single parent, a withdrawn mother in a town peopled mostly with chattering wives and their drunk husbands.

then, my mother and i, we were the fourth founding family of a puny protestant church that counted only seven households as its core congregation. this in an island with then a four hundred year old, coral stone, roman catholic church.

this never bothered me blatantly before. it only did when i was in an overnight ferry towards the capital with my first girlfriend. we were on our way to see the pope.

the year was 1981 and the pope john paul II was making his first visit to our archipelago.

i was just a month away from finishing grade school and i know then something was really different with me. different, like i-find-other-boys-more-interesting different. and so like every other sexually confused boy in our class, i got me a girlfriend.

she was the daughter of a stalwart of the indigo uniformed legion of mary in our town. and when the pope decided to fly in to the country’'s capital, there was no question as to her family going to see the pontiff.

somehow, i was swept along with her family'’s plans. looking back at the trip now, i am amazed at how my fundamentalist protestant mother allowed me to be in a trip that would deliver me to the hands of the head of what she firmly believed the apostate church.

maybe, mother saw early on i would need a miracle myself to become the straight boy she prayed i would be. and if that would involve the roman catholic pontiff, so be it.

and there i was, the only non catholic boy, glaringly unable to recite the mysteries of the rosary, in a boat filled with signing of the cross pilgrims.

i remember hardly getting any sleep that night. i remember looking over the next cot where my girlfriend was placidly asleep, a novena prayer book still clutched in one of her hands. i remember feeling somehow disgraced, and i didn’t know why, by the pureness, the serenity of this girl’'s mien.

when our boat docked at manila'’s north harbor, our group'’s leader, a seminarian with this thick, unruly mop of hair, barked at us to pin the commemorative medals he earlier distributed.

on it was a rather fuzzy picture of the pontiff smiling dangerously like a cad. his chasuble was as gaudy as any of the vestments of the santos in our town’'s mossy catholic church.

as we were walking down the bobbing gangplank, the pin from my girlfriend'’s lapel popped off and flew into the water now thick with opalescent swirls of spilled petroleum.

a very young sea gypsy boy quickly dove after the shiny errant pin thinking perhaps it was a coin tossed by a generous pilgrim.

seconds after, the badjao boy surfaced. while treading under the water, he waved the retrieved gewgaw in his right hand hoping the owner would redeem it with some measly coins.

in a flash of gentlemanly decorum, i quickly tossed a coin towards the boy. before diving after it, the sea gypsy hurled the papal pin towards me.

i wasn'’t able to catch it for in the early morning light, the pin glinted and blinded me momentarily the way, perhaps, a similar light stunned st. paul on the road to damascus.

the rime of the young mariner

i may have spoken too soon. just a day after i rhapsodized about spring settling down and the electric possibility of summer soon, the rains came. dreary london rain.

and with it, the temperature dipped once more to late winter territories. not to mention the gloom the overcast ushered - somehow gladly - back in.

it'’s not that bad, really. it'’s not that just good, either. spring good.

but just as spring can'’t make up its mind around here in the east coast, in the island i grew up in, it would be the season of decidedly blistering heat.

with the sea breezes taking their summer breaks as well, this, logically, should have been great fishing season. but alas, it is the most venturesome. for the vilest sea squalls always blow this time of the year.

but this didn'’t deter us, swarthy, pimply school kids, from dreaming then of finally becoming men.

summer months of my childhood meant dreaming of being allowed by our parents to join the foul mouthed crew of any of those well lighted fishing rigs ready to prowl the seas way beyond the island’'s iridescent blue green horizon.

but me being out in the open sea, that was just out of the question with my mother. and she had to concoct stuff for me to do, instead.

she had to shepherd me to sedate bible camps. and when that circuit has been exhausted by mid april, she would put me behind the cash register of our little store in the market. this almost made me forget my dream of being in one of those fishing trawls. the juicy prospects of wangling loose bills from the cash box somehow did it.

but then my best friend would drop in at the store. this whenever the purse seiner he’'s apprenticing in, sort of, would dock back in our island.

and he would regale me with the adventures he had in the high seas. but isn'’t it dangerous? i once asked him. the tempests, they’'re nasty.

not really, he said dismissively after slurping down the soda i offered him in exchange for his tales.

it’s not the wind. it’s not even the dark water. it'’s them fish. the lapu-lapu, the stingrays, the danggit zooming into the boat like mad crazy bullets.

that couldn'’t be possible, i was beyond belief.

you don’t believe me? just ask manong goryo.

manong goryo was the town's bell ringer. tending the belfry was the only job he could apply for after he lost his left arm in a freak fishing accident.

but it was a malfunctioning net that did it, i argued.

no, he said with finality. when you’'re out there, there’'s no need to worry about the wind or the waves. beware, instead, of mad fishes raining down on one’'s boat.

going out to buy me lunch earlier, my appetite was quickly smothered by the darkness, the gloominess outside. the air had this rawness that is not particularly appetizing during meals.

and the unrelenting rain, it nipped at my still dry umbrella like a school of hungry fish at a fresh live bait.