immigrant

if, indeed, those who can't, teach, then it could well likely be that, those who can't write, write obsessively about writing. and i am, indeed, talking, i mean, writing about myself.

lately, i've been rereading some of my precipitate posts and i was justly terrified. not only with the indeliberateness of thought that went with the writing of most of them but with the sheer inordinate number of them devoted to my so-called writing. truly obsessed with writing, yet i have no real writing to show for it. hell, not even a heavily blue-penciled manuscript languishing suicidally near my high powered shredder to show for it, complete with a pre-printed rejection slip from a kind publishing house.

this very vocal profession of my putative affection - or should it be just affectation? - for writing must be my version of what consumer economists label as the phenomenon of aspirational purchasing. more than anything else, it is much about myself buying into a logo (the brooding writer), or buying into a lifestyle, buying into a way of life (the new urban literati) with my newfound income, my noveau acquaintances with some pretentious authors and even ghastlier lit theories.

lux, a fellow traveler in what she implies as a "laborsome" path towards what i call, for lack of a more incisive phrase, real writing, is on to something. she is finally hunkering down to Write Something. she calls her effort working on change. i am in awe of her sense of purpose. as tom clancy (surely a writer i don't see lux fancying following the footsteps of) said, "writing is essentially an exercise in determination."

one time, on a semestral break during my junior year at the university, i brought back home a number of writing books. you know, those with puffed up titles like how to write the breakout novel and the likes. after shunning the tv in favor of some serious time with my books, my mother, who was just too familiar with my monstrous tv viewing habits, was alarmed.

later, she cornered me and asked if everything was alright. i told her writing could be for me. i remember mother, a high school english teacher in her own right, gave me a most heartbreaking stare, what i could only imagine she looked when she first learned of my father's philandering. "look," she said, "what should be for you is to immigrate to the states soonest and do something useful."

well, mom, am here, have come. and yet, am still floundering, looking for that useful thing i'm supposed to be doing? for surely, you weren't talking about double shifts in the hospital, were you? oh, you were.

but mom, no, not really her. i should say, but the universe, in all its infinite wisdom, must be telling me something. and i just hope it's something like writing could still be for me. for writing makes an immigrant of me like what my mama told me to do. it takes me away from our parochial island but in the end, it finds me a new home, more approving, less captious, anywhere my heart so desires.

just because

a thing of staggering beauty, say, a batch of yellow blotch peony just mussed into a plane vase. isn't this just a most crippling sight?

last night, i fell into this magazine article by chance of the life of a medieval, no, renaissance, aesthete, and i couldn't goad myself to finish reading it. it was just petrifying, the very idea of his life.

or could it be that i'm just jealous? envious of his almost tragic vulnerability to beauty?

today, yet another one of those gorgeous spring days that i'm starting to get alarmingly used to. and while waiting for my take out mochacinno from a starbucks near the bus stop at 56th and lexington, i saw a stray napkin on the counter, pristine and still crisp, but with a red inked scrawl on it. a confessional, really. "it's such a lovely day...i called in sick," confided the latte drinking malingerer.

i was immensely jealous of the skulker's daring. the courage to act on an impulse beautiful. whereas, i am just paralyzed by the sight, much more the proximity of anything, anyone of beauty.

on a clear day, such as today, new york is just untouchable. and what do i do? i run for cover. i make up these excuses. i go cower under the sheltering sky of my ill-lit apartment, because, as i reason out-to whom, exactly?- i need to write about all this beauty. i need to celebrate new york, my town, my life, or whatever alibi i can come up with. for what? to exonerate myself? from my shabby timidity towards beauty?

i must be really growing old. i'm nostalgic mostly now of my callowness, that which afforded me then glorious valiance.

i remember when i was quite young, my school posse used to steal away from the donkeywork of our gardening classes every friday afternoons. and almost always, we went to just loiter at this craggy overhang, what must be a prehistoric corral cliff overlooking bantayan sea. sometimes when we got lucky, after a storm had just breezed by our island, we could see the snubbed outlines of mt. kanlaon in faraway negros island.

and on an especially one lucky day, one which i particularly remember because of the preponderance of dribbly swells in the water, a clean blue pipe of a wave just bulged out of the muck of white froth. and we were just sandbagged.

but nature, being what it is, could not help but showed off. we realized just moments later after the pipe swelled that a school of stunned--or were they just frolicking?--sting rays were caught in the barreling wave. as the wave peaked again, we could see the tails of the rays sticking out of the wet wall like limp spokes of a runaway bicycle tire.

being young, foolhardily young, we just jumped thereafter into the water, starched school uniforms, spit shined leather shoes and all, just because.

the state of the pinoy in the us of a, sort of (part II)

(as continued from yesterday)

picture this: you're a pinoy immigrant fain to leave all of the dense lattice work of every conceivable obligations to family and community back home in order to be a part of this marvelous social engineering feat such as nowhere in the world called the united states of america.

you, without rancor, consume two decades of your productive life here, exuberantly raise a decent family here, pay your taxes diligently to the government here. you've paid your dues, right? finally, you're one of them, right?

maybe, you feel not that quite deserving yet. so, perhaps grudgingly, you offer one of your loved ones to a war you might not fully fathom. the ultimate of dues, you might say, perhaps.

but for ligaya, it seems she'll forever be that docile neighbor who, despite a lifetime spent dutifully discharging what she must have felt to be her sworn civic duties, could never cop that coveted invitation to the club house.

for in a group that no american mother would willingly desire to be a part of, the sorority of mothers whose children have died in wars initiated by the united states, ligaya was resolutely barred entrance.

because in the eyes of the group's current leadership, ligaya is not american enough. "you have to be an american citizen," the president of the organization said. "we can't go changing the rules every time the wind blows."

throwing the proverbial insult to injury, the group's leader contemptuously sniffed at ligaya's life's choices "why wouldn't you want to become an american citizen?"

in fairness, the less xenophobic american military dares not ask its enlistees, one of whom was ligaya's dead son, this question. and yet, after paying the ultimate sacrifice, a fallen american soldier's mother is now humiliatingly subjected to this discrimination.

a more forward looking member of the organization, its much missed past president, said "there's no discrimination in a national cemetery. there's no discrimination when they get killed side by side. so how can we discriminate against a mother?"

a filipino mother, i'd say again, if the underscoring would not be too much for all of you.

so julio, my friend, tell me again how and why is it that us pinoy here in the so called land of all embracing - what was your word again?- smothering tolerance have it that good?

the state of the pinoy in the us of a, sort of (part I)

enough of this navel gazing, at least for a weekend, say. enough time, i think, to report to you the state of the pinoy in the u.s. of a.

well, not really in those grandiloquent terms. who am i kidding?

in fact, this post is just a response to a friend's email recently. he, who feel sort of discriminated because of his pinoyness in a birmingham hospital in the queen's realm across the pond, brushed off my suggestion that our kababayan have it good over there in gracious europe than us here duking it out in still gauche america.

au contraire, he said. in fact, he declared, "the condition of pinoys in the usa is the best there is among the filipinos abroad."

i must admit, i am a pinoy still confounded with this great sociological experiment called the united states. and although i have not an iota of credential or inclination to speak for everyone of us farmhands here in uncle sam's ranch, i can say with some degree of cocksureness that there is no such thing as the state of the pinoy in the united states. that's the last thing, it seems, our kababayan wanted to fortify, much less maintain, here.

not unless somebody tells me i've been living so far in some other country, it's getting more and more apparent to me that for most of the kababayan, pinoyness has the rankness of a dirty word, way up there with incest and pedophilia, perhaps.

the quicker we can dye our hair brunette-don't forget the blonde highlights-and fade into the engulfing blandness of white america, that's about the ultimate in making it here. of all the emerging minorities here in the states, us pinoy are notorious for our obsequiousness to the bulldozing demands of the majority.

and then a story such as the following flares up out of nowhere and just about sobers up every self deluding kababayan.

this is a tale of a pinay mother who offered a son to the cause of the american invasion of afghanistan. the son died in combat and the bereaved mother, thinking she had all the rights to, applied for membership to a washington-based sorority of mothers who have lost their sons and daughters in the wars in both irag and afghanistan.

coldly, she was denied membership to the american gold star mothers, all because she wasn't an american citizen.

the grief stricken mother, who ironically is named ligaya (joy) is about to deal with the pain of the grim prospect of losing another loved one, that of her gravely ill husband, a cancer stricken patient.

here's praying ligaya is of stouter stuff, just like her soldier son.

...to be continued tomorrow

undercover poet

last night, i called in sick to help a friend pack. he is moving out. not back to manila; not even to another state. just two blocks away, in a cheaper apartment. and besides, i really thought i was sick.

to kind of reward me, he went out to order some decent take out from one of the italian bistros in our street, the one with the thickest bisteca fiorentina. "take a break," he hollered as he ratcheted down the newly tiled staircase. and i did.

i flip opened the yet unsealed, flapping covers of one of the boxes. on top of the heap inside was an old boom box. one of his very first big purchases, he told me once. ghetto blaster, announced a sticker, now peeling in its edges, still blazing with its neon green and yellow fading hues from one of the portable stereo's woofers. i closed the box back and from the yet unsealed crack, i could still see a glint of the radio's silver finish mute like an unplayed cd viewed from a transparent cover.

on the surface of the other unopened box were two logo sweatshirts which i never saw him wore in any of our outings. one of them, a hoodie, was still pasted with this vertical, elongated, transparent sticker that had m's printed liberally on it. the letters seemed to glow in the dark as if to call out to its owner "hey, over here, in the bottom rung. you haven't worn me yet."

somebody rang and, unquestioningly, i buzzed open the door thinking it was my friend. but unfamiliar knocks on the door later made me realize the movers have arrived. i told them that my friend was not around. they said, the gruff, portly one more forcefully, that they'd rather start hauling them boxes down now before they would be slapped with another ticket. and i'd just let them.

one of them peered inside another box filled with mostly magazines and grimaced. he motioned to a partner, the portly one. then both of them, with much audible grunting, successfully heaved the heavy box onto their bi-wheeled truck. as they made it to the landing at the bottom of the staircase, i heard them and they were incredulous at how people insist on moving out with their scraps. i took it they mean my friend's magazines.

some twenty minutes later, my friend had yet to come back. the movers had already slid his mattress, fraying at one of its corners, down the staircase. a rust hued line quickly marked the side of the mattress where it rubbed against the banister.

when two of the movers came up again, one of them, the whiny one, waved a piece of paper at me with familiar scrawl on it. "this must be your friend's," he said. the handwriting was my friend's alright. but my friend, one who could never sit still for a book, writing a poem?

there were only three boxes left and i suddenly felt uncomfortable standing inside the now empty apartment. so i went out into the hallway and took to just looking into my friend's now desolate place. and it felt like i locked myself out of my own place and all i could do, since the friendlier neighbors were not around to buzz me in, just peer into the window and see familiar things but not recognize who lived in here.

the gas attendant

two things i can't yet shake off: this edward hopper picture of a lone dungareed gas station attendant and a wonderful (no other more apt modifier) afternoon with a fellow blogger at the museum of modern art, which, in a way, could be just one and the same.

yesterday afternoon, lux, a globe trotting blogger, made a pit stop in new york, her mother's provenance. after having notched up all the excitement she could, to probably last her a lifetime, in her visits to vietnam, cambodia, egypt, greece, france and, god knows where else, she decided to have some downtime with moi, mr. excitement, at, of all places, the moma, a favorite haunt of sedate, chanel wearing upper east side matrons.

thinking i should match up all her previous heady travel experiences, i made the gaffe of ushering her first towards the more kinetic pictures of moma's most recent drawings and paintings acquisitions. you know, the type where the very idea of a representation in a canvas would send an artist serious enough to be curated at the moma to art hell apoplexy. and there we were, two flabbergasted art hicks who literally couldn't make heads or tails with the hung pictures.

but we were hardy souls and we slogged it through, our trek made only bearable by our conversations about our differing cultures and our common love for writing. until we finally found ourselves in familiar ground, the museum's gallery of its early modern art warhorses-picassos, matisses, magrittes, and even a spattering here and there of van gogh. and we both heard each other exhaled.

here's a dirty secret i've long kept. despite my very vocal affectations of digging contemporary art, i was never that comfortable around non-representational art. there i've said it. you can now heap scorn on me. i'm waiting. you're all done? let me proceed.

this is yet tentative, but i guess, my unappeasable discomfort with this type of art stems from my relentless love for both the written and spoken word. it's not that i don't get the validity of these paintings. i do, i truly do. the energy, the rhythm, the ambition. i do get them. (the lady doth protest too much!)

only that i also believe, and more strongly, i suspect, that representation is the more inexhaustible language. we still use the english language, say, to write the most scathing of essays, the most heart rending of poems, the most poignant of memoirs. why not representational art, the image, the figure in art?

i also suspect that as a species, us humans, both those from the peripheries of the art world and its metropolises, have this instinctual need to understand and remember things and employ words in our attempts. and to let go of the image, the figure as a latch on point to understand, much more remember, art is arguably akin to shedding our dependence on everyday language to make sense of our existence, to recall all that was sweet and good that ever happened to us. indeed, this art is the art of amnesia, the art of forgetting.

when i tried to show lux this edward hopper picture of the lonely attendant at an isolated gas station on the side of a long straight road which unfurls into the foreboding darkness of a dense wood, she told me something like this was more like me. or perhaps, the picture more to my liking. i wasn't certain then what she meant.

but now, i think i do. for now, i realize i could easily fill the shoes of that attendant. in fact, i am he. lonely and shabbily dressed. check. just a hop and skip away from the foreboding of a dark forest. and expectantly waiting for pit stoppers, like you, lux, to come by, to feel the frisson of excitement and life from stories of their travels. check and check.

flying jeepneys

stuck in an argument with a drug seeking patient last night, i sighed and thought of you and a song popular when i was quite young celebrating you. "you of the city of flying jeepneys," it went something like this, "i am forever trying to settle back in your arms."

often when faced with rude patients' bunkum, i smoothly remember your snarly morning hour gridlock along espana avenue after a flash flood, after a mere sprinkling of tenuous may showers. bloated plastic bags stuck like heaving snot in the barely breathing hoods of cars. bald cat sized rats paddling along. belatedly dismissed school children holding aloft their school bags and the hems of their drenched plaid skirts, giggling flotsam in this sewer brown rivered street.

i always say i love you more than the island i grew up in. because i always thought you were more forthright than my childhood town flooded with evasion and ambiguities. i thought of you and the business suited forgers, pleased and proud, setting up shops along recto, the pickpockets plying earnestly their trade along the elevated railways. i missed suddenly the nags of your street children, insisting you buy their corded sampaguita buds, suggesting, without blushing, you can have them, too, just a night, though, for double the price of their leis.

and then i snapped back from all this reverie to tell this patient. "no, sir, i just gave you your morphine half an hour ago. your next dose would be four and a half fours from now." he screamed back at me, "you good for nothing chink, give me my morphine now. hell, i am paying for your salary."

my eyes glazed over again at this homeless junkie as he flailed his hairy arms in front of me, his armpits-hair caked with grease, lint and sweat-snarling like bullying bearded giants at me. then my mind snapped back to my manila. and i thought i caught the muggy whiff of day old sweat of a jeepney driver, his left arm gripping the steering wheel, his right outstretched behind to receive a fare from a lady all dolled up for the early evening mass. oh god, how i miss the smell of honest sweat.

paul newman is flying

"paul newman is flying," a friend sent me a rather flippant text message the other day just as i was about to take my pre-work nap. i called him instead to confront his apparent inappropriate levity.

"you know alright that i need my sleep at this time?" i barked at him. and instead, i heard him at the other end, half screaming in his thick tongue unintelligible sentences after another. "if only you have a decent phone, i could have sent you a photo of the guy." this much i could initially understand.

it turned out, paul "cool hand luke" newman took on a dare by david "late show" letterman and hopped into what the comedian's show called its party balloons aircraft. my friend happened to be on his way to a bus depot midtown when he chanced upon the spectacle by the back entrance of the ed sullivan theatre where dave's show was being recorded that time.

"it's magical," he was still screaming and unwilling to tame down his enthrallment. mundane me and totally missing the point, i asked him instead "what was paul doing at dave's?" "i don't know," he sounded exasperated, "maybe some new movie he needed to promote." then his voice was drowned by what sounded to me like an orchestrated squall from the rubberneckers. "oh, he's being hauled back down," my friend said, this time sounding a bit defeated.

sometimes, i think that the trick in life, i mean, the happy living of it, simply involves waking up to all the ironies in one's existence and righting everything about its incongruities. now here's someone, and i mean my friend, who, for the past four years that i've known him here in new york, has yet to step foot inside a bookstore, much more shell out even a measly buck for a title of fiction. and here i am, my rathole of an apartment littered literally with novels, most of it, i must admit, has yet to be thumbed through. but that's beside the point.

the point being, here is a person whom my so-called literary friends back in manila would easily scorn for his hickness in anything literature but being more attuned to the wonders of our shared existence. and here i am, full of my putative love for literature and yet all dead practically, too dense towards its beauty. "one does not see anything until one sees its beauty." ah, if only everybody were as acute to beauty as you were oscar wilde.

last week when the weather was not as crappy as these past couple of days, i went for a jog, well, a leisurely walk, really at the botanical gardens. having just walked about the equivalent of two city blocks inside the garden, i decided it would be better for me, that is for my aesthetic growth (here i go again with this tired word) to just sit down on a bench and wallow in all these beauty.

to heighten this experience i decided to turn off my blaring hip hop mix on my ipod and switched to a more literary album, a collection of slam poetry. i really thought then knowing the intricacies of internal rhymes, of kick ass enjambment in this park, in this oasis of extraordinary beauty would make me a person more facultied to confront whatever is beautiful, or meaningful in my life. only that, i realize now, i must have certainly missed out on the more meaningful song of a horned lark preening atop a branch of a blossoming dogwood or the more magical sight of a magpie darting in the pollen heavy air like a yellow short circuit spark, gathering whatever it could to cozy up its, without a doubt, very literary nest.

the quack's back

"the quack's back," squawks the headline of a local tabloid this morning. it's all about this quack cosmetic surgeon who allegedly murdered a pinay investment banker two years ago in a botched procedure.

you see, it's one big mess. this account. here's what i know, so far. we start with the victim: a devout catholic pinay immigrant who snagged an impressive job as a financial analyst with barclays a decade or so ago. she had been plagued with this benign but embarrassingly fuzzy black growth on her tongue which led her to commit a fatal mistake of going to the bogus clinic set up by this quack aesthetic surgeon on the lower west side.

then there's the alleged murderer: a pretty party boy who, in a total non sequitur description by the tabloids was described as an hiv positive patient himself. on what should have been a routine laser treatment, the impostor prepped the pinay by injecting her tongue with a seemingly innocuous anesthetic. but then, the pinay just went into a rare but ultimately fatal convulsion.

but our story did not end there. instead of calling for help, the quack surgeon apparently panicked and instead covered up his reported crime. two years after the alleged crime and a tip from a disgruntled ex-lover, the police found what happened to the dead pinay. her petite body was all crammed in a patent leather suitcase and then buried in a concrete slab in the garage of a new jersey home that the alligator loafer loving quack surgeon had surreptitiously sold.

pretty soon, the mountebank shanghaied himself in a posh costa rican resort. but after a year of feisty fight against extradition, the quack has finally been dragged back to the united states.

this weekend, a friend from work, one who can do 16 hour stretches of back breaking work with a song and a whistle at least five times a week, sort of berated me over a cup of stale coffee in his apartment for my insistence that fiction, the sweet reading of it and the more sublime art and mystery of writing it down, has no real productive function in our lives. bluntly put, poor immigrants like ourselves have no business with this bourgeois affectation.

he bought me lunch and i completely agreed with him. but this morning, reading this tabloid account, i couldn't help but chide myself for not standing up to him. oh the flattening power of free lunch.

as i put away the tabloid, i realized how fiction, and the conjuring of it on paper or the computer screen, is one of the most productive, if not therapeutic, things i could ever possibly do. retirement nest egg be damned. only if have the courage to fully commit to it. it is a life at its most free as annie dillard proclaims it to be.

take the tabloid writer's circumstances. despite his obvious imaginative reach, he is forever hemmed in by the constraints of the details of this account. but spare just a morsel of this story to even a middling writer and one doesn't require a binocular to see a yawning chasm of difference in their accounts.

let us just say, this middling writer happens to be one raised in a tropical island in the philippines. and in the island he grew up in, it was common knowledge that to have some black growth in the tongue would mean one is bound to be preternaturally loquacious. could you just imagine how this delusional writer would make good use of this particularly rummy, albeit corny, detail to further order his story? how about the dead pinay and her hoary tongue with their incessant squawking not letting the quack surgeon get a wink's sleep every night while on exile?

this is maybe why, despite growing up chronologically and looking shitty like it, too, i've tenaciously clung to the peter pannish charms of fiction and it's legendary legerdemain of bringing order to an otherwise naturally chaotic world.

quite ironically, let me quote a non-fictionist, one who was solidly discursive, to further my sophomorically argued case. that anti-social thoreau scathingly averred that "the mass of men lead lives of silent desperation." true, oh so true. whether he comes back from the dead and takes me out to lunch or not.

he also said that to create simplicity-which to him should be man's highest aspiration- one should "chip away at the unreal, the useless and the meaningless until, like michelangelo's david, you are left with a life that is breathtakingly beautiful."

to me, fiction is that chisel that helps me order things, that lets me chip away all the junk, all the unnecessary, all what is not meaningful in my otherwise charmless and chaotic life. and if you think this is but just one vaporous quackery, then by all means buy me a lunch.

despairing in a used bookstore on an otherwise perfect sunday afternoon

whats the point? why this insistence to write? when everything has been written about. and written so well. but like a devout masochist, i allow myself sweetly to be drawn again to this bookstore, what should be a proscribed shrine for me. i stalk around, fully conscious of my rank, my caste, my uselessness, and piously touch the book spines, venerating the relics of long dead but still miraculous saints. i am an unworthy pilgrim atoning for what i hope my venial sin of obsessing to be in the company of book writers. walking around, i pray i don't break my friendship with my god for this my insolent insistence. and then finally, i go, for i can't help it, marvel, since prostrating is frowned upon in this public space, at this entire wall of shakespeares. and the man's soaring spiritual ambition just threw me to hopelessness. quaking under the immensity of the man's rhetorical and imaginative heft, i recite the man's canon, my rosary's mysteries. a mother fixated son is haunted by his father's uncommunicative ghost. a love crazed boy meets an equally love gaga girl amid the bloody fighting of their feuding families. a portly drunk and a bohemian prince exact some exorbitant taxes from the rebels. a warmongering english king goes waist deep into his conquest of france. a paranoid moor strangles dead his pristine wife. a foolish old man drives himself crazier after demanding who among his three daughters love him most. two seemingly mismatched couples get waylaid in a thick forest on a sweet summer night. a sex kitten of a queen ultimately dies of an asp bite. the entire world is here. and this man conjured it. and i suspect, i am just one of his inventions: a despairing fool, parched for words but drowning in his dreams.

stopping by a sitting park left opened by a truant caretaker early sunday morning

everything, it seems, begs to be heard and expects to be witnessed righteously at the first light of the day. the rutting cat, the rasping of branches still not fully greened, the sighs of neighbors dreaming late, the groaning weight of my errors. and i suspect because of my witness, despite being hemmed in by the rusty iron fence, amid the jostling throng of rules and expectations this society metes me out, i am rewarded with this shaft of illumination that somehow transubstantiates all my sinning, all my failings to this singular sweet fortifying vision, all for me. as i get up to move on, to get back home, i see the sharply tilting light of the rising sun burning the bulbous park lights. they look like fighting saints with their haloes aflame.

doing laundry on a nippy early spring morning in a bronx laundromat

the red of the laundromat's neon sign glinted pink behind the slight fog. the street was mute. only the garbage bags by the curbside frazzled by a light breeze buzzed. i flicked my cigarette towards an oily puddle behind a coral green camry. a wisp of smoke curled up from the water like a drowned secret gasping its last breath. i went back in. he was still folding his shirts, mashing his boxers, stealing glances at me. three more quarters i dropped into the dryer. my denims, my coloreds leapt back into circles, uninhibited, abandoned. there was something in this nippy morning not cordial to restraint. jingling like shrill cheerleaders in my pocket were more loose change.

scary story

here's a scary story. one told by my patient.

last night, i tried to breeze through my admission assessment with this patient, a crack fiend as he unabashedly described himself, when he wafted into what must be another drug induced episode of dementia.

he couldn't be withdrawing yet. it was too close for that from his last crack use. but suddenly he, sounding convincingly lucid, told me that despite being a crack fiend he never forgets to pay the rent of his mother's place back in georgia. that's great, i said. the shamness of my voice stunned me.

he looked at me reproachfully. i couldn't stare right back at him. let me tell you something, he began, his voice not as reproving as i thought it would be after my bullshitting him.

once, i sold drugs in a little town in georgia. i knew everybody and i mean everybody. i began fidgeting at the foot of his bed. i was thinking of my other medications to administer, the blood transfusion i was to start in the next room. but i stayed on, guiltily looking forward to his story.

then one day, the pastor of the pentecostal church from the other town came to score some fix. he thought i didn't recognize him but i did. when he realized he didn't have enough money in his billfold, he groped for an envelope stuffed with crinkly bills in his coat. church offerings, pastor? i tried to make light of it all. and the nigga just froze.

then what? i asked the patient. this time i sounded really sincere and very impatient. the patient smiled like i just gave him demerol.

well, after i told him everything was cool, the pastor chilled out and even snorted a line of that shit in my place. i asked him if he really needed to do this. the pastor replied he just needed a little boost. shit, a little boost, my ass.

as i walked out of the patient's room, i saw the sallow overhead lights filming like pee in the hallway. a patient, another drug seeker, in cane -- nothing wrong with his gait -- walking steadily towards the nurses' station to ask for an extra dose of morphine. an obese nursing attendant was half dozing in a chair in front of a patient's room.

a chill ran through me as i tried to ignore in my mind my patient's question. this he asked me as he finished off his story.

i am not spooking you, he said, but tell me how are you different from the pastor?

long memories

gifted families are all alike. every artless family is ungifted in its own way.

ours never had any member who can paint, one who can sing like a wounded kanaway nor one who can talk to the dead. and everyone, especially my mother, have never mastered the art of giving gifts.

on the 7th, or was it 8th, birthday of a friend from a family more impoverished than ours, i casually dropped in to their house expecting some token of a celebration. but all they had was their usual fare of brown rice and stewed reef fish.

i didn't know what came over me but it suddenly became imperative for me to treat this friend to something. i told him we should go watch this lito lapid movie.

but when we were at the box office of our island's nipa thatched movie house, i suddenly faltered in the thought that i may not have enough money with me. i got out of the queue to count my coins, my fifties, my quarters, like rosary mysteries.

sheepishly my friend told me maybe it was a bad idea to go see this movie. but i was on a mission. so i talked to the ticket lady and promised her i would bring the next day the balance of what we would owe her for two tickets. she agreed and that was that.

but the next day as i went back to fulfill my promise, the ticket lady told me that my mother already paid for the tickets. and suddenly i was just filled with dread. how could you tell her this, i was muttering to myself as i quickly got away from this nosy woman.

that night, i was waiting for my mother to go ballistic on my profligacy. but she never talked about it. not then, not throughout my high school years. not until yesterday.

yesterday, i talked to her on the phone and she was hinting at wangling some extra bucks from me. a neighbor, she told me, needed help in defraying the burial costs of one of their grandparents.

since when is that my problem? i asked her. there was a pause and then her gravelly voice came back. look at this as a payment for when i paid your debt to manang lita. manang lita who? i asked her. the ticket lady, she told me and the rest of the movie story.

inordinately, we've always prided ourselves as a giving family. you should see our pledges for our little protestant church. but then something, some little voice inside, always nags me, even while growing up, about this ostensible family generosity.

blessed, indeed, are those who can give without remembering. unfortunately, our family is gifted with such long memories.

is that a problem?

you said it was too late for me to go home. and that i should rather stay.

deliberately, i became ambiguous. for i was suddenly afraid. of what, i couldn't tell.

i just told you i needed to go. you asked me to do what? i paltered and said i needed to do, to finish something, something right now.

sulking, you snatched your spring jacket from the closet and walked me out of your apartment towards the elevator. as the cage opened, i leaned towards you, hoping you'd kiss me goodbye. but you went in the lift instead.

as our car ratcheted down, i put my arm around you, aware of the closed circuit camera blinking at us. i think i felt you leaned your head against my shoulder just before the lift belched us out into the well lighted lobby.

how's it goin' jose, you called out to your doorman. and he smiled at us, not concealing his knowledge of us still giddy. he answered alright, as if to say you still look naked in your clothes.

an empty cab passed by and you didn't hail it. another one came then another one. and finally, one screeched in front us. and i had to get into it.

i told the turbaned driver to the bronx please. he said that's a long way from manhattan my friend. is that a problem, i asked him back.

he said no. and throughout the ride home, i was praying my driver was right.

just live

i slept, like yesterday, an entire gorgeous spring afternoon once. and all i did was not dream, not dream at all.

all i did, if i could still remember it right, was talk, talk to my self simply unwilling to get up, oh so heavy with sleep. and i remember asking me, the part that cares yet to listen, the one that was still willing to haggle with the world, wouldn't it be lovely, wouldn't it just be sweet to just stay in bed all day, all night, all week, most of the time?

and i remember, someone from somewhere, some crazy sounding voice, like that of a rusty hinge, that if it could talk, squeaking, squealing right into my right ear, the one that was not covered by a pillow, and telling me that sure i should do it.

do what? i wavered. but the screechy voice just eased back into the ephemera. like somebody suddenly oiled the hinge and dumbed it, muting forever its sweet hoary secrets.

yesterday, as i thrashed about in my bed, i was just reminded how one summer afternoon in manila, i and some friends, decided to rent out what was promised to us as an old but really coltish western. the one with monty clift, clark gable and marilyn monroe. and boy were we stunned.

i remember the three of us intermittently dozing at various parts of the movie and asking each other, at least the one that was still awake when one woke up, what happened before. i remember waking up to the part where marilyn's character was asking clark's about his life in then staid reno.

she was asking him like what does he do with his time there. he replied, just live. she asked back how do you just live. then he countered, first you sleep, then you get up when you feel like it.

i was raised always to feel guilty, to reproach myself when i overslept. and to bear this crushing need to explain myself very judiciously whenever i did that as if i've been discovered in a place i should not be.

yesterday, as i tossed and turned in my bed, i did not hear my mother, frantic and demanding. but yet, i could not stop myself from composing an explanation for my staying in bed the entire afternoon, a rationale for not being able to just live.

habit

there was something insistent about his apartment even if it was a relatively relaxed 1 ½ bedroom - if you have the heart to believe that description - studio squeezed right smack in the middle of things manhattan.

everything he owned, the satiny sheen of the g4 apple computer, his gleaming shimano mountain bike he plastered against the spine of his door, all these seemed to demand attention.

and right above his surprisingly characterless couch was a full size poster of the long dead doors front man, his lithe torso bare, his arms flung open like a christ with a habit.

it was not his, he immediately made excuses, as soon as we got into his apartment, for the jim morrison poster which he labeled incongruous for his space. it belonged to his former boyfriend, he claimed.

his building, like him, was unexceptional to look at, shepherded right where other similar squat buildings sprouted maybe back in the 50’s in the east side of mid manhattan. but everything in it, in his apartment, seemed to urgently claim my attention. like him, as well. inside his apartment.

unlike when he first sought me out in the bar, inside his apartment, he looked lacking not in clarity and distinctness. his nose, which i thought before as slightly insubstantial, seemed to command a very dominant berth in his narrow and very sparse face.

and when i first hesitated going to his bed, he just stared at me with his green eyes, almost the hue of a wet snake skin. and all i remember saying to myself after he looked at me was i know what i'm doing and i could get used to this.

when i got up after to put on my clothes, he was asking things like shall i be again. be what? i feigned incomprehension.

to calm down the tempest which i was certain he could read in my face, i skimmed over his apartment once more.

a striped button down hanging for dear life like a limp scarecrow in his closet door. his drop leaf desk, the one with his computer, raging with the clutter of well thumbed books and magazines and some torn envelopes.

i went to his bathroom and stared at his medicine cabinet bursting with half empty cologne bottles and skin tonics. the lowest rung was splashed with drops of an undistinguished lotion - or is it liniment? - of a surprisingly sweet yellow shade. and i remember thinking i could come back here and restore order to all these.

i spurned his intention to embrace me before i hurried off. he asked me again his stupid question. will you be again? i remember nodding and it felt, scarily, like a habit already.

party fatigue

i read somewhere i couldn't recall now that parties of expatriates in strange lands always have this palpable feel of a very earnest church service, a high mass. and for a fellow exile to miss it is to cop a spot in hell.

by design, i missed another party of kababayan today, some congratulatory fete for someone finishing a masters from nyu. and i feel like banishing me from the communion of my pinoy community, a peer excommunication, is but an apt punishment for my absence. and yet at the same time, i feel right about my not being there, hell be damned.

here's a crazy wish. here's hoping any day now, some intrepid researcher would uncover the private journals of jose rizal or any one of those perpetually hungry propagandistas who fled to barcelona or paris before the end of the nineteenth century. wouldn't it be lovely to read in them, on top of the urgent talk of these political expatriates of country and god, some really low diss about the parties of fellow kababayan they have to drag themselves to? some filipino party fatigue, perhaps?

or not. for rizal and his compatriots didn't have to contend with this asinine but ubiquitous talk in any kababayan party these days of who is driving what. oh, you've got a lexus now? a bmw is still the best. of this simmering show among the new immigrants of who earns more. susmaryosep, my regular paycheck is but a third of what i get from my overtime. of this pathetic outdoing of what each other thought of as their perfect american accents. oh sheet.

the propaganda would have never blossomed had rizal fled to america in this century. for he and his high minded ilk would be drowned in this low class talk of money and status among the forever insecure kababayan.

in a way, a kababayan party these days feels exactly like a high mass celebrated in a provincial stone church where the parochial parishioners try to outdo each other in the public announcements of their offerings and the garishness of their sunday get ups. and the pastor's homily is just but a whisper in a party of untimid loud talkers.

stripped

on weekends when we could hardly think of anything cockamamie to do, my friends and i used to eavesdrop on this crazy old woman who lived in a ramshackle shack in the northern end of our village, right where the cemetery crosses start sprouting.

for a good year or so, this diminutive lady never left the far end corner of her hut. she just stood there rigid while the rest of her family, oblivious to this mottled and sallow statue, went on with the dreariness of their day to day lives.

but when we were about to graduate from elementary, some boy we were too grossed out to admit to our circle because of his overly sweaty hands knocked our socks off when he matter of factly told us that the catatonic woman was now up and about as if she just woke up from a bad dream.

sure, we were incredulous at first with his news. but then he dared us to go stalk with him the now animated woman.

and we did. and on such a perfect day. the sun was out but not too out. school was almost over and i was with friends bursting with the eagerness to know things we never dreamed of learning at school. of revocable deaths and people, cast offs, discarded ones, coming back to life.

we were dumbfounded as we witnessed this woman, modest only with a drenched housedress, bathing by a well under a palm tree groaning with green nuts. she took all the time in the world scrubbing herself as if stripping off everything the world has hung on her, has painted on her, has masked her throughout all the days, the years she was dead to everything and everyone else.

today, despite the heavy pollen count and the diminishing efficacy of my anti-allergy medications, it was again an achingly perfect day.

for the longest time coming, i had a taste again of munggo beans braised in the creamiest of virgin coconut milk brought as a gift, a gracious visitor's gift by this friend i haven't seen in a long while. someone who i thought i was permanently estranged with.

the sun was out and so we decided to go for a walk in the nearby new york botanical gardens. and when we were about beat, we decided to treat ourselves to the nearest cast iron bench.

we hardly spoke to each other. we just sat there and, since both of us are big time allergy sufferers, listened to our labored nasal breathing. and at times when either one of us sneezed without holding back, it felt like a piece of old sadness, of old regret we shared was stripped away.

and then i go

my subway chanteuse, i saw her again today. this time, she was soliciting inside the train cars. she must have performed quite well in the car before mine because she had this air of entitlement, a well deserved one, as she shoved her grubby bonnet right to the commuters' faces.

i groped in the front pockets of my denim and only felt two very insubstantial quarters. i flip opened my billfold surreptitiously only to realize i have but a crinkly twenty dollar bill in it.

paralyzed with the quandary of giving her the quarters (nah, too insignificant.) or the twenty (jesus, no, that's my lunch money!), i just sat there transfixed at the ingrained soot and dirt in the begging bonnet of the cabaret singer of the d train. in the end, the busker moseyed on without extracting even a dime from me, her putative grateful fan.

just before i was about to get off at the 59th hub, i overheard two snazzily dressed ladies, both of them clutching fendi knockoff baguettes made from faux reptilian hide, across me talking about the kind of animals they would prefer to be reborn as.

i thought of them immediately as foxes. but the other girl, the one wearing an olive spring jacket three sizes smaller for her, quickly told the other she would love to be reborn as a jungle feline. a lordly sumatran tiger, perhaps, i quickly shifted mental gears as i continued to eavesdrop on their chaffing.

surfacing up to a gorgeous spring day, i immediately peeled off my jacket to soak in the sun. and as i walked towards this restaurant where i was supposed to meet someone, i have this genuine feeling of being pleased with how this world works for me. i truly felt i deserve the sun, the uncloying beauty of this city, the soon to be beautiful meal i will share with this person i deserve to be friends with.

after lunch, i ambled towards the nearby train station still giddy from this hazy feeling of worth. upon entering the station, i nearly froze upon hearing another busker, this time a gruff baritone, scatting what to me was an ella fitzgerald song. and his substitution for the song's lyrics with alliterative non-syllables, it was just very apt, very accomplished, in fact. he sounded like a well burnished baritone sax.

instinctively, i reached for my billfold. but then my train quickly approached the station and my mind, without compunction, dismissed easily any thought about the scat man.

on the ride home, a strapping young man offered a straphanging lady his seat. the woman, without thanking the boy, languidly claimed her seat like it was hers all along. dreamily, she filled the seat with her pleased self. like a pampered feline.

and it just hit me, i'm a cat. i haven't the scintilla of gratitude. i don't really give a damn if the world loves me, at all. i just take what this world tosses my way and then i go slink away.

diskoral

i forgot his name now but growing up, there was once a novelty singer, a word alchemist, really, who coined a slap up name for one of the sweetest pleasures in my adolescent life.

the word was a perfect pastiche of two almost diametrically opposed words: disco and all of its sweet possibilities and this confining noun, corral. diskoral. an open air dance, barn dance al fresco. and in the island i grew up in, that translated to dances held under fruitless palm trees or in clearings amid spiny thickets enclosed by the flimsiest of fences crudely made most often of stripped young bamboo.

sweetest because such pleasure was never allowed me for i was raised by a puritanical mother. "be not ye of this world." i still hear my mother now and her constant quoting of this pauline admonition.

and so while a sound system blared dance hits breaking the serene island airwaves at twilight, i brooded in my room, sullen over not being able to be in a diskoral in some remote village, kicking up dust, dancing my heart out.

today, in front of the local mikey d, a group of b-boys and a killer backflipping girl was putting up a show. with a really throwback boombox blaring mostly old school mixes, the group breezed through their breakdancing routines - coindrops, applejacks, and your basic flic-flacs.

but halfway through their set, a gnarly old woman jumped into the group's space and started doing her jig. some bouncing here and there and with a lot of hand movements as if she was plucking something out of thin air. instead of being pissed, the group made way for the saltating woman and improvised their moves around her. the bystanders went crazy.

an american psychologist who advocated the use of psychoactive drugs in the 60's claimed that the highest destiny of man was to live an aesthetic life based on the dance. but the dance of what?

walking home after this unexpected terpsichorean display, i noticed big clumps of clouds blotching the otherwise clear blue afternoon sky. one of the clumps, an unruly shape which i was never able to describe, was playing hide and seek with the fading light as if in a frenzied dance while waiting to be overtaken by night.

without love and hardly a smile

here's a performance review:

not a narcissistic note she sang. not one remotely self important. she sang with a generosity rivaling that of the woman jesus saw in the temple, dropping the last of her coins into the alms box.

the review, mine and, may i admit, really stilted and egotistical. but the performer, definitely not.

she was, i'm certain, an unlicensed busker doing her thing on the sly inside the grand concourse station of the d train line. and, for the second time this week, i saw her earlier today.

this time, unlike the last time when i was unable to identify her song, she was crooning a henry mancini/leslie briccuse ballad, "two for the road," to an almost empty station.

"if you're feeling fancy free, come wonder through the world with me. and any place we chance to be, will be our rendezvous."

you think you've had enough of my literary pretensions? here's one more annoying tick. i believe that, instinctively at best, i know a thing or two about great performances.

and she was, to me, giving one. this unkempt woman, lugging along a grocery cart filled with the unclassified detritus of what she can call her life so far.

"two for the road we'll travel down the years, collecting precious memories. selecting souvenirs, and living life the way we please."

this is what it is with great performances. to me. a great performance is intimate but never relinquishing its theatricality. at the very least, it is heartrending. it must be. for a great performance is nothing but a full scale assault on my hardened, almost moribund, core.

the bag lady's tone production was decent; her timbre, quite remarkable for someone her age. but it's her facility to contain all the required pathos of her piece into the given space of her performance, the train station, in her case, and conveying it without sentimentality. without dishonesty. and she did it with this palpable generosity that only an honest woman can give.

"as long as love still wears a smile, i know that we'll be two for the road, and that's a long, long while."

reading about this year's tony nominations on the train, i felt guilty for the singing lady i left at the train station. a worthy performance requires a show of gratitude. and i was a thankless wretch. and i thought, foolishly again, that writing a glowing review in my journal would atone for my earlier lack of thankfulness.

and thus, this piece. only that now i feel mightily dissembling. that unlike the singing bag lady, everything i said or wrote was made with the utmost vulgarity, the most conscious narcissism. without love and hardly a smile.

like a prayer

"daddy, daddy," a nappy haired toddler was calling me. he was trying to wiggle out of the bus seat that he and what looked to me his teen mother were holed in.

i thought, at first, the confused tot mistook the puerto rican guy in the seat to my left for his father. but as our bus rolled on, the tot was persistent in singling me out.

i don't know what to make of this day, so far. first, i woke up with this urgency to accomplish a task i've never dreamed doing before: to buy a metallica album.

i remember getting out of bed after my clock radio did its despicable thing thinking i really need to download a metallica album. i only got back my bearing as i was on my way to be completely relieved in the toilet.

then, as always, i went for breakfast in my diner and, as her wont, carmela, the mexican waitress, greeted me with her skewed smile while asking me if it's the usual for me again today. i nodded and went immediately to my paper as i await for my belgian waffle and artery choking crispy bacon.

but minutes later, a bowl of oatmeal, drowned with cinnamon dusting on top, and a separate bowl of not so fresh fruit salad, made it to where i was.

"what is this?" i hollered out. "isn't that what you always order?" carmela yelled back.

maybe because i eke out such a humdrum existence that my initial reaction to these trifling mix-ups in my daily rote was one of joy, actually. suddenly, i was moved to think, to speculate, that somebody who eerily looks like me (god help him!) and with uncannily similar ways has been leading a parallel life to mine. only healthier and more willing to dare take on worthwhile enterprises. like fatherhood, perhaps.

somehow, it felt being in a shakespeare comedy, that of his usual caper of mistaken identities. and i tingle in the possibility of meeting, sooner, this other me, this fuller person.

when i was growing up, i always heard myself praying for a life other than the tedious one i had in the island. "please lord, let me out of here," i would always begin my prayers. "anywhere but here."

the befuddled kid still swathed in a winter jacket and his mother, a lacy thong peeking out of her very low strung jeans, also got off at fordham road.

as i followed them towards the train station, the boy was at it again, yelling out "daddy, daddy, daddy" to me. his voice, so shrill, so piercing, rose up to the sky like a prayer.

new york! new york!

i'm sorry to disappoint, but no cloying mother's day post here. i have the rest of the year to do that.

instead, here's one about a big motherhood statement. that if you live and love in new york city. and that is, few other cities, if there are at all, would let you live like my city.

and the weekends here, they just kill.

yesterday, free admission day to brooklyn museum. a friend and i went again for the jean-michel basquiat retrospective. and although this is our second visit, because we, against our latent snooty ways, followed the walking tour led by another witty museum docent, it felt like opening night again.

and the crowd, the hippest there was. honies sporting peacock plume earings. hepcats wearing fedoras and distressed jeans. this in a museum, in a borough museum. it felt like being lost in a meat packing district party.

from there, we felt a night of jazz would be great palate cleanser. and so we went back to midtown to this landmark club named after charlie "yardbird" parker.

a jazz trio, who bills itself a quartet, was doing pop takes on classics. in the middle of a joint with riffs from this ubiquitous incidental music to mendelssohn's a midsummer night's dream (better known as the wedding march), a cabaret chanteuse came out and did a take of an impossible to sing stephen sondheim's song from company. you know, the one where the bride had cold feet and in between shooing off guests at her wedding, had to deftly navigate between hysteria and the impossible tempo?

then while smoking at the curbside outside the bar, i heard these two ladies talking about the woman who sent cable news channels into a frenzy the other week when she disappeared a few days before her wedding only to turn up in new mexico confessing to, what else, cold feet.

and they were pointing out the similarities between this woman and a mid-19th century fictional character, jane eyre. a charlotte bronte fictional creation, jane stood up her fiance at the altar after learning of a not so sanguine revelation then ran away without a penny and threw herself at the mercy of strangers.

literature and tabloid at the curbside. jazz and baroque in a cabaret. graffiti and high art in a hipster museum. nothing like these, if i remember right, my mama could afford me in her care.

sure, there's the garbage, and the noise, and the annoying people. but still. new york! new york!

in one of the last episodes of sex and city, the workaholic miranda, after finally buying a house in the faraway borough of brooklyn, rues about leaving la vida nueva york. then, after exulting about the luxurious space she now owns in the borough, she was reminded of the series of sordid apartments she had in manhattan.

"why do i think living in manhattan is so fantastic?" miranda asked. then gorgeous carrie, without batting an eyelash, responded, "because it is."

piss pants, syrup nose, frog eyes

everybody else had nicknames growing up. and they were all undeserved. just lazy and unimaginative cruelty, perhaps.

there was piss pants. and syrup nose. and there was lazy eyed man-ceb. we called him that after a wise ass, himself called pot for his annoyingly clangy voice, made a stinging remark that one of man-ceb's left eye was looking toward the city of manila and the right one towards its southern counterpart, cebu.

but strangely, i never earned one. and i was an easy target. i had big eyes, rounder and more bugged out than ordinary asian kids. and i was dumpy, definitely.

among other things, i only have my mother to blame. she was a stern woman and never shy to let anyone in the neighborhood know about it. just her stentorian voice summoning me for dinner would make my other playmates go scampering back home, as well.

going for my laundry late afternoon yesterday, preschool kids of mostly spanish speaking mothers were ruling the place. the kids, native english speakers themselves, were ultimately calling each others names.

a pudgy one was called fat back. one wiry girl was stinky pinky. and another hefty girl (god, aren't all kids nowadays chunkies?) was called turtle ass.

as i was folding my boxers, the last in my batch, another kid, towed by her mother, lighted up when she saw some of her friends running amok in the laundromat. before her mother could have her ten dollar bill broken to quarters, the kid was well on her way towards the group. i believe she was called dish and i couldn't come up with any reason why.

and throughout their running around, their non-games, everyone seemed to know their places. fat back seemed content with her heft and stinky pinky was, to me, looked happy with her appendages.

as i dragged my rusty laundry cart back to my apartment, i couldn't help but feel smug for my ostensible good fortune of not being called any nasty name while growing up. but just before my building, someone unfamiliar accosted me. he recoiled upon realizing he mistook me for someone else.

"i'm sorry," the guy said. "i thought you were that other chinese guy from that building."

huffing and puffing with my 20 pounds of laundry up the steep walkup to my unit, i was now fuming as well. not with the hapless clueless guy but with my cowed childhood playmates.

had they stood their ground, blocked out my hovering mother and gave me a lackluster nickname, there'd be less confusion today as to my place in life, my identity.

"look," i would have gladly told that spaced out street cat, "how dare you not know me. don't you know i'm frog eyes?"

a joy forever

somehow, it's always the beautiful things that make me sad, ultimately. and the most, as well.

or is time?

the dogwood in front of my building, which just a week ago was unrestrained with the display of its resplendent white flowers, is now one dull green head bobbing atop a diseased, dirty brown, gnarly trunk. gone is the spray of perfectly burst popcorns. all i have now is one tree gone lazy.

the cab i took this afternoon to a discount club made a wrong turn and we ended up passing by the new york botanical gardens. most of the once explosive blossoming trees peeking out by the gates - the cherry blossoms, the magnolias, the crab apples - have now slipped into their regular conservative uniforms. i couldn't bear to look at them long. what treachery.

at the discount club, right in the alley of the humungous 36 rolls in a pack of toilet papers, i thought i saw someone i was - how to say this without reducing to pure guck - enamored before. the way he swaggered, such strutting. but of course, he was not the one. he'd never be caught dead prowling a discount club. he of the ultimate hip pursuits.

as i ticked off my shopping list, i couldn't help but come up in my mind with a rough list, as well, on why we never lasted that long. somehow, a list, a numbered enumeration seems scientific, therefore more credible, than the stuttering of my memory.

but then all the reasons i could come up with, they all boil down to one thing. he was just too beautiful for me.

by the time i ended up in the queue by the lane of the lady cashier who was sporting this spindly honey blonde weave, i realized i forgot to grab some really needed toothpaste. but i reckoned i would certainly lose my spot in the line if i went back to the oral hygiene aisle. i'd still live. there's still an inch or two left in my current tube, i thought.

wheeling my cart towards the entrance, i was sided by the loudness of the bouquets of flowers displayed just at the mouth of the store. a hand scrawled sign was hung over the brash flowers and it said "when you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other."

for what, i thought while waiting for a cab home. just to see the lily wilt on me? enough of this pap about a thing of beauty as a joy forever.

indulgences

to celebrate international nurses appreciation day tomorrow (yes, virginia, there is such a day and god, i'm certain, doesn't even know why.), our usually sterile administration has tossed out its penchant for giving out cheap gewgaws most often made in china - a calculator that conks out after the third square root attempt, a spiny umbrella that folds down under the slightest of spring showers.

this year, they're giving us a rather decently published cookbook, the recipes of which are contributions by the nursing staff, the foolhardy ones, anyway. and since i work in a new york hospital, the variety of recipes is just mind boggling. no aspiring fictionist could even dare to dream the breadth, the diversity of cultures represented by the recipes.

a bibimba plate special from a korean icu nurse, the classic red snapper escaviche with holiday cornmeal breads on the side by this jamaican patient care tech, another take on mofongo, mashed plantains with pulled pork this time, from a puerto rican nurse assistant, and a garden variety vegetable spring roll from a filipina nurse supervisor.

since i don't - not can't - cook (for how can i? i have cut off my gas service since i moved in to this apartment.) it would seem that this giveaway would just be another addition to the ever unmanageable clutter in my closet of an apartment. but somehow, i have already grown fond of it. that quick.

this morning, instead of my wont to read the times with my breakfast, i ended up lost, poring over the cookbook for a good hour. or two. after making a seemly effort to detach myself from reading the cookbook, i was saddened at how banal my breakfast was of runny eggs and pale toast.

then i drifted to sleep with the memory of when mother first brought me to the big city of manila and how we made this required pilgrimage to divisoria, the heady market of mostly cheap textiles just south of the capital's chinatown. i was only five or six then and mother hauled me by my hand as she, a veritable crazed woman, navigated through the labyrinthine market. by the time she had bought a pair of mules, the ones with a silver bow, if i remember right, she realized she lost me.

half an hour later and with the help of two surprisingly courteous cops, mama found me playing hide and seek with the daughter of a stall owner among the hung batik sundresses. as soon as the cops left, mama tweaked my ears and glared at me as if to berate me why i had been enjoying myself so much among the women's dresses.

i don't know why i'm telling you this. except perhaps, to rue. no, that's too pompous. to grieve, perhaps? maybe, just to eat my heart out at how my life has this predilection, somehow, to mislay me among beautiful food and brightly colored dresses. both of which i feel i have not the prerogative to indulge.

sacred place

it shouldn't matter, right? a succulent pork roast or a prime aged rib eye steak should taste about the same whether ladled right into your hands or laid out architectonically on an artisanal celadon plate. right?

i don't know about you, but it's not with me. somehow, the plates, to me, definitely make the entrees. and this realization bothers me a lot. it's like admitting i could really be one of those superficial people you hate to be in your company. which come to think of it, my friends, my forgiving group, may have already long known about it but just don't have the heart or the moxie to say right to my face.

there is this new restaurant in our neighborhood. nothing earth shattering with restaurant openings in our strip otherwise known as little italy in the bronx. restaurants, italian and mediterranean, i.e., in fact, are so obvious and not to mention dull that sometimes i find it refreshingly exotic to order take out chinese two blocks down.

but this one, this new kid on the block is nuevo latino. meaning, the chef, perhaps, is not really devoted to any particular south american regional cuisine. hence, a hodge podge of everything he or she knows about, or what most new yorkers associate to be, latin food. so, a farrago of carribean latin and some good old staples from central american isthmus cooking.

and like any other good neighbors, our friends dropped by recently to wish well the new move-ins. and frankly, i was expecting not to be disappointed. i'm a latin foodie, a hot grease and yellow rice and red beans guy.

but after we settled our bill, which was not that bad, really, for day wage earners like myself, i felt cheated. not that the fare was flat or uninspired. in fact, the chef's take on ceviche (with a surprising japanese yuzo salsa) was actually worth the trip back next payday, perhaps.

what ticked me off were the generic plates. it's not even the all white minimalist plates that are so dull that they are now considered cool. it's just your basic hotel low grade vitreous china. and in the center, is a drab green representation of what seems to be a vapid clump of saguaro cacti. sure, cactus, since this is a latino restaurant, right? how imaginative.

i guess my beef is that this restaurant has violated a cardinal contract with one of its patrons, moi. i go and dine out because i am hoping to experience some emotional ephemera that ironically will last me for quite a time. i expect that by dining out, i am going to expand my sensory repertoire. i will partake of a dish that mother has never served me as a kid nor one which i can make on my own even if i plunk good money in some fancy culinary institute downtown.

in a way, a restaurant is a sacred ritual space for me. and in rituals, one never serves offerings on cheap, much more chipped, plates.

the truth of my life

i have this feeling - and this gets more and more unassailable as ever - that i really don't belong to my times.

increasingly, i find that i just don't seem to get them. the ways of my times, the circumstances and ideas of my present. especially with how people, our esteemed ones, mostly, take truth and its pursuit thereof as something easily attainable. truth being tactile and thus easily groped. truth as an utterable commodity, just one of the many our snake oil salesman of a society sells.

someone i sort of respect told me rather nonchalantly yesterday that maybe why i seem to get "no happiness" (her words) at all is that maybe, i have consistently failed to uncover the truth of my life.

the truth of my what?

is she right? such daunting question. not to mention, does she have any right at all to tell me that.

but the more i rue about her callous observation, the more it seems to me that this rather intrusive acquaintance of mine is merely spouting the feel of the age, the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist.

the newly elected pope rails consistently about the evils of the so called moral relativism. and the president of the most powerful nation in the world (and the most supercilious, too) has this procrustean worldview, lazily dividing the world into the good and the bad, the truthful and the not.

and then, there's oprah. she who exhorts her minions to discover the truths of their own lives. "it's your duty to know," she scarily tells them.

i grant you this much. there is such a thing as truth. but to coerce me to think, the way most everyone seems to think nowadays, that things can really be figured out that facilely, that methodically, that seems to be one big falsehood to me.

"falsehood is easy, truth so difficult," so said the victorian english novelist george eliot, who, i suppose, hardly anybody reads nowadays.

ms. winfrey, not a writer but a gazillion times more credible among millions today than ms. eliot, writes that the truth is that which feels right and good.

but then again, i must be doing alright. i feel righteous and i feel mighty good saying - actually, planning yet on what to say back to my rather judgmental acquaintance - i am happy with my so called unhappiness. thank you very much for asking. at least, i feel right and good about it.

charming the pigeons

maybe because mother starved me with stories - i never remember her reading me a bedtime tale -that i latched on to the few morsels i was able to eke out from her. but this, much as i would love to believe, i somehow found it hard to swallow.

mama used to tell me that i was - how to tell this without blushing? - a very charismatic boy. not only to the easy to please tottering pregnant women in our neighborhood but to the more stable, four legged creatures. livestock raised by our neighbors, according to my mother, were somehow drawn to me, as well, when i was yet a boy.

this is how i remember mama's story. one day, when i was yet in my terrible two's, we were invited to a wedding reception in our block. nothing entrancing there. until such time that we were to leave.

that time, the bride's household had a lactating sow. rambunctious twelve litter. as we left, mama claimed that three of the sow's piebald piglets followed me home.

despite her attempts to shoo them back to their mother's sty, the seemingly crazed piglets wouldn’t budge. the three trailed me home and then resolutely milled around my scabby legs until our neighbor, forsaking for a moment their guests, had to come and pick up the straying shoats. according to mama, the shrieks of the piglets were heard throughout the neighborhood as they were towed back to their mother's fold.

as temperature cranks up to my liking, cafés in my bronx neighborhood have started laying out again their outdoor seating. this morning, trying to take advantage of the weather, i decided to chuck my trusty greasy diner in favor of this uppity café. espresso al fresco beats watered down coffee on a greasy counter top roundly in spring.

into my second demitasse, a stunning young woman, wearing only the flimsiest of cardigan with her beat up denims, took the table to my right. as soon as she took her seat, i could sense a palpable whiff of something i could not explain, of energy, perhaps, permeating the al fresco area. and it's not the espresso talking.

the waitress, without being hailed, quickly scurried to the woman's table. and just like that, this surly waitress, the one who just dumped the menus in my table and that of the two guys across me earlier, was now overly solicitous with her.

and as i tried to get the attention of the waitress for my bill, i felt this remorse, slightly perhaps, but it was there. this for not believing easily my mama's story.

as i left the café, browbeating myself for leaving an incommensurate tip for the lousy service, i had this feeling that any minute soon, the pigeons battling for bread crumbs in the nearby bakery would soon swarm at the feet of the woman who, i was convinced, could charm almost anybody.

confucian edicts

raise a son, plant a tree and write a book. confucius reportedly told his followers some two and a half millenia ago that these three are the only things worth doing in a lifetime.

obviously, i can't bear nor raise a son or, if choice is within my palette, a daughter. and since i rent a rathole in this conrete jungle, arboreal pursuits are also out of the picture for me. that leaves me to play with this cruel delusion to write a book.

no wonder, a friend has repeatedly told me that it is that dangerous to listen to dead men who had a penchant for pithy, and sententious, if i may say, sayings.

to write a book. now what are the odds for me to be able to cop that? when i was young(er), i used to handicap myself quite favorably as to my chances of being able to publish anything of value. not just fluff pieces, but really things worth wasting a good summer afternoon to read.

but now that i have almost seen it all, the chances of me doing confucian edict number 3 is as remote as i, heterosexually married and raising rambunctious kids in the suburbs.

now where that does leave me? since this is a weekend afternoon, in a game, perhaps, confucius, himself, enjoyed - mahjong.

right now, i’'m trying to zip up this post just before my friends call me up so we can commence our planned late afternoon joy luck club. should they call me before i will be able to wrap up this post, tough. this is how i am hooked to this game now. no, i don'’t have a problem. although, i would concede that denial is always a cardinal tell tale sign of addictive behaviors. but nonetheless, i'’m sticking to my guns.

and the thing is, i'm not even good at this game. i totally blow. so much so that, so far, i have devoted a considerable time ruing over my game performance as symptomatic of how i approach life.

no new age mumbo jumbo here, but mahjong aficionados have always claimed that this game is a very salient metaphor for life. (aren'’t all games, anyway?) how being able to visualize the game trend just by paying attention to the tiles thrown on the table is perfectly akin to seeing the big picture in life.

and if really that is the case, then, i'm done for. for in the mahjong table, my mind just goes overdrive. not with game strategies, but with stuff. just stuff.

come to think of it, maybe this is how i am at life, so far. i go to work and i yen to get back to my dingy apartment. i am warm and toasty in my apartment and i long to watch the latest met opera production of faust. i am in a plush seat at the grand theater and i hanker to be in a dank room with twelve other you know who.

oops. there's the call. i have got to go. and maybe, before i would lose again (oh god, please let it not be over a hundred bucks again this time.) i would have the chance to think what kind of book to write. this while playing mahjong.

here's hoping confucius would approve.