Tuesday

Everybody must know what's happening in Burma (Myanmar) right now. With the SPDC cracking down on dissenters, the body count just keeps on piling up. The monks won't give ground and so does the junta. Apart from a few condemnations, the ASEAN is not won't to putting more pressure on the junta. So right now, everything is bleak for the Burmese people and other nationalities in the region.

I just want to post here a picture of my Burmese friend, Zaw, a freelance journalist who I think is now going underground. You could guess what day a Burmese is born by his name. Zaw means Tuesday. This photo was taken the night he got a tattoo and up to this day, i still don't understand what it was. I asked  him right after he got his and he, too, had no freakin' idea.

He did like the design though so I guess I could live with that. 

I received an email from him a few days after Yangon, the capital, fell into chaos. And I will post here verbatim what he had to say: 

On 9/27/07, Zaw Naing Oo <oo.zawnaing@gmail.com > wrote:

 Hi…..Shooting and seven people including BBc reporter were shot…

I share my experience in shooting area in center of Yangon, Capital of Burma. It happens in angle of Anorratha and Sula Pagoda Road at 1:30. Over 100000 people are sitting tight and singing the Buddhasim wishing song by paying respect to Solidiers guarding on the Sula Road . Other people are standing and looking at the crowd around.People add more and more,near 150000,, they make wishing and sing national authum.At 1:30, The four trucks bring the solidiers and police who wear the full equipment ,, drive from the diffrerent side of Sule pagoda road..The trucks pass across the people without horning with hight speed to Sule Pagoda where over 50 soldiers  guarding sulae road facing to peace protesters facing to sulae pagoda . Soldier and poeople so close , 30 feets the trucks stop in the crowdee by waiting the wire fence to be open . So poeople around the track . At that time ,

two persons in the crowed find the stones to throw it to the track . Other people try to catch them to prevent throwing . One of them run to truck to do throwing . I follow to catch them when i get him near the track , so close in front of gun . At that time ,one remaining at the back throw a stone , at one the soldier shoot to people directly by waving the gun .We run to different direction and they follow and shot people . On the sulae road , we run to  Trader Hotel side , a university student boy running in front of me lays down on the ground because a bullet was on his waist . I hear seven people including BBC reporter , foreigner were shot and injured , arrested over 30 peace demonstrators ,

When I write this story I hear that people and soldier are fighting in the southen part of the yangon , others riot are happening and shooting also everywhere in Yangon .

I will send a lot of information about shooting ang killing…on time..

Zaw
 

When I first heard the Burmese language, the phrase "a staccato of gunfire" came to mind. Devoid of the mellifluous quality of  the Filipino language, for example. I thought the Burmese language lacked the pause, the inflection, and the tension as words string swiftly together like the sound of two fingers pounding keys of a rusty typewriter.  

But they're actually a gentle people. Then again, you could never account for man's capacity for cruelty when the choice boils down to death and self-preservation.   

Just a shout out to my brother Zaw.  Give the bastards a good fight. 

Noodle

Following the Senate investigation into the ZTE deal has been very depressing — from the way the senators comported themselves, Juan Ponce Enrile’s supercilious smirk (I’d love to punch that wry grin off his face), Miriam Santiago’s antics – but last Wednesday’s hearing did fling an extra bone my way: watching Comelec chair Benjamin Abalos squirm.  

I knew it was going to be good by the way Abalos has been running the elections like a goddamn personal playground over the years, ramming his shod on each overeager politician’s ass as they grin and bear it. Abalos managed to wrangle himself out of the “Hello Garci” and P1.3 Mega Pacific scandal hearings “in aid of legislation.”

Not this time… no siree! The tough bully was finally given his comeuppance.

Before Miriam Santiago walked out of the hearing over reasons as palpable as her Ilonggo accent, she managed to lay down the predicate: that the investigation couldn’t be possibly be made a venue to sift the truth in cases of two persons hurling accusations at each other, while hiding behind half-truths and half-lies. To illustrate, at one point during the hearings Abalos called former Socioeconomic and Planning Sec. Romulo Neri a bare-faced liar when the latter accused the Comelec chair of offering him 200; Neri’s reaction? He said he has a vivid recollection of the events that transpired at Wack-Wack golf club. The question now is who committed perjury?

To digress, could Santiago have walked out to save face? I mean, after Neri swore that Abalos offered him 200 million(?), there’s no defending the Comelec chair after that point. Not because Neri’s character is impeccable but rather on Abalos’ reputation. As far as perceptions go, the term character and the name Abalos seem a logical inconsistency; unless taken into context of the movie, where “character actors” generally refer to villains. Not to mention that the red-faced Abalos has been caught many times with his hand inside his pants.

I only have one rule when confronted with the he-said-she-said scenario: whoever has more to lose is most probably lying.

Now, I’m not trying to dissect the political and economic repercussions of the continuing investigations or even if the hearings were warranted in the first place. I leave that up to the economists, political analysts and columnists.

I’m just saying that most senators don’t exactly possess the unbiased personality of the justices, for example. All too often, the lofty collective intention to fiscalize the actions of our officials will eventually be deflated by personal motives.

Look at Nene Pimentel: Why does he have to sink so low as to name somebody as Abalos’s mistress? Couldn’t he stop to think about the effects of his accusation, based on text messages no less, on the girl? And how could that, pray tell, impact on nailing down Abalos for allegedly brokering the ZTE deal?

The only logical explanation, of course, is he felt bitter because his son Koko lost due supposedly to cheating in last May 2007 elections under Abalos’ watch. Unfair? Maybe… but he brought it upon himself.

The statement of the year however comes from Abalos’ wife who said that after a prostate problem, her husband has become, well, a limp noodle.

Unless somebody comes forward that could prove to be the smoking gun in identifying the personalities behind the pay-offs, the investigation will go nowhere. So I have a suggestion: Since the grease money has already been advanced, why doesn’t the Supreme Court, who earlier issued a temporary restraining order, just junk the ZTE deal?

Whoever floats at Pasig river, I pronounce guilty.

The Letter "O"

I was waiting for my lunch at one of the restaurants near our office yesterday when bad news entered: a rowdy 3 year-old child and his equally uncouth mother.

I knew it from the first moment they barged into the restaurant. The kid was throwing a tantrum and the mother, in turn, was shouting invectives like Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye probably does for repeatedly being made a complete tool in front of the media by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita.

Right from the get-go, the boy imposed his impishness on the two ladies sitting adjacent to my table while the mother was queuing up to order. I, on the other hand, was sitting near the cashier’s counter, just waiting for bad luck to approach my table.  

I was watching bemusedly at the boy pulling the shirt of the lady in brown while she was trying to contain her patience. I wasn’t amused at the boy’s antics but at the reaction of the two ladies next to me. I looked at the mother and she was strangely apathetic to the fact that her kid was bothering somebody; perhaps she was even relieved that it wasn’t she he was upsetting.  

I knew they were annoyed from the manner they glared at the boy and I was waiting anxiously for one of them to knuckle-crack that boy’s head to knock some sense into him but still, nothing. I guess they decided to just ignore him so he would go away. Hmmn… I might have to do things on my own. I’ve always thought that if you want something done right, you do it yourself.

So about a minute goes by and the kid got bored pestering the two ladies and geared his tantrums towards his mother, which earned him a pinch on the ear. He squatted and bawled like a big baby (Okay, I have nothing to say to that because that’s what he essentially was).  Everybody was still ignoring the scene, including the mother.

I looked askance and our eyes locked. I meant me and the boy. He walked towards me and I stared right at him, daring him to come: “Common, boy. Bring it on, I ain’t impressed with your cuteness.”

He left his mother, who was by then ordering at the counter. His tiny right hands clutched at the white toy car as he languidly walked towards me, his face stained by tears and green goop.

When he attempted to put the toy car on my table, I told him no. He ignored me and leaned on my chair instead, totally invading my private space; the car now on top of the table while his right hand was feeling my biceps. His left hand, meanwhile, reached out to my food.  While an observer might see his actions as totally cute, I see right through what he’s trying to do.  That’s some power-play shit right there, the young grasshopper challenging the turf of the elder kung-fu master.    

And because I’m such a nice guy, I again asked him not to touch my food. His hand stopped in midair for a brief moment and continued its descent. I glanced towards the mother who just passed by my table, settled in her chair and not even bothering to admonish her child.

I fashioned a letter “O” with my thumb and middle finger, showed it to the boy and released the finger that’s already taut with tension. Not my fault really, I always do that in the middle of meals and I just happened to hit his hand in the process.

Not surprisingly, he wailed and ran towards his mother. I eyeballed the lady, waiting for her to come to me and surprisingly, she stayed. But she did let go a long diatribe after another about letting children be children and all that crap and how some people have no manners. Ha! Manners is what some people use to justify backbiting other people.

Now, I’m all for letting children be but their parents or guardians should take responsibility for the wayward actions of their ward. I’m sick of these parents who allow their child to annoy everybody else and then act like you’re so mean whenever you act in response. I mean, you don’t allow your dog to bite somebody’s ass just because the mutt is cute, do you?

Besides, not a single person in that restaurant gave me a dirty look so I guess everybody’s in agreement with me.  I tuned her out and I went back to enjoying my pork and chicken adobo.

Man’s folly

Man’s sublime existence has been largely undermined because of too much rationalization. How simple things would have been if we were like the bird who greets the morning with a song.  The bird doesn’t think why the sun always rises in the east, nor question the caprices of the seasons — it just lives. Enjoying whatever surprises the morning offers, totally oblivious to the approaching afternoon armed with the knowledge that nature holds whatever it requires. With that realization, only a food wouldn’t burst into a song.

Why do we think that we are greater than nature? Why do we feel the need to control the universe and take comfort in science and religion? Do you think that identifying the parts of the tree you claim it as your own? Do the bird’s physiological and anatomical characteristics define what it is? Don’t you think its soul, its life force, characterizes the bird regardless of species and form? For example, If I have the structure of a man but I have the animus of a woman, would you call me a man? I think my superficial qualities are incidental; my design makes me what I am.

Our ego is so great that we dismiss everything as false until we say it’s the truth. We dismiss the idea that the universe will continue without us; we dismiss anything that we can’t identify and explain as an illusion; we dismiss the idea that we are made of the same element from the lowest grub that crawls the earth. We dismiss the idea that we are not gods.

How great is the man who knows that he is nothing for only in knowing that we are a mere dust in nature’s eye that it can easily flicker away can we truly marvel at the vast wonder of the universe. Only in knowing that we are small can we begin to be great.

All our lives we are made to believe that we are special; that we have the faculties to design the world as we see fit. We took a passage from the book of Genesis that we are to be the caretakers of the earth, distort it and gave it new meaning — that we can do anything we like with it.

But how can we call ourselves caretakers when it’s been nature that’s taking care of us all along? She could have easily annihilated the human race with a mere sneeze, but she chose not to. She endured the destruction that we inflicted. Nature endured for us. Now, how can we presume to take care of her when we’re the ones hurting her?
Man thinks that his ordinariness is his curse and that’s why he constantly denies it.  I think Angela Hayes played by Mena Suvari in the movie American Beauty summed this impulse to be better when she said: “I don’t think there’s anything worse than being ordinary.”

And that’s where fools exceed geniuses, because they never claim to be otherwise than being ordinary. Why do we revere geniuses anyway, are they better than us? Do they possess special faculties that weren’t sprinkled to everybody when the gods distributed talents? Was Shakespeare a better man for composing all those literatures, however majestic they were? Was the Greek philosopher Plato superior because of his dialogues?

Genius is but an offspring of necessity; man’s involvement is unintended.

Why do you presume to be better than anybody else? Is it your intelligence, your wealth or good looks? You die like everybody else and worms will feed on your belly. That means, dear sir, you will succumb to the laws of nature just like everybody else.

For is it not conceit and self-delusion that make us kill an ant without guilt and yet almost worship the television set and all the modern appliances we have on our living rooms?  We think that the television is more precious than the ant. We think our creation is better than nature.

Can we not grasp that the single step an ant makes is much finer that the most advanced robotic limb invented by man? That a single particle of sand possesses qualities that are much more complex that the most expensive computer known to man? Yet, it’s there on the ground to be walked upon, totally ignored!

Man’s folly is thinking he’s not one; for presuming that he breathes the same air as gods; for presuming that he is greater than his own nature. If he just but pause and think how inconsequential he is in relation to the workings of the universe, how insignificant society that he created is, then he can truly appreciate the reason why he is here in the first place — to experience life.

Cleaning out my closet

I completely forgot to mark a year off my life maintaining this blog. I hope that oversight was not my subconscious telling me how pointless this whole thing is because up to now I feel a bit ambivalent about blogging and the repeated self-immolation it entails to churn out even a decent post.

Though to be fair, it’s a personal milestone for me. Who would have thought? I actually wasted a year on something that’s neither mildly therapeutic nor remotely erotic.  Maybe because I’ve been very clinical about my approach to blogging: a great experiment that, if proven successful, might hopefully improve my writing and maybe get in touch with the inner writer in me — that squeaky, dirty voice which have been muted by years of neglect and disregard.

It’s a funny thing, this writing business or more specifically, the business side of writing. I realized that when I started to make a livelihood of writing, the fun in weaving letters together to form words, stitching words together to create paragraphs and organizing paragraphs together to construct a story completely vanished. Work certainly has the penchant to wring the fun out of something you love. At one point, writing ceased to be an abstract concept that I pursue almost to an obsession; all its intangibles were missing and it evolved into something mundane, as concrete and solid as the ashen keyboard I’m using to type this shit.

By the way, my obsession with writing, in relation to my family having produced no writer along the line of its genealogy, refutes the old maxim “shit doesn’t fall too far away from the ass.” I hesitate to call it love affair in lieu of obsession only because the term love affair insinuates reciprocation.

Was it Nietzsche who said that if you have something to live for, you could endure the how?  So what keeps me coming back? Apart from the practical aspect because make no mistake, blogging is a sensible way to practice your writing skills, there’s the extra gravy – fellow bloggers who wittingly or unwittingly hitched a ride in my journey.

The fact that I have yet to see even a shadow of these bloggers, much less meet them, is insignificant. Humans have the need to be a part of something bigger than their puny selves and that accounts for the omnipresence of the godhead. No matter how independent you think you are, you always seek the affirmation of your peers and the acceptance of your betters. In that sense, perverted childhood does not translate to neuroses as Freud suggested, it’s the lack of recognition that causes more psychological damage.

To complete the picture, my account asks for a password and username before I could log in and write this post just like most exclusive cliques which also demand a code, be it a secret handshake or a tattoo, to distinguish it from the others or cloak the group with a sense of inimitability. That password is something I share in common with fellow bloggers, and lest I be accused of being an elitist, I have a ready-made excuse: my password allows me to protect my account from hackers.

This is my clique, no matter how transitory and I like that because anyway I look at it, I always come to the same conclusion: I am a closet blogger.

Worms

It’s been a while since my last post and the reason was much more mundane this time. My computer crashed due to the virus in the system. As of last check, there were five worms and 2,443 malicious spywares in the computer so it’s a wonder it didn’t crash earlier. The anti-virus software was no use either as the virus/es rendered it impotent.  

How could a worm do so much damage?

I remember when I was a child many summers ago when our father forced us to drink Combantrin to deworm us. Papa said not to worry because we’re just going to shit the dead worms when we defecate. Au naturél baby!

So Hakuna Matata, right?

After a couple of days, we played in the backyard totally forgetting the whole Combantrin episode. We were squatting on the earth playing with jolens, or marbles if you will. The game is pretty simple: you draw a circle on the soil where you set the marbles. The number of marbles inside the circle might vary from the number of players and how much the players are willing to bet. Then some six to seven feet from the circle you draw a straight line where the game commences. You get down on your knees and use your thumb and your pointer finger to fling that marble or pambato towards the cluster of marbles inside the circle and whichever marble that gets nudged outside the circle is yours. The winner gets the most marbles and the bragging rights.   

Of course, we didn’t see the sense of wearing drawers then, (that’s underwear for you, non-British readers) because our uncircumcised shaft was barely two inches long (Unlike today, ehem! When it’s already 2 ½ inches long. Erect. Bwahahaha!).

Okay, you didn’t need to know that.

Anyway, my youngest brother bent over because it was his turn, right? We were directly behind him and we saw something violently moving from inside his short pants. Naturally, we were curious and tugged at his shorts and the thing fell. It was the biggest worm I ever saw.

Even as I write this post, trusting the dimensions of the worm on my fading memory, I still couldn’t believe the size of that thing. That was no worm; that was a snake!

It was about three feet long and about the diameter of a pansit lomi. And it was thrashing fiercely. When my brother saw the worm he dashed straight towards where my father and uncles were, the worm still suspended from his buttcrack like Son Gokou’s hairy tale in the anime series Dragonball Z.    

When my father and uncles saw it, they jumped in fright. Such sissies, really. At least they managed to hold my brother down so he’d stop running around. He screamed, however, every time the worm touched his leg. The next problem was obvious: who’s going to yank the worm away from my brother’s anxious ass?

Well, the houseboy volunteered but he wasn’t touching that thing with his bare hands, fuck you very much. So he picked up a piece of paper marked Lion-Tiger katol from the ground and while my father and uncle held my brother, the houseboy pulled the worm/snake and I swear I heard it pop.   

So, how could a worm do so much damage?  

Well, when my father and uncles jumped, one of them smashed his shin on the edge of the table and the Tanduay bottle they were drinking toppled over, spilling its contents; the blocks of ice spattered on the ground and my uncle suffered a cut on his shin. Blood was everywhere, not least of which came from my brother’s ass from the worm’s sharp teeth, and our game of marbles was aborted.

You heard about the Butterfly Effect? This is the Combantrin Effect. You drink a tablet of that crap and you shit worms for real.

Papa told us later that when they were young, my lolo also had them dewormed. His brother had the same experience as my younger brother with a slight, albeit disgusting, difference: the woozy worm found itself on my uncle’s nostrils.

Thanks to that bit of unnecessary information, the next few days were a torture. Maybe amid all that ruckus, he forgot something possibly life-changing to an impressionable child: I, too, swallowed a pill of Combantrin, remember?

And oh, we spent P750 for the computer’s repair.  Fucking worms!

My mistress and me

Wow, I’m back. For a while there, I seriously considered ditching this blog. There was a point when I my infatuation with the written word waned, or more accurately, it abandoned me.

You really can’t blame me. Growing up, words have always intimidated me but like a stupid, little lovesick boy who’s unbelievably obsessed, I seek words out.

With apologies to the god Apollo, I made Calliope my own. 

By sheer passion, I managed to tame the fiery wildchild. No, that would be inaccurate. For my muse is not, and will never be, submissive. Well, at least I tricked her into thinking I was worthy of her glance.

With her extreme mood swings, our relationship was understandably volatile. There were nights when I sit on my bed, my sheets still folded and unsoiled, and wait for her. The clock ticking away the dusk as the moon, mistaking spite for wit, occasionally taunted me by drawing on the shadows in my room to mask its pockmarked face.

Weeks might pass and still no news from her and just when I was about to yield her to a more talented and younger upstart, she shows up – totally unrepentant. Her defiant eyes stare me down, daring me to ask her where she’s been and I, expectedly, capitulate. Genuflecting instead on her stained, guilty feet. 

Perhaps it’s best to give this post a bit of perspective. By coincidence or ignorance, I landed a job that requires me to write, rewrite, reconfigure, and in most instances, massacre news articles.

In short, I have a sissy-ass job.

I mean, who in his warped mind writes for a living? I personally don’t know any writer or journalist growing up. These inbreds seemed so surreal, like chancing upon fireflies in middle of the metropolis. In a sense, I even feel acrimonious towards writers and journalists because I don’t think they hold real jobs but swindle others into thinking they are entitled into their privileged position. Now, I know somebody who I can channel all my anger to: myself.

It doesn’t help that I belong to a family of thugs and ruffians. Strangely enough, brute force is the language we abide by. We look at killers, drug addicts, or snatchers as role models and for some of us, being a con artist is the penultimate dream. And when on rare occasion we try to be imaginative, we garnish our language with the words fuck and shit and putang ina (roughly translated as mother fucker). And that’s the extent of our creativity right there.

So being tagged as the bright kid who has a way with words has a different connotation for my relatives – a connotation similar to the unknown matter that I puke when I drank too much.

I remember going to my high school reunion eight years after we graduated (who calls for a reunion after only eight years? Wait at least for somebody in your batch to die) and was staring at the attendance sheet. Next to occupation, I wrote stambay (bum) because I was weirdly ashamed to admit what my true job was.  Well, I was only partly lying because the flexible time at my disposal in my current job does give an impression that I’m just bumming around.

It’s rare for a child to live his dream when he grows up. Okay, I might be being deceitful since I haven’t really written a book or even published a short story or anything as illustrious. I’m still leading a writer’s life, although admittedly a poorer adaptation of it. Like a Xeroxed Hemingway. Similar beginning and ending but the grains on the words imprinted by the cold machine do leave you feeling cheated.

I’ve digressed enough so back to my treatise. The point I’m trying to make is simple: when you find yourself married to your mistress, she becomes your wife.

And repetition being the antithesis of creativity, I have to work double time to add spice to my marriage. I used to dream about possessing her, of making love to her at mid-noon while the satin curtains shield our naked bodies from the prying eyes of neighbors. But now, it’s different. Not in a good or bad way, just different in a sense that my mistress is always accessible.

I see her always, my ex-mistress and wife, reclining there on the sofa, rollers on her hair, her white granny panties showing from beneath a pair of skimpy maong shorts, watching TV. Somewhere, somehow, she stopped trying to excite me. She’s just sitting there.

Looking bored.

As always, the fulfillment of every dream is the most disappointing part. I’ve been doing this for the past six or more years. Most days are better than others. There are perks, of course, but then the 10^th and 25^th days of the month more than covered up for those perks.

My salary is what most accountants would term a negligible asset.

And what happens if I don’t feel like writing? Sadly, that’s not an option. When you feel writer’s block coming along, you write, scribble, doodle or pound those keyboards until you produce a graspable train of thought and pray to God, Allah, Brahma or whatever higher power you ascribe to that your editor would find it in his or her heart to be magnanimous. 

Your mangled copy is proof that God has a nasty habit of flicking off the finger.

It’s not a lost cause, however. Through the years I’ve been doing this, I learned something about myself. Something that was made obvious to me as I nearly cap this post:

I’m not very good at what I do best.