Worms

September 10, 2007

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

September 3, 2007

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.