Controlled

At home last night – for where else could I be – I heard a shrill cry from the housekeeper. From the computer table I went upstairs, to where I had heard her voice. It came from my sister Lourdes’ bedroom.

I was in time to catch the sight of Lourdes suffering from two consecutive epileptic seizures. Mother and the housekeeper were there already, and their silent yet heightened presence seemed to be marked with anxious entreaties. The second and last attack climaxed with sister falling head-first to the edge of a wooden drawer where she kept her stack of DVDs. The impact left a vicious cut on the bridge of her nose. Meanwhile, her eyes crossed; her arms twitched; her cheeks rolled – all involuntarily; her face, her toes, and her fingers were numb as a corpse, and from her mouth had erupted bubbles of drool. She convulsed, but not violently. She urinated on the comfortable bed. The seizures, which were more prolonged than before, reminded me of scenes from “The Exorcist”.

Mother wiped her daughter’s face wet with a small yellow towel to rid of the fluids running to the edge of her chin, those trickles of blood and saliva and tears. Tears. These tears were not – had never been – part of the seizures. Lourdes was crying; perhaps she felt embarrassed and helpless and doomed, or maybe she was thinking what possible blessing could have been disguised in having been afflicted with this. Whatever was going through her mind, it was certainly hard to tell. She never cried during the previous attacks; this time she tried desperately to hide the tears with a small yellow towel.

Meanwhile I sat quietly on Lourdes’ bedside. I massaged her pretty fingernails in silent confidence that her nerves will eventually – well, become normal. But what the hell else could I do? Call emergency? Shove down her throat all the Trileptal she kept on regurgitating? Watch earnestly with eyes of sympathy? Pray? To a higher power?

But whatever will be, will be!

With the aid of father, mother and the housekeeper, my sister gradually calmed down. Finally Lourdes was under control, both cognitive and emotional, and she lay dreamily “like a submarine on the ocean’s bed”. The tide had ebbed, and the night had become still again – but an intense kind of stillness. I kissed my sister on the forehead and said good night.

Bohemian Boats

We found ourselves in the middle of a body of water in the middle of the day in the middle of the season. The mid-afternoon sun roasted us like muttons – to quote a little John Steinbeck – and we were melting like the cheese on yesterday’s pizza. Summer has officially made a blistering entrance. We were right in the middle of it.

“Let’s swim,” Marte Perez suggested.

A lovely, affable woman of whose age I shall diplomatically refuse to take an estimate, Marte dove straight from her husband Rolly’s pocket yacht, into the cold (yet sulfuric!) waters of Taal Lake in Talisay, Batangas. Nykko, my photographer, made a louder splash: seemingly a thunderous beckoning to someone who had no intention to swim (or, to be more precise, was quite embarrassed to have his fear of the waters exposed.)

But how, in my representation of Action and Fitness magazine, could’ve I declined? “No” was not the correct answer. So I made a most clumsy jump; before I even hit the waters, I already felt a slight chill come over me.

Floating like a petrified boy and trembling like a leaf, I shuddered violently – shuddered amidst the presence of seasoned sailors, yacht club commodores, and experienced swimmers. Perhaps there was no wicked probability of me drowning to my death, but wasn’t there a mortal terror of sharks fatally hungry for human legs, or of equally dangerous eels underneath? Seaweeds were ready to smother me - that much I saw.

While I swam in deep anxiety, I nonetheless took notice of the parading flotilla of a dozen homebuilt sailboats and motorboats. A most fantastic sight! The tarpaulin sails, dancing esoterically with the invisible breeze, provided a sublime saturation of colors against the vaporous backdrop. Taal Volcano was a beauty to behold, too – a faraway mound full of textures, imaginings and mysteries. The children who kayaked near the shore of the lake were looking at the same thing, in awe perhaps and most definitely in wonder.

And then – the back of my head resting on the pillows of water – I gazed at the cloudless sky which was rather threatening in its vastness. Suddenly a single bird flew across the view. Peculiarly, it awakened me to muse upon what Kenneth Grahame once wrote: “Believe me my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing half so much worth doing as messing about in boats.” It was to be the epitaph for the death of my fears.

Announcing to the mates that “I needed my lifesaver (cigarettes),” I became first to climb back on deck; Rolly followed suit. We enjoyed a wine-less conversation about his life in sailing and his prologue to that. He was from the Northern province of Tuguegarao as I was; attended Ateneo de Manila University as I did; studied English literature in college as I regretted not doing; photographed professionally for seven years (and ran a theatre company) as I could only have dreamed of.

“But you’re still young anyway,” I almost wanted him to say. Instead he smiled silently, thereby allowing me to arrive autonomously at this same conclusion. The rest of the sailors continued to mess about, and the winds scattered gently all throughout.

“Ahoy! Ahoy!” we afterwards kept yelling at those who happened to sail nearby. Roy and Louie and Cheryl and Mario and Cherrie and Felix and Ben and Kuton – I don’t want to miss any names here – all waved at us as if we were friends either long-lost or newly-professed. But did it matter? Was I not feeling the oats best described as bohemian? For as the sun began to set and the blue sky faded into orange, I seemed to have settled in a kind of camaraderie where I felt no storm could come. And I heard the delicate waves of the lake echo exactly where we were.

Home.

***

Memories (Taal Lake Edition):


The scenic Taal Lake Yacht Club with Commodore Peter Capotosto at the helm.


Marte Perez: a portrait of a sailorwoman.


Happy boys watch the preparations as the rest set to sail.


Rolly Perez: the accomodating owner of pocket yacht named B'lisss.


Two sailboats mess about the waters of Taal.


Cherrie Pinpin tests the waters with her newly built canoe.


Feeling my bohemian oats while in summer's microwave conditions.

Thinking About It

Memes. Or meme tags. I have no idea how it’s referred to at the so-called “blogosphere” and why. Whatever they are called and howsoever the terms are pronounced, nothing – almost – will ease my fundamental hatred of them.

You see, I am a rather boring, old-fashioned fellow. I’d be hanged if I heavily depended on the Internet. I’d sell my mobile phone for a typewriter. I’d walk rather than drive – if I could drive; and if I had to drive, I’d be listening to Crossover FM instead of Magic 899. Caught between two worlds – of tradition and of technology – I am dumbfounded as to my place in the latter because of my endearment to the former.

Really…if it weren’t for the ease of Microsoft Word, I’d be writing on pieces of scratch paper. Or I’d be writing on pieces of scratch paper more often. But what if there is a tincture of warmth in our embrace of certain changes? If there is, how would I know?

And so I think.

Lovely Lizza, perhaps, had been misled into presuming that I use my thinking faculty more often than I really do, and for that, it is on me that I place the blame. She bestowed upon me the formidably weighty title, “Thinking Blogger”.

Nevertheless, I must admit that the mistaken presumption has flattered me greatly, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons, and it has in no small part enticed me, finally, to join the online circle of 'meme-complexes' (ahem!). In the spirit of thinking and linkage, therefore, I have decided to participate in “tagging” – “tagging” the writers who, as Lizza says, tickle and stimulate my cerebral cortex. No matter how small I suspect that part of my brain is. Here are the five writers – or authors, rather – upon whom I bestow five more “Thinking Blogger” Awards. That is, of course, if my name at all carries any merit….

I wake up every morning to read what the Daily Blague has in store. Dear friend RJ, more than the 'bourgeois bohemian' he ridiculously describes himself as, is a modern day prince (or king!) of arts and letters. New York is already as romantic a place to anyone as romantic places may come, but RJ easily makes it, to the thinking man, the most romantic city in the world. Moreover, his literary perceptifs are always to be read more than once. I honestly would never have so loved reading if his words hadn’t prompted me into thinking.

He rarely updates, he seldom replies, and he has assumed, shall we say, idiosyncratic philosophies. But the Outer Life remains to me better reading than most of what Inquirer’s Highbloood manages to churn out. Not that I will stop reading the dailies when I get older; only that the process of getting older has – through the notes of Outer Life – absurdly predisposed me to think it less scary.

Mr. Wilfredo Pascual is the Filipino essayist I most admire. Needless to say, his photos are spectacular. Needless to re-announce, he is a Palanca Awardee. Needless to chronicle, his journeys have taken my imagination far beyond its imposing limits. But Secret Gospels, Sacred Sites is nevertheless a treasure I was lucky to have stumbled upon. When my thoughts are lost and my words crumble, the sacred pilgrimage is just a gaze away.

Perceptive, rhapsodic and brainy – these are, in fact, appropriate words by which to describe Searchblog. Upon being introduced to it, the voice of this academic lady in exile both haunted and struck me with her uncanny grasp of human psychology. And Searchblog is, above all, a brilliantly original documentation of a mind, of its memories, of a life, and of a human being in all her sublime imperfection. I am only too glad to have been found by it.

Lastly, though most certainly not the least, say hello to Mindspinner. This is a diary in all respects. Like me, though in simpler and less pretentious terms, the author shares acute observations of everyday: the weather and the gardens and the insects and the lakes. It is a world wholly different from Manila (I have never before raked snow!), but Mindspinner nonetheless inspires universal introspections. From what I gather, then, the paradox of life is that we’re all different...yet somehow all alike.

On a parenthetical note, here are the rules of such a meme tag:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to five blogs, or web logs, which make you think.
2. Link to the original post so people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. As an option, you can proudly display the “Thinking Blogger” Award with a link to the post that you wrote. There’s such a thing as a silver version of the thing, but never mind that. Nothing silver glitters.

Bird's Tongue

“Bird’s tongue.”

Mother was alluding to how the people in her province of Tuguegarao – my province, technically – described their dialect. She was in a nostalgic repose by the bedside table, whereupon prayer cards and religious icons and scapulars had been scattered. In the meantime, I was, unusually, in a rather holy disposition myself; and by that I mean my mouth was shut, my ears open, my glazed eyes with a faraway gaze to the open window and farther away, to the night sky. Midnight was approaching, yet we both knew that the conversation was not to be cut off in the midst of a deep torrent of remembrance.

“Ratata-tata,” mother went on, mimicking the unique chattering tempo in which the Ibanag language was spoken. Like a bird’s tongue, indeed – quick pecks of clattering words which were hard to catch on, harder to comprehend, and blasphemously complicated to translate.

Ibanag, however, was the invariable lexicon during her youthful days. She said it was what the St. Paul College nuns used in praying their rosaries, and what the conservative high school girls spoke in when they exchanged murmurs about the new and upcoming Western films. Mother should know; she had been one of those girls.

“And it was, in fact, my thirty-year old cousin” who made the advertising rounds via one of those 18th century Spanish kalesas: going around the small neighborhood, yelling, in bird’s tongue and at the top of his lungs, that for a mere five pesos an individual would be admitted to watch the double programme screening at the local cinema – “Now showing…Hilda Coronel in her first starring role! Double with To Sir With Love!”

Mother, by the way, loved Sidney Poitier. Squinting through the darkness of the ungodly night, I immediately believed her. Her profession needed not her personally standing by; those days, after all, often found her and her yearnings to the town’s dilapidated theaters. As she vividly remembered and poetically explained, the theater was a place where people brought old newspapers to keep the bugs on the seats at bay; where the stench was of an intense combination of dry urine and the nearby wet market; where instead of popcorn, viewers would bring slices of green mangoes to eat, plastic bags of fish sauce to dip those slices into, and warm peanuts, the empty shells of which the familiar faces in the back row would throw recklessly at the audiences seated up front. The provoked would react with sharp hisses in bird’s tongue.

That was way back during her lyrical days in Tuguegarao. To pursue her collegiate studies, mother then moved to Manila. On the history of our city, as my cicerone spirit led me to believe, I could easily research; but mother, with the soft white glow of the bedside lamp cast on her face, took it upon herself – though gently and without imposition, without the restless vibe of someone who grew up in a society of Ibanag-speaking people – took it upon herself to make me understand what I couldn’t have possibly understood. “Your grandfather would visit from the province every now and then,” I heard her say. “In each day of his stay here, we’d go shopping in the malls and stalls of Quiapo. That was where he’d bought all those expensive leather shoes!” In her voice, I heard mother smile. The tiny twinkling of the stars above seemed even more splendid.

“And we’d watch movies, too,” as if she only suddenly remembered. “There were cinemas in Santa Cruz, in between the districts of Tondo and Quiapo. How your grandfather loved those action films!” By this time the lamp had been turned off. The night was sacred. My mother was one with me in my darkness; I was one with her in her illuminating idyll.

“Then came The Graduate – I believe you had once asked about it – and with such an interesting plot, I just thought I’d bring my father with me,” she said, barely above a whisper, and which could have sounded as the antithesis of the bird’s tongue. “The film wasn’t even halfway through when your grandfather asked me: ‘My child, my child…what are you watching?’”

It would have been presumptuous of me to conclude that I was listening to a confession. Mother’s memory did not at all sound confessional. In fact, we both enjoyed her anecdote with silly giggles. And perhaps these giggles echoed across and beyond the solemn airs of mother’s bedroom walls. After then, we kissed each other a goodnight, kissed each other in mutual recognition that words were not only unnecessary, but also that such words, in whatever language, would anyhow be lost in translation.

An Itch: Last Confession

A writer and friend once told me that “reading creates an itch, the itch to write in response. The itch to answer.” It seems to me a philosophy that is almost, or should be, natural to arrive at. And I believe – as a writer first and foremost – that the best written things have that same, response-provoking quality to them.

Nevertheless I am fundamentally averse to copying and pasting and publishing that which I didn't write, however good, or what I thought of it in response, however valid or idiotic. It's not simply out of laziness. It's not, I should think, out of fear either: fear of appearing unoriginal, tasteless, inflexible. And I refuse to attribute my stance to a lack of extraordinary circumstances. One could conclude then that perhaps I'm just being stubborn. Hence, the sorry, one-time crack at a book review (it was of Lively's The Photograph, for those fatally curious).

But today I came across Last Confession, a short piece in the Sunday Philippine Daily Inquirer. It was written by Gilda Cordero-Fernando, and her article (I am led to understand) are excerpts from The Last Full Moon, winner of the National Book Award for Best Biography and now the top place-holder of my must-buy list (attended to only during seasons of prosperity).

Just having read the piece, therefore, I am making an exception to copy and paste and publish. I am making an itch as public as made possible by technology today. Here are excerpts from the excerpts:

***

During the alumnae homecoming I met up again with my kindergarten pals Remy and Ludy. They were part of a gaggle of cute old ladies in tiger-stripe blouses (my contemporaries) asking the priest whether the Mass he had just said would be good for Sunday or would they have to go again tomorrow. They were still bargaining with heaven, it made me nostalgic. It sounded like I was back in good old alma mater all right.

Remy said that the week before, she had made a “general confession” (a term I had not heard in decades!) to a kind Italian priest. She recommended it highly, would I like one myself, and I said, oh, yes! without at all knowing why. You will have to remember all the sins you committed since you made your first confession, Remy said. (When I was seven?) And she described how clean and light she felt after having been shriven. No, the general confession had not been difficult, not difficult at all.

Remy said she was so relieved that the priest didn’t even get angry or scold her. (I thought maybe it was because Remy was 79 and the Italian, 60.) He did not even give her any penance - no rosaries, acts of mortification, litanies or ejaculations (heavens, no!). And Remy thought she’d be doing penance the rest of her life! (I began to wonder if Remy had poisoned her husband; she was a widow.) Before leaving, Remy was told that if she remembered any other sin, she was to consider that erased, too. (I guess the priest didn’t want anyone coming back for a second round.)

I wondered, the moment I got home, what I would say in my general confession. That I did not feel sorry about anything I’d done in my life and that there was not a thing I’d like to change? Because that was the truth. My transgressions I had tried to understand. I had suffered their backlash because it hurt me to find out what kind of a lousy person I still was, but even more because they had hurt other people. I had already atoned for most of them with the people concerned. The rest (mostly relationships) I was still grappling with and trying to accept as best I could. I felt that pitfalls were necessary in one’s journey through life - they had made me suffer and learn. Isn’t that what makes us grow? From being ashamed of our bad deeds? Did I have to burden a poor priest with that? I began to regret making an appointment for a general confession.

How could I, for instance, explain why I had not gone to Mass or confession for something like 30 years -and not once regretted it? Didn’t that mean that for the same number of years I had not been a Catholic? (Nor a Protestant nor a Buddhist nor a Muslim.) Aren’t people like me what were called by the nuns “free thinkers,” condemned to hell in the august company of heretics like Voltaire?
Why should a murderer going to confession get better treatment than me?

I remember the day, several decades ago, when I realized that “being spiritual” or being a good person had nothing to do with religion, that spirituality and religiosity were two different things. Searching for my truth could not be done, in fact, within the folds of any religion. That day, I went to a book fair and, for purely literary reasons, bought a Bible from a Catholic booth. As I was leaving, I was proffered a freebie, a pamphlet on Medjugorje and I said, “No thanks, I am not a Catholic.” I was horrified at my refusal. It was the first time I had publicly verbalized my stand. I was agitated. Surely a pack of little demons was hanging on to my skirt and back and I kept looking behind.

That night I went into a deep, deep meditation. I was surprised to find myself asking God if I was still okay in his book. The panoramic image that opened in my mind was of enormous male and female genitalia copulating, much like the earth and sky in primitive myths. At first it startled me but I did not find it blasphemous. Watching the divine act of Love, in fact, made me feel reverential - what is creation, after all, but the greatest act of love? If the symbol seemed crude to a prudish mind, well, in my limited world, sex was a personal heaven.

I felt a warm and protecting love physically enwrap me. I wanted to peer over my shoulder to see if there was indeed a giant magnificent creature embracing me. I felt infinitely loved. God and I had found each other again, but no longer in other people’s terms, just God’s and mine. God didn’t even have to be a “he” written with a capital letter.

In subsequent meditations I got to know God in a deeper way. God is me, the higher me. He is my blood, she is my bones, he is my flesh, she is my organs. He is my eyes and my ears and my nose and my mouth. She is my shoulder blades and my breasts and my womb.

God is imagination. God is inspiration. God is all the heady colors that flood the sunset, the blush on the soles of a baby’s feet.

God is the energy to fly, to leap, to dance, to create. God is, as well, simply to be.

God is the goodness in every human being whether it is in the heart of an enemy or a friend. God is the stranger who gets off his vehicle in a storm to see how he can help me with my stalled car.

God is the rich and poor trying to understand each other. God is the rich and poor liking each other.
God is the sky, the clouds, the seas, the clean rivers, the mountains and the plains, the air that I breathe. God is the rice I eat and the fruits that I suck, the cows on the wayside and the birds that I watch.

God is everything and everyone and everything is God.

God is a warm hug. God is passion. God is sex.

God is learning how to love. God is friendships. God is the solidarity of women taking care of one another, of men taking care of other men, of women and men taking care of one another.

God is one’s husband, nice children and a house filled with art. God is ballroom dancing. God is a green salad and maybe a slice of pizza.

When I came out with that meditation in a small article, I really got it. A pious friend said that God being the sky and the clouds and the rain was “pantheism.” Someone said I was a “polytheist.” Another admitted that God is everything but maybe not the cows and the ballroom dancing and the pizza pie! She made it sound so ridiculous.

I realized that the way people neutralize anything they are not comfortable with is to give it a label. Your painting must be a Picasso, your poetry Edgar Allan Poe, your leaning Marxist. To a scholarly religious, I must be an agnostic, a Manichean, a monophosite, a Calvinist, a Zwinglian, a Quaker, a Christian scientist or a Saksi ni Jehovah.

And we had not even gotten to that quaky creation part yet! Creation is the one attribute of God that human beings share. Artists, painters, singers, composers, dancers, writers practiced it all the time. Does that not mean that we are pieces of God? If you are a piece of God, then what are you?

Blasphemous? To believe that one is God enough to be able to create something beautiful out of the chaos that is our sad land today, to dream to life a society that will care for the earth. If we believed we owned the power.

People create when they are willing to see other options, when they are ready to break boxes and challenge institutions, are not afraid to buck what is accepted and safe. Growth is a special and very painful process. A quote goes: Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon; how much of it can fill your room depends on how wide you open your windows.

When all was said and done, the priest asked, So why did you come here? And I replied, Because I wanted to find out if things had changed, if maybe there is now room in heaven for people like me.

He smiled and ignored the question. And gave me absolution anyway. If you die tonight, the holy man said, you will go straight to heaven. I said I believed him.

Promise me you will receive Holy Communion tomorrow, he said. I never make promises I can’t keep, I said. I told him I admired the way their religious order carried out their mission, what tremendous good it had done for the Filipinos.

Then receive Holy Communion tomorrow, he said. Do it for me.

Why should I? I said.

God bless you then, he said, opening his breviary.

You, too, I said, sincerely, and blew the nice old priest a kiss.

***

I am scratching because I am thankful. Thank you, Ms. Cordero-Fernando, for the sublime affirmation that we are not alone.

Client Rant

*This is, by the way, my one hundredth post. I'm just saying.

He walked with a swagger, with the stride of purpose and a swooping movement, with a smile that would otherwise have been quite charming if not for those hideous braces. The ID was worn always and obediently 'round his neck collars; an employee who walked along the office halls as though he were a living advertisement for the employer. His shirts were crisp. They were always tucked in. There were two notebooks he always carried in ever-shifting whereabouts: one a laptop; the other of the spiral and old-fashioned kind. The point of his black ball pen was mighty fine.

Clearly he was respected by his own colleagues. He went by the title “sir” to most of the employees on the floor, and his presence – nay, his mere name – extorted a great deal of high opinion from everyone. Maybe even fear – or fear, to be more precise. In fact, he might have requested, and successfully, a prefix to his name on his E-mail account, or perhaps some well-earned Roman numeral – letters and characters meant to decorate a human being’s position in the business world. But apparently he had only his middle initial inserted. This, I believe, relieved the IT officers and subsequent E-mail correspondents of typing-related stress, a trivial yet unbearable ennui.

So it was that in the course of his first day on his new job, he presented himself the way he planned on presenting himself from thereupon: a gift to diplomacy yet an avatar of bureaucracy. Process flows, policies, standard-operating-procedures: these were the words in his gospel, and he preached the message with a marker on one hand and a glass board by his side. He preached with an instinct so unrelenting and exacting it could never have been described as human; in a conference room so stifling, too, that it may as well have served, plainly, as the animal’s favorite arena.

Perhaps all this would have been well and good. Perhaps the hold of the gel on his hair would not have appeared so stiffened. Perhaps his condescending cruelty would have been more tolerable if he hadn't spoken, one disagreeable day, so authoritatively about art. Or perhaps he could've spoken authoritatively about art if he had the same audacity to realize he came onboard after working for a pawnshop – a pawnshop for Christ's sake! – or if he spoke straight from the heart and not from a most anal impulse. And perhaps I'm digressing – the only point I wish to make, after all, is that he might not seem so bad if he wasn't always preoccupied with trying to look good. Well, you know, I was disappointed, too.

Might I not have been so affected by this – this mortal? I should have assumed a disposition by which I would have recognized that his power play was the rule of engagement, the only rule. In the corporate continuum of meetings, transactions, presentations, and conference calls, I should have regarded a self-righteous man with hideous braces as nothing more than an inconsequential (albeit inconvenient) blip.

Only that I am not the most humble man on earth myself. And that, as another equally irked colleague had said, “I am not a fool”; which brings me now to the cowardice seeping from underneath that dapper attire, the real face behind the mask, the fabrications betraying the scenes behind the show, and ‘the pathetic quaver of his brave boast’. For that last phrase, Sir Henry James, I give my thanks to you.

Sooner or later, when his transgressions have been exposed (and his revolting smirk, wiped off), the rest shall raise a collective middle finger in defiance. Of course I'd prefer it should be sooner rather than later. At any rate, I believe the man is bound to be the center of a grave-digging drama.

So, if the man so pleases, here are pieces of advice. Read between the lines. Lend an ear and swallow some pride. Better yet, read the hidden message: take the first letter from the first paragraph, then the last letter, and then take the first letter of the succeeding paragraph, then again its last letter, and so on and so forth. If deciphered, I shall extend my hand to offer my congratulations.

Remembering and Celebrating

I am skimming the pages of an old journal, conscious and ashamed that a rather awful wave of nostalgia is sweeping over me. I figure it must be that farewells, mild or heavy, have that rather awful effect on people. You see, it’s that time to bid adieu to friends in the office, all for whom (as shall be duly noted for the sake of this entry) the most dangerous drink might very well be stale coffee.

I continue reading the two year-old spiral notebook, and the words go…

"It was way past midnight, and the voice of Damien Rice wove soulfully across the calm of the swimming pool, singing a song of sorrow that would have made even the most macho guy weep. The sky was a sacred black, too, and coupled with such a lonely lullaby, I would have naturally grieved along to the faint soundtrack. But this was a party, a birthday bash, even an informal college reunion of sorts. On nights like this, all that will be asked of you is to celebrate.

"And drink. Sure enough, there was plenty of alcohol for everyone – beer, vodka, tequila, red wine, gin – to drown each of our own miseries and tragedies, and to celebrate as if it was the last night of the world. Outside this place of refuge they called Boyd’s Oasis, there were indeed plenty of things over which we were bound to sulk, but after a round of Jose Cuervo, we all came to a mighty realization: who in bloody hell plays The Blower’s Daughter in a pool party? Will someone do all of us a favor and play anything bubblegum?

"We settled for a Gwen Stefani single, and eased into the collective peace we might not have enjoyed if we remained in our own little cocoons. It would have been faux pas to wallow in the burden of our professions, the strangling hold of our regrets, or the pain of our broken hearts. A cardinal sin it so became to talk about growing pains and unwanted adulteration. It was time to laugh, at each other and with each other. If the sight of a drunken one-legged man throwing shot glasses into the water wasn’t enough to amuse us all, at least there were other ways to find an ephemeral high.

"So the unforgiven confessions became silly punch lines. The sadness of reality and the joy of poking fun at it stopped being mutually exclusive. The statement, ‘Where are you? I’m in love’, had everyone bursting into hysterical laughter as if it was ripped from the pages of a bad movie script, because if, for that night, one was going to be a hopeless romantic – nay, even just hopeless - then he might as well not have shown up, for we were all jolly good fellows with beer in one hand and a cigarette on the other. Just a bunch of twenty year-olds catching up on each other’s lives and drunkenness.

"That night, I had an increasingly stronger conviction that if we are to meaningfully celebrate our lives, a little alcohol helps more than absolute sobriety, a little humor more than much alcohol, a little hope more than much humor, and a little connection with those human beings we call our ‘friends’ more than anything.

"So go ahead. Celebrate, and make sure that a good time shall be had by all."

Ah. The times that pass, the difference they make. The tempered youth. The written witness.

To Live or Die

It is precisely three thirty-two in the morning. I have just woken up in the middle of an already forgotten dream. Groggily opening my eyes to the glowing murkiness of my bedroom, I see that I have left my laptop on, and instant messages have popped up. “Hey, do you know so and so is going to New York? Damn!” and “You there? You’re chatting with so and so?” There are several new messages in my e-mail inbox, too: from clients, from the Daily Astrological Horoscope (which, with my undying curiosity for superstition, I cannot not read), from an old friend, and from a random spammer selling me Viagra and Valium.

Then suddenly I remember crying myself to sleep. Covered in a thick wool blanket, I had been, once again, listening to Tony Bennett with a book in my hand. Or was it that I had been reading Evelyn Waugh to the tune of soft jazz? It matters now that I get my descriptions right, the general and the specific. “To live and die by the pen”, after all, is the waking phrase that just came upon me like an ethereal epiphany.

Yesterday I came to the office to the director’s news that a business trip to Singapore this month has been set. What for, I asked. It turned out we’re going to have to extend our service pitches to the Asia Pacific Region.

But I came to the office yesterday bearing some bit of news myself. “I don’t think I can work full-time anymore because I want to write prose” was the headline. I revealed these tidings to the inner society of three colleagues with whom I believe I am very close, yet the established trust between all of us did nothing to ease the maddening confusion I had felt. Who makes enough for three meals a day in this country with some damned prose? This is probably why, later on and as I threw myself unto my grotesquely hard bed, I chose to listen to Bennett, read Waugh, and cry. The sleeping pills made for an easier transition into tranquil dreams.

And so here I am, sober and awake not many hours after, wondering how in perdition I can live by the pen – and not die by it (how romantic, eh?). Am I, in the first place, meant to write? Am I any good, or am I good enough to ask for a higher rate than a peso and a half per published word? Now that I have set aside other pursuits solely for one, will I ever get to write a book, or a collection of short stories, or maybe poetry (but that’s wishful thinking!)? And if I get to write it, will I be able to publish it?

And how gripping is this doubt! Why, I am no businessman as my boss. I am no musician as my peers, not the filmmaker who makes their videos. I am not a photographic artist like my colleagues. I am not at all a graphic designer equipped with a MacBook Pro and a set of fingertips that produce magic. And I have given up professional basketball immediately after I had realized that smoking felt much better.

And I don’t have money. I don’t have the nursing credentials necessary to find work abroad. I don’t have a face blessed with handsome features and the potential for instant stardom. And I don’t have the sense of humor which can take a person farther than he just might have expected. I don't have much, you'd by now have figured.

Looking around the darkness to which my dried eyes have adjusted, I can see that I only have books, a black fountain pen, and a pack of Marlboros. Maybe I will smoke my starvation away. Maybe I will change my mind and decide to go to Singapore. Or maybe I will write, and someone will read. And by the pen, maybe a life will go on.

The Rhythms of Nyko Maca

A significant crowd has gathered from outside the gates of Saguijo Cafe, and not a few have begun to cavort on the skewed pavement. On this young night, they can all hear from inside the rousing rhythms of Afro-Brazilian all-percussion ensemble Brigada – booming, then rattling, then booming again, like a loud happy trance. Like a powerful drum anthem.

And then suddenly, in perfect accordance to a drum riff, comes a sultry, beguiling, unmistakably beautiful voice, the kind that makes you want to take your corduroy jacket off. It brings the audience into jiving and singing along.

“Laa-la-ya-la-ya-la-ya!”

The voice's words defy meaning, and yet the stylistics define it. The jamming is in full gear now, and the improvised vocals of Nyko Maca bounce funkily with the beats. Her real name is Nicole Severino, bound very soon to be a true mover and shaker in the local electo-samba scene. She is waving her arms with the rest of the students, artists, yuppies and bohemians inside who are themselves all partaking in the hypnotic chorus.

While the number with Brigada is well before the night's main performance of Nyko Maca + Playground, (“with the plus,” saxophonist Alvin Cornista says), Nyko sings to honor the roots of her group's collective sound. After all, Nyko Maca + Playground's musical influences vary to an extent revealing of its genre-defying music: in it, one could hear traces of hip-hop, electronica, bossa nova, jazz, R&B, Latin, breakbeat, gypsy and flamenco strings, classical, and more.

It would be a disservice, in the same manner as with Up Dharma Down, to ascribe a definite genre to Nyko and the band, but if only for purposes of description she clarifies that “we wish to encapsulate a sort of Brazilian electronica hybrid”. She explains: “After all, this is a representation of what we are, and ultimately, what we want to achieve. While a lot of people appreciate electronica within their own musical spheres already, nobody is really bringing that world music sound - which we think we are capable of.”

And the 26-year old's journey has been remarkable enough to test these very capabilities. On this night, in between her performances, Nyko weaves her way through the crowd with the stride of purpose and confidence of movement. She is promoting the band’s CD sampler “Manifesto in the Raw”, and she does it with a shy accommodating smile, a certain glow of energy and excitement, plus a touch of charming eloquence.

The night makes its passage into dark, but as she greets the arriving guests via a touch of her cheek with another, one cannot help but notice the rich-colored tattoo just below the back of her neck.

“Oh. That,” smiles Nyko, when asked about the body art. “I got the tattoo from Joe of Parañaque (Mishka Adams referred him to me), and it has three symbols: an axe which represents protection, Phoenix wings which stand for rebirth, and the Ankh cross which symbolizes life.”

This last one, the cross symbol, has something to do with Capoiera, a rhythm-based Brazilian martial art which Nyko has been studying passionately for six years. She is one of the highest-belted students in the Philippines, and it is her Capoeiran name (“Macaca”) from which stage surname Maca came.

“I actually started Capoeira when I was still living in Montreal, Canada. And then I developed a deep love for the language, the culture, the music, the sport. Nearly everything Brazilian seemed to appeal to me.” Nyko then came back to the Philippines with a fusion of talents and passions to her disposal.

There was, of course, that determination to continue pursuing Capoeira. There was the adventurous zeal to go surfing on beaches all over the country. And not only had she been armed with the ability to speak and sing in five languages (English, Tagalog, French, Portuguese, and Spanish); she was by then also honing her singing style, the commercial viability of which she tested via a stint in ABS-CBN's now-defunct “Star in A Million”. She came out with a runner-up finish to Frenchie Dy, proving that people are or had begun to become receptive to her brand of music.

After the talent show, Nyko spent the next three years mixing the “transitional ingredients” to perfect her musical potpourri. It was also during this time that the paths of Alvin Cornista, Rick Sanchez, and Madz Abubakar had crossed to form + Playground: a constantly evolving ensemble that blends and plays with instruments both organic and digital. Guitarist Sanchez, who's a Filipino-American computer engineering graduate, is influenced heavily by classical and film music, citing Danny Elfman, John Williams, Beethoven, and Mozart as among his major favorites. Cornista, meanwhile, is an avid follower of hip-hop, which he saw as the gateway to jazz music (he had been listening to The Souls of Mischief when he realized the sound needed experimentation with the saxophone). Finally, Abubakar is a self-taught DJ (known as "Neon 8" onstage) who doesn't play any instrument and yet has a unique live electronica mastery of pushing pads and keys on his MacBook. All three have been crucial to establishing Nyko Maca + Playground's trademarks of musical expression – spontaneous, improvisational, free.

Nyko is the “vocal tie” that binds everything together, without ever compromising the band members' respective styles and sounds. “I like making stuff up,” she says, a reflection of how willing she is to assume such creative freedom. And on this night, as she takes the stage with Alvin, Rick and Madz, one begins to understand just what Nyko Maca + Playground is offering. Or saying (even if it's in five languages and broken beats and random rhythms). That is, there's unity in diversity, and definitely not the least in sound.

Of this, Rick is quick to affirm: “Music is our language. It changes and evolves, and we never know to which direction it will lead. But it must not be a dead language.”

The night ends, and the rhythms of Nyko Maca reverberate as the people file out to retire into their respective abodes, deeper into their own tranquil dreams. That's the dynamic of it all, it seems: wherever her journey, whatever the lingo, only one place echoes for Nyko Maca. Home.