Fighting Temptation

(Photos by Nykko, Buds, and me.)

Have you ever thought of escaping Manila, and then you passed by Roxas Boulevard and immediately changed your mind? I’d be happy, like Carlos Celdran, if you have; yet I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t.

But have you ever thought of escaping Manila, and then thought of it even more? If you haven’t –though I would be inclined to reject the very idea–, just read the newspapers (which, traditionally enough, now report three simultaneous super typhoons and a recent North-wide earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0. And should I mention that there is a large ongoing government rally march at Makati City by military groups, civil society, and bishops? Goodness, maybe the Church should start running the country!). Or step out onto the streets. Contemplate the absurdity of having pink pedestrian bridges and no more than five seconds later you’ll ask yourself, “What on earth?” Pink bridges, oh I tell you: the government’s idea of the New World experience!

(There are other, more serious stuff, too – like income inequality, corruption, and terrorism: you know, big words that have scared the doo-doo out of potential foreign investors, which resonate in the Filipino consciousness like an unholy litany of why one should leave, and which I probably ought to write about if I were to become relevant like Patricia Evangelista.)

So – are you really, really happy here?

Eleven million Filipinos weren’t, and now they are all so hopelessly abroad. Many of our doctors aren’t, and now they are aspiring to become nurses. The terrorists are not only not happy; they are also pissed beyond pacification, and have thus made it a point to bomb every other shopping mall every other year. It is hard to think of how one can wrestle with these modern forms of temptation.

But then we have Roxas Boulevard.

“Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world,” says a character in a movie, which I won’t tell you is American.

“Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.”

Pass by Roxas Boulevard before evening and look at the sun as it dips cautiously behind the peninsula. You might notice that almost all the dinghies are moored already at the yacht club, with just one remaining under sail, one small white boat slicing through the glassy waters where there would be a reflection, though rather hazy, of a few city lights. When the gradient of the sky has turned deep purple, like a huge lilac flower, with random whorls of clouds and their shadows in thin streaks of grey, well – when that happens think of how it’s only one sky we’re all under. Don’t think of escape. Just try your best to be glad.

I did.

***

Memories (Because-looking-at-pictures-from-some-of-this-year's-trips-makes-me-happy Edition):

A sidestreet near Session Road.

Three stooges in Mine's View Park.

Macho Temple.

Baler bonfire.

In Baguio with Angelle.

Agoo Church.

Of Pets

Photo of the Ace Ventura inn in Baguio by Budo.

First, the cockroaches. Now there are rats. Even though they’re not quite as numerous as the cockroaches in my apartment, one rat, for me, is one rat too many.

And it seems to me that they’re invisible as well. At midnight, when the floor is cold from the breeze and the world sleeps darkly, I would be awake to catch the sound of, say, snippety pitter-pats on the stove; of soft chirping under the stairs; of steel pots clattering weakly; or perhaps of a plastic bag – left on top of the kitchen table – rustling, something like what you hear when dry leaves dance with the wind. But we’re not talking of anything so lovely here. We have, unmistakably, the rats – invisible ones doing their thing and scurrying in the shadows, from corner to corner, as incessantly as if to say in high-pitched French, “Catch me if you can.”

I wouldn’t try to catch those hairy grey rodents if I could. Naturally. Should I drink my coffee alone at the dining table, they’re free to roam and tease and sniff stuff (ha! as though they’d have anything else to nibble on except old newpapers). And, so long as shelves are closed and the pots’ lids are in place, they’re free to mingle with relatives.

Reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover the other night (which I find very funny, despite whatever the author had intended), I realized that what I cannot pardon is the interruption. To someone who can hear a person breathing from fifty yards away, and who cannot ignore it even if he very badly wanted to, well – a ‘silent’ night is no lullaby. Why is it I seem to hear everything at a disproportionate volume when all I am trying to do is finish a novel? And oh, the rats: they’re simply worse than D.H. Lawrence’s inopportune commas, worse than that if my eyes happen to fall on so much as a wriggling tail.

Let’s forget cats. No, thanks! I happen to disbelieve in their dominance over mice anyway, call me an anti-felinist. But can you even imagine the mess a cat will make? I’ll take cockroaches any day, they whose ugly and natural uselessness is there for one’s taking.

By the way, a one-dollar subscription to Metroblogging Manila can now be purchased for Kindle, Amazon’s new wireless reading device and that which has been called the “future of book reading”. Isn’t that terrific? I am one of the site’s authors, but then when I come to think of it, this bit of news doesn’t really mean anything to me: I haven’t got a Kindle. I’m not paid to write. And I have never understood how Amazon works.

Is paper really becoming that unnecessary?

Thank You for Having Coffee with Me Today

Thank you for having coffee with me today. Well, you actually ordered mint tea. I drank a cup of brewed, and ate half of what they call ‘bacon twist’, though one will not be able to tell how it’s any different from the ham and cheese croissant. Typically I would have gotten a honey-glazed donut or nothing at all, but then I was a bit hungry, which I didn’t tell you because I didn’t have to.

Thank you for having coffee with me today. Stepping outside on the cobbled street then sitting at a round al fresco table, we lit cigarettes and blew smoke to let it scatter away to the deliciously chilly November evening wind. There was a teenage girl who, seemingly as if on cue, had stopped in front of us to sell a cluster of sampaguita flowers. And the traffic was a bit noisy and the odd group of young professionals on the next table was a bit obnoxious, but I am really just nitpicking in an attempt to describe the otherwise very agreeable scene, which was quite like something out of a foreign language movie, definitely European.

Thank you for having coffee with me today. Usually, you see, at that time of day, I’d be reading a book, napping, or listening to a play list, which nowadays consists of nothing that isn’t by Rufus Wainwright or Antonio Forcione. I didn’t know what I’ve been missing. To be more precise I didn’t know what would’ve made the days – well, more complete. Like riding taxis. And letting a cool breeze strike my face. Keeping appointments. Talking. “This is nice,” you said. “Conversations sustain me, and so do comfortable silences.” I think that conversations and comfortable silences sustain me, too.

Thank you for having coffee with me today. I listened intently, just so you know. (I may have stared too long at the coffee shop’s poster advertisement of a new Christmas blend, but I did listen intently.) And now I realize how plenty of catching up to do there is. You were very kind to have shared – in between listening to sympathetic Sarah McLachlan songs and to my constant, “Oh, there’s nothing new with me” – juicy gossip about mutual friends, about strangers worth the attention, about others who’ve turned into memories, and others still who’ve turned into names. And of course I was a vile creature, asking all kinds of indiscreet questions about what is going on where and who’s seeing whom and other impertinent queries into such whys and wherefores as I’ve no business in.

Thank you for having coffee with me today. And thank you for the orange. After dinner I ate all of it – not as an afterthought but as a dessert. I enjoyed it very much; prior to that I hadn’t really eaten any fruits for a long time.

Waking Life

The other night, I had a terrible nightmare from which I did not want to wake up. I was in Paris for four days without a camera. How I had gotten there (and all by myself, too), I could not remember; it might not have been part of the dream at all. But there were, I can recall, magnificent cathedrals, rows of quaint restaurants, bookshops, taxis with shiny windows, and on the street a string quartet playing a love song with French lyrics. I was on my way to an unnamed city stadium. And the people wore coats because it was raining.

Then I awoke to find the camera and everything else in place.

As expected, that morning’s astrological dream decoder did not provide any satisfactory interpretation. It also didn’t explain why, on the verge of gaining free entrance to a Regina Spektor concert, I suddenly got transported from, ahem, La Ville Lumière back to the City of Shopping Mall Explosions. The timing was appalling. I went back to bed to sleep again but drifted instead into another dream about a funeral: grandmother’s. It was perfectly fine, though, as I hadn’t wanted to play professional basketball again in Madison Square Garden just to be roused and realize I was the owner of this ugly and unedifying beer belly.

In any event, how annoying! The dormant consciousness is being raped all the time. I’ve noticed that it has always been this way and not just for me. I mean, any man can find himself winning the national lottery only to wake up beside his wife the next second. Or he can be attending a very important sales call, in the midst of which his 36-slide presentation cannot be located anywhere in the computer, and –boom!– the nightmare continues and he’s fired. Then he wakes up to remember he has neither a laptop nor a job. Moreover, such a wretched crime, knowing no distinction, does not spare women; I’ve met plenty who dream of their in-laws all the time, but never enough of fabulous Botox injections.

(And the writers, ah – I think that they’ve got the rawest deal. It is indeed possible that they literally dream of writing a most elegant novel; conjure in their sleep an image of themselves typing at a desk with the fury of someone who knows he’s about to be shortlisted for next year’s great literary prize; imagine in vivid detail how the last page had ended and the first good review had begun. But then what is his story about? How can he call it his own? You see, the writer’s work is devoid in dreams of its very essence –process– and he is left without understanding the very detail which should be most familiar and congenial to him – that is, the written word.)

It is therefore my opinion that likening the nature of our dreams to rape (as afore) makes more sense than a shallow mind might think. After all, they come upon us unawares, in a cold, mysterious darkness where we are likely to be most vulnerable, and upon being assaulted we are rendered mute, the cries for help hollow and meaningless and distant, strangely enough, as though not coming from us. Wherever we might find ourselves and with whom, the dream is bound to be terrible and traumatic –not a dream really but a damnable nightmare– and we won’t be able to do anything except endure an ordeal such as we’ve never gone through before.

But was Paris terrible and traumatic? Hardly. I was loath to leave that world. So let’s see. If the dream does turn out to be a fantastic experience, taking on a form that’s pleasantly malleable and arousing to the senses, then we may well expect it to end at once. Or very, very abruptly, so that we’d soon ask, “That’s freaking it?” And therein is the catch. One who is sleeping cannot command the intercourse of his imaginings, the same way one cannot tell a predator what he ought not to do.

I don’t know with others, but I’ve found myself a solution. Never sleep. I can’t anyway, not since the little trip to France and not much since my bedroom was repainted the shade of phlegm. So instead of dreaming I’ve been bathing in moonlight, drinking gallons of coffee, twanging the guitar, singing karaoke, and appreciating the fact that I’ve literally never had this much time in my hands before. Now doesn’t that sound like fun? It is. A rather outrageous arrangement, maybe, not to mention physiologically demanding; but I don’t know why anyone would prefer to see a world, or figments of it, with his eyes closed.

How Strange, When One Goes Biking

After school, and not during mornings, may very well be the best time to go biking around the area of our small neighborhood. By then, the sun would be on its way to dipping behind a row of undistinguishable two-storey wooden houses (some with numbers on the gates, some without numbers, some without gates at all), yet without taking away the amount of light necessary to appreciate a Manila suburbia. The wind would also be mild and cool, this being November, and typically there’d be at least one young boy in every other block flying a kite, or trying to, despite the telegraph wires.

Because I’ve acquired the rather unhealthy habit of fixing my eyes on beautiful, million-peso houses to imagine what might be happening behind their closed doors, wooden and carved (this is where the Reyes family became dysfunctional, and that’s where a Filipino-Chinese marriage fell apart), I’d often take a route that would bring me past the familiar zone and to the more affluent parts of Santa Mesa Heights. But these quieter areas –for example, the level streets in Barangay Lourdes by which one would have to pass to get to the church– are, I’ve found, less populated, and effectively less of a “community”. At least that’s the impression from where I’d pedal along. Don’t the people ever go out?

In front of these houses’ gates, no old man or maid, or houseboy, would be seen seated on a plastic chair, smoking a cigarette and exchanging stories with the old man or maid or houseboy next door. There’d be no one with a frying pan with which to prepare banana-cues or banana rolls (the finest afternoon snacks for neighbors at ten pesos each). No kids. No sounds of laughter. No echoes of song. At the street corners – that’s where I’d see the lone soul loitering outside: usually the homeowner association’s security guard, posted there with his tabloid until late, until night passes and his being posted there is no longer necessary. His dog would eye me suspiciously because I am a stranger.

Office

Sometimes, when it’s too quiet and the telephones don’t ring, I’d miss the office. At this time, I’d wonder, colleagues will have taken a late lunch and stepped outside to smoke near the fire exit, right beside a garbage can that does not stink, and the talk would be about the impending deadline for an advertising campaign pitch or a recent party at which this celebrity or that hotshot journalist had shown up. Or maybe the people, having gathered round a circle of swiveling chairs, would be poking fun at a smart-alecky client.

“Of course we give hard copies of the press release to the editors; what does Mr. High Waist think? That we E-mail stories using our Yahoo! accounts and pray they’re front page stories the next day?”

Home is one thing work never felt like, but there was nonetheless a veritable locale that made life in the office – well, rather endearing, because I not only felt as though I were in it, but that I was in it together with the rest of them.

***

Memories (Because-I-like-being-in-the-frame Edition):

On the Dining Table

The loveliest part of my day is when the dining table has been cleared after lunch and there’s still plenty of coffee in the pot to drink before it cools. There’d be no one outside, just flecks of suburban dust between the sky and the asphalt. And inside, while others are taking siestas, there’d be, on the dining table, coffee and cigarettes and a quiet such as I’m unable to enjoy during late nights when the mind, restless and overwrought, does not wish to retire so early into slumber.

The afternoon is when the newspapers would be neatly laid out near the china cabinet, on the carved chair where grandmother used to sit. I’d take my turn to read what is happening, or has happened, or will be happening, but of course very little, really, has changed: the items would be either bad news or an advertisement, the advertisements would be either paid or obscure, and editors, I’ll notice, took little to no trouble in indicating which is which. (“Illiteracy costs more than education,” a headline reads in the metro section of the Inquirer. You don’t say.)

After this ritual comes another, striking a much-needed balance between keeping abreast and keeping sane, and one which speaks just the same of the signs of our times: literature. (Presently, a 1950s collection of short stories from The New Yorker is what is on the dining table, with pieces by, to name a few, Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Nabokov, Salinger, James Thurber, and E.B. White.) On a remote November afternoon such as this, only Mitzie –half-Shi Tzu and half-leprechaun and the only animal I ever loved– is vigilant enough to disturb. She looks up at the table through her hair-covered marble eyes, nose moist, tongue out and tail wagging, pleading silently for water or leftover food.

The fluorescent bulb in the kitchen is best turned off, and during the loveliest part of my day I let the soft, gentle glow of the art-deco chandelier in the dining room illuminate my afternoon nook. It’s earthquake-tested, and older than the antique rug that drapes one of the walls with the Last Supper scene, but the light fixture completes a setting that is as cozy to me as any (with or without the cobwebs). Inhabiting the darkness that’s broken only by the chandelier, I think of how accomplishment can be a sorry goal.

Would I rather be elsewhere? Maybe, but I haven’t yet found a way to airlift myself out of the country.

Beauty

Recently, when my cousin crashed his grey Mitsubishi Lancer into a van on his way to the province of Dagupan, everybody wanted to know if the dogs were okay. “How’s Beauty?” they asked, and by Beauty they meant the flea-infested black ogre with eternal eye discharge, an abnormally short tail, and a penchant for leaving golden excremental souvenirs where people are most likely to step on them, like the garage or right in front of the doorway. Beauty had just given birth, you see, three bitches just as hideous and annoying as the mother, only in junior sizes.

The dogs were safe (though a bit traumatized according to Auntie Josie). My cousin left without a scratch. His car suffered the most damage, with the two doors on the right side getting mangled like Joseph Estrada's English vocabulary. I was invited to go with my cousin to Dagupan and enjoy a little fishing break and obviously I would have been on the passenger seat when the accident happened but the gods, I guess, had successfully interceded again.

Why hadn’t I gone? Well, first of all, I was expecting mail from the US Post Office (books). Secondly –and this still rings true–, there really isn’t much to do at my cousin’s new terracotta-roofed quarters but fish and drink and sleep and smoke. Last but certainly not the least of reasons, I didn’t want to ride with the dogs, no matter how cool that sounded. They are better off now and happy in the province, no longer littered beside the slipper rack, but I can still detect unmistakable traces of Beauty’s very funky smell, right where she used to do most of her barking. And this makes me want to throw up on my father’s office desk. How can the ghost of a dog who isn’t even dead haunt a person so terrifyingly?