Olats

Mamula-mula na ang mukha mo, mukhang may amats ka na naman. Kagagaling mo lang siguro ng inuman kasama ang mga barkada mong paniguradong may amats na rin at gumagapang na pauwi ng bahay.

Alam ko, mas malala ka pa sa mga iyon, sa mga basag-ulong utak-biya at sunog-baga na mga kaibigan mo, na walang ginawa kung hindi turuan ka ng samu’t saring kabulastugan ngunit tinutulungan ka naman sa harap ng mga katakut-takot na problema. Maganda ‘yun, pero ang mga ginagawa mo, hindi talaga maganda.

Alam kong rinding-rindi ka na at bad-trip na bad-trip na sa mga sigaw at utos ni ermat at ni erpat, sa mga sermon at take-home assignment ng mga prof na mga nagmamagaling sa buhay, sa mga utang sa kamag-aral na hindi pa nababayaran, sa pagiging busted mo ng ika-limang beses in a row at sa na-hack mong Friendster account.

Ngayon, sumusuray-suray ka na, nahihirapang bumalanse dahil sa labis-labis na alak, naghahanap ng makakapitan, at naghahanap ng makikisalo sa iyong pasanin. Maswerte kang nilalang at nandito ako, lasing lamang sa pangarap, ngunit ang tuhod naman ay matatag, hindi basta-basta bumibigay.

Habang inaalalayan kita, nakita ko ang nangingilid na luha sa mga mata mo. Akala ko matapang ka, malakas ang loob, at hindi basta-basta nagpapatalo. Ngayon, para ka nang isang lampayatot na nadapa, isang uhuging batang inagawan ng Stick-O, isang uugod-ugod na gurang na sabay inatake ng rayuma at depresyon dulot ng pakikinig ng emo na tugtugin.

Oo na, isa na akong malaking talunan, biglang sambit mo.

Napahagalpak na lang akong bigla sa mga sinabi mong yun, pero hindi na ako nagulat, dahil alam ko naman ‘yun simula’t sapul pa nang nakilala kita.

Alam mo, hindi ka lang isang malaking talunan, isa ka ring malaking hangal, magiliw kong sinabi sa ‘yo.

Hangal, dahil sa pag-aakala mong ikaw lang ang pumapasan sa nakamamatay na bigat ng daigdig, na ikaw lang ang tangi at kalunus-lunos na biktima ng iyong kunwa-kunwariang tadhana. At hangal dahil masyado ka nang nalalayo sa reyalidad.

Tinapik-tapik ko ang likod mo, at pagdaka’y ngumalngal ka na lang bigla sa gitna ng malungkot na dis-oras ng gabi.

Ayos lang yan, sabi ko sa ‘yo, ilabas mo lang lahat ng sama ng loob mo sa pag-iyak at bubuti rin naman ang lahat. Yun nga lang, mukhang matatagalan pa.

Bigla mo na lang pinilit tumahan sa abot ng iyong makakaya, at sinundan ito ng katahimikan. Bakit, anong problema? Tinanong kita.

Siguro, pag makita ako ng mga kaibigan ko nang ganito, baka bigla nila akong gulpihin.

Bakit naman?

Dahil hindi naman sila ganito tulad ko kahit mas talunan pa sila kesa sa akin. At kahit na mas patapon ang mga buhay nila kesa sa akin.

Bigla na lang akong napa-buntong-hininga, at pagkatapos ay napangiti dahil napag-tanto mo na rin sa wakas ang ganyang bagay, at mukhang nahimasmasan ka na.

Ano, tara, inom ulit tayo, anyaya ko sayo.

At bigla ka nalang bumitaw sa pagkakakapit sa akin.

Out of Order

On your way to school or work, you suddenly sense that your bladder has distended, perhaps from surfeit of liquid waste, and then you feel the urgency to extract the juices out of your urinary viscera to ease the discomfort. You will look for the nearest public establishment, say, Mcdonald’s, to have a precious pee-pee, and to feel afterwards that you belong again to the world. But much to your disappointment, all the urinals and cubicles, if not occupied, are out of order.

Yes, as the Murphy’s Law states it, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And all things that go wrong are hands down irritating. But some things that come crashing are not all the time sources of further dismay and grievances. Sometimes, they have a bright side— a silver lining. They have subliminal messages of fulfilment and satisfaction.

Back to the subject of the out of order urinals and cubicles, well, that kind of situation is one of those rare moments of implicit affliction where you can derive empathy and develop a brimming love for the meaning of existence. Do not let a full bladder miff you so much; instead, take pleasure in an annoying situation for it will never last long. You may either leave the place to look for another john or let yourself be petrified on the spot by a full bladder. You shall relish the indignity being offered by the moment, and in this way, you will never feel offended by any circumstantial ineptitude.

Take for example the omorashi fetishists who enjoy a full bladder. Now, do you get the picture?

In a manner of speaking, a feeling of joyous supremacy and domination can be derived from a mishap, a failure, a contretemps, a defeat. And from our proverbial out-of-order-urinals-and-cubicles example, you can attain a Nirvana-ish sentience and indulge in a fit of self-actualization just by enshrining an untoward moment. Just like a sexually-starved masochist who will willingly transform blows of torturous pain into an orgiastic and gratifying pleasure of the senses. It is turning a negative force to a positive one. It is countering a negative mood with a positive aura.

Simply put, you must bask into moments of inadequacy, of wrong twists of fate and of bungled circumstances, and enjoy them like hell. Yeah, enjoy them like hell. And laugh at them if you want to, with a matching sinister laugh undertoned by sarcasm. Laugh at your bloody mistakes, and laugh at the universe’s inevitable glitches and lapses as well. Life is fleeting, and so are the innumerable negativity and flop appended to it.

One Muggy Summer Morning…

I was in the midst of a maelstrom of dreams when a thunderous bellowing had abruptly made me half-awake. The booming voice was very familiar. My sense of hearing identified the coarse tone, the high-pitched voice, and the reckless litany of foul words- it was my mother’s.

‘This house was never been a house! Everything was messed up! I was away for only two days, and no one cared to fix things here! ’

My eyes were still closed and I decided to continue my sleep hoping to catch up with the unfinished dream. But the words were persistently penetrating my eardrums.

‘And you Alex, (my big brother, not his real name) you are not always here! You lazy ass!!! If you’re here at this friggin’ house, you’re busy, and you’re with your cohorts while minding insignificant matters. You frequently bring friends here as if this bedeviled house is a party house! Look at the heap of dried clothes in the sofa, they weren’t even friggin’ touched! Who'll gonna do them for you? The socks, the hankies! Get up from the bed! Son of a sloth!!!’

Perhaps this is only a terrible adjunct to my formerly-dulcet dream. Or could it be a nightmare?

‘And you Ellen (my little sister, not her real name of course), you’re a girl but you don’t have a sense of order. Look everywhere!!! Whore! You don’t even know how to sweep the rooms, or arrange what has been disorganized! Bummer!!! Now get up from bed too or I’ll hit you with the friggin’ broom!’

Broom. The word reverberated. Ah, it perfectly rhymes with room. Holy Guacamole! My room! MY ROOM!!!

‘And you ____(my name withheld), while I’m away, you’re away too! You’ve been friggin’ gone for whole two days. You are of no help in this house! Look at your friggin’ room! It’s an annex to some stinking dump site! You choose, make a magic to clean it or I’ll throw your things away? I’ll give you an ultimatum, and if you don’t do anything, you'll see what you're looking for! Now unlock your room, I'll get the hangers! You're getting on my nerves!!!’

‘Ackkk!!! I’m friggin’ late! This is all your fault.! I’m the one who lives nearest to our office, but I always arrive late. You know why, because I commit all my mornings cleaning this fucked-up place!!! Really fucked-up! You’re supposed to be helping me out to maintain cleanliness, but look! All your junks, your rubbish, I’m gonna burn this house soon! You friggin’ children of whores!!! Oh, the bitches! The scabies-infested pups! Who let them on the loose? The neighbors are griping!’

If the discordant voice and the pernicious accusations were an earthquake, then my ears were a Richter scale. The seismic magnitude is so prodigious that mitigating the damages would be unnecessary.

Mother’s last words faded like an echo of a plinking campanile, deafening yet remaining. When the decibels of pure, concentrated silence sallied forth from out of nowhere, I gratefully snuggled my pillows to find reprieve. Ah! The sounds of the chirruping birds and the cockadoodledooing roosters outside the window are so endearing to hear. It is going to be a fine, sunny day ahead for sure.

The Tales of The Irked

The charisma and economic appeal of the LRT is still unfaltering and indomitable for the commuting hoi polloi. But I, for one, reckon that the LRT operations should be suspended or canceled once in a while just to save a great deal of money, time, effort, morality and yes, virtue.

Every LRT train car has their own violent vortex to unmercifully suck gullible commuters inside, and pucker them like dried sardines in a tin can. If you are uninterested to wait for the next crowded train, you might as well squeeze your flesh and bones in the midst of the thick passenger plethora in the train car. If and only if you are one of God’s lucky children, nothing bad will happen to you. Then if you are an inborn jinx, you might end up with a broken finger, leg or wrist, or a face slammed smack on the automatic door’s tempered-glass panels. The scenario in almost all equally-populated stations is a pathetic scene to behold, let alone the jam-packed concourse and ungodly queue lengths.

Inside the train cars, it is an impossible actuation to strain any bodily muscles, only your eyeballs are allowed to spontaneously move. The motley crew of passengers also means motley of ineffable and indistinguishable aromas emanating from dysfunctional sebaceous glands. The homogenous mixture is a putrid combination, rivaling that of Payatas’ mélange of malodorous vapor. You are spared from such a lurid snarl if you have nostrils clogged with thick, hardened calculus or you instantly acquired anosmia just in the nick of time.

Another complication that could follow is the presence of lechers and maniacs. Women will be perverted as long as there is a chance, and men are not exempted from that. If there were lascivious asinine old-timers, there would also be the equine cross-dressing faggots. These LRT stock characters will leverage the insufferable horde of unsuspecting people in their own sexual behooves. Pickpockets, however, will never be left out of the scene, they are but infuriatingly passé.

If you steeled yourself to muscle in on the train car successfully, the effort you exerted in your initial venture must be quadrupled to get out past the intransigent standing passengers. You need not to mind kneeing frail legs or stepping on newly-pedicured toes because your co-passengers also would not mind blocking your way. Now, that’s what you call an efficient human barrier.

After alighting from such horror, the turnstile within sight is the consoling prize for you. Your ride is just like finishing an arduous marathon, only less than the stretch of the Baclaran-Monumento route. For occasional commuters, this is a stinking dung heap to hurdle. For the inured habitués, this is the inexorable way of life.

Mama Don't Preach

If there’s something I want to change in my life, it is my not being serious towards everything I do. You may find me a family rebel slash occasional family yes-man or even a sleazy boy slash seldom dutiful boy who knows a lot about cooking but pigs out all food in the refrigirator by his self, the heaven I care. I’m into anything under the hot, scorching sun. I am a maestro specializing in the art of sleeping, but I dunno how to smoothen out the gazillion convolutions and creases my bed cover has. I let my room become a Petri dish for multifaceted organisms and lifeforms to breed. I’m appreciative to the aesthetic effect the drooping gossamers have done to the cornice of my room’s ceiling. I half open the windows in my room to orchestrate the moisture so that mildews, molds and extraterrestrial toadstools would sprout healthily on every nook and cranny in my room. (Now God will be proud of me for sharing my sacrosanct pigsty to some of his other creations.) Am I really that eccentric, eh? On weekday mornings, I swear to God that I really don’t know what a comb is. Or what in the whole wide world a mirror is. I only know hair wax- which I use it to dishevel more my very disheveled hair, and perfume, you know, to add sweet, saccharine smell to my not-so-sweet aura. Call me unwell-groomed, and I’ll take it as a million-dollar compliment.

As I go out school-bound to ride a jeep, I’ll have to trudge about 359 paces going to the main road to remember that I forget something. It’s perfunctory that I’ll journey back homeward to get either my allowance, my hanky, my school ID, my water tumbler, or my hair wax, which I use to dishevel more my very disheveled hair. Nonetheless, I’m a tad boy with not-so-tad ambitions. I can perfect quizzes (please insert a round of applause or a hook punch swoop cue here) and flunk the morrow quizzes. I am your average student who yawns widely in front of the lecturing professor as he kindles more of the collective tedium in the classroom; I impulsively pick my nose as mad as a hatter while jotting down stenographic notes, and sleep while simulating how fishes doze off without their having to close their eyes.

So, I said I have not-so-tad ambitions. Yep, just like anyone else. Those ambitions, I must say, were formulated without being mulled over seriously. Now they are stashed in some uncharted stead inside my gray matter, waiting to be dispatched or to be rehashed for future references. For now, I am a sitting duck. My stance is vulnerable to extraneous influences and a helluva deviltry, perhaps because I did not give ample seriousness to the minutiae of my existential being, or to the discombobulating enigma of life. Oh life. Or it is just an upshot of my being an ungrateful brat who never says grace before and after meals?

I am just a curious creature with much obscure questions to ask. I know you smart-Aleck kid would precociously reply that it is natural for we, as humans, are rational beings. But sometimes I am irrational, kiddo. At times, I easily believe in things that I read, hear and see. Tell me that Richard Dawkins will apologetically recant his blasphemous creator-smashing philosophies, and I will cheerfully spread the loving news to my little sister, to my little sister’s friends, to the friends of my little sister’s friends, and to the friends of the friends of my little sister’s friends with vim and vigor. Persuade me more to read and reread and overdose myself with Conrado de Quiros’ almost-Machiavellian rants, and in no time, I’ll become a die-hard and true-blue PGMA destructive critic.

I once questioned my purpose, my life, and all those itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny things that happen here and there. What if the Creation Theory is just a figment of someone’s imagination and fart combined? What if reincarnation is true, and then you find yourself reincarnated on an inanimate object, say, a toilet paper? Then holy baloney, the unsolicited law of karma will take center stage. All the shit you heaped upon everyone in your mundane days will backfire, and you know next that you’re a dead meat. Thence, the literal shit will be literally wiped on your literally whole fibrous fabric, it’s your just punishment, and all you can do is curse and ululate “you asShole, ya’ll pay for this!!!’ sans the vocal cords, to that rotten, befouled fundament who tainted you.

Honestly, I want to have a normal outlook and mindset in life. I’m tired of intrusive thoughts, soul-searching, contemplation and incessant whining about Pluto’s miserable eviction as a planet in the Solar System. I just want to do unique things, experience new things, and efface some of my unpleasant behaviors. I want to be kind all the time, like trying to flash my pearly-white smile to everyone I will come across, even if I don’t know anyone of them. In due respect to my moral principles I edified some years ago, I will never scribble again phallic symbols drawn side by side a stylized, diamond-shaped linear vulva on the school’s drafting tables as I brim with overweening machismo assertion (you fool, it is not vandalism, it is art.) I will never shout again muted expletives and invectives against my professors, my parents, my friends and to the priests back home who say mass for two hours. I will never ever surf the net again at home at ungodly hours just to find some softcore, dulcet-moaning Ozawa vid clips just to end up waking my nosy mother in the adjacent room. I will never blow my nose again in front of or near a church even if it can’t be helped (blame the god-damned polluted air) and et cetera.

As I cogitate for a fitting closing salvo, I became a doubting Thomas; I doubted my self, my one and only ally in times of doubled trouble, “what if I only play a minor role in the significance of the universe?” My spastic fingers and strained eyes, too, questioned my consciousness and my enervated synapses, “Hey, are you on illegal drugs? Why are you typing this kind of bosh and sappy things? ” “Nah ah,” I said. “So, you are really going to take life seriously? It’s quite a big leap.” “Not really,” I retorted, “I’ll just do it as some teenybopper named Jordin Sparks sings it— one step a time. Oh, I almost forget, there’s no need to rush.”

Parallel Universe

What if there really is a parallel universe out there, a macrocosm wherein a version of you and me exists? If that is probable, they might be more intimate than bosom friends, treading any path together only centimeters apart, more affectionate than eager lovers, with hands glued together. There could be a vast field where they always frolic under the sun, carefree all the time, because of a sinewy emotional bond that ties them together. They could also think of nothing else but each other, doing nothing but kill time and banter while saying sweet nothings, telling each other how much love has engulfed them. In that parallel universe, they will never run out of time, there will be no roadblocks, no hassles, and no impasse. But all of that are big ifs. What if that parallel world is a coincidental one? It will only conclude that the idea of us being together is preposterous. We will still remain the same immobile acquaintances, used to exchanging his and hellos under a cloudy and somber day.

Sugarcoated

In just a split second, an intense fixation of someone could morph instantly into a deep-seated abomination. One might end up cursing a long-revered friend, or end up entreating an atrocious saboteur. As the clichéd cliché goes-- people do change.