the city mouse and the country mouse

i wake to the full volume shrieking from the house next door of, of all the music from all the musicians in all the world, air supply's greatest hits album... for the Nth time, where N is approaching infinity... at 6am in the friggin' morning. my cellphone alarm hadn't even rung yet. i get up, i grumble, i have no choice. then i remember, it's friday the 13th. a good sign. i zip through my bath, my breakfast, my dressing up: a zombie, a machine, a robot. then i step out of the house for my commute to work.

not yet 20 meters away from the door, there is a shrill beeping behind me: a habal2x driver in a hurry. but the already tiny street, made even tinier by the jeepney driver who considered our tiny street as free parking space, is just too tiny for the both of us to pass through comfortably. the driver has no choice but to let me pass first. i continue walking.

i pass through, the habal2x behind me, still beeping. it passes through, and the driver hits his breaks in front of me to block my path. he tells me he was blowing his horn. i tell him yes, i'm not deaf. he tells me maybe i am. i tell him to fuck off. he glares at me, i glare back, then he goes on his way, beeping away all the other pedestrians in his path. my words startle me; did i just say that? i continue walking.

the street is pockmarked with potholes and littered with dog shit and random pieces of trash. to the left, the smells of buwad (dried salted fish) frying and plastic burning mingling with the decay of dog shit. to the right, another house arrayed with giant speakers near its gates, this time pounding the eardrums of all residents within a 200 meter radius with that most infamous staple of mid 90s diskorals: the macarena. and walking toward me, a grimy woman dragging her own grimy son, who is bawling out with all his lungs, and the mother threatening the boy with a broom. ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my neighborhood.

i finally emerge at the eskina, a tricycle waiting to transport me from the hell of my neighborhood to the hell of my office cubicle. i hop on. the driver, not yet satisfied with his passengers, waits, the tricycle's engine humming its impatience all the while.

a man emerges. his hair is wet, combed back and clean. he is wearing a clean blue polo, cleanly ironed jeans, and cracked leather shoes brushed clean. but on his astringent clean face is the bewildered look of a lost man.

in his right hand, a clear plastic envelope. in it, sheets of bond paper, and on the top sheet, a pasted 2x2 id picture, and in big black bold letters, the word 'BIODATA'. he approaches the driver.

in a singsong bisaya spoken in dalaguete and southern cebu, he asks if we were going to the highway. the driver tells him to hop on. he looks at the tricycle like it was some alien spacecraft, unsure of what to do. he takes his seat in the sidecar. the driver revs up his engine. off we go.

it's starting to get hot, and the traffic is running slow and heavy. with the driver deftly negotiating the obstacles of the road, we reach the highway. the bewildered man asks the driver to stop so he could get off. but it was a still a 'no stopping' zone, and a traffic policeman was standing in a discrete corner, a wolf waiting to pounce on its unsuspecting prey. the driver tells him, 'sa unahan' (a bit farther off). another 10 meters, and the bewildered man again asks the driver to stop so he could get off. the driver answers him again, 'sa unahan', his annoyance now ringing clear in his voice.

we finally reach our stop. all of us passengers get off. i hand my money to the driver, mutter under my breath a 'good luck' to the bewildered man, then proceed to the jeepney stop across the street. it takes me a full 20 minutes to get my ride. as our jeepney fights its way through the traffic on the highway, a metaphor for the sad realities of living in the city presents itself to me.

there laying on the highway, under the growing heat of the sun: the raw, bloody, mangled carcass of what had been a dog. and no one thinking it worth stopping for: the jeepneys and cars on their morning rush, the trucks and vans going on with their deliveries, the pedestrians on the street waiting in vain to get their ride, the cigarette vendor anticipating the traffic to slow down so he could peddle his goods, another traffic policeman sitting under the shade of the nearby bakery, idly watching the rest of the world on its senseless turning. and no one coming to clean the mess up.

our jeepney finally finds open road, and the driver steps on the gas. the wind in my face, i reflect over the dead dog. then i remember the bewildered man; i hope he doesn't end up as roadkill.

sabado nights

this was about 3 saturdays ago

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a generic saturday evening in my neighborhood would involve the following: a few houses away to the left, a murder... no, a massacre is being committed against supposedly popular songs, facilitated in no small part by that evil evil invention: the portable videoke machine. meanwhile, a few meters away in the opposite direction, another house is blasting the night with loud and irritating 80's disco music (with the purpose of driving away evil spirits like we do every new year's eve, i suppose?). and right in front of our house, members of the beer belly club gather for their weekly booze sessions, drinking themselves silly like they had a strong death wish (their motto being: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die), and as a result causing a racket not unlike what you would hear from a pack of squabbling dogs.

imagine the pain of having to hear "brother louie" playing over and over again in an infinite loop, combined with a rendition of "my way" so horrible that it would make frank sinatra rise from the grave to seek justice by strangling the singer. enduring these torments every weekend may be enough to qualify me for sainthood. that would make me saint kenneth, patron saint of those who suffer from uncivilized neighbors.

but this was not your usual saturday evening. no songs were being massacred. no 80's disco music to wreak havoc upon the night. and the beer belly club was mercifully absent (i hope their wives, or their livers, are telling them to slow things down). it was that rare and pleasant saturday evening, the general peace and quiet allowing me to catch up on my backlog of books. but as to how unusual it would actually be, i had not realized yet.

sir francis drake was about to finish up his attack against a contingent of the spanish armada that was anchored in cadiz when i hear gasps of alarm from the next door neighbor's house. curiosity had gotten the better of me, so sir francis drake took a break for a while. i put my book down and listened. then the word i had always dreaded reached my ears: sunog (fire).

the combination of iced coffee and panic gave me palpitations. i jumped out of my seat, ran out of the room, and looked through the windows on each side of the house. a terrible light brightened the sky north of us. the fire was huge and looked dangerously near. i alerted everyone in the house.

there's nothing like a common threat to galvanize a whole community to action, even though you annoy each other's guts. my mom and my aunt ran outside to gather any news they could get about the fire. calls were made to the local fire department. updates as to the location and status of the fire was broadcast around the neighborhood. and just in case, everybody started filling up all available buckets and containers with water. in that moment of great danger, everyone had suddenly become comrades. how pinoy.

meanwhile, we switched the radio to the AM band and searched for any station reporting the incident. sure enough, an evening news program caught wind of the fire and a reporter was already on site giving a blow by blow account. according to the report, the fire was at a factory just 3 or 4 blocks away. the city's firetrucks were having a hard time getting to it because the street leading to the factory was too tight. right. so what else is new?

the reporter began doing interviews with the factory's security guard and onlookers in the area. by the sound of the it, the security guard, the onlookers and even the reporter himself seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. why... those crabs! just wait till it's YOUR house...

in the face of oncoming catastrophe, i started evaluating my dependence on my possessions. i looked at my books, my pc, my collection of music cds, dvds, toys and gadgets... would i be able to live without all these? i had begun to resign myself to a future without them. i think it was dostoevski who wrote that man is a being who can get used to anything. guess i'll have to get used to losing my stuff.

then the irony of it struck me. how strange it is for us to spend a huge chunk of what little time we have allotted on this earth to accumulate all our possessions, and yet the moment we lose them by circumstances cruel yet indifferent, then will those possessions ultimately bring us nothing but pain. we slave away at our tiny office cubicles to accumulate all this but in the face of our common destiny, it wouldn't matter. we won't be able to bring them with us anyway.

don't be mistaken. i do not advocate a return to the stone age. i just find it oddly poetic that it has to take something catastrophic like a fire or a flood or the specter of imminent death to jar our senses and get our priorities straight. things that we consider bad sometimes do serve a purpose. it's up to us to figure out how to turn it to our advantage.

yet what makes things tragic is when the going gets back to being good, we take advantage of the luxury by turning priorities back to our diverse frivolities. just when we see the light, just when we learn something profound and supposedly life changing, then we forget. we never seem to learn. funny thing this, human nature.

our radio reporter finally comes back on air with an update. a firewall was now blocking the spread of the fire. we were spared! waves of relief wash over me. looks like we won't have to go back to the stone age after all. things begin quieting down in the neighborhood. everybody seems to have lost interest in the fire after hearing the good news. we were all back to minding our own business. so continues the story of sir francis drake and the spanish armada...

and that is how i spent my saturday evening.

but wait... what's that i hear? oh crap, they're singing again. like nero playing the lute while the rest of rome burned to the ground.

the sound of a thousand pigs in the slaughter house

i may have one of the worst neighborhoods anyone could ever live in. every weekend, the whole place is filled with the sound of what i can only compare to that made by a thousand pigs being slaughtered. if you're a filipino, yes, i think you know what i mean. i bet your neighborhood has been infested too, at least once, by this scourge of humanity, this evil, evil device only the devil could have invented, the karaoke, and its more modern incarnation, the ktv.

if you think hearing gloria saying "hello garci" is enough to make you sick, wait till you hear my drunk, potbellied neighbors' version of a classic karaoke standard, frank sinatra's "my way". i feel only one word is able to describe their rendition more fully, disturbing. the vexation resulting from their infernal howling is enough to make me want to burn the whole neighborhood down. i think i'd rather be a refugee than be subjected to this inhumanity.

to give justice to the song, i bet even mr sinatra would rise from the grave to try to scare them back to their senses. i can almost hear him say, "the nerve! how dare they murder my song!"

man, the karaoke should be outlawed by the geneva convention. the karaoke can be considered as a weapon of mass destruction, you know. thus, it can be covered by the articles of war.

hey, mr. kofi annan, sir, are you listening? this is a matter of world peace. you should have taken this up in the last UN general assembly.

hey, mr george bush, sir, if you're still sending troops running around in the deserts of iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction, you better come here to the philippines. there's a bunch of terrorists here in my neighborhood.

this karaoke thing has taken over the whole country in ways the abu sayyaf or the npa could never even dream of. today the philippines, tomorrow the world. i shudder at the thought.

but i have to admit, i too have once been on the dark side. and i enjoyed it. now ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you condemn me to death by karaoke, allow me to plead my case. it was only once you know, during my company's last summer outing. our damned room didn't have any airconditioning, and there were a lot of mosquitoes, so i couldn't sleep. there was no more beer, the bar was already closed. so i had no choice but to spend the rest of the night singing myself hoarse till sun up. but at least everybody else was either too drunk or safely fast asleep to hear my wailing, so, no harm done right? at least i don't do it every bloody weekend for the whole damn neighborhood to hear. not guilty.