White light

Love is blinding, like white light.

Robert de Niro had it coming. Al Pacino had it coming. Joe Pesci had it coming. I had it coming.

What have I been doing in the past two weeks? Reading up new and old authors (Arundhati Roy, Stephen King, Ayn Rand, people like them), listening to new bands (Itchy Worms or the reconstituted The Dawn, for example) and discovering old ones (Herbie Hancock, Sade, George and Ira Gershwin, Digable Planets), working on a still-nebulous pseudo-novel, and watching old films like Author! Author!, Glory, and Casino.

All these while juggling, sometimes beyond what is humanly possible, three home-based editorial jobs from three different countries. And I love it, every fucking morsel of it.

I’m living what Anais Nin would call "the fever of creation and discovery." I have my fangs buried deep in its throat. And I am growing, like a monster in some mad scientist’s lab, growing into a larger monster, a more invisible monster, a more vicious monster.

Right now I’m seeing connections everywhere. For example, in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Robert De Niro’s character falls in love with Sharon Stone, because she was the prettiest bitch he ever saw. I immediately felt a connection with Robert de Niro. But the strange thing, I also felt an immediate connection with Joe Pesci’s character, who is so brutal he would stab a stranger with a fountain pen just because the unlucky stranger had the gall to insult his friend Robert. Stab stab stab. Cool. I also wanna do something like that to some people, like to most of our senators, or to Adamson’s jologs correspondent to the UAAP (man, you must change your frigging worldview about coolness) or to PMAP’s Ronald Lumbao.

Put me in a bar with all these people, and I’d approach each of them, fountain pen in my hand, and stab stab stab stab them in their thick, soft necks. Don’t pull off a fucking thing like that with my friend, Joe Pesci says, blood splatters on his face, all the other people in the bar staring in shock and silence. I wanna stab stab stab the senators and say, Dont pull off a fucking thing like that with my life, with my country’s life. Naks! Suddenly I’m a frigging patriot.

In Author! Author!, Al Pacino is a strange playwright that in certain moments, babbles incoherent arcana, lost in his reverie or in weaving the plot for his play. I saw myself in him, because he was weird, and strange, and disconnected from the real world. Because he was full of love and hatred and confusion. Because he thought people who don’t watch his plays, or dabble in the arts, are not really alive, but the perfumed dead.

In City of God, the character Rocket finds himself in the middle of the nasty and the lofty. He’s an amateur-everything, and he tells the tale of drugs, love, friendship, and power in the world’s filthiest slum. I am Rocket, too. If you want me to elaborate, visit me in my country.

Last Sunday, I watched for the third time Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. This one is different, because I am the entire film, not just the individual characters. I am Morgan Freeman when he says Sometimes, the best way to throw a punch is to take a step back. But step back too far and you ain’t fighting at all.

I am Morgan Freeman when he says Sometimes it is so hard to pursue a dream that nobody sees but you.

I am Clint Eastwood, who mocks his parish priest with lines like, Do you have time for Immaculate Conception?

I am the parish priest, too, when he says to Clint, There’s no demigod, you fucking pagan!

I am Clint Eastwood when he goes home at night and finds the letters he had sent to his long-absent daughter returned. He picks up all the return-to-sender letters, sits in his room, opens a special shoe box where he keeps all those return-to-sender letters, and he counts them quietly.

I grapple with existential horror each day–the daily, ordinary, pedestrian kind of horror, but sad nevertheless–and I see stories like these and  realize the only way to be alive, to be really alive, is to rub our sore nerves, salt our own wounds, connect with our sad stories everyday. These things make our hearts beat madly. Truthfully. These things remind us of little truths like Everyone has a number in them or Love is blinding, like white light.

Yeah. Like white light. Like white fucking light.

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Iraqi Roulette

Every evening, my own little way of "destressing" is browsing world news and other heavy stuff on Yahoo or Reuters or The Economist (but I still can’t pay for premium content), sometimes with a large mug of hot milk beside me. Yeah, yeah, milk is corny. But who can resist Alaska? No wonder "wala pa ring tatalo dito."

I have also developed this little mean game. Every evening, without fail, the top news on Yahoo is about how many innocent women and children are blasted to bits on the day’s round of suicide bombing. Tonight, for example, the count is around 70. I’m having a hard time imagining 70 mangled bodies stacked in a room; it totally freaks me out. But what further gets my goat and beats the shit out of me is such horrible existential horror happens daily in most towns in Iraq. Daily. Every. Single. Day. I can imagine the Iraqis sitting around the breakfast table each morning, each of them thinking it might be their very last. The taste of that breakfast depends on either they’re grateful for surviving another day (it would be the best-tasting breakfast ever), or sorely afraid of what the new day would bring (it would taste like desert sand).

The game I’ve developed is a simple guessing game. Today, the death tally is around 70. My bet for tomorrow, Thursday, is at least 40 and no more than 60. My bet for Friday is around 80, give or take 5. Saturday? Because it’s weekend and maybe the "special recruits" are scheduled to drag more people to their deaths, I’ll be a bit more generous: a hundred, I think, give or take 10. Especially now that the "insurgents" are desperate because Operation Matador is closing in on them.

And to tell you the truth, I’m hoping I’m over-estimating it. I’m hoping nobody dies tomorrow. I’m hoping this shit stops. But shit happens, and the funny thing about shit is that it never stops after you’ve fired its gears. Believe me. It’s like a machine that runs on nuclear fusion, or an energizer hamster pounding its treadmill. And like these corny examples, shit stops only when it has fully devoured itself.

Call me evil or nasty or mean, but I’m just a messenger, a middleman, a jaded scorer. The thing about statistics is that it takes away the flesh and blood. The funny thing about numbers is that it doesn’t show you the face of that kid smashed by shrapnel, or the decapitated body of a mother who only went out to buy Iraq’s version of vetsin or sukang iloko.

This is the only game in which I’m hoping I’m wrong–dead wrong–about my numbers.

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