Judas the Armadillo

When evening came, and when Saturday Night Live was over, Jesus was reclining at the table with the Twelve. They talked about why Scarlett Johansson was simply the sexiest girl on Earth, and how George Bush sometimes reminded James of a nasty baboon he once saw on National Geographic.

And while they were eating, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me."

They were very sad and began to say to him one after the other, "Surely not I, Lord?"

Jesus replied, "The one who will dip his hand into the bowl with me will betray me.”

At
that time, Judas was not listening; he was so busy prying off his
dentures that got stuck in the ham that he was startled when he dipped
his hand into the bowl and felt that somebody’s hand was also there.

It was Jesus’ hand.

Jesus and Judas looked at each other.

And Judas said, “Is it I, my Lord?”

“Is it I my Lord?” Jesus said, mimicking Judas. “Is it I, my Lord?”

“But that was an accident,” Judas stammered. “I didn’t hear you.”

All the disciples stared at Judas.

“So
now I am the villain, eh?” Judas said. “So what if my opinion has
always been different from yours? Look, guys, if we’re gonna say the
same thing, why in hell do we have to speak at all? Why don’t we just
stare at one another and admire one another’s butts?”

James said, “Dude, you can’t do that to the Son of Man.”

“Yeah,”
John seconded. “I thought only Dinky Soliman could do that. And now, we
have you. Now, God will punish you and transform you into a Chinese
spotted swine.”

But Judas didn’t become a Chinese spotted swine; in an instant, he transformed into an armadillo.

The other disciples were so astonished.

Bartholomew said, “Cool.”

James said, “I’m sick and tired of eating bread my whole life. Don’t you guys think this thing will taste good when roasted?”

“Yeah,” James said, “let’s stick it up on a spit and roast it over the coals. Like what folks do in the Philippines.”

“Do they have armadillos in the Philippines?” Bartholomew asked.

“No, but they have Franklin Drilon and Joe de Venecia. I think that’s worse.”

But
as they spoke, Judas the armadillo rolled up into a ball and went
crashing out the door. He rolled and rolled until he found himself in
the temple. Once in the temple, he became a dude again.

Judas ran to the first priest he saw and screamed like a girl.

And the priest asked, “And who did you say tried to eat you?”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Aw, come on. Try another one.”

“No, I’m serious. Jesus and my friends tried to eat me. They thought I was an armadillo.”

The priest laughed. “Yeah, I watched this Monty Python film once. They had this Roman general named Biggus Dickus. That was funny, too.”

“No,
no, no!” Judas panicked. “I’m telling the truth. Look, if you don’t
believe me, I’ll lead you to them. They’re going to a beer garden
called Gethsemane.”

“And?”

“And I’ll kiss the one who tried to eat me.”

“And why would you do that?”

Judas was stumped. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s written somewhere that I should kiss him.”

“Okay. I have this feeling this information is not free, is it?”

Judas
stared at the priest, his eyes gleaming. He said with a Dr Evil gleam
in his eyes, “You have to pay me thirty. Billion. Fifillion. Zizillion.
Silver. Pieces.”

The priest laughed. “Are you crazy? Guards, get this piece of shit out of here before I have him guillotined.”

“But, Sir,” Judas said, “the guillotine hasn’t yet been invented.”

“Okay. What’s your point?”

“Well, you can’t guillotine me if nobody yet knows what a guillotine is.”

The priest pondered it and said, “Tell me about the electric chair.”

“Sure, sure,” Judas said impatiently. “But pay me first.”

Again, the priest laughed.

“Five billion,” Judas said.

The priest shook his head.

“One billion?” Judas said.

The
priest was rolling on the floor in laughter. One of the guards said,
“This guy’s so hilarious. He’s even funnier than Teddy Casino and his
friends hiding inside the Batasan Complex.”

“Yeah,” another guard said. “or that bunch of buffoons who call themselves the Black Friday Movement. Really funny.”

When the laughter dissipated, the priest said, “Dude, we won’t give you any. Not one, not ten billion silver. But….”

“But what?”

“But if you can really kiss this guy like you say you would, I’ll give you something. Maybe a bag of peanuts.”

Judas
thought it over, realized it was fair enough, and whispered, “I have a
little problem. I’m willing to accept the peanuts, but can we keep it
secret? Like don’t tell anybody?”

“Sure,” the priest said.

“And can you mention in your Jewish newsletter that what you gave me were silver coins?”

The priest thought about it, nodded, and said, “You know what, I like you.”

Judas grinned. “I like you, too.”

“I’m not really a full-time priest. I sing and do guitars at a local pub. Maybe we should form a band.”

Judas became excited. “Cool. Let’s call it Judas and Priest.”

The priest said, “Why not Judas Priest?”

“Okay.”

And
so Judas left the temple with his bag of peanuts. After the Gethsemane
incident, the duo formed a heavy metal band in 1970, and went on to
become what junkies call “The Metal Gods.”

Now, that’s funny.

***********

For something similarly crazy, see also Jesus Sings Sinatra.

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Traipsing in the Dark

[Also on The Skirmisher]

Cyberspace is full of dead people; it’s crawling with traces of people’s last thoughts, last sentiments, last human impressions.

In a sense, mankind has unwittingly created an electronic version of immortality.

Simon Ng was a college freshman in New York. In May 2005, somebody tied
him up and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest with a butcher knife—but
that was minutes after Simon made his very last blog entry.

That blog entry later helped the police trace the murderer.

There’s a quirky side story why I signed up on Friendster
in the first place. For some years, I ignored it because I considered
it merely a fad for teenagers. But one day in the summer of 2004, a
girl was murdered in her own condo unit. The girl was a Metrobank
employee, and days after her death, an email circulated that directed
people to her Friendster account. I couldn’t resist it; I was on Friendster faster than you can say “Bienvenido Jesus Torres.”

Since
then, while I struck “friendships” with total strangers, I realized the
heartrending side of Web-based services like blogs and social networks.
People remain “alive” on the Web even years after their passing. And
often, so few realize it.

Friendster,
for example, doesn’t delete an account even if it remains inactive for
many, many months. In October 2004, amateur mountaineer Prana Escalante
died on Mt. Halcon. Anybody who is curious enough may still see her
account and learn how much she loved life and Samurai X.

Sometimes,
things are fresh as today’s headlines. There was a woman who was
manager of that McDonald’s branch on Taft Avenue beside DLSU, and the
last time she accessed her account was hours before her bitter
officemate shot her in the head.

Folks with “normal”
sensibilities are usually “shocked” when I’d tell them I dredge the Web
for traces of people’s lives. But I can’t help it; I’m consumed with
the desire to know these people as human beings, not as some goddamn
statistic.

Like Johnny Smith in Stephen King’s novel, The Dead Zone, or that kid in M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense,
I see dead people as I caress and romance the dark underbelly of
cyberspace. There are times I’d be staring at my monitor for long
moments, placing myself under their skin, retracing the last seconds
their fingers tapped on those keyboards,

And I wonder and wonder about the meaning of it all.

Technology
gives our human presence some sort of “permalink” to the wired and
wireless masses in such a way that persists as long as the foundations
remain in place. In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,
the “evil” genius Totenkopf fools the world for two decades into
believing that he’s still alive, when it’s merely his machines that
have been continuing his work down to the last details of the man’s
disdain of humanity.

And it’s not only about dead people, but also about dead websites. A month ago, I rediscovered the Internet Wayback Machine, and saw again the homepage of a literary site I used to maintain.

I called it The Inkblot,
for lack of any better name. And years after it “died,” I discovered
for the first time how it was full of crap, and how much somebody like
me could change in the past five years.

I often wonder how
things run these days. How everybody can have access to somebody else’s
most treasured feelings and thoughts that would have mortified the
living daylights out of somebody like Beethoven, JD Salinger, or Thomas Pynchon.

And more to the point, how practically anybody can leave persistent vestiges of their lives in cyberspace.

Maybe,
in a universe where lives are short and people know they are doomed,
and where things end without any sense of resolution, we find ourselves
consumed with this desire to leave our mark on things that we touch. We
find ourselves in situations that somebody like Kazuo Ishiguro loves fleshing out.

And maybe, like Bjork in Dancer in the Dark,
it’s our lot to find ourselves so jaded for having seen it all, but
still having the heart to cling on, hold on to the brightness of some
little spark—whenever, however, wherever we find it.

****
Simon Ng’s last blog entry on May 12, 2005.

New York Daily News article about the arrest of his murderer.

Latest Dead MySpace members.

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Trouble with the Debutante

We’ve been deciding on how to create a new invite for a girl’s 18th
birthday. The mother of the girl wants something different. While the
usual invites say something like, “I’m 18 now, you’re invited” and all
that shit, the mother wants it done in as unique a way as possible.

And we’re wracking our brains because all our brilliant ideas are being turned down.

What’s wrong with these title suggestions?

1. I’m 18… I’m legal now.
2. I’ve just turned 18, so come and pop my cherry!
3. I’m 18 and ready for some action. Come join the fun!

The
girl’s mother is no fun at all. I don’t see anything wrong with these
suggestions, but there she is, angrily stomping around the room like
one of those lead characters in Jurassic Park (I’m not talking about the humans).

For
example, she’s raising hell about the “cherry” part. What’s wrong with
the cherry? It’s going to be a great bash, so it’s fair to assume there
would be lots of cakes and fruits, so what’s wrong if I’d assume there
would be cherry in a salad somewhere? Sure, it would be okay to replace
the fruit with, say, mango or banana, but anything else wouldn’t sound
“girlie” enough, would it?

“I’m 18. Come and pop my mango”
doesn’t sound so right, does it? Would you go to a party of a girl that
says, “Come and pop my mango?” Come on.

Maybe there’s something wrong about it that I just couldn’t put a finger on.

But
for the meantime, the mother wants us to suggest something unique about
the humongous cake. That gets me so excited, because I’m thinking about
suggesting we sedate and bury a dozen small guinea pigs inside the
cake. And then at a signal, maybe we’d use something like an electrode,
we’d wake up the guinea pigs, and they’d all be crawling out of the
cake at the right moment. Their faces would be covered with
icing, and they’d be sniffing their way on the table. I’m sure they’d
be so cute they would delight the guests.

Darn. I’m so good I can kiss my own ass. I bet the mother will just love it.

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Kubrick’s Apes

[also on The Skirmisher]

The further integration of blogging into the lives of individuals is
fast taking us back four million years ago, right at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest tale.

I have always believed the whole idea behind blogging is simple:
placing anybody in a role that allows them to make sense of something
as faceless as the Internet on a purely personal level.

I’m
seduced to imagine a swarm of humans approaching this giant called the
“Interweb,” poking its underbelly with their little stick/schtick, and
seeing how it reacts.

If it wakes up, if you get its attention,
you have options. You either ride on it and let it take you to places,
or you scoot back to your cave.

The Internet in its present incarnation has become a truly Grand Monolith, which reminds me of the same block of gray in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey.
In the film, a mysterious monolith appears amid a sleeping group of
apes. The apes, when they wake up, react with the three great things
that would later propel their own evolution:

fear, curiosity, and courage.

The
monolith becomes a point of contention: they stare at it endlessly,
they fight over it, they try so much to make sense of it. It baffles
and annoys them. But it also inspires them. The apes make those excited
grunts that you could only hear these days from somebody like Elizabeth
Ramsey.

And because they cannot deny its existence and they can
do nothing about it, the monolith somehow arouses them to develop what
could be life’s next best creation since the human cerebral cortex: the
human tool.

This part of the film where one of the apes makes a
little tool out of animal bone is one I could not forget: because the
tool, uncannily, is also the world’s first weapon.

It drives
home one of the important points of the film: that the first product of
human ingenuity was not the wheel, not religion, but something
fashioned to defend and destroy.

Which, when you think about it, is also very much like religion.

The
tribe of that ape that invents it, the tribe that had been driven away
from their precious water pond, makes a comeback with the weapon to
slay the fuckers that had driven them out. And there, in a classic “war
over natural resource,” the “advanced” tribe makes its first kill.

Us bloggers are like Kubrick’s
apes; we were all sleeping when it hit us in the 1990s. Some of us
merely touch it and some rearrange their lives around it. And there are
those who spend most of their waking life trying to make it fit into
the grand scheme of things, and somehow, make it into a really good
thing.

How blogging is fast emerging as a powerful form of media works the same as Kubrick’s
prehistoric monolith: we are forced to grapple its possibilities with
the things that make us human. Blogging, and the Internet at large, has
aroused our fear, our curiosity, and our courage. It has filled us with
a certain longing for something that engulfs and devastates—and also
empowers.

These days, we blog about the cute puppy or the cat,
the daughter’s first smile, the drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. We blog about
how we could enlarge our dicks and complain why John Holmes or that guy on Bang Bros had
it so good. We blog about how this girl’s boobs are so stunningly
gorgeous and so large that they have their own political system. We
blog about the cute classmate who never knew our name. We blog about
our little triumphs and our little questions.

We wage our wars
here, we say our “fuck yous” here. And the good thing, whenever a
gaggle of us hit critical mass, the targets of our yearnings eventually
listen.

But blogging isn’t only about the things that excite
your mother; it has also become a balance of sorts. It has become, to
use this blog’s theme, a skirmish of dark and light. Because for every
molecular biologist documenting their find, there’s a pondscum
somewhere preying on the unwary. For every tech-savvy CEO who reaches
out to his company’s direct consumers, there’s an idiot who uses a
frightened blindfolded man as his header image (why does this sound so
familiar?).

Xanga alone currently hosts fifty million bloggers,
and most of them are articulate enough to define both the gaudy,
terrific excess of a meaningless life and the unbearable lightness of
being. And for better or worse, bloggers are driving decision-making
and commerce across the planet.

This emerging monolith has
allowed the individual to give face to an otherwise formless giant. And
like the apes in that 1968 film, we are sinking deeper and deeper in
trying to make sense of it. It has been changing us so quickly. It has
been pushing us out of that door.

Until maybe one day, we’ll find ourselves finally out there, in a place we could no longer return from.

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The Smallest of Things

[Also on The Skirmisher]

You can’t really believe most things you see on the
surface. Take her, for example. One look at her, and something tells you what
you see is just bull; that if you drill a hole through her walls, you’ll find a
little girl just dying to be understood.

 

And usually, her beef is all about small things.

 

Something strange is happening to me. And me talking like this is
“strange” in itself; people who know me would eagerly attest that you
haven’t heard and seen weird things in your life if you haven’t met me;
and that’s not a “self-compliment”; I’m not trying to be cute like Woody Allen.
To be even brutally honest about it, people with whom I’ve closely
worked long enough eventually discover how disagreeable I am.

But
the thing is, these recent days, certain discoveries bubble up on the
surface of your life, discoveries that tell you that somehow, fuck-ups
as large as Mt. Everest began life as a pocket lint.

And when these small things get bigger, you’re left wondering like Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, asking dear Maggie to help him imagine how their spouses’ betrayal began: When did it start? And how it must have felt?

 

Some months ago, a nursing student committed suicide in her room
because her mother didn’t give her P500 to buy a medical book. The
mother was devastated—everybody was—when they discovered her body, but
even more so when they read her suicide note. Suicide. Because of five
hundred pesos.

Oh, the humanity.

Somehow, I blame soap operas.

In Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple,
Celie’s a black woman who has never had anybody care for her as a human
being. She grows up and gets married to a man who treats her like
livestock.

Celie’s not so smart, but she knows enough that to
survive, you need "therapy", even if it’s self-administered: so she
ends each night of her life whispering the line, “Dear God,” to the
empty space. Each night, she tells the shit of her day to the darkness.

One day, however, someone comes along to buy her a new set of clothes.

A new set of clothes, Celie asks in disbelief, just for her? And she chokes on to stifle her tears.

Sometimes,
things like that hit closer to right where I stand. There was one
afternoon I’m working at home when this old lady came knocking and
asking for food. I was annoyed; I thought she was one of those slackers
who’d suck the fruits of somebody else’s industriousness. I’ve never
been a “good” person, and that afternoon, I was up to my neck with
work. So you can imagine how deep I probably was in my vicious Marilyn Manson mood.

And
to get rid of her fast, I fished some money in my pocket and gave her
the first bill I found—only to realize too late that I was handing her
something bigger than I had intended, something like fifty pesos.

Yeah,
fifty pesos, when I only meant five. But suddenly, she gazed at the
money on her palm, and she wept. Right there, she wept and almost
kneeled before me in gratitude. I tried telling her that it was
nothing; I even laughed to prove it meant nothing to me. But the truth
was, I laughed because it shamed me, if a monster could be shamed. I
felt cheap.

After she was gone, when nobody was around, I was
tearful, too; there was something about the way she broke down that I
couldn’t forget it. It felt so real and so staggering, like somebody
bashed me in the face.

And Jesus, I thought, I’m so nice.
All those kids whose asses I kicked would never believe this. All those
people who hate me, they’d come to my house now and shoot me right in
my moment of vulnerability.

Before Celie, before the
old lady, I never realized that the things I don’t even count could
become powerful enough to make somebody break down and weep. Before
films like Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less, I lived with a very limited set of beliefs when it came to the question of what mattered.

I
had been so fascinated with things that had nothing to do with people’s
desperation that for a long time, the stories I attempted writing
belonged to that great hated category I’d call, “The Pretensions.”

Well,
I’m not there, yet. I still tell friends I’m a bleeding work in
progress, and maybe I won’t ever be complete. But being fully aware of
the crap I do is probably a nice start. As nice as seeing the small
things for what they are, but having the liver to wait there at the end
of the road, knowing and accepting how these small things might grow up
and devour me in the end.

But I don’t really mind. Like I said to that girl with ten thousand issues I met months ago, I’ll just enjoy, dread, even long for the small things that make up my crappy little life. I’ll enjoy them before they’re gone and leave holes in my heart.

And maybe like what Galileo asked the Vatican about its angst over heliocentricity, I’ll start identifying these small things by asking myself the same brilliant question:

What exactly is your beef?

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A Riddle for Kübler-Ross

There’s something so sad about a dead man with shiny shoes
and a lunch bag.

[Also on The Skirmisher]

I got this email today, about somebody who got hit by a
bus crossing Ayala Avenue in Makati.

 

And the first thing in my head was, “What shiny shoes.”

 

How neatly the shoelaces were tied. And the lunch bag. These
little things, how strongly they remind you that this headless corpse used to
be a person; that people cared about him enough to shine his shoes or wash his
socks or prepare his lunch.

 

It makes you remember all those times you’re going out for
a new day at work and tying those shoelaces and thinking of that old Stephen King
line, SSDD (same shit, different day),
and hating everything.

 

I’m probably just being silly and hopelessly melodramatic;
maybe this is what I get out of “unintentionally” watching Gulong ng Palad on most nights. These days, when things like Rotten
or Philippine politics have killed an enough number of brain and heart cells to
leave us so jaded, there are still some things that make you stop and wonder,
in a Milan Kundera sense.

 

Of course, all of us die a little, every single day, if
you believe people like Sylvia Plath or Courtney Love.

 

If you’d ask biologists, they’d say things like you
replace your entire skin every some months or so, or each of your cells is gone and
replaced every seven years. It’s one way of saying that the person you were
seven years ago, that’s dead now, and the only thing that creates the illusion,
the semblance, of continuance is memory. And stem cells. But let’s not even go
there.

 

Maybe, yes, we all die a little every day, but at least,
those little deaths are nothing dramatic; just a bad hair day, a broken tooth,
a night of heavy drinking that decimated thousands of your neurons.

 

But if you end up lying on the pavement and staring at
your own squashed brain, right there, on the same metropolitan road so many of
us beat everyday, it just makes you stop.

 

Or maybe I’m not as hardened as I think I am, after all;
at least, not as dead-hardened as any regular faceless, nameless Iraqi. Not as
neuron-fried or fed-up as those vendors in Quiapo.

 

Somehow, the first image that flashed in my head was that
scene in Fallen, where the serial
murderer is being gassed to death and he’s singing that Rolling Stones song,

 

“Time is on my
side, yes it is…

Time is on my side, yes it is…”

 

Says a character in that Nicholas Kazan film, death is probably
what you get when you finally figure out the answer to the Big Why.

 

That when finally, in that small moment you figure out why
there are six billion of us here on this blob of mud and nothing seems to make
sense, death strikes you to shut you up. So that the secret remains a secret
forever.

 

So that the answer to the Big Question remains
heartbreakingly inaccessible.

 

Sometimes, I imagine Death as something formless that
leaps from person to person, unseen, flying above your head as you walk the roads
of your days; it brushes past you, breathes down your neck even during your
happiest of moments. And then one sunny day, it finds you and smiles at you. It
finds you to shut you up.

 

When the Roman town of Pompeii was unearthed in the mid-1700s
after almost two thousand years of being entombed under volcanic debris, one of
the graffiti on the walls the excavators found said something like, “Let’s eat,
drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we’ll die…”

 

You can’t stop it; nobody can. And because we know it’s a
losing game, we sing our songs and drink our beer and fornicate whenever we
can.

 

Like that murderer being gassed to death, the Pompeiians
would also probably sing that Rolling Stones song in the last moments before
Vesuvius came raining down on them—just to mock and spit in the face of the
inevitable. That is, had they known the Rolling Stones.

 

That dead guy on Ayala, why is it so easy for me to see
him in those last critical seconds as he crossed that road, humming that same
song because finally, on his way to the office that morning, the Big Answer to
the Big Why struck him. Like Archimedes’s eureka.
Like Tony Kushner’s “blue streak of recognition.”

 

And as swift as the Big Answer came, death arrived to shut
him up. Just like that.

 

So that the secret remains a secret, the Big Answer
remains, forever, so heartbreakingly out of reach.

 

“People walk during the rush hour mindless, automatic,
vapid, safe. I am walking past lives I will never know and faces I will never
fall in love with.”
                        – from an old Eric Gamalinda piece of fiction.

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Friday Evening Kitsch

[Also on The Skirmisher]

Look at yourself. Aren’t you just all dolled up? How cool you’re standing there like that
toothpaste TV ad. Sucking air through your teeth. Staring into the glass and
wondering what you’re doing here, anyway. You’re thinking, This is how Elvis
did it.

 

You gaze across the maddening hyperspace and still, she’s
on the bar stool. She’s laughing like a schoolgirl with a honeybee up her
underwear. She’s laughing like a horny Madonna
of the Rocks. Because, indeed, she might be horny. And everybody knows it.

 

And in the back of your mind, you’re asking, What the fuck
am I doing here?

 

At the far end of the room,

 

Staring into my empty glass?

 

In your head, you say it’s because of the music. Kruder
and Dorfmeister are so 1990s, that tiny boy in your head says, but who cares?

 

You’ll get laid tonight, the tiny boy in your head says.

 

Tonight.

 

You look across the space. There’re all the lasers, the
neons crisscrossing like deathrays. There are all the zombie-teenagers flopping
their arms around like scarecrows in a nasty twister. Their eyes staring at nothing.
Their faces all sweat and emptiness.

 

You gaze across the space and for a millisecond, she looks
in your direction. And your heart bursts.

 

And you tell yourself, It’s time.

 

Yeah, it’s time.

 

It’s time to give nicknames to your testicles.

 

How about, Little Boy and Fat Man?

 

Alright. Little Boy and Fat

Man.

 

Go ahead. Glide over there and tell her exactly that.
Serve her the best pick-up line a guy on this side of town could ever invent.

Say to her exactly what’s in your heart. Say to her, “I call my balls ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man.’”

Then show her the hole on your socks. And your tangerine boxers. Give her a
whiff of your minty fresh breath. Because with all things being equal, you’re just a
cut above the rest, aren’t you, cowboy?

Circa 2006. Remember this year. The year you’re kissing the Darwin Awards.

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The State of the Art

[This post appears in full on The Skirmisher. To see how certain "images" or photos go with the things described, just visit that blog.]

[OldBoy: Daesu
eats a live octopus before an awestruck Mido [left], and later screws
the girl [right], only to discover something so devastating about her
that he’d ask the first asshole who comes along to “shoot him in the
head.”]

 

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

 

I first saw that line in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather; some decades later, Quentin Tarantino’s marketers would use it as slogan for Kill Bill.    

 
And some years after Kill Bill, I would slather those same words on my own birthday cake.                                                                                                

Read more…

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Wrongness

[This post also appears on The Skirmisher.]

Three of the best words in the world are, “You are right.”
When I find I’m the recipient of these three words, it calms me. It makes me
feel good.

 

But sometimes, it also shames me. It gives me a strong
urge to jump off a cliff and die. How can anybody enjoy feeling so right when
the rest of the world seems so wrong?

 

These days, I’m finding comfort in being wrong. It feels
good. It removes the burden of trying to keep up with all the fucking pretense.
I’m wrong? That’s just beautiful. As beautiful as George Bush in power or
walking out of the Kyoto Protocol, or as feel-good as this old, completely
toothless 80-year-old lady who still sucks guys’ dicks somewhere on Doroteo
Jose (if you don’t believe me, ask somebody like Noli de Castro. He will know).

 

Because that’s the rare beauty of people’s idea of wrongness—it
feels superficial. It feels like cold water dribbling on your skin. You squeeze
your heart to feel the real deal about the universe, and your heart tells you that
what everybody’s mouth says is wrong,
is what everybody does in real life.

 

Rightness is somehow good, but it’s fiction. It’s like
this eternal PR propaganda, served by ourselves to ourselves. We have our cake,
eat it too, then tell the rest of humanity we never ate the cake; in fact, we
never baked any, goddammit.

 

In my line of work, I fix up these English documents and
hunt for “wrong things.” Dangling participles, incorrect subject–verb
agreement, and wrong use of dashes (there’s the hyphen, the en dash, and the em
dash, and each of them has different uses—and I’m sure somebody already
guillotined whoever invented these three). There’s British English and American
English. There are all the crazy idioms that don’t make sense.

 

Sometimes, when I’d look at an English composition and see
the glaring mistakes, I’d find myself fighting hard to make sure it remains wrong. Because there’s a day you
realize what’s so wrong with wrongness, anyway? So what if this Japanese dude
said (as a warning on a mobile phone), “Warning: Be careful of bad language in
this mobile phone, because a partner’s feeling is going to be bad. Let’s keep
mobile manners.”

 

(That came from www.engrish.com;
I can’t use my own “editables” as specimen here. But let me just say my own
work is equally mind boggling.)

 

I mostly spend my days trying so hard to be right, find the wrong things people do
with their writings, and “correct” them. In my dark moments, I usually daydream
it would be cool to accomplish my job with a loaded gun and a bulletproofed
Bentley, so I could “correct” the authors myself and ensure they won’t contaminate
the system with their mistakes ever again.

 

Sometimes, the urge to be wrong is so strong I
unconsciously fuck up my own grammar or spelling. If you find many mistakes
scattered all over this blog, it’s because I don’t really care [but I’d like to
reassure the people who give me “rakets” that as long as they pay me, I can
“control” these demons, thank you very much. As Bill Gates usually say about
Windows, “Yes, I am on top of this. Everything will be alright.”).

 

Here are some more wrong
things I want to do:

 

1. Flash
a crisp P500 bill to Cory and Kris Aquino’s faces, the one with Ninoy’s somber
face on it, and tear up the money so slowly and dramatically while I laugh like
a horse on meths.

2. Bring
the entire team of young “psychics” of the TV show Nginiiig into a room and beat the living daylights out of them
until they’d admit they never really saw or felt any ghost EVER—until they confess
to the truth that they only had really bad childhood involving characters like
a sexually repressed dirty ice cream vendor, a gay boy scout instructor, and a horny
female goat.

3. Challenge
Butch Francisco to a gun duel, only that his bullets would be blanks and mine
would be dumdum, and he won’t be informed.

            4. Bring
the parish priest of Saint Michael’s Institute in Bacoor, Cavite to Pegasus and have the prettiest, most skillful bitch do a lap dance on him.

5. Teach
a class of eager and impressionable kindergarten kids how to use a condom, with
their young twenty-something teacher as my “demo assistant.”

 

I could add more, but I have to go out and take a ride on
my “bulletproofed Bentley.”

 

I’ll see who I can “correct” tonight.

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Destroying the Beautiful

[This post also appears on The Skirmisher.]

I was feeling sentimental the other night. There was Mozart’s
piano sonata in the background as I worked. Then out of nowhere, a small butterfly
came fluttering into the room. It circled around me as I stared. Tenderly, it
landed on my shoulder.

 

I almost cried; there’s something about pretty small
flying things that touches your heart. The Hindus say dead loved ones come back
sometimes to visit you, and it’s a blessing if they’d come in nice forms, and
not in ugly things like maggots or a small, crawling insect version of Bella
Flores.

 

I remembered many things that night. I remember that line
from a writer I like, about a dream of water and hands and song.

 

I remembered how I’d usually imagine most of Mozart’s music
as they would visually appear in my head—as butterflies that suddenly flutter
from out of nowhere: Mozart begins so simple, for example; there’s just the
whisper of basset horns. As Salieri said in the film Amadeus, “Then
suddenly—high above it—an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a
clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight.”

 

This butterfly was that single note. This butterfly was
that oboe, hanging onto me, unwavering, even if I’d try to remove it from my shoulder.
It kept coming back to land again. And again. And again.

 

It would not leave.

 

I looked at the butterfly so sweetly. God’s beautiful
creation.

 

Then I squashed it.

 

Yeah. It’s dead, baby.

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