Cojones Grande
“Is this how you want to be remembered?” the father asks Yuri Orlov in Lord of War.
Yuri shakes his head. “I don’t want to be remembered at all,” Yuri says. “If being remembered means being dead.”
In a Pearls Before Swine
comic strip by Stephen Pastis, the “cute” characters talk about how
everybody, in the end, is forgotten. You remember a famous name from a
hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago. But the more you go
back in time, the less people you “remember.”
“Eventually,” the cute character says, “We’re all forgotten, even the best ones among us.”
Somebody
said sometime ago, and I’m not sure now if he had something to do with
Freud, that it was only the human ego that pushes us to delude
ourselves of our sense of importance. Whenever we think of our own
personal worth, we tend to exaggerate it. We tend to feel “big.” We
tend to see ourselves as if we’re the center of the universe. And
indeed, for many centuries before the first breed of upstarts like
Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, people everywhere, even ordinary
peasants, were sure the universe was made for them. That man was the
apex of creation; that there was in fact a “creation.” And that
everything else revolved around this blob of mud called “Earth.”
These days, somebody like Raul Gonzales would merely roll his eyes and say: “That’s bullshit.”
I
might be walking down that road with my devil-may-care swagger, and I‘d
meet Raul Gonzales with his needle, ready to pop my bubble.
I might say, “I am a big-shot cyberjock.”
Raul Gonzales would just say: “That sounds like Dinky Soliman’s dung.”
I might say, “You know what, my dick is bigger than Las Pinas City.”
Raul Gonzales would just say: “That’s the stinkiest dog turd I’ve ever smelled.”
Because
while Freud’s Ego and Superego would sing in unison about one’s sense
of significance, there’s the Id somewhere, lurking in the dark caverns
of our heads, always devoted to remind us we’re just animals.
Animals who can talk. And fuck. And brag about it.
One of my favorite scenes in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
that hits it home so deeply is when Snowden lies on the plane’s floor,
the guy’s intestines and lunch slipping out of his blasted torso, and
Yossarian staring at it all and finally getting it—finally
understanding that man is garbage.
I once told somebody I’m not
here to bring beauty to the universe or change this fucking world. I’m
not here to make any difference. That was back in those days when
people expected wonderful things to come out of my hat, and were
disappointed.
I told that same somebody, If you believe that
crap, I’ll tell you another. I said, All those kids want to “make a
difference.” Now, this planet is a bleeding mess. Everybody you meet
down the road, they want to change the world. Now, look at this. Is
this the planet you want? A world created by all sorts of crusaders,
all sorts of upstarts out to launch their own revolution.
It’s
all pap. There are days you’re just tired of it all. You see
somebody say on TV, “My dream is to make a difference.” I scratch my
head and wonder, how do you do that? The universe is a swirling mass of
change, and it churns every moment. How do you add more shit to the status quo, when the status quo itself is a quick-shifting neon light in any Malate trance club?
Besides,
“making a difference” is one of those insufferably crappy lines we love
serving ourselves; it’s in the same hackneyed league as “be yourself”
or “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Lines nobody really
thinks over, lines that we use as ready resource when the need to
masturbate strikes or when there’s the sudden craving to slake off some
deep personal emptiness.
Human beings are funny. First, they acquire some new
evolutionary equipment like the cerebral cortex, and they begin
“thinking” that everything they see is made for them. Then, they build
on the tale and reinforce it for generations until they begin taking
the myth as “truth.” Until nobody remembers that the first guy who
told it wove it around a bonfire just to entertain the tribe’s kids. Until nobody
remembers we’re just articulate animals, after all.
It’s usually
fun to listen to the mass of people. But eventually, the fun wears thin.
Sometimes, I feel like I’d rather just sit down and stare at my balls
till kingdom come.
Extra-territorial Pissings
There are only two things I hate waking up to. One is discovering I’ve
no coffee left. The other is receiving an “official” email telling me
my blog has just been blasted into deep space through some
fancy-sounding dish antenna.
["Official Certificate" can be seen in The Skirmisher]
That just got my goat. To be fair, when I signed up, I really had
wanted to “reach out” to somebody in the star Vega, which was what
inspired the writing of the post, “Jesus Sings Sinatra.” It was my way of saying, “We have here some fellow who walked on water; now, it’s your turn. Tell me your planet’s joke.”
That
was done in the spirit of intergalactic camaraderie, because I had this
feeling in my guts that aliens are no different from people like Scott
Adams’s Evil HR Director or folks who suddenly appear in your cubicle
muttering the line, “Your base are belong to us!”
But in the
intervening time, I realize I might have written something that might
make alien life forms unhappy. How would they feel, for example, when
they read about my War Against Small Animals? What if aliens were just guinea pigs with laser pistols, and they see my recipe for guinea pig cake? I’m also pretty sure they’d take offense with the way I projected Abner Mercado’s importance
in the future of human language (assuming that Abner, in fact, had been
spawned in the raging eye of the birthing of Andromeda; hence, the
exoskeleton, err, I mean, the ethnic get-up).
So, to make up for
it, I’ve drafted a little haiku as some sort of “I come in peace” line
for the aliens who’ll be reading this blog.
And your planet is my butt hole
I’ll poke you, I’ll poke you, I’ll poke you!
Brilliant,
isn’t it? My haiku’s so subtle it’s not very obvious that I’m
apologizing. I guess that’s just the rare beauty of “alien-speak.”
Platoon
“The first rule of the platoon is you don’t ask questions about rules.”
This was not a scene in Fight Club,
and I wasn’t Tyler Durden. This was summer of 1987, and I was speaking
to a bunch of kids younger than myself. It was already months after I
saw Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and I couldn’t still get over the idea of people following
orders. It was fascinating. It fascinated me that adults with supposed
wisdom in their heads could obey somebody’s stupidest command to the
death. So this afternoon, in our front yard, I gathered all my
neighbors’ kids—the youngest five, the oldest probably eight—to
“consummate” my newly found enthusiasm.
“And our mission,” I
said, as I stared at their faces one by one, trying to simulate as much
Willem Dafoe military gravitas as possible, “is we’re going to hunt.”
“What are we going to hunt, sir?” one of them asked.
“We’re
going to hunt… Hmmmm…” I stopped for a moment; I was mentally choosing
between hunting small animals and harassing much younger kids that we
could always find playing with paper dolls somewhere. It was a windy
afternoon, and the undulating rice stalks in the fields just beyond our
picket fence added up to my excitement. These kids were putty in my
hands.
“We’re going to hunt snails.”
When they’re still not moving, I screamed, “Now!” They ran in all directions.
There
was no greater fun than “hunting” golden snails. Even in the present,
the Philippines’ rice fields are still crawling with them; they’re one
of those botched agricultural projects that remind you of a doomsday
movie, or the creation of chlorofluorocarbons, or Adolf Hitler—things
that seemed a solution at first, but later wreaked more havoc than a
blonde bitch could do in a room full of horny men. I think the snails
were supposedly imported to augment the local food supply, but instead
they turned out to be such pests, like today’s janitor fishes. They
devour rice seedlings that in some estimates, farmers lose up to 40% of
their crops to the snails.
In the 1980s, when my family still
lived just a leap away from some hectares of rice paddies, the snails
were good “toys”; whenever I was bored and when mother wasn’t looking,
I’d take off my rubber slippers and wade through the mud to collect
them. Then I’d dump a pail of these snails in our yard and I’d sit back
and watch how they’d try to escape from me, their “monster.” Then as coup de grace,
I’d stomp on them like what Godzilla did with the citizens of Tokyo.
Crushed, the snails were a “hot snack” for free-ranging chickens and
ducks that roamed the neighborhood. So it’s probably fair to say that
on any given afternoon in those days, everybody, except the farmers,
was happy with the snails.
When my platoon came back, each of
them had a handful of snails. Their loyalty and efficiency made me
smile. I ran to our grocery store, took a small bottle of cooking oil
and some empty tin cans and candles, then I told them to follow me to
the back yard.
“In single file,” I barked. “And don’t forget to march.”
They giggled and marched behind me.
“This
is survival training,” I was saying as I lit the candles and poured
some cooking oil into each of the cans. “We’re lost in the jungle,
boys. And we have nothing to eat. Thank Jesus Christ we have these
snails.”
The “brilliant mission” was elegantly simple: Fry the snails in tin cans, using candles as our stoves.
“At my signal,” I said, “when the oil is hot enough, drop your favorite snail into your can.”
They
were all grinning as they held the cans over their candles. When the
oil began to smoke, I gave the signal to “unleash hell.” The snails
smelled like a revolting combination of black mud and fish, but I
stifled my disgust and said, “Yummy!”
The kids chimed, “Yummy!”
And through it all, I never forgot pretending I was Willem Dafoe.
Then
when the snails looked dead and fried enough, I ordered them to scoop
up the snails and place them on the “ceremonial leaf.”
“What’s a ceremonial leaf, sir?”
“Any broad leaf is a ceremonial leaf,” I snapped.
“Why do we need a ceremonial leaf, sir?”
“Because the platoon will use no ordinary dining plates. Because the platoon will always use Nature as its tool. Understand?”
They looked around, saw a harmless-looking alugbati vine crawling on the fence, and attacked it. In an instant, the vine was as bald as Bembol Roco.
After
everybody (except me, of course) had a snail-on-a-leaf “survival meal,”
I simply told them to eat it. They all hesitated. One of them asked
“Why aren’t you eating a snail, sir?”
I glared at the upstart. “Of course, not. I’m the captain. Captains don’t eat the snails of the platoon.”
They said nothing. So I said, I’m opening a bottle of Coke as soon as they’ve eaten the “survival meal.”
What
followed was something that reminded you of a bukkake session:
suddenly, upon hearing the “reward,” they were outdoing one another in
trying to make a disgusting thing look delectable. But the moment they
finished the snails, my mother called out and I promptly forgot about
the promised Coke.
That night, I heard a commotion outside our
grocery store. I peered through our window’s slats and saw my platoon’s
mothers, all cackling like a flock of geese about their kids’
inexplicable gut-rot. I felt that they already knew it; I was sure all
the kids had already ratted on their “beloved captain.” But because we
owned the only well-stocked store in the neighborhood, on which the
housewives depended so much whenever making ends meet was as difficult
as diarrhea, nobody had the nerve to say to my mother’s face
everybody’s suspicion.
I was frightened; I ran to my room, glared at the mirror, and told my reflection, “If they all die, you’re dead, too.”
I
didn’t dare venturing out of our house that weekend. I didn’t want my
platoon or their mothers meeting me on the road and finding my face so
full of guilt. I was busy, anyway—I had recently discovered my father’s
stash of porn, and I was consumed with the suspicion that our house
harbored unimagined treasures I had yet to discover. So I was digging
up dusty corners and suspicious-looking boxes in my feverish search for
more skin.
One afternoon in the week that followed, I found the
kids again playing with toy cars in the dirt. They wouldn’t even look
at me. When it dawned on me that I had become some sort of pariah, I
ran back to the house, sneaked into the store, and took a handful of
colorful hard candies.
I ran out and declared: “Who wants candies?”
All faces turned to me, but everyone stood their ground.
“Alright, you can have these. But we have a new mission, boys. Those who want to join me, raise their hands.”
Everybody raised hands.
I stared at them all, my eyes gleaming in sinister delight.
It was the first time I discovered a shining truth: People never learn. You could always slaughter more innocents.
***
Related posts:
Feeding the Cat
Once, when I was six, we had a well from which our poor neighbors would
get their water. The well’s water was deep and crystal clear. It so
happened that our well for that day was full of fishes. There had been
a flood, and when it subsided, the fishes remained trapped in it.
Once, we had a cat that my mother called “Cathy.” One day, Cathy was hungry.
So I asked the cat, are you hungry?
The cat said, “Meow!”
I nodded; that probably meant yes.
So I asked the cat, “Do you want to eat now?”
The cat said, “Meow!”
I nodded; that probably meant yes, too.
So I asked the cat, “Do you want to eat fish?
The cat said, “Meow! Meow!”
I nodded sagaciously; that probably meant, Yes! Yes!
I smiled at the cat; and patted her furry head.
Then I shoved the cat into the well.
I heard a deep splash.
She shrieked, “Meowrrr!”
I assumed it meant, “Thanks!” So I shouted into the well, “You’re welcome!”
I’m not sure if Cathy enjoyed the fish; I never saw her again.
***
This is part of an ongoing "saga" of my "war" against small animals. For similar posts, see:
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Clenched Fist
When I was in fourth grade, I was a small, weak kid. I was the sort who
looked like I was begging to be tied to a post and fed to ants. One
look at me, and you’d know here’s a kid you could kick without fear of
reprisal.
There was indeed somebody who was bigger than me who
loved kicking my balls. I hated it, but because I was a newbie in that
school and was not very confident about anything yet, all I did was
grin or avoid large crowds as much as possible. But this particular boy
so persistently hounded me until I came to the end of my tether; he was
bigger, taller, and generally looked like he came from Hell. He’d make
faces, interrupt my conversations about the amazing powers of Voltron
and the Transformers, and eat my food. Worse, he had the entire class
behind him; he was the kind of boy whom the teachers loved because he
sucked up to them, and usually, when he’d fuck up, he’d cleverly pass
the blame to somebody else—and that somebody else, at that time, was
often me.
So there was a point I decided that, although I’d
usually avoid physical trouble, maybe I should make an exception. Maybe
I should give this boy a taste of his own blood.
One day,
somebody sold me a metal ring for fifty centavos. The ring’s supposed
diamond was just cheap glass, and when you’d remove the glass, what’s
left were the little metal claws that used to hold the stone. It became
a terrible little weapon. I would wear the ring in my quiet moments and
promise myself the next time the fucker busts my balls, he’ll be
sleeping with the fishes.
So one afternoon, I was on my way to
school when I spotted him at the far end of the road. I felt the rush
of blood to my head. I took out the ring from my backpocket and slipped
it into my middle finger. I steeled my nerves and surrendered to the
fact that it was probably my last day on earth. It all felt like
suicide, like I was running headlong to something that would shatter me
so utterly. But I thought, if this fucker makes the mistake of doing
something that even remotely resembles oppression, God help me, but I
would rip that face apart.
Then I clenched my fist, shoved it deep in my pocket, and walked on.
But
for some reason, the boy disappeared; he probably made a turn that I
didn’t see because I was so rapt in my thoughts of “righting what was
wrong.”
I failed to see him at school that day. More strange was that, afterwards, he and I would be good friends. Well, not really good
good friends, but something along the lines of
I-Leave-You-With-Your-Shit-Alone-While-I-Bother-Other-People kind of
friendship. I don’t exactly remember how, but I think it started the
day he asked me to draw something naughty and I obliged.
Years later, that fellow would die in a freak motorcycle accident.
I
would also forget about the ring for some years until one day, when I
was about to enter college, I found it again at the bottom of a box
that contained the knick-knacks of my childhood. Half-buried in lint,
the ring glimmered faintly as old memories sometimes did. I picked it
up, held it against the sun. The ring was still sharp; its little claws
looked like the talons of a small bird. But it was still sharp. The
cutting edge could still make you bleed.
Patterns from the Cold
[Also on The Skirmisher]
One day in 1963, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam
was bored out of his skull at a scientific conference. But instead of
screaming “Fire!” or “Vietnam!” and head for the exit to spice things
up, he did something only mathematicians would do: he doodled on a
blank sheet of paper a spiraling grid of regular numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
and so on. Then he circled all the prime numbers—and what emerged made
him scratch his head. The prime numbers form diagonal lines on the
grid. It looked like some sort of pattern.
The whole thing is now known as the Ulam Spiral, which even today, nobody has yet fully explained.
Often, what strikes humanity into humble submission are the staggering surprises.
Take
the circle, for example. Any circle seems so simple; take one look, and
it seems clear a circle will be unable to hide anything. It’s just some
naked shape. But once you succumb to the seduction of attempting to
look at the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, you’re
like opening Pandora’s box: you’re met with the maddening complexity of
the pi’s endless string of numbers—3.14 off into infinity.
The numbers jump out of the box to bury you under its staggering endlessness.
These mysteries help you understand why mathematicians talk about numbers as if the subject of conversation were the curves of Eva Longoria or Naomi Watts. Mention something like Fermat’s last theorem to somebody like Carl Friedrich Gauss, and the guy would probably have a hard-on. Whisper the Poincare conjecture to Grigori Perelman,
and he would probably wet his pants and wax nostalgic. Math is so
seductive because, for one thing, it’s like everybody’s Lady in
Red—she’s this beauty that seems to be both “easy” and hard to get,
both so happily understandable and so deeply confounding. And that’s
just the stuff undying romances are made of.
But sometimes, math can be a bitch.
That line was on my mind a decade ago when I had the epiphany I loved calling “The Day the Truth Fucked Me.”
The said epiphany basically says: “Goddamit. I am not a math person.”
This
was after I had successfully convinced my father to buy me my first
personal desktop computer. This was after I had bought all those pricey
math textbook references that were supposed to do to me what spinach
did to Popeye: Make me tough and “muscled” enough to face and grapple
with algebraic confusions.
I was in my third year as an
engineering student. I was on my study table, a three-inch-thick
physics textbook parted before me, when the epiphany hit me. I could
even tell you what went through my head at the exact moment on that day
in 1995; I could tell you how the newly-bought book’s pages smelled,
and which cassette tape I was playing in the deck (U2’s Zooropa).
But none of these small things matters, really. What matters was that I
was quitting; that the following day, I would be dropping all my math
subjects. What matters was that finally, I was admitting I was a
technical loser, after all. That I would never have Bohr’s insight, or Newton’s precociousness.
But
despite admitting defeat, I continued standing outside the fence of the
happy party, refusing to just turn my back on it all and walk away; I
would avidly consume anything if it had something to do with folks like
Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman or when there’s news about the planned terraforming on Mars. I would pounce on every copy of Discover or Wired, and because those were days I lived on a measly allowance, I would kid my friends that I was devising a scheme on how to steal more copies of these magazines from a nearby bookstore—and usually, nobody would notice I was in fact serious.
My “failure” has been responsible in making me an obsessive bystander, “watching” Sagan or Dawkins do all the work while I root for them halfway around the world, in my room deep in the bowels of the Third World.
But sometimes, I wonder how it might be if I were some math whiz like Maximillian Cohen in Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film, Pi.
The main character is a social outsider who believes everything in
nature can be understood through numbers. Max is obsessed with patterns.
Although widely criticized for its flawed and muddled Kabbalah
and Western math, the film is intriguing enough because of the
questions it poses. There’s the layer of meaning that says the
universe’s fabric, from the very large to the very small, can be
plotted with numbers; step back far enough—like what Ulam did with the grid of prime numbers—and
you might see a pattern. The name of God, maybe. The future of the
stock market. Or just the little cherished answer to your most personal
question.
Sure, you can’t take these things at face value.
Especially because each question mankind manages to answer only gives
birth to another set of questions previously unimagined. But that’s the
beauty of it, isn’t it? Because it shows us that there will always be
some more “staggering surprises” left lying around in the universe,
promising us that we’ll never run out of wonder, telling us that
humankind will probably never stop running on the eternal treadmill.
These surprises are just waiting for the next fool, waiting for the next wunderkind to find them.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)V for Vindication
Talking about Judas Iscariot is like talking about porn; he belongs to
that hated class of things called “Which We Do Not Speak Of.”
But thanks to National Geographic,
here comes Judas’s Gospel, which seems to do to Judas what Hugh Hefner
did to the porn industry—make the whole thing soft enough for the
masses.
The first thing that hit my head on hearing about the Gospel of Judas was Martin Scorsese.
You see, Scorsese—Martin
to his friends and probably Il Capo Di Tutti Capi to some influential
Italians who must love him—made the film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s
novel, The Last Temptation in 1988. The film pissed off Pope John Paul II so much that the Pope went to Martin Scorsese’s home, spat in the director’s face, and muttered the famous line: "You know what, Martin, I kinda liked Taxi Driver. But this… But this… This is just full of shit."
Okay, I’m just kidding about that one. What really happened was that after the release of the highly controversial film, Cardinals Fang, Ximinez, and Biggles,
and a dozen of those other guys who had happily burned folks like
Giordano Bruno and Joan of Arc dragged Scorsese to Rome, gagged his
tongue, stripped him naked, and burned him at the stake, with Scorsese
reported to have screamed: “Robert de Niro will avenge me! He’ll kick
your pampered Catholic arses…till you beg for your MOTHERS!"
All right, I’ll be serious now.
In
both the 1955 novel and in the film, Judas is not really “bad;” in
fact, he’s not only rational, revolutionary, and sensitive, but he’s also smart
and principled—he’s a better specimen of humanity than the rest of the
disciples who are nothing but a bunch of superstitious yes men.
Judas
questions everything, and he has a firm belief in the ability of Jesus
to emancipate the Jews that he acts as Jesus’ bodyguard and is usually
the first to present logical strategies. Judas is convinced that Jesus’
future is in politics—that ultimately, Jesus will free all Jews from
the Romans. But Jesus realizes later that his purpose on Earth is to be
the “lamb of God,” which means sacrificing himself on the cross.
In
one of the most unforgettable scenes in Scorsese’s film, Jesus urges
Judas to betray him to accomplish the “divine mission,” but Judas gets
annoyed with the “change of plan.”
“Die?” Judas asks. “You mean, you’re not the Messiah?”
Jesus says, “I am.”
“That can’t be. If you’re the Messiah, why do you have to die?”
“Listen,” Jesus says, “At first, I didn’t understand myself…”
“No, you listen,” Judas cuts him. “Every day, you have a different
plan. First it’s love, then the ax, and now you have to die. What good
could that do?”
“God only talks to me a little at a time and tells me as much as I need to know,” Jesus says.
“We need you alive!”
“Now I finally understand!” Jesus says. “All my life—all my life, I’ve
been followed by voices, by footsteps, by shadows. And do you know what
that shadow is? The cross. I have to die on the cross, and I have to
die willingly. We have to go back to the temple.”
“And after you die on the cross, what happens then?” Judas asks.
“I come back to judge the living and the dead.”
I
have loved that film for years; it cemented my admiration for Scorsese
and made me discover Kazantzakis and his works. As noted by critic
David Ehrenstein, the film presents “divinity not as a given, but
rather as a process Christ explores through his humanity.”
And
personally, maybe it meant more to me because when Jesus blames himself
that Mary Magdalene has become a prostitute when he could have married
her, his sadness, his confusion is so excruciating that the physical
pain later on the cross seems like a joke—it showed me how this is a
Jesus I can feel, I can believe, I can sympathize with—and this is me
speaking as an atheist.
And now, this Gospel, which somehow has
the same role for Judas as conceived by Kazantzakis—or is it the other
way around? I’m not really sure if Kazantzakis ever had any idea about
the Gospel of Judas and its general drift. By many accounts,
Kazantzakis was a spiritually restless thinker; he didn’t take comfort
in the canned answers of his religion. He explored with his fiction. He
hit on things. And he probably read about St. Irenaeus and got the idea.
But the point is, the Gospel of Judas somehow reaffirms what some of us
have suspected: that the whole thing about the betrayal as told in the
official canon of the four Gospels somehow lacked what Wendy
Wasserstein would call “the third punch.” Yes, that kind of betrayal is
believable; human history is full of that shit, from Julius Caesar’s
“Et tu, Brute?” to Evander Holyfield’s “Fuck, Mike, did you just bite
off my ear? I thought we were…friends?” But somehow, it has always felt lacking of something.
Let’s pretend I believe
in the Passion; let’s pretend I’m buying it at all. Now, in my book,
there’s something so unexciting about how the end came for somebody
like Jesus; the whole thing has always felt like a soap opera, where
the villains and the heroes are as clearly cut as cardboards. If you’d
ask me, and if I may tell you frankly, there are no “human beings” in
the four Gospels; what we find and what we read are caricatures, stick
figures, bleeding puppets. But now, with the Gospel of Judas, or with
stories like that of Kazantzakis, we’re offered an alternative, “more
believable” story that even nonbelievers like me are seduced to like it.
I
wonder how it’s going to go down the road. How the entire orthodox
world would nibble on this thing. Anyhow, if Kazantzakis were here
today, he’d probably write a sequel to The Last Temptation. He might give it the title, Judas and the She-Goats. Or Judas: The Disciple Who Shagged Me.
But I don’t know; that’s just a wild guess.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)Gab @ the Speed of Light
There was this friend who was so excited over something that he
appeared in my house one night and began shooting off with the mouth.
He
said, “It’s so fucking cool, you could shit in that fuck, and I’m like
so fucked out, man. It’s fucking terrific, you could shit in that
fucking stupid fuck!”
I stared at him for long minutes and the only thing I remember saying was, “What’s that again?”
It wasn’t really a question; I was stunned realizing he was trying to tell me a tale and he was using less than a dozen words.
Quite
recently, I’ve been learning to speak Cantonese, and it astonished me
that when you speak a language like Cantonese, you better be careful
with your intonation. “Sing” a word with the wrong tone, and you might
as well be saying a completely different word—and in certain exciting
parts of China, that might mean getting beheaded or getting laid.
What
if in the future, for example, the word “fuck” can mean five hundred
different things, depending on how you “sing” it. Or depending on when
you say it, where you say it, how you say it, what color of underwear
you’re wearing when you’re saying it, and where your hand is located
while you’re saying it.
Maybe in the future, the only words that
will stay will be those that are necessary to explain life; words like
“fuck,” “shit,” “cunt,” “dick,” “boobs,” and “Abner Mercado,” for
example.
Maybe folks like George Bush, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, or Debbie Lafave might have a chance entering the hallowed ranks of my less-than-a-dozen-word “envisioned” language, but I’m not really sure.
Maybe the human race will end up twisting a single word to mean many different things.
Take “Abner Mercado”:
You’re such an abner mercadochist! I hate you!
Don’t you be abner mercadoing my fucking leg, because I know.
Look at that guy, he’s abner mercadoing on the fucking pole. Look! Ha ha ha!
Frankly, my dear, I don’t abner mercado a damn.
Don’t abner mercado with Texas!
We are quite sure Iraq is bristling with abner mercados of mass destruction.
Flush the abner mercado, will you?
What can be more delectable than Magnolia’s abner mercado-flavored ice cream?
When
you think about it, human language is getting increasingly streamlined.
As technology continues to create faster, more efficient, deeply
indispensable machines, these same machines drag us around like those
nasty kids did in Children of the Corn and force us to live as fast, as efficient, as “compressed” as they are.
LOLs.
The other day, I caught a glimpse of Pride and Prejudice,
a film based on a novel set some two hundred years ago, and it awed me
how this guy would take ten million pages of script when all he wants
to say to Keira Knightley is that he’s got the hots for her.
While in the Middle Ages, somebody like Chaucer would take a long and winding road to tell some erotic tale like that of the merchant, somebody like the Black-Eyed Peas these days would just merely say, “What you gon’ do wit all that breast? All that breast inside that shirt?”
Or in the terse, intense style of my over-excited friend, the entire Pride and Prejudice or Canterbury Tales would be summed up in the over-exciting words:
To take this to an even more unthinkable extreme, maybe in the future, human language would end up having only two words.
Two words might be enough to describe life, the universe, and everything.
I wonder what those two words might be.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)Strange Brew
[Also on The Skirmisher]
I’ve invented something that could instantly kill living things. And I’m only eight.
It’s amazing, I tell my friend. He gapes at what I’m handing him.
His
runny nose has already made a permanent yellow-greenish pair of mucus
canals from his nostrils to his mouth, and there are times I wonder how
it must taste.
It instantly killed that plant, I say.
I point at the plant, which is all wilted under the sun. It really looks very dead.
We can conquer the world with this, my friend says, in his hand is the bottle of the brew I’ve “invented.”
This
is 1984. I’m in second grade. We stand in the sweltering afternoon heat
of the school yard of Bacoor Parish School. I just made my first
“invention”: a bottle of a strange reddish liquid, a mere drop of which
could kill an otherwise healthy plant.
Now, how did I invent such a potent thing, in the first place?
We
owned a small grocery store in 1984, and one day, I found a small box
brimming with all sorts of medicines past their expiration date. There
were blister packs of red and green pills, white tablets, frothing
cough syrups. The moment I saw the cache, my eyes gleamed with delight;
I had just seen a movie where there was this scientist with all sorts
of colored liquids in tubes, and he did some very cool things like
shrinking somebody to be small enough to swim into a woman’s vagina
(years later, I would see something similar in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her).
The
scientist in that movie impressed me so much that afterwards, whenever
the adults would ask me the Shakespearean question, “What do you want
to be when you grow up?” I’d say, I want to be a professor or a
scientist, never mind that I didn’t really know what kind of
teeth-gnashing those vocations involved.
I wouldn’t usually
blink when I’d say that. It became an all-consuming ambition, although
later, I’d change my mind over it many times. Of course, in the
present, I’m far from being a scientist, but I’ll talk about that kind
of shit maybe in another post.
There was this one time we were
in a jeepney, and my mother’s friend asked me that same question. You
have to realize that I loved being asked that question; deep inside it
made me feel good just giving my answer. As if just giving the answer
already made it real and true, like some sort of self-fulfilling mantra.
So
I gave the stock answer; and I was so caught up in my reverie that I
didn’t realize my hand was already resting on the knee of the girl
beside me. I realized it only when the adults around me were chuckling
and staring at me as if they’d seen a pervert. It was a good thing that
the girl, some hottie in her teens, merely found it amusing that some
eight-year-old would find her knee attractive enough to be “lost” in it.
But
back to my invention. This strange brew, I created it out of some white
tablets, multicolored capsules, and some bottles of cough syrup mixed
together. Before I showed this to my friend, I had tested it first on
my mother’s cat. Well, the cat survived for some reason (she had nine
lives, anyway), although she limped away while giving me what seemed
like the feline version of a “scornful look.” But I took it as
sufficient proof; I interpreted it as my brew’s potency. I went to
school that afternoon with a bottle full of that strange brew. In my
heart, all eight years of me, I had already “arrived”; I was already a
frigging “scientist.” Dang!
The first thing I did when I arrived
at school was look for some unfortunate test subject. And because there
were no cats at school, and because I was afraid that if the cat died,
it would be hard to conceal the evidence, what I did was sneak into the
schoolyard, choose some scraggy bush that nobody cared about, then
poured some of my brew on the poor thing.
And to my horror and amazement, the plant wilted before my very eyes.
I was ecstatic; I ran back to the room crazy with the thought of world domination.
And
so, my classmate with the perennial runny nose, gazes now at my bottle,
then asks, “Which plant did you say you poured this on?”
I pointed at the plant in the corner.
His face follows my hand. He stares at the plant long and hard.
“That?” he says. “That’s the plant you killed?”
Yeah, I say.
“But that’s not dead. That’s a makahiya*.”
I
just stand there, not comprehending it. He walks over to the plants and
begins touching each one of them, and each one, after being touched,
“wilts” so dramatically. I’m stunned. I feel so foolish, but I hide and
swallow my embarrassment. I’ll never admit to this kid that I now know
how stupid I am.
Oh my God, I say, you have magical powers? You can kill them with your touch?
I flash him my best shit-eating grin.
He gives me a look that years later I would learn to mean “fuck off.”
Then he walks away, my dirty, impressionable friend.
*****
Makahiya’s scientific name is Mimosa pudica.
This plant “wilts” when touched, the compound leaves fold inward and
droop, re-opening within minutes. Its ability to “move” has fathered
the self-awareness of countless kids with delusions of grandeur.
