Earnest entries

I know I was supposed to end my reportage on Bellagio a couple of weeks ago, but there’s a few odds and ends I left out that might be just as interesting to those who, like me, are more inclined to peek behind the curtains than to mind what’s happening on center stage.

Geek that I am, I jot these notes down on a Palm at the end of the day, or just before I think I’m about to forget what I saw, then sync them to my laptop at least once a week. No, unlike my more methodical and disciplined colleagues, I don’t keep a journal; I have a stack of old diaries with earnest entries that end sometime around Jan. 17. I like old pens (and some new ones – my European souvenir of choice was a Graf von Faber-Castell "Guilloche" fountain pen that I’d been lusting after for ages; I think every 48-year-old boy deserves one), and I can stand for an hour in a stationery store just breathing in the papers, but I find writing something like "Dear Diary" a tad too affected.

Europe’s a great place for those pocket-size "Moleskin" notebooks with the wrap-around elastic band that famous writers like Hemingway were supposed to have used; I wish I’d had one back in the pre-PDA ‘70s (not that I could afford it then) instead of those cheesy diaries, encased in the finest faux leather (or worse, faux wood-veneer) plastic, that I got every Christmas from This Hardware Company and That Insurance Corporation. I’m almost sure, though, that I wouldn’t have imprinted anything of real value in such a classy notepad. I used to scribble like crazy on the backs of calling cards, cigarette foil, and bus tickets, keeping them in my wallet until they turned to chaff. Every time I lost one of these snippets, I was naturally convinced that Philippine literature had lost its greatest opening sentence (something along the lines of "It was a dark and stormy night…."). I think there’s a kind of Murphy’s Law somewhere to the effect that the cheaper your materials, the worthier your product – a law made up, no doubt, by some penurious poetaster who thought himself better than Sophocles, Mozart, and Picasso combined. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t buy this moist-eyed ideal of the starving artist; I hate starving. But I must admit to a nagging suspicion that what will probably survive as my best work was done with a Bic ballpen on yellow legal pad paper, not in Microsoft Word 10.1.2 on a Titanium PowerBook G4, and, sadly, not with a Guilloche on vellum.

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Let’s leave depressing thoughts behind, shall we? Let’s talk porn – I mean, talk about it. Or at least think about it. For literary purposes. Whatever.

My wantonly wandering eyes – which could be digesting anything from flat noodles one minute to steamed crabs the next, just to show you their remarkable range – stumbled on soft-core porn on TV in our hotel in Rome, just as I was opening a packet of potato chips. Those chips felt like compacted sawdust in my throat as I took in the sight of… never mind. It did remind me of the first time I watched French late-night TV in Paris a few years ago, and I was up until the wee hours watching… uh, let’s just say, baguettes and croissants. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen such shows before, and it isn’t as if I live for them, either.

But if there’s anything I admire about Europe and the Europeans as much as their cathedrals and museums, it’s their relaxed, uncomplicated, and unhypocritical attitude toward sex, for which they seem none the worse. While we wring our hands over what our fellow adults deserve to see in their movies – and in restricted screenings, at that – the French, Italians, Dutch, and Swedes are enjoying themselves guiltlessly and shamelessly. (If, to us, occasionally overmuch: witness the exuberantly excessive TV show Eurotrash, or the advertisement for American-style lap dancing over a giveaway map of Milan and its famous 14th-century Duomo.) Is the rate of sex crimes in those countries any higher than ours? Have their film and entertainment industries sunk to the production of nothing but gratuitous sex? Are their minds and spirits so sex-addled that they can’t produce Nokias, Vespas, Rolexes, and Popes?

I’m not saying that it’s time we turned over our 1 a.m. TV time slot to the pornmeisters. You can actually put TV to better uses than the human emulation of an internal combustion engine. But we can all grow up a bit and focus on excessive politics, rather than excessive sex, as the source of our woes and worries.

And, oh – if you fancy looking as sexy as the Europeans do (or think they do), then get yourself a pair of the sharpest stiletto shoes you can find, then sneak into a pair of dirty jeans – as in muddy-brown, heavily distressed dirty; to make things easier, put the jeans on first before the shoes; and make sure you’re a woman, or a reasonable representation thereof.

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Frankfurt International Airport advertises itself as a no-smoking zone, but I nearly choked to death during a stopover there, given how scores of passengers were blithely puffing away in and out of designated smoking areas. That was pretty much true, come to think of it, of wherever we went in Europe (except at the Villa Serbelloni, where smoking indoors would have been cause for instant banishment).

As a former four-pack-a-day smoker myself, I’m no anti-smoking placard wielder; even after 11-year and 7-year stretches without a puff, I still hanker for the occasional cigarette, and sometimes cheat by sniffing the nicotine in the whisky-bar air. But I pay for it the next morning, of course, when I wake up with a huge ball of clotted phlegm in my chest, which I spend the rest of the day or the week expelling in ugly little pellets. Many of my closest friends smoke, and since I sit with them by choice, I’ve come to accept the morning-after agony as the price to pay for their friendship.

But it burns me up, almost literally, when I’m supposed to have a choice of clean air, and then can’t get it because some gorilla at the next table thinks he looks cool with a flaming faggot in his mouth. It makes me wish he’d choke on his own phlegm; better that than me choking on mine.

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Whatever happened to Lufthansa? Not that I’d know what it was like before, never having used the airline until that homebound flight from Milan via Frankfurt. I got the firm impression, however, that Lufthansa had seen better times. On the flight we took, there were none of the usual amenities you’d expect from a leading air carrier – no hot towels, no bag of toiletries, nothing in the toilets by way of hand soaps or colognes. The service seemed perfunctory – efficient and cordial, yes, but perfunctory no less, stripped to the bare minimum.

I suppose I can live without these things, but I’m a hopeless Pinoy who likes the little touches and takes home those mini-bottles and sachets of shampoo from hotels and airlines – not in the shamelessly scorched-earth way some close relatives of mine do it, leaving nothing but the cookie crumbs for the cleaners, but yes, I do pocket the occasional toothbrush and cake of soap, at least to replenish my little toiletries case – what I call my kenkoy kit. (Speaking of in-flight accessories, there was this time some friends and I were seated on a CAAC flight from Beijing to Shanghai, when the stewardess very nicely began handing out pretty paper fans. What for, I sweetly asked. Because the air conditioning’s dead, came the equally charming answer.) I wouldn’t mind passing on the cabin socks if I were traveling on a non-revenue or heavily discounted ticket, but on regular fare? Times must really be hard for Lufthansa. I still swear by Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, but maybe it’s just the noodles I know I’ll be getting somewhere over the black Pacific.

Incidentally, in the seat-pocket map of the world that I find irresistible about seven or eight hours into any flight, there’s a place called Abulug in the northern Philippines – in Cagayan, as it turns out, although Lufthansa’s version of the universe had no space for provinces. Not Laoag, not Tuguegarao, not Ilagan, but Abulug – which, I’ll bet you a day’s pay as a UP professor (what we call a harmless bet), doesn’t even have an airport. They might as well have put in a spot like Camalaniugan, whose river we once crossed at midnight on a ferry under an upturned bowl of stars. I had no such misty memories of Abulug, but apparently someone at Lufthansa’s cartographic section did.

My curiosity whetted, I did a Google search on "Abulug" as soon as I got home and turned up the interesting information, courtesy of cagayanet.com, that "The municipality of Abulug lies between the municipalities of Ballesteros and Pamplona on the northwestern part of Cagayan along the China Sea. Tulug – the original name of Abulug – had been a flourishing fishing village long before Don Juan Salcedo sailed to the mouth of Abulug River in 1572…. Silk weaving at one time flourished in Abulug but with the abdication of Spanish rule and the absence of Spanish friars who introduced the industry, silk culture, has been totally forgotten. Its important agricultural products are rice, vegetable and industrial products are lumber and fish. Its native craft, cottage and trade are mat-weaving, pottery, nipa shingle and native winemaking."

So now I know, and we all know, thanks to some nameless German mapmaker – unless that "German" happens to be a transplanted Pinoy like a guy we’ll call Ralph who, signing the on-line guestbook of the Cagayan Valley Association of Hawaii, says "hello to all of the cagayanos especially to all my friend there in centro abulug, cagayan.im glad to know that there is a webside there in my lovely and beautiful province.hope you all there have a nice day allways.to all my friend there and former classmate i hope you will see this my e mail add. GOD BLESS YOU ALL AND GOOD DAY."

And a good day to you, too, Ralph, and Merry Christmas, everyone.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at: penmanila@yahoo.com.