Dance the disco corrosion

Hey, Mr. Nakata. Gramps. Fire! Flood! Earthquake! Revolution! Godzilla’s on the loose! Get up! — Haruki Murakami

This is a commencement address of doom. Well, kind of.

When I left school, I never realized that it would all come to this:

Fingers dabbing down on those keys, with words (well, more like rudimentary text) lining themselves one by one across the computer screen like slim, angular soldiers. Off to battle the forces of writer’s block, never to return. Page after page of zilch. Nothing came, just shades of Beckett and the exhibitionist Emperor. An electric shroud hangs. Welcome to the dead white country.

Is it possible for a writer to just run out of life to write about? If you were jetting off to South American backwaters or South African townships in search of stories, along the way riding a rickety bus with lovers and lepers and the dead, subsisting on stony bread and dusty water for days, just the trip or the accommodation alone would make up the tales, twisted yet truthful ones at that. But not if you’re a writer leading an abnormally tedious life in Manila with its black noise, stabbing smells and mile-long malls to make people forget about their daily straggling. Buy this… it will make you feel better. Congratulations for recruiting yourself into a Philip K. Dick story.

This is you (to parrot Jaworksi pushing either a green or red magnet across a whiteboard, surrounded by the baffled). You wake up in the morning, have black coffee, eat a glop of something non-nutritious and dead from the fridge, hit the road (the ever diminishing roads), get to work, do something alienating that Karl Marx forewarned us about in college (something we didn’t give a shit about because we were too eager to leave school to be part of the “real world”). This is it: a cramped cubicle with cockroaches and chances for asphyxiation. Forget the natural world outside. Forget there are trees or parks or birds a-chirping. Break your back and crack your head with something menial that almost always leaves you somewhat soured up and stale, like a piece of bread spread evenly with malaise. Forget yourself.

How difficult it is to be a writer with nothing more to say.   

Wisecracker No. 1: To get out of a rut, you could always write about, er, writing.

Yes. But that would be like a singer singing a song about singing. Sing… sing a song… make it simple to last your whole life long. Even the Muppets would find that anomalous — and to think they’re puppets with arms lodged up their butts. Manamanah…

Makes me think about Sundays of yore when radio stations played The Beatles the whole day, or a smattering not-so-gasgas OPM tunes from Dinosaur (Try A Little Suicide) and Pabs Dadivas with the Moody Blues and Procol Harum. We skip the light fandango, sings Gary Brooker, with lyrics channeling Chaucer. And you lose yourself in those impenetrable lines. Beautiful Sunday then, Sunday bloody Sunday now. Three stations have this in their Sunday rotation: Wind of Change by the Scorpions. No, I don’t want to let that balalaika ring. Whenever I hear Klaus Maine whistling and being wistful about the children of tomorrow, I wish to be stung by a scorpion.

Last year I e-mailed my travelogue about Vienna to my Viennese friend of Turkish descent. I thought I described everything to death in that article — from the bronze monuments with greened with verdigris, to the roads and quadrangles where Nazi Stormtroopers marched during the black days of history. She said she loves the “Vienna of my memories,” even if it’s less interesting to her than the Vienna outside her window.

I could write about being paranoid. Worth a try…

The first time a day passed without me seeing Eva Longoria — on TV, in a magazine, on a billboard — I thought things were going to go awry. As if the balance of the universe had been upset, that we were all walking on an unhinged plane of existence, that it was already December 12, 2012 in the Mayan calendar. Fire. Brimstone. Celine Dion on the radio, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

There was a time Eva was on every damn channel, every button I clicked. It was like the Blitz. The flashing of a Desperate Housewives episode or its trailer, Longoria on Oprah or on The View, more dissertations about that show with evilly ridiculous plots about slutty suburban wives who seem to have received formaldehyde injections, Longoria watching a Spurs game, walking the red carpet, fleeing the paparazzi, or hawking something. I was being stalked by a face, those teeth, that hair — and that was so “other-weirdly.” The world couldn’t get enough of her. And since I am just renting my time here on this planet (just like the rest of you bozos) then I had no choice but to un-grin and bear it.

During those hazy days in the ’90s in Malabon, a friend — a painter who painted nude Minnie Mice… holding cocked revolvers — would see a pregnant woman every day, every freakish day. Freaked him out.

One time we were drinking gin on the porch of a house his brother rented in Tansa and he was about to congratulate himself with a shot: it was close to 9 in the evening and there had been no preggy woman in sight. Para sa araw na walang buntis, followed by the clink of glasses. Shot too soon. A tricycle rattled and stopped in front of us, its motor sputtering like Shakira singing about she-wolves and tango obsessions. One passenger alighted. Well two passengers, actually — one was yet to be born. The streak continued. It only stopped when his then girlfriend broke the news: my friend was to become a father in six months. I told him to check the forehead of the baby when the wife gives birth. There might be a “666” there somewhere. He need not end up like Gregory Peck.

The Eva Longoria visions were an omen to something I am still not aware of up to now. Surely some revelation is at hand.

Then it happened. No Eva for a day. Two days… then three. On the way home I looked to the skies for a sign of hurtling comets or maybe the Whore of Babylon. If I were in America I wouldn’t worry about the Apocalypse happening today since it is already tomorrow in Australia. (Steven Wright said that, or was it Charles Schulz?) The stars look healthy, though, silvery cheeks and all. All I could see were skies and giant billboards peddling products we don’t want, don’t need, and cannot afford.  

The everyday apparitions of Tyra Banks took over. Tyra, with her arsenal of teeth and wigs, searching for models, interviewing celebrities, sharing her insights — a tirade of Tyra-ness. Tomorrow it could be Ellen DeGeneres. Let’s dance un-funkily.

Wait. It might be the universe conspiring. Or it could be nothing. I feel like Dan Brown creating hogwash out of bullshit. 

 “Please accept the mystery,” says the deadpan Korean dad in the Coen’s A Serious Man.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Yeats said that. Everything ends. Even a cigarette vendor would tell you that. Somebody told me heart attacks usually happen on Mondays. I don’t know where she got that info from (or whether it’s true at all), but all I know is that one seemingly ordinary Monday my heart got broken.

Tom Robbins wrote in Still Life With Woodpecker about how to make love stay. “Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

I did all that, but love didn’t stay. It wasn’t there when I woke up on that blue Monday. It felt crushed. It needed space. It needed to find itself. It wanted to love itself more. It is happy now, it declared as it frolicked on a sunny beach. It can breathe now. I should be happy for it, but I’m not. It is gloomy and shitty where I am. It seems as if the world had already ended, and that the Mayans were merely being metaphorical all along. 

Life is a series of arbitrary things that don’t add up to anything. I have nothing to say and I’ve just said it.

Do not build your dreams on a mountain of tofu, or upon Shakira’s wiggly she-wolf buttocks. Do not believe in “fake hype for dead trends.” Get a steady job where there is always an influx of customers — like an embalmer or such. Do not tango into the gloom. Do not talk to the driver while the bus is in motion. And do not go quietly.

Oh, and congratulations to the graduates.

Get unwell soon.

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Special thanks to the Noon Transit Rider for the illumination.