Where were we?

The mosquitoes flying around my front porch are particularly bloodthirsty on this humid afternoon in Merville Park. No rest for the wicked, indeed. Not even for the cable and Internet guys who stood me up today, Friday, and left me without a reliable source of broadcasted information and entertainment for the next 48 hours. It made me think about whether I could actually breathe without these media, and when I began to choke midway through Saturday, my doubts churned into raw paranoia.

I consider myself a man of the media. When I moved back to the Philippines in 2001, after 10 years of living in San Francisco, I embarked on a very long and strange trip that would otherwise come to be known as my career path as a local writer and journalist. I came home and observed my homeland in a warped new way and became weirdly fascinated and reacquainted with the general manner in which my fellow Filipinos — both people I knew and didn’t know — styled their lives. It didn’t matter whether they were rich or poor, new friends or old, mestizo, Chinese, native Filipino, or any other type of hybrid — they just plain interested me in ways only a writer in search of unique inspiration could dream of. Manila was swarming with complex character studies, and most of them were my friends! And that means everybody, because let’s face it: in this brave, new world of social networking, even your parents’ friends and your friends’ friends are your friends. Even your enemies are your friends.

So all these people and the events and actions that comprised their daily lives, set in a multi-layered backdrop of lurid cities surrounded by literally thousands of rotting tropical islands, became instant fodder for a struggling writer’s manuscripts-in-progress. One of these manuscripts was the pilot issue of a magazine that would attempt to chronicle the life and times of our crazy country and the characters that in no small measure contributed to its madness. My own existence in manic Manila led to the development of a sadomasochistic habit for the Philippine way of life so consuming it forced me to write a bastard called Manifesto, which not only officially branded me a journalist, but also a trouble-maker.

After two issues and much controversy behind their publication, the magazine quickly morphed into the much more appropriately titled Rogue, which, in one word, perfectly encapsulated both the magazine’s content and the turbulence of the years that followed its first issue. Some of you might be familiar with it, as it is still being published and sold on the stands today. The magazine was founded four years ago, right around the same time I had my first daughter, and together they drove me bull-goose crazy in their own wonderful ways.

The magazine was — and still is — a critical and commercial success, as it vibrantly documented what its tagline refers to as “lifestyles on the edge” — profiles of the people, places, and things that made the Philippine culture and personality a deviant example of interesting, exotic, and oftentimes dangerously peculiar behavior. We are a rogue nation, as well as a nation of rogues, and in many ways the magazine captured and defined that notion. It described the rebelliousness and unpredictability and anti-heroism of the modern Filipino; it pointed out his strengths and weaknesses, celebrated his triumphs and rebuked his crimes; and in these regards the magazine struck at the core of who many of us were. Including myself.

Four years at the helm of Rogue drove me stone mad, and I mean that in the best of ways. It literally felt like driving a 1968 Mustang GT 390 fastback 300 miles an hour off a 500-foot cliff and expecting it to instantly grow wings and fly. We were fearless and aggressive with this magazine, even amongst ourselves, and we accumulated many a war wound along the way. Many things were put to the test: talent, endurance, resilience, creativity, patience, even friendship. I started the magazine with my best friends and on several occasions we nearly strangled each other. We sacrificed all these values and more just to give Filipinos something interesting to read.

Earlier this year, when things finally came to a boiling head, I suddenly came face-to-face with an unexpected opportunity to leave my post as editor in chief and take a much needed trip back to San Francisco, where I would attend to things that demanded my immediate attention, such as regaining perspective on life and work, ironing out some family creases, and sorting out my festering US immigration problems. I also badly needed to return to some long dormant personal writing projects, and over-extending myself in San Francisco always does the trick whenever I need to demolish Writer’s Block with the intensity of a wrecking ball.

So I detached myself from Manila and the magazine for a while, allowing some open wounds to heal over time, some hot winds to blow over, and some water to flow under half-burned bridges, while still maintaining my fundamental connection to it as its editorial director and one of its owners. Now I am back with a renewed sense of purpose and an insatiable new jones for writing, and my editor for this column, the inimitable Tim Yap, was considerate enough to revive it. My work for Rogue has, of course, also been revived, as I have been currently coordinating with my original co-conspirators and will again be writing regular features for the magazine, beginning with its highly anticipated Christmas double-issue.

So that’s the story, folks. It may not mean a lick of difference to many of you, and there’s never enough space in a column to disclose all the gory details — but my life in the last couple of years has turned into a Coen brothers movie, and being able to vent some of it out like this makes all the cathartic difference in the world to me. Like your life, like everybody’s lives at some point, It’s been a Steve McQueen chase scene full of terrifying and exhilarating ups and downs and twists and turns and edge-of-your-seat moments happening so fast you don’t know whether to crap your pants or go blind. Sounds dramatic? Well, that’s what life is: a drama. And if you haven’t experienced the car chase or the climax or the goddamn dénouement, then sit tight and keep your popcorn warm, because the only difference between life and a good dark comedy is that we know how the movie ends.

Our own lives go on until the protagonist is dead, and nobody knows when and how that scene is going to play. And even after we’re dead, life will go on without us at 60 seconds a minute, not a fraction slower. So try and relish the chapters, even the bad ones, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. Take something from them, whether its a lesson, a reality check, or pure mindless entertainment. Use your senses and pay attention to everything around you because everything is important. Preserve your memories and remember what you see and hear. And if you feel your experiences fading away, pick up a pen and write them down. It always works for me.