Meditations on everything and nothing

I. Knee-Deep In The ‘Ha-Ba’

Days ago I was stuck inside a motel with the Malabon blues again. It had been raining for three days already and I couldn’t go home. A lot of people (taxi drivers, yes; professors and bosses, no) are aware that it always floods in our wicked little coastal town (nowadays pompously calling itself a "city"). Rain a little…and there will be flood. Tide rises…and there will be flood. Frogs urinate…and there will be flood. Some old farts spit…and there will be flood. The water stays for approximately five years. We wade in puddles of water that were around during the Ramos Administration. We ride garbage trucks in order to get to Monumento or Letre, and bring the lovely scent of fish, trash and sewers by the time we get to our schools or offices.

At first, I could joke about riding styrofoam boats or APCs and doing an Elton John (who has a predilection for elevator shoes) by wearing red botas to get to school. My sosi classmates would ask, "How high is the baha?" I would answer, "Hanggang dila. Tignan n’yo, basa pa nga dila ko o (flicking my tongue)." Soon, the jokes grew stale, my sosi classmates dropped out of school and became starlets, but the floods never left.

One doesn’t need to be Stephen Hawking to make this observation: Talks about flood-control die during summers, and are resurrected like Adonai during – well, you guessed it – the rainy season. It’s an idiotic cycle. Nowadays, there is talk about building the Sharon Cuneta of dikes (drum roll please – the Megadike), which public officials started discussing in the mid-’90s. (Or according to the wags in the barbershops, during the parting of the Red Sea or when Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go was still a hit.)

Ah, politicians. They’re too busy overseeing the production of billboards that wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, crow about project this or project that, and depict their hideous faces beside heroes Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio (I am not making this up). They’re too busy making up stupid anti-drug acronyms – "DEAD or Drugs End All Dreams," for example. They’re too busy asking their henchmen to paint horrible signs and drawings on walls telling people not to make graffiti…duh!

Blaming politicians about floods, crime or having a shitty time commuting to and from the office is futile. One will have a more fruitful time designing the ultimate styrofoam boat, finding out where to order a hovercraft just like in Star Wars, or learning, like Jesus, to walk on water. And even if I feel nostalgic about Malabon and everything associated with it – the zoo, sapin-sapin, peachy-peachy, sumpia, seafood, the row of bars we call Paradise City, etc. – when the frogs start urinating again, I will get out of that city like a shot.

II. A Chevy Chase Moment In Boracay

I was in Boracay with a couple of friends a month ago. We were staring at the whitest, most pristine beach in the world. We were watching beautiful women pass by – schoolgirls with rosy knees and ankles, slim foreigners with tangled golden hair, tangled bikini tassels which left me with dirty, tangled thoughts. There were no ugly bellies pressing through bikinis. There were no bodies that hadn’t slaved away in a gym at cutthroat rates. Not a piece of candy-wrapper anywhere. Nor a cloud misplaced. There were no asphyxiating fumes or apocalyptic traffic. We were booked in paradise for four days and three nights and we felt oh-so rotten. And what was the source of this Henry Miller-like dread?

Remember Living Colour, the rock group composed of African-Americans who hit it big in the ‘80s with Cult of Personality and Love Rears Its Ugly Head? In the song Which Way to America, vocalist Corey Glover sings, "I look at the TV, your America’s doing well/I look at the window, my America’s catching hell/I just want to know which way do I get to your America" – the lament of a depressed, disenfranchised, dispossessed young black man. He wonders why he doesn’t have his picket fence, his long, tall glass of lemonade, his VCR, his stereo, his TV show, and his America.

That was what I wanted to ask the rich beach bums: Which way to your Boracay? Where were my broads with adoring arms, my banana boat rides, my beer and barbecue, my abs and glistening biceps, my three-night stay at a plush hotel? This pessimist who always sees a bottle of Pale Pilsen half-empty and not half-full wanted to ask, "Which way to the optimist’s Boracay?"

My trip to the balmy island was like something straight out of a National Lampoon movie. We were standing on the beach in happy floral shorts and matching shirts, but we were on the grip of despair – "looking California and feeling Divisoria," to mangle a line from Soundgarden. It was like being onboard the Star Cruise Leo but not getting anywhere near the buffet table.

On the plane bound for Aklan, I dreamt I was one of the boys in Beach Blanket Bingo in crimson trunks, singing a Stranglers song, "Walking on the beach, looking at the peaches." Instead I became Chevy Chase, watching the whole trip get flushed down the Karmic toilet bowl.

First, our hotel gave us the desire to sing, "Welcome to the Hotel Himalayas." To reach our hotel carved on the side of a steep hill, we rode a tricycle, took a short walk into a barrio (complete with the props of barrio life: shanties, wells, muddy paths, roosters, rabid dogs, the barrio minstrel strumming Quando Quando Quando.) and climbed 110 steps to our room. It was a sweaty and punishing trip. If Attila the Hun were a hotel it would be that one. Tipsy guests could plummet to their grisly end if they were not careful.

Our room was very small – no closets, no refrigerators, no TV sets or radios. It had a ceiling made of pawid, so I half-expected an aswang to slither its tongue through one of the cracks and suck the blood from my friends and me. Hotel Hell had no generator and there was a power failures in Boracay for two straight nights. We felt like daing in the morning. Plus, they turned off the water supply in the early evenings for God knows what reason. Thus, every time somebody asked us where were we staying, we’d nearly bawl our eyes out.

Another misadventure: One time we got thrown out of a seaside restaurant by its pathological owner who obsessively-compulsively seated customers and asked them to leave afterwards even if they weren’t through with their food and drinks yet. The irony is the name of his restaurant is the title of a Beatle song with the line, "So let it out and let it in."

We went elsewhere. In a bar, we met a self-confessed hooker named Rosa. She told us she was involved with a bald German. Rosa was sharing with us her "love" story when the guy showed up and returned her things. (He resembled the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man – the "White Angel.") She was visibly broken; but in the skin trade as in showbiz, the show must go on. So, the woman had to get work, and she brought along her pink card certifying that she was disease-free. You could say Rosa was in the "pink of health."

The next day, we saw Rosa back with her German lover. Rosa was all smiles and all teeth, like something the swamp puked out, like a komodo dragon having learned to walk on two legs. The Gestapo lover’s pockmarked head and potbelly glistened under incandescent bulbs. The two snuggled, cooed and kissed. I never knew love could be so menacing.

Things have a way of turning up roses for everyone in Boracay. Well, almost everyone.

My friends and I met a girl during the beachside event that we covered. After the show, we decided to all go out. The girl, who works in scuba-diving company, was pretty. Unfortunately, I was with two dudes you could call the Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of flirting. And there I was: lowly Luc Longley.

At first, the girl sat beside me. But somebody, I’m not sure if it was Michael or Scottie, was able to change the seating arrangement. The game of musical chairs left me sitting next to some drunken insurance agents.

I tried to wax intellectual (not just to impress the girl; I hate talking about movie stars and jobs, anyway). I talked about fate, destiny, despair, transcendence, the stars, the human condition, the philosophers, and all that cock-and-bull. But "Michael" ("the greatest flirter of all time") only had to crack a joke and it would earn him a million pogi points; the same result with Scottie, who charmed his way by being the brusko, Dante Varona type. (Males, admit it: We all have our respective shticks.) Anyway, at the end of the evening I scored a negative digit on the pogi points scale. So, I probably owe the girl some money.

On our way back to Manila, we rode on a plane that seemingly had the shivers. It was shaky as hell. I nearly wet my pants. Time is relative as Albert Einstein proved, (or was it comedian Rhea Perlman?), thus half an hour aboard that blasted plane seemed like an eternity. The passengers all had the Close-Up Smile of Doom creeping across their faces. Every five seconds, the plane would wobble and I tried to remember all the saints in the exclusive country club in the sky but can only muster San Pedro, Saint Elsewhere, Santa Claus, San Francisco, Santa Banana, M.Y. San, santong kabayo, etc.

When we finally landed, something came crashing at the back of the plane like a really emphatic cymbal. An epiphany was there somewhere but I was too busy dislodging my balls from my throat to even care.

III. Weirdos For All Seasons

People are strange when you’re a stranger/Faces look ugly when you’re alone.

Jim Morrison was right. There are a lot of crazy diamonds out there. Once, on a Caticlan-to-Boracay van, I was unfortunate enough to sit beside a person named ‘Chard, a bloke my friends and I baptized as "Mongol" because of the shirt he wore (a Mongol-pencil-yellow jersey) and because he was the king moron of the universe.

Mongol was with his fami-ly aboard the van, and he’d ask the most moronic questions: "Are we there yet?" "What does our hotel look like?" "Can we change hotels?" "Are we there yet?" He kept asking dumb questions. Maybe the dude ate a jarful of sugar, or a bottle of uppers, or the sex organ of a pig that’s why he was as bibo as L.A. Lopez. He kept fidgeting. He kept looking back at his companions. He kept nudging me out of my seat. He even sneezed and sprayed saliva and droplets of phlegm on my shoulder. He would annoy even Oprah or the most tolerant Buddhist monk.

When we got to Boracay, we saw Mongol, wearing wraparound shades and puca shells, slurping away on a watermelon, sporting a Henna tattoo and the stupidest smile on the planet – like Don Quixote after jousting with imaginary monsters. How to get to Mongol’s Boracay? Just get a plane ticket, book a hotel, pack, and (more importantly) sniff mosquito coil – plenty, so you could fly over the cuck-oo’s nest with ‘Chard.

A day later, while walking on the beach, we saw a Vanilla Coke booth and a guy who resembled Mr. Burns of The Simpsons. Mr. Burns was flirting with the ladies – "What the faaaaaak! Coke is freeeeee. Are you pretty girls freeeeee?" he hissed. Mr. Burns was wearing black, skimpy trunks that highlighted his reed-thin legs, reed-thin arms, and disproportionately huge testicles. The guy seemingly stepped out of a Playboy cartoon. He had the most annoying hiss. I think he and ‘Chard are from the same planet.

One time on a plane, I sat across a person who headbanged to an Ogie Alcasid song that was blasting loudly from his headphones. Dito, dito sa puso ko! I didn’t think it was humanly possible to headbang to Ogie Alcasid.

On the same trip, I heard a couple debating whether fish pens have electric fences or whether Michael Jackson and Madame Auring were the same person. ("Magaling pala manghula ‘yung kumanta ng Thriller," the husband sagely said. "Ha! Sino, ‘yung naging gelpren ni Victor Wood?" genius wife snapped.)

And since I was wearing an anti-SARS mask and one surgical glove (I inadvertently flushed the other one down the toilet), I hid from the two lest they mistake me for the King of Pop.

Hey, talk about people being strange should start with the man in the mirror.

* * *

For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.