The year of discontent
My heart rate is speeding up and my mind and body are beginning to swell with nervous anxiety as I crouch over my iPad and read my first journal entry of the year — a heavy and serious description of the setting and mood of my life at the precise moment (and subsequent moments) the clock struck 12 last Saturday night. To wit:
Midnight, New Year’s Eve 2011-12 . . . I am sitting on my front porch and the wind is howling. Rain and fireworks, a village brownout enhancing it all while my wife and children sleep soundly through. The brownout only lasted through the midnight hour and made me wonder whether it was intentional; cut off the power and leave the villagers with two options: Go to sleep or get drunk and watch the night explode. . . . No lights in the house, forcing me to sit on the white-stone ledge of my porch and welcome the New Year in solitude, jolted in my meditation from moment to moment by the crack and flash of lightning and homemade firebombs. Cardboard noisemakers competing with this screaming windstorm in front of me, lashing gales of hard rain everywhere. . . . What a fantastic scene, and it feels great . . . the wind, the noise . . . I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end this rotten year of our Lord, 2011. . . . Just looking at those numbers makes me want to heave in nausea. What a goddamn wretched bummer last year was, there’s just no other way of putting it for me. . . . 2011 was a botched back-alley abortion, a treacherous stink-bomb any way you looked at it — depression, poverty, debt, heartbreak, loss, betrayal, madness, hangovers, and tears — last f*cking year had it all.
The Year That Was
Wow, well… I’m not commonly that upset about things, but last year did belong to the birds and in the books. I guess I just needed to get things off my chest, and doing it in the eye of a storm, with no lights, and rockets shooting up into the sky and exploding into raining umbrellas of multi-colored fireballs, seemed as good a time as any. I had just been kicked out of my own family beach home in Batangas for bad behavior, and my 96-year-old grandmother was rushed to the emergency room with pneumonia. I was brooding on all this and the general angst of the year that was, and privately celebrating its passing on my porch that night.
Probably the saddest thing that occurred last year was the sudden passing of a good friend, whose death my brain somehow still refuses to accept, constantly telling me it was wrong, that he was the wrong person to go this early. Too soon, too young, too nice, too close to home, too unfeasible. Too sad to accept, a grim capstone of a doomed year. Makes you feel like it’s back to square one, questioning the meaning of life, why it matters when it could be snuffed out of a good person like that at any minute, for no good reason at all. . . . And of course that’s precisely the point — that life is fleeting and therefore should be suckled tenderly while it’s still there.
Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead
Nobody understands this better than former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who in a spectacular display of political downfall, was arrested without bail for electoral fraud just as she was about to leave the country and seek medical treatment abroad. This was probably the biggest news of 2011: Yet another disgraced President knocked off her pedestal by accusations of uncontrollable greed. History is indeed forever destined to repeat itself in the filthiest of ways, and nobody will ever learn because nobody really gets punished. Rapists and psychopaths get away with murder and justice is always the first casualty. But will this time be different? Am I seeing donkey-sh*t visions or does President Aquino appear to be growing a pair by mustering up some attitude, perhaps a taste of that brash political will this country so desperately needs? Or is he merely allowing himself to be jerked around by Justice Secretary Leila De Lima, like a bomb-sniffing bulldog pulling its master’s grip on its leash?
Ah, let’s not seal the coffin and stray into politics now — we will get to that evil swill soon enough. Whatever the case may be, 2012 is bound to be interesting in ways we could never imagine. What will happen to GMA? What will happen to Justice Corona, who now faces an impeachment trial? What will happen to the Supreme Court, whose institutional integrity hangs haggardly on the line? Too many questions and not enough answers, so let me at least leave you with something: If PNoy truly possesses the political will to do what’s right for this country, he will set precedents in the administration of justice by allowing his power to be driven not by ambition, but by patriotism. The country feels like it’s shuddering through a correction period that is making many people very uncomfortable, but if the President can manage to keep a firm and tight handle on the wheel, he may survive the rough patch and lead us out of the tunnel. The problem is, every time I see his face on TV, he looks like he’s anxiously waiting for Ashton Kutcher to come running out of some trailer to tell him he just got punk’d and this whole presidential gig was one big practical joke — and this raises many doubts in my mind about whether he can keep it together next year. Next year will not be about the Constitution or institutions or democracy — those things don’t exist here anymore. It will be about the Filipino people and what they want, need, and should have now; and whether this slacker-bachelor President of ours actually has the gonads to give it to them.
