Employment

"The problem with you," he said, "is that you write what you want for shows that you want. This isn't about art, man. It's about getting as many shows as you can and then cashing in. It's about employment."

"Okay," I replied. "I'll give you the straight dope. People like me are unemployable in the corporate sense of the word. Some of us say it's because we're free spirits or some such quasi-cosmic fluff. I dunno much about that. What I do know, however, is that we piss too high and we swing our egos around like warhammers because we think we have creative superpowers that can boil your brains inside your skull. We don't want employment. We want a piece of the goddam kingdom. It's not about what the audience wants from us. It's about what we want to give the audience."

Super Inggo at ang Super Tropa Trailer

Airing this November!

Do You Smell What the Rock is Cookin’?

Say you’re a good cook. You like cooking and whatever comes out of your kitchen brings tears of joy to men’s eyes. So, yeah, you’re a pretty awesome cook. Good for you.

Well you gotta work, my friend. You gotta earn the bucks. So you try to make money out of this God-given talent by being a chef in a restaurant and cooking for other people. Fair enough. Cooking other people’s meals is a noble endeavour.

But then your boss, the restaurant’s manager, tells you that you should cook something else, something that you know you wouldn’t eat yourself. And you do as he says. Because you gotta put food on your own table. You don’t like what you’re cooking but you do it because you have to. You think what your boss makes you cook is a pile of offal starving dogs wouldn’t touch but you do it anyway. As the years pass, you grasp stubbornly, desperately, to your opinion that what you enjoy cooking is what’s good and what you’re cooking now is abhorrent to you. If you don’t lose sight of the distinction, you say, you’ll be alright. You’ll stay true to your art inside you heart. It’s what the people want to eat, your boss would say. Nevertheless, you’d answer him politely, my taste is different.

The day comes when your boss goes away and is replaced by a new boss, a boss whose sensibilities are nearer to your own. You learn that he likes the food that you like cooking. He doesn’t know yet that you can throw together a mean version of his favourite pasta. So you crack your knuckles and tie on your apron. You’re ready and raring to fire up the stove and create a gastronomic miracle that would make your new, more appreciative boss weep tears of joy.

But wait, your new boss says. Wait.

He smells something in the kitchen. Something he doesn’t like.

He follows his nose. It leads him to the refrigerator.

He opens it and sees leftovers from your old boss’ breakfast.

Your new boss thinks it’s an abomination.

You agree with him silently, your heart alight with the feeling that, at last, here’s validation. I was right!

You new boss looks at you with a cold expression on his visage. He takes out something from his bag. He gives it to you. Study that, he says without looking at you. And then he leaves the kitchen.

You’re confused. You look at the object he’d given you. A book. You look at the cover.

It’s a cook book.

Study that.

Let's Not Get Carried Away Here

I realize, of course, that I can draw a lot of shit from this. But what the heck. At the risk of sounding like a total douchebag…

Not to diss our lingua franca, but when patriots say that the Filipino language is beautiful, I tend to ask: as opposed to what?

Is there such a thing as an ugly language? Is there a standard of beauty when it comes to languages? Is it the melody? Or maybe the sibilant consonants? Consider Tolkien’s fictional High Elven and Black Speech. High Elven is more sibilant, more melodic. Mordor’s Black Speech is guttural and brutish. If Black Speech is the ugly language, then Filipino, with its hard consonants and short vowels, sounds more like the tongue of Mordor. French, on the other hand, sounds more like High Elven. Do I like French better? Of course not. Despite the two French subjects I took in college, it still sounds like gibberish to me. I use Filipino everyday. Do I think I sound orcish? Christ, no. I can articulate complicated thoughts using Filipino; thoughts no orc can contain within his puny brain. Thus it’s not the sound that makes a language beautiful.

Is it the poetry? But every language has its own great poems. And these poems are great only for those who understand the language. For everyone else they sound like Pig Latin, despite the beautiful metaphors.

Is it the ability of the language to transmit ideas? Well, every language does that to those who understand it. And, quite frankly, there are a lot of ideas Filipino isn’t developed enough to convey effectively. That’s why when we’re talking about particle accelerators we switch to English. Do I think English is more lovable than Filipino? No. I write better with it but I use Filipino about 70 percent of the time when I’m talking to other Filipinos. Filipino does the job more effectively with fellow Filipinos. But when talking to the world via the Internet, I use English because it’s the language most people understand.

Let’s not get carried away here.

PSALM 12: On the Meat Train

This morning I took the train.

***

The bizarre thing is that I look more human than a lot of real human beings. It’s cosmic kitsch, like when Charlie Chaplin lost in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, believe me, you start noticing how often these things happen. You start getting suspicious. Oh, I don’t know. That maybe there really is an Intelligent Force out there shaping the cosmos. Some Unimaginably Awesome Being for whom humanity is a punchline held back for far too long. He knows the gag must come to an end. But he dares not. Because he also knows there are no more punchlines after it. Nothing worth spit, at least. And so he draws it out. He chews it like cud. He swallows it. He regurgitates it. He chews some more. On and on. He’s sick of it but he cannot admit it. You start getting suspicious.

***

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in an Unimagibly Awesome Being. Though I don’t deny that there may be one, chances are there isn’t. At least I don’t remember him. And my memory is long indeed. No, I don’t remember him. I don’t remember seeing even a hint of his shadow. What I remember, though, is ancient humans—barely out of the trees—burying their dead in the hopes that there is more to existence than eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, and fucking. They painted the bones of the dead with red ochre and created symbols and rituals. They drew strange images on cave walls and told each other stories so that they can make sense of the whole mess in their desperate search for patterns in the events of their indescribably short lives. They shed blood upon crude altars to buy power from forces beyond their ken and make their existence last just a little more. They looked up the skies at night and imagined they saw the faces of those who are gone.

***

You must understand that I don’t have all the answers. Truth be told, I don’t even have a lot. I have bits and pieces. I have glimpses and guesses. Not much more than your entire species, in short. Look. I don’t admit this very often, but I don’t even know how it began. I don’t remember. Maybe I was born the day your species was born. Maybe my fate is inextricably linked to yours. A romantic notion but hardly probable. At what point did your ancestors become human beings?

***

Long ago, some crazy fuck wrote about me. Or he wrote about someone people nowadays think is me. It wasn’t very flattering. I usually don’t give a flying fart about details like that. But what that man wrote stuck. Even today, billions believe what that man said about me. It’s… annoying.

***

Yes, I look more human than a lot of human beings. I look… finite.

***

This morning I took the train. It doesn’t matter where I’m going. I come and I go. There’s nothing much else left to do. So I took the train. A family was sitting across from me. They were remarkably ugly. No, don’t look at me like that. I mean no disrespect. I’m not commenting on the quality of their humanity. They were simply ugly. They were poor and worn out. The mother and the father were probably young by your standards but they looked weathered. Their skins were dry and sagging. Their teeth were dead ends. Their lips curved down at the edges, as if weighed by the chains of the human condition. Their eyes looked absolutely bovine.

***

The child sitting on the mother’s lap was predictably ugly as well. Flat face, bad skin, cheap clothes lovingly bought from some sidewalk vendor. Yet her eyes were alive. They sought out faces like a man looking for nuggets of gold from a pan filled with silt. They would look at one face and gently but firmly discard it from her sphere of attention. They would look at another face and consider for a moment if this held a small treasure within. Unsatisfied, they would move on to other faces. The child was a prospector of human souls, if such things actually exist.

***

Those eyes locked with mine.

***

There are about 6,786,216,374 human beings on this planet today. I read that on the Internet. Each one of these human beings have absolutely no role in the intricate clockwork that turns in the belly of the cosmos. If the entire race disappears in one quiet moment, the universe will go on.

***

Maybe I was born the day you people were born. And I’ll die when you people finally die off. It won’t take a lot for that to start happening. I can pull Wormwood out of the sky. I can knock away the moon or extinguish the sun. I can roll time and space into a miniscule ball of pure gravity between my palms and bury it in the center of the planet. I can split atoms with a fragment of a dream. And then you will be gone. And then I will be gone. Maybe. If I’m still here, though, there won’t be any great loss. Silence would be another adventure. I may take to the stars. Maybe I’ll find another species like yours. At any rate, the universe will go on.

***

The child’s eyes locked with mine.

THE PSALMS OF HATRED
Psalm 1 (Video)
Psalms 2 to 7
Psalm 8
Psalms 9 to 11