How the Game was Played

I mentioned in my previous post that I had not got the opportunity to catch live the Game 3 of the Pistons vs the Bulls. All I got was the incomplete information from my cousin telling me that the Pistons won the game therefore setting the series in a comfortable 3-0 lead of the series.

Well, I was able to catch the reply of the game at Start Sports and see for myself how the Pistons dismantled the young, spunky Chicago Bulls.

The first half was a low-scoring game for the Pistons, perennially missing their shots and bungling their seemed perfect offensive plays.

The Pistons was having a taste of their own bitter medicine what with the aggressive defense of the Bulls. The Bulls looked like hungry pack of wolves ready to eat alive the Pistons. Bull’s Luol Deng, Ben Wallace and Ben Gordon leaded their team in overlording the boards and defense, and shooting above par compared with the Pistons who seemed could not get their acts together.

The first half finished off with the Bulls having a comfortable, almost a sure-win lead of 19 points against the Pistons. The Pistons looked beaten-up and a no-match in the United Arena of the Bulls; the statue of flying Michael Jordan stood outside the stadium as if to imply that the Bulls is on the rampage again and now on the rebound and ready to move toward the Eastern Finals, then the Finals proper to earn another ring.

The Pistons in my imagination were fidgeting in their locker room, panicking and being berated by coach Flip Saunders for their bad game. The fans of the Pistons in front of their tubes all over the world were pulling their hair in disbelief on how come their team feared badly at the court let the young, fast and seemed hungrier Bulls made a rampage in the court at their expense.

The second half started. I watched with doubts whether what my cousin said to me was true: that the Pistons won Game 3.

I could not see any trace of panic from the players of the Pistons yet could still see the lunging horns of the Bulls ready for the kill.

Several minutes after the start of the second half, the Pistons was able to chip out the lead of the Bulls by four, making the homecourt team’s lead down to 15.

That was when I saw the aura of the Pistons – the leading team in the NBA today and if you would agree with their players’ statements ought to be the NBA Champions for four seasons. The Pistons’ aura and gait on the basketball court told of mental toughness and sure composure. There was no tinge of an expected panic in their faces. They are the Pistons and they learned in their long years of battle in the court that a 19-point deficit is no reason to lose heart or panicky about.

Pistons captain ball Chauncey Billups orchestrated the well-maneuvered comeback of his team with toughness of spirit used of shutting down their opponents with surgical military precision. They started making shots, making stops and chipping eventually the lead of the Bulls.

On the other hand, the Bulls, as characteristics of a young ballteam, began to fumble, tremble because they realized that the Pistons was advancing through their defense and that they were in trouble with this veteran team.

At the end of Game 3, the Pistons marked their 3-0 lead in this second-round playoffs of the Eastern Conference.

The Game could have been a blow-out game against the Pistons. But resiliency, composure and mental toughness made them overturn the tide to win Game 3 and post a 3-0 lead which as mathematical statistics proves is a sure win scenario for them.

Now, I don’t know if there’s a game as I write this between these two teams, but even if my cable provider doesn’t air it, I anticipate the Pistons moving up to the Eastern Conference Finals.

It's 3-0 in Favor of the Pistons

I haven't seen the Game 3 of the Pistons vs Bulls because I got to attend some business in Navotas. To find about the result, I have to rely on the story by my cousin Peng and learn about how the Pistons fared in the homecourt of the bulls.

Many predicted that the Bulls would bounce off from their two-streak losing games against the Pistons since the game would be held in their homecourt.

But no (yeah!) the Pistons, as I described them, is really a well-oiled machine that can beat any team by their choking defense and well-executed offensive plays.

It's seems it would be a sweep again for my Detroit team this time.

Walang Nagbago

It is always been my philosophy to look at the world with a half-full of glass of water rather looking at it as half-empty. This is the foundation of me being an inveterate optimist. Optimists they say see the opportunity in ever difficulties, while the pessimists are those who see the difficulties in ever opportunity – a well said adage.

I have written about this issue on my first – and hope not to be the last – column in the now defunct The Edge magazine.

I have seen individual’s faith to see the world in this positive light faltered and totally been destroyed. I see them as old grumpy old people always bemoaning the state of everything in this land in a total mess and the lack of good people to turn it around.

Ever time you talk to them, they are those who never cease to pick on the government’s shortcomings in making this nation a better one, making jobs for the unemployed. What’s more is that they fail to appreciate the talents of every individual making a name for himself because of hardwork and a little help from some people.

If you would talk to these kind of people and listen to their pessimistic view of the world, it is better if you just keep your distance from them since listening to them can only hypnotize you to think the way they do.

To think, they are the mediocre type of people and much worse they are those who are a failure to themselves. So what they are doing to the younger generation is passing their personal frustration through negative opinions and comments about everything. Misery loves company so they say, and basically these people are in misery and could not contain it so they pass it on every person they mingle with.

What do they people don’t know or fail to know is that the world, from the time they are born didn’t chance a little bit. Life is still hard. Making a living is still a struggle in a day to day basis. But this is not a reason to think that life is not beautiful.

They forget the times when they are young and everything was coming their way. They don’t remember their childhood years when the world is a happy place to live in because they are having fun playing and winning. The lost they suffered they endured like dust shaken off their shoulders and continue seeing the world as a happy place.

No, they no longer remember that.

In the years that would follow, their innate optimism is rocked and beaten with how hard life is to live in the adult world. Thus, they forget what they learned when they are young and what the world had taught them. They are eaten up by their own failures, which they should have, like children, shake like dust off their shoulders so they could walk through life with a happy face and composure.
Yes, they forget this valuable lesson.

They forget that life is really tough but not tough to beat with a positive outlook in life. Nothing has changed as I said. It is only how you look at the world that has changed.

"Walang nagbago," as the lyrics of one of the songs of Eraserheads say.

If you want to spare yourself from this subtle misery of being pessimistic, you better take a second look at the world and probably by then, you can see and choose to see the world in a half-full glass than half-empty.

The Pistons Pummeled Once Again the Bulls

It’s 2-0 in favor of the Pistons against the Bulls.

As coach/commentator Doug Collins says the Pistons is like a well-oiled machine functioning perfectly. The Pistons throughout their Game 2 game against the Bulls is a perfect team offensively and defensively speaking.

You cannot see any flaws in them and you wonder whether there is any other team out there that can match their composure and military precision plays. The Pistons’ players are perfectly skilled worker in the court.

Oh, can’t wait to see the series end up in 4-0 in favor of the Pistons being a fan of this team.

The Pistons Beating the Bulls in Game 1

I have been anticipating for days the confrontation of the Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls in the second round of the playoffs in the NBA after their successful campaigns in the first round. The Pistons pummeled the Orlando Magic 4-0 while the Bulls made an amateur team, the 2006 Champions, Miami Heat by beating them also 4-0.

Chauncey Billups and the rest of his gang still showed how they can dismantle a hopeful team against their way to get another ring with military precision. And their fist victim to have a run for a ring was the Orlando Magic, an 8th seeded team in the Eastern Conference playoffs.

Meanwhile, the young Chicago Bulls showed spunk and speed when they stopped the reigning Champion Heat and making Shaquile O’neal a has-been in the painted area. They swarmed with tight defense the plays of the Heat. Ever attempt by the group of O’neal in the painted area was faced with double team and even triple team; this making for the Heat a hell of a hard time penetrating.

What I have been anticipating when these two tough teams meet in the second round of the playoffs was a swing tight game. I even considered it the Finals already since there seems no team in the West that can match their intensity while playing in the court, both offensively and defensively.

But when the first game of their best-of-seven series was played I was proven wrong.

The Pistons beat up the the Bulls in a blow-out game that could have shamed Pistons’ former teammate Ben Wallace, who plays as the defensive man for the Bulls. Bulls’ guard Ben Gordon was a no-show also. He was ineffective offensively.

Pistons was just all over the place trapping the Bulls and intimidating their shots. To say, the Pistons broke the horns of the Bulls. Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Rasheed Wallace were just in their best form.

The Bulls just lost their composure and speed and spunk of a young team when confronted with the mastery defensive team play of the Pistons.

For now the Pistons lead the series 1-0. Will it be 4-0 for the Pistons against Bulls?

Well, we’ll see how far this will go as the series continues.

View from the Mountaintop

For several years I have been maintaining this blogsite. During all those times most of what I have posted here are either rants on how I wish I could be a writer plus my inability to rise to the occasion. If there are some flashes of wisdom or subject worthy to be written, I could only count them by my fingers.

The point I’m driving at is that I still have to write about life, what I know and think about life; what for heaven’s and my spirit’s sake did I learn in this huge jungle of a classroom called real world.

To the intellectually challenged people, those whose philosophy about life begins and ends on how to make their wallets thicker, they whose lives are run by practical reason, I usually say to them – half for the reason on how narrow they think and half for my propensity to play the mystic – that I have sat like a buddha on a mountaintop watching the world below.

What then did I see and learn while I was on the mountaintop?

I would want to start with our use of word, this basic and necessary communication tool to interact with the people around us. Yet, on the second thought, what I want to relay with the readers is all written in the book of Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements.

If one would read this book, everything that I learned on how we use our words is summed up here. It also summarizes in a general way the life that I have long been observing in homes, communities and work places.

It seems everybody is casting poison spells through words to their love ones, neighbours and co-workers. Most of the times he does it without knowing that he is doing it. An angry person can just flares up and say the most insidious words against anyone around him. For us this behaviour is normal.

And what would be more normal than the act of back-biting against anyone. I have long observed that if one could not get on the person that has slighted him or someone he envies, he would recourse his anger to get even by attacking the person through words he spreads around their community or work places.

This back-biting tells more of the person doing it. First it betrays his feeling of inferiority, envy and anger. But by trying to back-bite someone, he gets the illusion that he is impeccable and way above the person he is attacking. He feels superior.

This kind of behaviour is long considered normal in our world, or the real world as some would say. And I would not want to wash my hands and tell that I have sometime, one way or another, have used my words through this kind of behaviour.

Anyway, unfair and unhealthy as it is, I would say this usually is what is happening around us.

Short Kerouac Yakking

I really have nothing to say or write as I decided that I would go to the nearest net cafe at our place. Yet, there is just something in me that keeps on saying, whispering, prodding me on that I should write something, anything: just write.

I need to pound on the keyboar and feel again that ryhthmn made by the sound of it.

Drat! I have to write something, I keep on telling myself.

What is there really to write about? I used to pluck subject after subject out of the thin air and could make out at least 500 words about it. But now there is nothing. Nothing really.

What I am doing now is taking the easy way out, trodding a familiar path used and mastered: writing a morning journal (even if it is already noon and lunch time) or probably what should I call pure Kerouac yakking, talkfest in front of the computer; me and the computer (or the probable readers of this entry) alone. One on one.

I'm writing this with The Game featuring 50 Cents rapping Hate it or Love it in the background and the sound of the these little tods playing computer games.

Sonofabitch! There's really nothing to write about. My head is like a tabula rasa with nothing in it but blank whiteness. Nada. Nada. Nada.

There is nothing happening in my mind of what to write about.

What is keeping me from stopping pounding the keyboard is the pure intention to make this blog entry as long as it will take. I have to keep on pounding the keyboard, really pound the keyboard as fast as I could even without saying anything. Just yak.

And yak I stop now.

I Wish

Nowadays when I cannot write nor read, when doing this basics is difficult as if chipping a great boulder along my path toward my personal legend (owws, using that term learned and heard from somebody special) I wish that one day I will suddenly wake up with true knowledge on how to write and a subject for a novel.

I wish, as if waking from a deep slumber and unproductivity that I can really write, write as if I really know the craft. I wish that like magic everything that I have dreamt of throughout these years will come to reality. I will know the proper and correct grammar in my text or rather the kind of loosening of one’s writing tongue that I can just yak/pound on my computer and write as if there’s no tomorrow trying to finish a good, well-planned writing project.

This times is tough. All I can do is what Jack Kerouac says about writing: stick with it with the energy of a benny addict.

And I’m sticking with it with all my spiritual energy, hoping and praying to the gods that one day that I would wake up with everything I need to write will be there.

Tough wish, eh. Yes, indeed.

But as the Rolling Stones says: time is on my side.

Good well power words, something that you cannot get in the streets.

No computer. No money. No honey.

Language Lessons

Recently, a task was given to me as a prerequisite in getting employed as a freelance writer for a not-too-small publishing house. The task at hand was to write three chapters of what to be a novel in the long run. The project was a romance pulp fiction – the kind stereotypically known as the pocketbook maids and helpers read. Not that there is something wrong with it except that the language that I would employ is Pilipino.

For a stubborn writer like me who sticks with the strength of a benny addict to the English language as his preferred vehicle of expression, this was an alien, almost unimaginable, task that I would venture in. I never in my whole writing career wrote in Pilipino. Nor I have secretly dreamt of getting a career in writing in Pilipino. But I needed the extra money so I thought why not give it a try.

Gauging by the writing style expected of the job, I estimated that I could easily whip up, not just three chapters, but the whole novel in a week. That was how confidence I was regarding the matter.

Another underlying purpose as to why I wanted to try my hands in the project was to loosen up my stiff tongue in telling a story. With the casual, formulatic style needed to accomplish the work, I deemed it a good venue to practice making my writing stamina stronger.

But unknown to me, there were lessons, valuable lessons, that I would learn while carried out the task.

First, I was able to connect with the Pilipino language, as if finally finding my true self, my own language, my own voice. Writing in Pilipino is so natural for me it seems I was just merely chatting with a neighbor, telling him a story about matters of the heart.

I have been writing for more than a decade in English and never did I automatically, on the first try, felt at ease with the language the same way I experienced writing in Pilipino. God knows what a backbreaking labor I had undergone just to acquire this relative proficiency in the English language.

I can still recall those desperate, almost hopeless, days when I would scout a corner in our old house to set up a table with my papers and pen and get on toiling for long hours trying to write a decent, simple sentence in English. Those days were difficult and hard – I usually ended up mentally exhausted and sleepy.

This lesson was followed up with a clearer perspective regarding both languages and the inherent tendency of Filipino writers when he uses either of the two.

Probably this tendency is best summed up by the late Rolando Tinio when he described his relationship with the two languages. It went something like this: “When I write in English, I tend to be flowery. But when I write in Pilipino, I write simple and true.”

The late writer could not say it better than that.

When I scanned my electronic copy of some parts of the short fictions that were recently published by a new literary magazine and I could not help but notice the glaring similarity on how those featured writers used the English language in telling their stories.

They all used big, heavy words and their sentences are almost a forest of flowery sentences that can only reek of hyterical artificiality. If by any chance these fictions will be read by natural-born speakers of the language, I don’t blame them if they all throw-up because of the stories’ excessive wordiness.

With these new insights, I appreciate once again my native tongue and at the same time looking at the English language as no different animal altogether.

Barely Writing

I barely write nowadays. Anything you can see in this blog that is posted for the last several months are only the product of my fervent desire to stay in shape. And all of them I wrote during those moments of desperation when I was in need of something to say just to avoid drowning in the state of inability to think. Thus they tend to be gibberish than saying something meaningful at all.

I can only attribute this sparse writing output on my deficiency to continuously read. I say my writing output is proportionate on how voraciously I read. The more I read, the tendency is that I can write more. But lately, I barely read at all.

There is even not one book that I totally consumed this past year (oh, okay, there’s Stainless Longganisa, but it’s really not to be counted at all). Right now, there is a slew of books that is begging for my attention and waiting to be read in its entirety: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which I dream of pulling out of it a novel someday; Jerry Oppenheimer’s Front Row, about the story of Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, and which was the prize I received from Read Magazine for contributing an essay; Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees; and Nick Joaquin’s Culture and History and The Woman Who Had Two Navels – the latter a re-reading after more than a decade of having read it during my college days.

With only this short list of books waiting for me to be read, I cannot help but realize how far I have gone sterile in stimulating my mind. And I cannot be surprised at all if I find myself not writing lately. What even gets my goad over my obvious wanton laziness is to read in another blogger’s site a long list of books he had read which I ever imagined I could read in a year; and it explains why his high writing output and adept use of the English language.

We can say then that reading is like fuel to cars which is writing. If one stops reading, it is inevitable that one cannot continually write. One will agonize on finding that he seems not to know how to write. And I’m experiencing it now.

We Are All Alone

We are all alone. Who was the sage who said that we are born alone and alone we will die? We may also add to that that we are going to live our lives alone until our last breath. This stark bit of wisdom is hard to accept but it never fails to ring a bell to those who have stumbled consciously on this reality.

During our formative years, we are deluded that we are never alone. Our parents are always there beside us, plus we are constantly surrounded by other relatives and friends. In school, besides developing the notion that we are immortal, we believe that we would enjoy till eternity the companionship of our classmates and best buddies. We have the faith that the bond that we have formed with our college friends will deliver us from separation.

It will be too late and seems to soon for us to realize that there is an end with our friendship with our classmates. Right after graduation, we know now that each one of us has to take different path in life. Even if we stay in touch with them once they are in the real world, the connection thins out especially if they got into marriage already. They pass on the get-togethers and informal reunions then, finally, they just disappear out of the circulation.

The idea that we are alone will only dawn on us after several stints in various jobs. When we go to our first jobs and if asked one of the reasons why we want the job, we may answer that we want to meet new friends. Like a habit we have formed in our schooldays, we are deluded that this job will be our last and the co-workers we befriended here will be there beside us forever. But unlike in school, our tenure in this job depends on many factors and it is not unexpected that we may lose it any day. And when we lose our job we lose also our friends there. We are no longer part of the organization and we will find ourselves alone. Friends in the work place come and go as we transfer to different organizations, and there are there mainly to give us an itinerant companionship.

There may come the time when we will also get married and find our partner in life. The hope of making the relationship last until both of you grow old is intense and grave. Probably, if separation or annulment is avoided, you’ll reach the autumn season of your lives together. But somehow, as it is inevitable, one may go first in going back to the Creator. And the one who is left behind will find that he is all alone after all.

Can we say then that the one who past away first never lived alone? Does the fact that he or she died beside his/her partner mean so? On the contrary, the dead person at the hour of his death gets the illumination of his circumstances that he has been alone all the time as manifested by his departure; he was born alone and will die alone.

We are all alone.

Mental Calisthenics and Looking Back

Mental Calisthenics

Waking up late in the morning to the shouts inside the house between my parents who both manned the store at the front of the house, asking each other what was the price of a certain items were, I opened my eyes resolute that the day ahead is the day in which I have to start working on my writing. There was nothing left for me to do, and it seemed the task had been waiting for me ever since I began my self-imposed exile from real work.

I have to write, I said to myself. I have to do some mental calisthenics, flex my writing muscles. And what I had in mind then was the 15-page requirement a student of Creative Writing has to finish before the end of the semester. Indeed I will never be a writer, with a book to boost, if I cannot even pull that simple feat.

I have to write. Write again like I used to do without bothering anything about the world outside since my last refuge and salvation is with writing. Yeah, I will write. I will write those things that I saw and heard and felt and those things that I learned.

There is no other way.

Looking Back

When I started out this personal blog a couple of years ago, my agenda, like the usual blogger out there, was to utilize this free space in the vast universe of the Internet as a venue where I could post my peripatetic musings about life. Of course I cannot deny that I intended also to use this blog to hone my writing skill with the aim of perfecting the art of essay writing.

With excited, controlled pounding of my heart, I tried to set a goal of writing at least an essay in a week, pretending that I have a column here in the net which I need to maintain. (To think, I just have to mimic what I normally do for almost a decade in which I maintain a personal journal in my computer which unluckily had been deleted by an unscrupulous hacker.) The only question that hung in the air was whether I could stick and beat my imagined deadline.

And the answer to that, after all this time, is that I fall short. My postings are like erratic downpour in a summer season. Though I can blame that to the demise of my computer – which is now like a chop-chop vehicle with its memory chips, video card and harddisk dismantled from the CPU. With nothing to write with, my mindset of delivering to my own expectation has gone wayward.

Nevertheless, the aim of using this free space as a venue for honing my writing skill does not change. Right now, I’ve begun, like an old boxer, training for the task ahead. Anyway, as long as blogging is free and my postings are safe in the virtual world of the net, then I will write and post them here.

About an-essay-in-a-week thing, I’m still trying to gather my momentum then I’ll go ahead performing the task.

Bday

Lil Feather said that the sad thing today is the evidence that I’m growing old. (Yup, today my dear friends is my birthday though I don’t mean the date when I post this, but the date when I wrote this). I’m growing old indeed still without nothing to prove to the people around me and also to myself. This is the sad, hard fact of my more than 30 years of existence.

This morning, I woke up earlier than the usual, with the bad collective recollection of the years that had gone by. Drat! I said to myself, I haven’t done what I was suppose to do these past years and here I am rotting in my parents house. And this followed by the sutble pain in the stomach and sudden urgency to do something or else I will be in dire straits until my old age – and it is coming sooner than I expect it to be.

Then while channel-surfing I caught on the cable the 1997 NBA Finals between the Bulls and the Jazz. I could not imagine that it was almost a decade since that momentous time. I recalled how time flies by when then a document analyst and was having a fast, easy-go-lucky kind of life never bothering about the future. Arg! The year 2006 was a non-existent time for me and either as a goal for whatever undertaking I had then. Then suddenly, it stirred me that I was seeing this year as a gauge of what I have done so far.

And so far, nothing it seems.

Thinking about it, there are small achievements nevetheless that i have done. Like being published by a national paper and a magazine; working as a writer for an online magazine and two publication houses though for short period only and able to pose as a columnist once.

Then like a thunder of hope, I realise that it is not true that I have not done anything. My long-time dream of writing for a magazine and being a columnist, even just for a single issue, has come true. That is already a feat for a 21-year old then who could not write a decent sentence.

I have gone a long way so it seems.

The only trouble with my struggle is that I cannot take off completely but it is obvious that I can do something as a writer. Yes, I cannot take off completely. But, mother of all hopes, I am getting there slow it may be. I know I will get there.

Probably, this guilt of having done nothing is caused by the my relative absence of work for sometime now. And, probably, it is.

On Reading Stainless Longganisa

Usually the moment I open my eyes when I wake up every morning, my head is swimming in the murky, deathlike impression of another long day. I guess this feeling goes along with the realization that I don’t have a job and days inevitably are going nowhere mfor me. Add to that my passion for serious readings that makes my face worn-down as I wake up because of some memory of last night’s failure to decipher those difficult text by my favorite writers.

Then one day, like a grace showering on me, I wake up with a sunny and bright impression of the day without a trace of grudge against the world. I even afford to smile and grin from time to time feeling no heavy burden on my shoulders as if suddenly freed from long years of imprisonment. Life is beautiful and what a blessing it is to read and write and dream and be whatever you want to be; and yes, what a blessing it is to be able to read and live.

This quick turn from my usually stern outlook about life is the byproduct on reading Bob Ong’s Stainless Longganisa.

I long have known Bob Ong by my perennial visits to the bookstore but have never tried opening one of his books, which usually stare at me from the bookstore shelves of the Filipiniana section. I am never fond of novelty books, which gauging by the way his books are marketed are one — though his Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas stirs the interest of the serious reader in me.

It just happens that my one of my sisters bought Stainless Longganisa and the book aroused my curiosity of what kind of a writer really is Bob Ong since my sisters kept on flashing their pearly white teeth and making that strange upward curve on their lips while reading the book.

As I find out, Stainless Longganisa mainly tells in casual Filipino text the experiences and philosophy of Bob Ong as a local writer – but don’t be misled by the word ‘philosophy’ as a hint that this book is a heavy read. It is one light read that is hard to resist to put the book down without reaching the last page. Another thing is the book is an intelligent read with mischievous and constant fooling around by Bob Ong.

The grim clouds in my head vanishes the moment I start reading the book. For one, this book is a sort of an inspirational book for the regular guy who dreams of becoming whatever he want himself to be. Written in subjective anecdotal tone, replete with jokes, Bob Ong never misses his mark in stating that his readers are important, beautiful Filipinos.

Good book and a good pick in giving as gift this coming Christmas to those close to you who are starting to learn loving a book.

Blisters in the Sun

Blisters in The Sun is the first punk hits that I learned how to pluck in my guitar. I post this video to share this upbeat song by the band Violent Femmes.

An Evening Shower in the Rain

On September 28 the storm Millenyo whipped the National Capital Region with strong winds and heavy rain. Halfway through the day, people working in the city were ordered to go home. On their way home, and days later, we would hear how they’d seen billboards along the length of EDSA were blown down and electric posts put to the ground by the merciless storm winds.

As the storm progressed on that day, our place in Cavite promptly revert to the Dark Ages, literally, as electricity was shut down. Gauging by the force of the storm, I anticipated a complete black-out in our place for at least a week, or two at the most basing from the past storms that debilitated the electric service in our place.

The problem when there is no electricity in our place is that it means there is also no water for us. The centralized water pump that gives service to us relies heavily on electricity as there is no generator to give power to it to pump water from the ground and thus supplies us with water for our domestic needs: for washing our clothes and utensils in the kitchen and bathroom. It also means we will have no means to do basic health hygiene like taking a bath.

The next day, like a joke from heaven, the sky cleared up. The day presented a hot, sunny one that kept us sweating inside our houses where the electric fans didn’t work. (Yes, after only a day of a passing strong storm, the electricity had still not returned.) The whole neighborhood was a packed of oily herd on the brim of doing a rain dance to wash away the collected dirt in our bodies.

Then evening came. I retired inside the adjacent house that we had and tried to spend the slow dark hours reading under a candle light. I heard a soft rain pelted on the tin roof. Before I noticed it and firmly sank into my consciousness busy with my readings, the rain that started minutes ago intensify into a heavy downpour sans the lash of strong winds. It was just pure rainwater from heaven pouring on the earth.

I heard my mother outside in the rain trying to fill every container we had with rain in frenzy. And when I went out to help her out, bringing an umbrella with me to protect me from getting wet, I scanned the street outside. Some of my neighbors were in reverie taking a shower in the rain; the teenagers running to and fro with pails and bringing water to their house. There was no doubt that I had to throw away my umbrella and partake with the blessing of heaven soaking the earth with rainwater.

I put away the umbrella and let myself got drench. And good God! The rain was pouring heavily to my heart’s delight. I ambled in the street bonding with my neighbors as we find roof gutters gushing with bitingly cold rainwater. I trained my eyes at the street and I could barely see the end of the street because of the downpour. It was like New Year’s day with the rainwater as the firecracker smoke and with the same celebratory mood.

For once, for at least an hour and a half, I became a boy again gleefully taking a bath in the rain. And to add to the experience, I was doing it – for the first time – during the night.

Untitled

“Lucia, would you please do me the favor of pulling off the curtains,” Gabino Santiago rasped on his bed. “I want to see the outside.”
An ordered tangle of sensory cables and tubes connected to the pulsating machine, which gave readings in numbers, ran all over his body.
“I’ve been expecting to do that as I have been doing for months, old Santiago,” the nurse said. She put his breakfast of oatmeal, glass of milk and a piece of banana on the movable table before him and walked toward the window and pulled the curtain. The weak natural light from outside washed into the room.
“A favor for you, my love,” the nurse said in a tender, teasing tone.
He heard how lovingly the nurse called him ‘my love’, but it did not matter a bit to him. All he wanted was to see the outside. He pushed a button beside the steel railing and his bed adjusted propping him halfway up. He looked beyond the glass window, over the spacious green lawn, at the line of old mango trees that hid by its rich foliage a creek, then past the shrubbery knoll to the jagged outline of the city. Soon the sun would rise over those glass and steel buildings and perennial light crafts zooming in and around the labyrinthine streets of the city.
“Eat your breakfast now, my love.”
He continued staring at the view outside, not hearing anymore what the nurse was saying to him, until the blue sky turned lighter and lighter and he stared at it wantonly knowing that he was visually feasting on something beautiful beyond description, at something he would never forget.
He could have done watching the sunrise by closing his still sleepy eyes by automatically switching on the nanochip in his brain and recall the same, familiar view. But why settle for something artificial when you can have the natural fresher one, he thought.
He squinted from time to time as if to absorb the invisible spirit of the view. He knew this experience would never be orphaned, forgotten memory. He would always remember it the way he experienced it the first time.
Everybody in the world remembers everything now, he thought, smiling bitterly.
Anyway, the version of his nanochip memory was the still reliable Super MemSoft III that could store fifty more years of experience, if he ever reached that length. His wife had the latest PulseSoft version 6.0 which had the capability to tap it onto televisions and share her visual experiences in hologram media.
He winced when he thought about the fact.
In split seconds the atomic circuitry in his memory chip calculated that it was almost five decades ago, or to be more precise 48 years, three months, seven days and 16 hours since the 27th of December of the year 2252. He was a century-and-a-half years old then, and around the globe during that time China suffered a death toll of two thousand who perished when a meteor hit their controlled colony in Mars; the Philippines signed a ten-year agreement with Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia on a space venture to explore Pluto; an earthquake with 7.5 intensity in the Richter scale hit Brazil that virtually severed the country into half as the ground opened a maw of twelve meters wide and several miles long with half a kilometer deep in the gash.
It was during this time when an inexplicable obsession to recall something in his childhood forced him to consult a memory nanochip specialist.
Dr. Artemio Baltazar, who sat at the other end of the table, shook his head with stoic, industrial coldness in his mien which could be interpreted as a lack of interest in Gabino’s trouble.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the doctor said, leaning on the backrest of his black leather swivel chair as if announcing a terminal verdict on the case.
“Do you mean there’s no way to retrieve it?” Gabino asked, refusing to comprehend what he had just heard.
“The problem is that the experience occurred prior to the implant,” the doctor said rocking gently on his chair, then added, “You must understand that the chip’s function is not to absorb and interpret your pre-implant experience. It just does not work that way.
“There’s still no technology capable of decoding an already imprinted memory in your brain cells. Our science is still too young to pull that kind of thing.”
“There must be a way, somehow.” Gabino mumbled feebly.
“Have you tried the old science of regression? Practitioners of this ancient method are now rare. But I bet you can find one. As they fondly say: The soul remembers.”
Gabino strayed off his sight from the doctor, on toward the wall where wooden plaques of scientific achievements by the doctor hung, and composing mentally the right words to express his sad, frustrated thoughts.

To be continued…..

Bye my Lil Feather :-(

There has been a long period of time when I did not write nor read because I could not. It was during those times when I asked do I still what it takes to be a writer. There is nothing I wanted in this world but to be a writer and nothing but a writer. And when those times hit me, my world suddenly lost its color and I could not even find any purpose in my life.

Nevertheless, here I am again, trying to write inspite of my semi-cerebral paralysis.

Assessment of Pending Works and Blackhole

Assessing my work at hand under the rate that I am doing it, it seems it will take a decade before I can finish them into something that can occupy some space in bookstore shelves.

Here's a run-down of my projects:

1. Short Fictions: 1.) An untitled short story about a nightmare and love is already on its first rough draft. Its status is shelved until I find the right time to polish it and improve the storytelling style. 2.) The Adventure of the Man They Called Mariano Torres is an old story that I rewrote wall-to-wall in long hand and waiting to be transferred into the word processor.
2. Novel: 1.) The Gulag Experience. I have been thinking of imitating Ignacio Padilla on writing about a foreign country from my own, veering away from the usual local subject or theme, and writing it with a history as a backdrop. But it seems Alexandr Solzhenitsyn have exploited that subject. 2.) Wasteland (Tentative Title). My whole being has been revving up to write this just finished research I did and plunged into for more than four years. But my mind is not yet ready for it is still recuperating from too much use/abuse of using an "articifial force" when writing. I still have to get used writing again in my normal state. I have the story in my head already and it is only time before I can it - I hope soon. And also practicing to get my wind back.

* * * * *

"Me a black hole and everything is being sucked by my strong gravitational force. Can you believe that? And is the comeuppance coming soon?" Thyrone Slothrop talking to the Kenosha Kid.