when an anti-establishment hippie is established...

SiLent Thrill....I admit

Spent the last two days traipsing in and out of different worlds courtesy of SM Cinemas in Megamall and a BOOKSALE branch in SM Centerpoint.

Yes, I am quite the fan of SM malls nowadays. (Well who wouldn’t be seeing as you can’t get a few kilometers walk into anywhere without being obstructed by this rather imposing SM logo).

World number one was SILENT HILL which Jason and I caught last night at cinema 3---despite squeaky protests from me. I really would have rather watched D’Lucky Ones, as I spend eerie nights all by my fearful, paranoid self. Visions of disfigured subhumans really were the last thing this jumpy soul needed. Plus, Jason had two tickets entitling him –and a friend—me, of course, to free entrance at any cinema screening of D’ Lucky Ones. Hullo. That’s a hundred and sixty bucks savings. Plus we get to see Sandara Park in a bikini..

But of course all feeble protests were dashed to even feebler consistency.

We watched.

And for someone expecting the usual round of video game turned cinematic venture fare, as by way of tomb raider and resident evil and ice climber..(oh wait..vertical limit isn’t the full-length version of ice climber?)

 Anyway, I was surprised. And for over two hours barring some minor eyeball - drying scenes, was pleasantly engaged.

The ghosts were pretty blah although that barb-wired gentleman contortionist in the bathroom gave me the creeps. And what up with the Michael-Jackson-thriller-dancing nurse troupe? I’ve been scared more by regional dance competitions in Olongapo.

Really, with the all-pervading might of the digital age, nothing is really scary graphically anymore. This is why Sadako and some (not all) of her creaky pals rendered me close to early demise when they first started crawling out of TVs and down the stairs. Nothing scarier than real live lenghty limbs and hair, methink. But now that Hollywood has caught on there is of course a saturation now of these very images. And so they better come up with something new or else horror movies may soon end up just a spoof in another scary movie… coming out soon , by the way.yay

So what was I making such a big deal about in the first few paragraphs if I’m not so scared of anything, you may  query

…..ach. I don’t know. There’s just something about this Silent hill...

And I reckoned right. It wasn’t the images nor the demonic whiplash of religion and sanctity nor even the brutal burning scenes, which were all played up in classic grotesque fashion.

It was something. The story jagged and skidded at times and the final devil character was a pirated, female Ju-on and all of history’s best “don’t go in there!” scenes were scrumptiously aplenty..and yet, something held you quite glued to the story.

I personally felt it was the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack that contrasted with the willowy colors. And the eerie, wailing siren that signaled the rise of the Darkness. And the film’s final few minutes, at which point your heart is plaintive and exhausted and you really just want to go home.

Point is, the movie literally drew me in that gray tinted world.

I don’t know if my reaction was beset by my 7 hours of blinking in front of a computer screen earlier at work, but I felt a great deal dead myself by the time I’d clambered out of the theater---but in a good way. 3D emotions, if you will.

So there. For the first time in quite a long time I watched a movie and I enjoyed it. Mostly I depend on my trusty old DVD players for cinematic thrills, not much thrills you can get nowadays from standard Hollywood krap.

But I did.

And I slept very well that night, thankyou.

 

Posted by: Hoon at 09:55 | link | comments

I wasn’t really hungry when I set out for lunch at half past twelve this afternoon. My stomach is this weird organ unlike most others—a fussy cluster of membranes which actually had a nose it could use to snub the various choices I laid before it. This nose is connected to my usually hapless brain, which subserviently approved most anything my senses would tell it. Not a particularly reliable bunch of neurons I’m made of, but hey. They keep me alive. And so my stomach, its nose and my brain-- in their usual prissy little manner-- got me nonchalantly peering over all the food carts lined up like grade schoolers across Ayala Avenue. Let me tell you something about this financial hub called Makati. It’s basically made up of sky high scrapers and steel and glass and elevators that rocket business folk up and down and into their little cubicles. So at various points of the day you’ve got all these hungry executives prowling around the avenues for executive cuisine with quaint sounding descriptions such as.. “java rice and black beaned pilaf”  or anything else that was most “executive” sounding.   That’s the picture that comes out in postcards and tarpaulins and the little ads that hail Makati as the shiny, sleek-suited home to a thousand budding professionals. But in the outer edges of the photographs, in that grubby corner where thumbprints are oft to settle most accommodatingly in, are the side streets they most certainly don’t want you to see. Where the sweaty, brown-collared life forms (I say brown not blue because in the Philippines necks most certainly stain collars with this more dusky shade and I just say this offhandedly and not because I think in the U.S worker necks sweat blues) are hunkered awkwardly over little pieces of meat and gruel (what is gruel?) served inside little knotted plastic bags. You are handed a paper plate swathed the same in plastic and you humbly wait for your cup of rice and free soup. And then elbows turned awkwardly inwards for fear of nudging your neighbor’s gruel and causing spillage, you begin to hungrily dig in. (I exaggerate a bit, but just wanted to point out disparity of the two ends for arts sake.) You’ve got your Starbucks and delis and bento boxes and then you’ve got your modest food carts with their jutted out counters and pork parts in plastic.

 

Needless to say, that at this point very early on in my budding professional career, I have become quite a hunkering expert at the latter. But not to consume pork parts as I do not eat animals with beaks and hooves.

 

Anyway, so there we were, my porous comrades and I breezing along the stretch of food carts purposefully obliterated by the photographers and not really hungry but just wanted the feel of hot sun on skin.

 

Our office by the way has a temperature roughly equivalent to that of the North Pole and as I have unfortunately neither the outer coating of a polar bear nor the steely resolve to adapt--as my colleagues have done—I find myself having to defrost by means of baking under the glorious tropical sun for extended periods of time.

 

At the sixth stall or so of standard meat byproducts and guts growing increasingly more boorish at each stop, I decided to follow simply the jolly long path of food carts and see if they would ever end. One took me to another and another and more hunkering here and there and before I knew it I was at the foot of a tiny bookshop. A bookshop.

 

If there was anything I loved more than coming up with little games such as “let’s follow the foodcart and see where it would end,” it was spending many dusty, musty eons of breathing in worn-out, dog-eared booksmells. At these sort of shops I am most smug because of secret knowledge of treasure books past owners did not realize power and value of. Tsk. And at almost guilt-inducing prices, too.

 

My stomach, nose and all other body parts simultaneously shriek in united glee. And so my brain steers me in the door.

 

 

 

…but, ah, my dear friends..’tis 5 pm on a Friday and I must be hoofing it outta here. I will tell you the rest of the story some other time…….

 

 

Posted by: Hoon at 06:31 | link | comments

hunched over lunch part 2

Ahhh… sweet, free time. That’s the best thing about working as a writer. When you’re working, you’re writing, when you’re not working, you’re writing…

I remember telling the story of a most strange sort of lunch last week, not that any of you really care…just my storytelling itch acting up and maybe one day thirty years from now I will still have good enough eyesight to view webpage and still have enough neurons in brain to remember that yes indeed, I was once a cheeky lil feller who had a cheekier set of organs about her! The question here is… I most definitely may still be here, BUT! will our computers withstand technical selection? The weeding out of only the strongest of the machines into the next space age?.. imagine if none of our gadgetry today were able to make it and someone somewhere contended that only the TYPEWRITER is worthy and sturdy enough to survive… yes. The cockroach of the print world. And everybody will be back to threading ribbons and smudging ink on their papers and crumpling up drafts and beginning over and over again with pressure-weary fingers...

Where was I?

Oh yes. The bookstore.

IT might be useful for you to know that I can most certainly inhabit a moldy old bookstore with absolutely no qualms. And by inhabit I mean to dwell in. As in years. I may step out once in a while to bake in the sun but would be most content blanching in the hundreds and thousands of metaphors and similes. Bliss…..

.

Ehem. So anyway, there I was inside this tiny book shop and I was rocketing with the speed of might  to the nearest shelf, shoving and jostling other book freaks and running my trembling fingers down each and every title.

Some are obsessive-compulsive over dirt, some are consumed by the desire to probe dank little holes. And me?

 I pore.

Over every singular book spine looking up at me.  Not to mention those beyond sight.

Hidden beneath a whole row of other books? Buried under a pile of trashy lust sagas? No problem! I am blessed with particularly long and flexible limbs and could squat and reach under the most pressing circumstances. This I do with years of practice behind me. Not recommended for the weak at heart and the allergic.

So there I was gleefully taking one book out after the other, putting some back in, excavating for the deeply entrenched ones and causing a minor avalanche every now and then.

Disclaimer: Have you ever noticed, by the way, how almost all mystery novels somehow manage to get the word CAT in their titles? Are felines unanimously tied to murders and whodunits? Does Agatha Christie and the rest of her brood have a patent for this particular animal? What does PETA have to say about this? Hmm.

I got through a whole sort of topics--politically correct nursery rhymes and French rhinoceros plays included--and was, as usual lost in a time warp before I realized that my leg muscles were getting most distressed. It had joined in the whiny bandwagon of stomach noses and temperature sensitive epidermis. It grumbled and creaked and hurled invectives at me. Though you may think my groveling brain went along with the charade quite readily you are mistaken.  I had my brain in control, thank you. At such elemental levels of recognizing what I liked and didn’t like---

for example—lovely books: Like. Stuffy, contrived ones: Don’t like

---I had complete and utter prerogative. No amount of numb leg muscles could sway that.

And so I carry on; but by this time my formerly happy, shiny eyes were turning more and more vacant, and exuberance was filtering into panic.

Another footnote on my shameful affair with bookstores:

I am obsessed with dislodging-- every time I set foot in any book haven--from some carefully hidden little nook , THE PERFECT BOOK.

I always believe I’m meant to find at least ONE BOOK destined for my spirit whenever I enter these shops. I imagine it calling out as I grope around the evil decoys intentionally unleashed to keep us from meeting. And nothing, oh nothing, save the rearing of the seven-headed beast could keep me from staggering on with my mission.

Somewhere in the middle of uprooting and tossing aside the hundredth copy of  JURASSIC PARK, I was struck with a vague yet nagging thought.

Wasn’t I supposed to be somewhere?

And then, enlightenment….. ACK!I was an employee!!

Paid to promptly be at my cushioned little seat inside the bounds of my fenced in little cubicle by 8 am every morning and 1 pm every afternoon.

Paid to move in perfect synch with the bundy clock.

Paid not to be meandering aimlessly at some little shop kilometers away from office premises!

And here I was tunneling through paperbacks and hard bounds at 1:15!!! Ack! 

And so I summon all strength and will left and step out blinking into the real world.

 

Where was I?

 

For ten horrible minutes, I was lost. The increasing guilt and pressure of not being back at the office on time—and devoid of the PERFECT BOOK, at that--- gnawed away at my progressively crumbling sense of self and direction. The streets were a blur of trotting business folk and cars in stop-motion.

And then…..amidst the honks and sun rays and cigarette butts and stern looking police people waving their arms about, I was just able to make out the faint outline of about ten brown-collared men, backs bent, elbows in, devouring what looked to be meals in plastic bags. HUNKERING.

I was saved!!!

I cunningly follow the line of little food shops looped all over the streets like snotty grade-schoolers, much like that beautiful story of Hansel and Gretel finding their way back home.

And I did.

Quite hungry… a little shaken …a little freaked out….but stronger. Oh yes.

Till the next encounter anyway............

Posted by: Hoon at 06:26 | link | comments (1)

AAAgh
it's MOnday once more
and the reality of the weekend gone
is blinking like a cursor!!
but wait...it is the cursor!!
Cursors were probably made to make people feel like...... cursing.
IRRELEVANT BLOG
Am feeling that thus, I am rambling
taking up precious memory
wasting your precious time
dawdle dawdle
skedaddle
i've lost half
of my yellow
paddle...
ah.

Posted by: Hoon at 09:43 | link | comments (1)

                                                                       

 this is Holy Week in my country...how is it in yours?

Posted by: Hoon at 07:14 | link | comments

 

RED is the color of DEATH

Nowadays, very few things in the newspaper rattle me so much that I am left literally, stunned. Everyday tragedies and horrors have done wonders in numbing readers. Our eyes scan through murders, arrests and bankruptcies with such regularity that we've been drugged into apathy.

 

A recent death in jolted me back into consciousness, though.

 

It’s not so much the manner of death—a gunshot to the head—as the cause of death that sickened me.

 

The Bengalese student who very recently graduated from a telecommunications course was killed because he wasn’t white.

 

Of all the horrible reasons and rationale—whatever you may call these excuses that supposedly justify a death—that killers act on, perhaps the most incredibly senseless is this directed anger towards a skin color.

 

While others exact revenge, are temporarily blinded, or are so poor that the only recourse left for them is to kill, racists are fully aware of what they want to do.

 

And they do.

 

Never mind that these targets have not done them the slightest bit of harm.

Never mind if this person was a 9-year old girl born to multi-cultural parents, who did not even have the words racism and xenophobia in her vocabulary.

 

Never mind that these “enemies” are people who did not ask to be born to a certain race, people who had no choice whatsoever in coming out compartmentalized in a shade marked below standard. And never mind that these people could not do anything short of extensive surgery to be FREE.

 

In a world that’s supposedly been redeemed from the horrors of the Holocaust, how could there still be people who believe in racial supremacy? How could anyone still  adhere to the notion of wiping out races? In slaying humans who do not meet standards of being worthy to live?

 

It’s beyond words and expression how one could even try to make sense of it.

 

Because nobody goes out of their way to be born to Asian, African, Jewish, or whatever non-Anglicized parents.

 

Nobody came into this world volunteering to be inferior.

 

And most of all nobody wants to get shot in the head because somebody just decided that they were.

Posted by: Hoon at 07:06 | link | comments (1)

 this salt

 

 

Trying to make sense of a feeling so immense is like trying to locate solid particles of salt in seawater. It’s all around you, you feel it in your skin, you swallow and choke on huge amounts of it and the taste more than assures you it’s there. You don’t know why, you don’t know how and somebody somewhere just told you it’s salt, and so it is. You leave it at that.. And you swim and because of it's properties.............you float.

What if the salt in your life right now is a stranger you just met, know nothing of and about, but feel strangely drawn to? What if this person is an irregularly shaped jigsaw  gravitating, threatening your carefully pieced together  network of puzzles-- that just this morning,
 could not fit anymore pieces? And what if because of this sudden sweet, unnerving  presence, this unforeseen bend........
you start questioning the true meaning and extent of such hazy
principles as
fate, destiny and serendipity?

What if?

Would you try to understand it? Put it under a microscope and extract it? Go through the pages of a book and define it?

Or would you just feel it, in your skin and in your mouth, swallow it, and swim in it, take it in, take it all in and believe in it.

..   ….will you float because it’s salt?

…or drown because, despite everything that’s been assumed about it….it’s........... not?

Posted by: Hoon at 06:53 | link | comments (1)

SuPeRR MICRO BRAIn WAiVE

The thing with blogging is, frankly, you put your brain out in the open.

For people—complete strangers included---to admire, adore, step upon or spit on.

There is a free exchange of compliments, insults, mockery and concurrence.

It’s a virtual dive in a convoluted, hypermass of a million fevered minds.

You venture in-- witty, wise-cracking, pensive, poetic, foul, fearless.

We spew out curses and madness and ravish the system with different levels of wants.

Silent warriors of blazing tongues we are, tap-tapping in confidence the stream of stories, swirling psyches, fingers flying.

I can be king of the world in my entries. I can be worthless dust. I can claim to like Kafka, understand Zen or be profound in all matters.

And so the brains are out, dueling one another, clashing, merging.

The gigabytes turn to monolithic-bytes and the cables burn burn and burn…every second burning, pooling, diffusing.

…..and one day, .. .. CRaShiNG.

Until there is nothing left but burst and bleeding thoughts.\

 

 

And then…. brains to be claimed.

\\\

‘’

\

\

……

Posted by: Hoon at 04:59 | link | comments (3)

Suffice it to say that when Starbucks first came out in the Philippines and the elated mass of laptop- brandishing professional career ants fell on their little knees worshipping it, I was nothing short of nauseous.

I was the eye-rolling, wise-cracking Janeane Garofalo of the corporate world, the anarchist who drew up defenses at anything vaguely resembling a navy blazer. I made it a sinister point early in my college years never to ever in my life concede to the gaping jaws of capitalism, and for 4 years following graduation, I was successful.

I became a beach bum, a night owl, a drifter, a rat—anything except a respectable young woman on her way to a respectable job. I felt that the 10-letter word “employment” was synonymous to death—death to freedom, to rights, to self. Surely anything that held you confined for 8-hours against your will qualified as oppression. Surely a soul would get lost somewhere between the blank white walls, the programmed lunch breaks and the monotonous, ceaseless marching of starchy white shirts. Death and demise, no doubt..

My first foray into the workforce consisted of snorkeling in the brilliant blue seas off a skinny island in the South China Sea, checking for plant organisms and possible seacow strandings. For a good two months I violently refused to get in line for a social security number and a tax identification number, requirements for the proper processing of one’s salary. Having to get one, to me, was equivalent to being run under a scanner at a grocery shop and being priced. I would inexorably and eternally be tagged and all the intricacies and nuances and little quirks that made me  unique would be reduced to numerical figures with dashes. I was indignant, but I needed the money, and so I went. I figured that as long as I was wearing slippers and picking fruit to eat during work hours, I wasn’t a real, honest-to-goodness employee anyway.

My second job was just a little less exciting than my first. I romped with tiger cubs, cuddled piglets and trained a bear. I was high up in the mountains, surrounded by hundred-old trees, and could sneak off into a nearby waterfall whenever I wanted to. I had to get additional requirements like health insurance and loans and tax forms that I didn’t really understand, but with the nature of my work, who had the chutzpah to complain ? I was far away from the city and farther than ever from donning a real corporate suit. For four years I dipped and dodged my way around the exasperated chidings of family and friends, purposefully avoided better job opportunities and defiantly shirked from promotions to more professional settings. I was adamant in holding on to my self-formulated dictum. Independence: good. Companies with cubicles: bad. Self-expression: good. Nameplate and title on desk: bad. Slippers: good. Closed pumps: horribly bad.

 

My rationale was that I was in charge of my own beat, the drummer in my own band. The only problem, as I had to find out some time later, was that I couldn’t keep up with my own tune. If I kept chasing after only what I thought I wanted, then I would be running around in circles and most likely end up with a trombone down my throat. It was a crucial moment, but I had to make a decision. It was dawning on me that the life I wanted--fun as it was—seemed to inevitably spiral towards disorder without borders. I hated to admit it but the years of chasing thrills, pipe dreams and daisies had left me hopelessly lost. I didn’t know where I came from and even scarier, I had no idea where I was going. I took a deep breath and chose.

Today I work for a newspaper firm located in the main valve of the corporate artery that is Makati. I wake up at six am every morning, slide my feet into a considerably more formal pair of slippers (no pumps, thank you) and take a bus into the very zone I used to abhor. There are blank walls most anywhere I turn, I go to lunch at 12 noon everyday and I meet an onslaught of white-shirted commuters every afternoon. I very recently filled up forms indicating the transfer of my monthly tax remittances to a new branch and now spend hours bundled in front of a computer screen, often awaiting instructions from my superiors regarding my next assignment. Minus the three-piece navy suit and the detached, glazed-pupil look, I have become the very person I used to run away screaming from.

My fellow hippie-gypsy friends would have gone up in arms had they found out I’ve enlisted, but the strange thing is, I haven’t seen any of them in a long time now. Maybe they’re holed up in anti-establishment tunnels somewhere, thrashing firms or perhaps, like me, they’ve discovered that there’s nothing infuriating, really, about being a company employee. I still wear my favorite shirts, still use the single, weird-looking character as my signature, still confound people with my food choices and essentially have not lost my soul. On top of everything, my job requires me to do the one thing in this world that I know I will always love doing, no matter what: writing stories.

So if I could only go back in time, I would love to try and track myself back when I was a 20-year-old senior, when communistic sentiments were just beginning to ferment. I would then smugly teleport this past self to the present (hey, if time travel is possible then anything else would be, too) and show her just what a great time I’m actually having. But if I did that and she let go of her radical thinking, then I would lose this sensation of wonder , this almost humorous awe at actually liking this job that I have right now, in this building within this “evil network”, this spirit-usurper that I had such ghastly nightmares about. It’s weird and wonderful that by letting go of what I believed was my artistic freedom of self, fate turned around and showed me who I really was.

Heck, I’m enjoying the whole working vibe right now I might even grab myself a Starbucks latte on my way out.

Over my rotting carcass. I haven’t sold out that much just yet.

Posted by: Hoon at 06:12 | link | comments (8)