when an anti-establishment hippie is established...

Green hearts forests fire

 

So there I was with my gawdawfully gawdy umbrella: green, striped and squiggled with all the colors that just shouldn’t, and a whistle (whatever for, I’ll never know---maybe when rain gets too mad and actual deluge drowns metro and shrill tweets of help are in order) a whistle of the same green handle and overall gawdawful green gaudiness, there I sit on Edsa Shangri-la’s club lounge couch (divan! settee! ), sipping daintily from real mango nectar (plucked and pureed from only the Philippines’ goldest) and lounging of course,  (and pretending I did not know this ugly umbrella who had the nerve to perch by my feet) I see that the United States is being scorched alive.

 

It feels realer, that California forest fire of a million nautical knots away—434, 543 acres of burning green and roots and lives however tiny—than last week’s bombing at Glorietta mall, a ten-peso bus ride from my own living quarters. It was a TV-free week, that week, as most of my weeks since coming back from the zoo now are, so no real image was stamped in my head of the blast---except saucer-eyed announcements at the faculty room where I was that day, oblivious of everything outside my sphere (there was a talk on newspaper: the putting together of that I had to give in a few hours). And that one picture I purchased fronting the Philippine Daily Inquirer as I sped home the morning after on a cab, stirring my soul fiercer than the play of dawning orange light and Karen Carpenter on the radio.

 

The photograph showed an enormous hole which blasted through three levels and gaping, crumbling, concrete fragments, powdered white and singed fringes of once alive consumerism and branding and seduction and blurred transit for people like  me, who mainly used the mall to get from one mall to another from another to another from another to another.

 

And there it was, childhood, teenhood, adulthood mallworld fixture, under a rubble of previously dignified manwork— burnt, bombed, broken, flat and grainy but said enough: Things inside television box tube did happen and were real….nearer and realer but… still never too real nor too near.

 

And watching the living submit to fire, a week later, in real time, far-flung as I was, through cable and satellite and technological galaxies I’ll never understand, there I am before silver mounted LCD, drinking it all in, amazed and awed and sad and weak and watching with a glass of pureed nectar in my hands and an ugly umbrella by my feet. And feeling, near, far, ten thousand leagues away but there. On fire.

 

In one minute Mr. Gilly arrives. We take the window seat and I fumble with my recorder and half-listen to a spiel on hundred-thousand dollar jewelries and brilliance and beauty and owning perfection and jabillions in annual growth and monogamy and hearts on fire and Diamonds and Products and Markets as I hurry to half-scribble what I half-hear down.

In another seven hours I will, for no explainable reason, forget green umbrella on the train ride home.

 

 I had it clutched between protective fists the entire day, even during forced side trip to a doctor in the p.m. because of rapidly spreading rash on left arm (and possibly Lyme diseased, if I further allow paranoia and saucer-eyed admonitions from the Science Department folks to overtake sensibilities), and I tell you there was absolutely no way it could have unlatched itself off my paws without my knowing. It just vanished, and

I write this post in its memory.

 

 

(For the record, I paid 300 pesos for the doctor to boredly encircle my rash with his pen. If the rash progresses out of the circle, he says, then I should probably worry. So, apparently, as long as the redness stays within the area established by his pen’s ink, I’m safe).

 

I shall keep you posted.

 

Posted by: Hoon at 16:15 | link | comments