A 99 cent China-made bonnet on the head, a knitted-sweater topped by a black leather jacket--these are no match against a cold, wind blowing since this morning. It has knocked down the red lounging chair in the yard and blew away the potted plant and pulled the plant out, earth and all.
The so-called Santa Ana winds blow from the desert gusting at 35 mph. It is still blowing in the late afternoon, and may be blowing through the night.
A breakfast of a malukong of oatmeal mixed with peanuts, red grapes and dried raisins.
A wildfire has burned about 1,000 acres of grasses in Ventura, along the shore and there were forced evacuations, according to a CNN television report. Five hundred firefighters are battling the blaze that could gobble more areas because of the high wind.
We kept mostly indoors the greater part of the morning. Taking a morning bath has been postponed twice, thrice. No literary narrative worth putting into words. No creative juices and it is already a few minutes to lunch time.
Quotes of the day from Jeff Koons, artist in the Los Angeles area:
"As soon as you accept yourself, you can start to have transcendence. What's menacing is not to exercise your freedom."
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Friday, December 25, 2015
'NOCHE BUENA' IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY
Friday, Christmas Day, early riser, about 4:00 in the morning. Last night's "Noche Buena" celebration with a meal consisting of the typical Filipino food: of lechon (roasted pig, but only head with an apple at the mouth), brown rice, pancit canton, pinapaitan, maja blanca, rice cake, dinardaraan, iced tea, etc. The boys finished off half-consumed bottles of lady's drink like Margarita, moscato, left from a previous celebration.
We were only six partaking off the huge meal: Dianne, the Julian boys--Jeric, Junjun- Whitney, the Vietnamese girl friend of JJ, Estelita and Peter, that's me. Anib worked in the night shift in a hospital in Hemet. Filipino-Vietnamese Leo, a friend of the Julian boys, arrived half an hour later.
We put on red-white Christmas caps and a Nikon timer camera took our pictures.
We left then in the sala, these young kids who have a lot of life before them. A horror feature movie was playing on the wide television screen close to the wall.
They were animated as we went upstairs to sleep.
It will be a long night for them.
****
The rich of the brown Philippine earth did not amass their mind-boggling wealth through hard work. They did not inherit their lands, their mansions, their flashy cars and other amenities that differentiate them from the majority poor people, some of who eat once or twice a day. They are political businessmen, an easy job by just dipping their fingers on the people's cookie jar.
Some filch from international donations to victims of disastrous typhoons like Yolanda that flattened as it did, with enormous destruction and death, the Visayan provinces of Samar and Leyte and Negros including Palawan.
(The nerve of Dinky Soliman who allowed sacks of donated rice to rote in some warehouses and buried them.)
What do they know about the integrity of the soul, these denizens that inhabit Christian Philippines?
We were only six partaking off the huge meal: Dianne, the Julian boys--Jeric, Junjun- Whitney, the Vietnamese girl friend of JJ, Estelita and Peter, that's me. Anib worked in the night shift in a hospital in Hemet. Filipino-Vietnamese Leo, a friend of the Julian boys, arrived half an hour later.
We put on red-white Christmas caps and a Nikon timer camera took our pictures.
We left then in the sala, these young kids who have a lot of life before them. A horror feature movie was playing on the wide television screen close to the wall.
They were animated as we went upstairs to sleep.
It will be a long night for them.
****
The rich of the brown Philippine earth did not amass their mind-boggling wealth through hard work. They did not inherit their lands, their mansions, their flashy cars and other amenities that differentiate them from the majority poor people, some of who eat once or twice a day. They are political businessmen, an easy job by just dipping their fingers on the people's cookie jar.
Some filch from international donations to victims of disastrous typhoons like Yolanda that flattened as it did, with enormous destruction and death, the Visayan provinces of Samar and Leyte and Negros including Palawan.
(The nerve of Dinky Soliman who allowed sacks of donated rice to rote in some warehouses and buried them.)
What do they know about the integrity of the soul, these denizens that inhabit Christian Philippines?
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
PHILIPPINE POLITICAL HOOLIGANS
Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and. Sen.Mar Roxas, two of several candidates in the country's presidential race, have been exchanging brickbats, even if the campaign period has yet to begin in 2016. Dirty Harry has challenged the senator to a gunfight. This son who bears a great name has previously dared Dirty Harry to a boxing bout.
Duterte is supposed to be a lawyer while Roxas, a scion of old wealth, was a graduate in business at an American school.
They are behaving like school bullies who run roughshod over their hapless classmates.
Behave like global leaders, the former Philippine president Fidel Ramos said by way of advise.
Bad-mouthing rivals and muck-raking are signature brands of Philippine politics that has remained mired by exponents of low-level political campaigns and practices.
In the slap-sticks type of politics, limited talents and mediocrity are not impediments to run and win public office. The great unwashed that comprise the great majority of voters and the political imbeciles have one thing in common with respect to these traits. So the latter ascend the thrones and stay there with nothing to do but wait for the standard operating procedure that brings in the dirty money.
***
The Inquirer writer US-based Boying Pimentel has taken the cue by writing an article on presidential assassins from President Manuel Roxas to President Ferdinand Marcos. But Pimentel dwelt lengthily about the latter about FM's record as "killer" of many people during the martial law years.
What is at issue here is the number of persons personally killed by Dirty Harry during his reign as Davao City executive. It is not the number of criminals that he caused to be eliminated through his Death Squad.
In the same manner with Marcos, it is not the number of persons he allegedly caused to be killed via the apparatus of martial law. (In a cacique type of society where the oligarchs reign supreme, there is a need for reforms and that is what Marcos did. And the so-called democracy advocates had to stand against him and the tension had to result in confrontation and death.)
If Marcos indeed personally killed Julio Nalundasan, the political rival of his father Mariano, it was only the person he murdered on record.
Duterte is supposed to be a lawyer while Roxas, a scion of old wealth, was a graduate in business at an American school.
They are behaving like school bullies who run roughshod over their hapless classmates.
Behave like global leaders, the former Philippine president Fidel Ramos said by way of advise.
Bad-mouthing rivals and muck-raking are signature brands of Philippine politics that has remained mired by exponents of low-level political campaigns and practices.
In the slap-sticks type of politics, limited talents and mediocrity are not impediments to run and win public office. The great unwashed that comprise the great majority of voters and the political imbeciles have one thing in common with respect to these traits. So the latter ascend the thrones and stay there with nothing to do but wait for the standard operating procedure that brings in the dirty money.
***
The Inquirer writer US-based Boying Pimentel has taken the cue by writing an article on presidential assassins from President Manuel Roxas to President Ferdinand Marcos. But Pimentel dwelt lengthily about the latter about FM's record as "killer" of many people during the martial law years.
What is at issue here is the number of persons personally killed by Dirty Harry during his reign as Davao City executive. It is not the number of criminals that he caused to be eliminated through his Death Squad.
In the same manner with Marcos, it is not the number of persons he allegedly caused to be killed via the apparatus of martial law. (In a cacique type of society where the oligarchs reign supreme, there is a need for reforms and that is what Marcos did. And the so-called democracy advocates had to stand against him and the tension had to result in confrontation and death.)
If Marcos indeed personally killed Julio Nalundasan, the political rival of his father Mariano, it was only the person he murdered on record.
Friday, December 11, 2015
THE LAST VERBAL JOUST
She was fading away in the shadows in the distance, the red Gabu sun enveloping her.
She had come to my place at the bank of the Padsan. We wanted to clear things out. But it was not a productive encounter.
And she went away, leaving words that needed no response from a young man who suddenly grew old.
"You have to grasp this," she said, a hint of the anger she was trying to control, her brown eyes blazing.
"You have to grasp this," she repeated, pronouncing and grating every word in a slow cadence.
"What? Have I not understood you? You are impossible You are a brat, a very selfish brat."
Her smile was naughty, if not sarcastic.
"You said you love to read the poems of Pablo Neruda, and you have just read one."
"And did you say yesterday you can recite from memory 'I can write the saddest poem?'
"Forget it," she said.
A breeze rustled the leaves of the nearby balete tree.
"You said you love music, the best music of that classical Italian composer--what's his name?"
I was remembering a time in university days in Diliman. She was sitting on a chair at the lobby of the Liberal Arts building.
Her voice was cool and deliberate:
"If you love poetry, if you love music, how could you be so rude? How could you be a barbarian, an animal?"
The footprints on the white sands were clear, following a straight path.
 |
| Grandchild Margarita Denise Julian |
The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. --Soren Kierkegaard
Saturday, December 5, 2015
THE COUPLE IN THE CALIFORNIA SHOOTING MASSACRE
The young couple had left their 6-month old baby with the grandparents in their apartment in Redlands, a prosperous community east of the Los Angeles area.
They arrived aboard a rented SUV at the Inland Regional Center a few miles away from their residence. With assault-type rifles and wearing black vests, they entered the room where a celebration was going on, and sprayed bullets and suddenly, there were screams, cries of pain, moaning. It was an eternity and when it was over, 14 people lay dead and 17 injured. There was smell of gunpowder in the air in the room that was earlier filled with joy and laughter.
The man, 28, was in the room earlier and had joined in the celebration--he worked as an environmental specialist at the center-- but he left for unknown reason. Was he repelled by the merrymaking of his colleagues? What was going on in his mind as he went out the door?
Why did Syed leave? What was going on in his mind? When he came back minutes later, he was with his wife and in tandem with Tashfeen, 27, went on a shooting rampage.
What went on in the minds of the husband and wife as they pulled the triggers of their weapons of mass destruction? What were they thinking as they saw the people fell one after the other, spilling their precious blood all over the floor?
Were they mad and insane? Were their minds diseased? What triggered them to do the act that lasted probably for a few minutes? A few deadly moments that leave one in pain, sad, angry, dumbfounded.
Was the killing ideologically motivated? Psychologically driven? Was there a workplace issue? A religious dispute that had to be resolved by violence and fear?
What went on in their separate minds as they lay dying in the SUV, their young bodies riddled with bullets fired by the lawmen who engaged the wife in a firefight as he drove away in the car chase that ended in tragedy for them?
What went wrong with the young, educated, good-looking Asian couple? They were living the American dream in a wealthy neighborhood.
No Filipino casualty was reported in the carnage. The victims included an Iranian who fled his country because of religious persecution, a female Vietnamese and other nationalities that had become US citizens and embraced the American way of life. *Facts culled from California newspaper reports, radio and television broadcasts/
They arrived aboard a rented SUV at the Inland Regional Center a few miles away from their residence. With assault-type rifles and wearing black vests, they entered the room where a celebration was going on, and sprayed bullets and suddenly, there were screams, cries of pain, moaning. It was an eternity and when it was over, 14 people lay dead and 17 injured. There was smell of gunpowder in the air in the room that was earlier filled with joy and laughter.
The man, 28, was in the room earlier and had joined in the celebration--he worked as an environmental specialist at the center-- but he left for unknown reason. Was he repelled by the merrymaking of his colleagues? What was going on in his mind as he went out the door?
Why did Syed leave? What was going on in his mind? When he came back minutes later, he was with his wife and in tandem with Tashfeen, 27, went on a shooting rampage.
What went on in the minds of the husband and wife as they pulled the triggers of their weapons of mass destruction? What were they thinking as they saw the people fell one after the other, spilling their precious blood all over the floor?
Were they mad and insane? Were their minds diseased? What triggered them to do the act that lasted probably for a few minutes? A few deadly moments that leave one in pain, sad, angry, dumbfounded.
Was the killing ideologically motivated? Psychologically driven? Was there a workplace issue? A religious dispute that had to be resolved by violence and fear?
What went on in their separate minds as they lay dying in the SUV, their young bodies riddled with bullets fired by the lawmen who engaged the wife in a firefight as he drove away in the car chase that ended in tragedy for them?
What went wrong with the young, educated, good-looking Asian couple? They were living the American dream in a wealthy neighborhood.
No Filipino casualty was reported in the carnage. The victims included an Iranian who fled his country because of religious persecution, a female Vietnamese and other nationalities that had become US citizens and embraced the American way of life. *Facts culled from California newspaper reports, radio and television broadcasts/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)