HACKED EMAIL ADDRESS

The blogger's email address andrewlab20011@hotmail.com  has been hacked. If you want to communicate with us, please post in this blog

PRAYER IN THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

They have maligned the blogger, O, Lord of Hosts.
They called him names
And smashed the mirrors of memory.
The blogger did his best for them.
The baby is now a young maiden, walking tall.
You knew what we and Errol did--the many sleepless nights
In the altar of sacrifice.
The burned offerings that the toddler might live
You know the many lies
The treacheries, the subterfuge.
Let your justice run its course, O Lord of Hosts.

THE 'IFS' OF LIFE AND the KINGS AND QUEENS OF SIMPLETONS

"If you were not in my country, I would not have met this accident, " the Saudi man said to the Filipino driver inside the court room.

It was a traffic altercation in a Saudi city. The Pinoy was family chauffeur of a Saudi businessman and was driving his employer to his office in the downtown area.

The Saudi, in his limousine, was trying to beat the red light when his car's rear bumper was hit by the car with the Pinoy at the wheels.

The judge ruled in favor of his fellow Saudi.

Junction in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte, the malabi  (earthen pot) capital in Amianan, the imagined country in northern Philippines.

 

It was the logic of the Saudi that caught the attention of the journalist, "If 

 you were not in my country.... "

What if it was another Saudi that the man "encountered" in the traffic accident?

An accident always happens by chance. A fortuitous event and it was unfortunate that the Filipino was there?

There are many "ifs" in life.

"If I did not go the the lotto outlet, I would not have bought the winning ticket."
"If I did no go to Mindoro, I would not have met the woman who became my future wife."
"If you did not reprimand this girl, she would not have done her thing."
"If you go away, I will die." 

Stretch the discourse further:

 "If there were more honesty and transparency in the writers' group, we would not have come to this situation."

"If the blogger did not publish the rules of the contest, there would not have been writers' quarrels in the internet."

" What if they did not give permission, as they did, to writers in the rival group to enter freely the portal and maligned us? "

"If they did not go, as they did, to Pure Gold mall in Laoag, the Australian lady would not have lost her $5,000 and other currencies to pickpockets." 

A, the sine qua non in life and the Kings and Queens of simpletons!

The blogger who suffered verbal abuses--the first time in his life-- from them is now as confused as the Filipino driver in the Saudi capital.


    

HOW TO LOSE 10 POUNDS

From a woman's magazine:

Ilokana TV broadcaster Grace Alba and her Fil-Am auntie Erlinda Julian Gantong at the Padsan River in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte

1. Eat breakfast
2. Watch your fluids (for example, use skimmed milk in your coffee or go for black coffee, which has only at least 10 calories per cup)
3. Drink more water
4. Take the stairs
5. Swap white for brown--bread, pasta, noodles

QUOTES FOR THE SOLITARY LITERARY BARBARIAN

  
     "There are deserts in every life, and the desert must be depicted if we are to give a fair and complete idea of the country."--Andre Maurois

  "Free at last! Free at last!  Oh, my God, I am free at last!"--Martin Luther King, Jr. 

     "Writing a story is one way of discovering sequence in experience. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves."--Eudora Welty 

     "We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy to befall us is to go unimagined." N. Scott Momaday  
     
       "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will."--George Bernard Show, Nobel Prize winning playwright

     "A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be the mercy of my emotions. I want to used them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."-- Oscar Wilde, author and poet

     " The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him."--Schopenhauer

     "The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts."--Pascal

    "Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself."-- Herman Hess

THE 21-YEAR OLD MAIDEN WHO KILLED HERSELF: THE MYSTERY OF FAITH

She was beautiful, tall, the slender kind, fair-complexioned, with a ready smile that would have disarmed you. She would have had wonderful years ahead of her. Yet on the night her lover told her their relationship had ended, she killed herself-- all of her 21 years on earth.

If you were Lani, the village lass of Ramon, Isabela, what would you have done in a similar situation?

Would you sleep the rejection off and let the issue go away? Would you take action until the following day when things are different--you see the sun rising beyond the far mountains and the sky and the hills appear to be on fire. What a beautiful sight!

Would you stay in your room the whole day and nurse the inflicted pain?
Would you think a million times that life is no longer worth living but in the process you see the light?

Would you go to church and, in the silence, pray to the Almighty God for comfort? Would you pray to Him for guidance? Would you go the local priest and seek counsel?

Or would you join your friends and go camping or go to Boracay and see the place and find out for yourself why it is the best tourist destination in the planet?

There are so many things to do in a day in a difficult situation.

But for Lani there was only one way out of her despair and frustration: Kill herself. This is the mystery of the human condition and faith. Why did God her creator allow Lani to take her own life? Isn't God in her that He would have told her it was not the right thing to do? That He alone is the giver as well as the taker of human life?

And the philosopher says that God was generous to her: she gave her everything, loving parents, a home, a beautiful mind including the freedom of choice. And the argument stops there? No. Did he also give her a mind that snaps at the slightest pique?

Lani's action was deliberate. Before she jumped to her Lethe--a watery grave at one of the canals of the Magat River Irrigation System that originates in the village of Aguinaldo--she wrote a suicide note which says in part," Mother, I drowned myself. " She was alive then but she was thinking in the past, her sentences were in the past tenses.

The Magat River in Ramon, Isabela, the water of which empties into the canals of the Magat River Irrigation System.

The last time her mother saw her was at 11:30 at night outside their home. Lani was then talking to someone on her cellphone. Her mother even called her to come inside the house because it was then a windy and cold night.

She was missing for two nights and three days. Then there was a call from a  funeral house in Cordon town, 19 kilometers away from Ambatali, informing her family of her body, which had been found floating in the irrigation canal in the village of Malapat. They had traced Lani's family through her cellphone she had zippered in her maong pants.

WHERE IS JONAS BURGOS?

"Free at last! O, my God, I am free at last!"--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where is Jonas Burgos, the activist son of the late Ilocano journalist Jose? Now six feet all below the ground or just disappeared like the desaparecidos of Argentina? The desaparecidos  were left-wing activists  and political dissidents of Argentina, ruled then by a brutal military junta, who were kidnapped, drugged, dropped, still alive, out of aircrafts, into the sea. 

In a press conference, when asked about the missing persons, one of the military generals said, "They are neither dead or alive; they disappeared."

Was Jonas killed by his alleged military captors, his body put in a container, which was then cemented and dropped into the sea?  Kas iti ar-aramiden dagiti politiko iti Amianan kadagiti kabusorda? 


Dios-ti-agngina, Isaganie, for the insight and the guidance. Muchas gracias, mi amigo de Madrid, para el comento, "Nawaya a Prensa, Saan a Mangidumduma. "

It was all in good faith and in the name of truth and freedom.