Strangeways Here I Come!

I'm writing this entry from the Senator Lounge of Lufthansa at NAIA. I'm on my way to Barcelona via Bangkok and Frankfurt. I've only got 15 minutes free time so (as I've told countless women) I'm gonna make this a quick one.

I passed Ansell Beluso at the airport lounge on theway here. I'm not sure but did he actually check me out? On second thought, he must have made a comment about me for wearing a suit and it's hot as Pavarotti's butt crack in this airport.

How am I feeling? Excited, I guess, but not as much as I thought I would be. I'm not relishing the thought of 15 hours inside a tin can travelling 35,000 feet above terra firma.

I just found out about what I'm gonna work on in Spain and it was a bit of a disappointment. I won't get into boring details but suffice it to say that office politics gets absolutely more shitty in Europe where the big bosses are in comparison to Asia.

Oh well, my 15 minutes are almost up. I'm gonna post pictures of my shenanigans while I"m away.

See you guys soon.

Hang the DJ!

What is it with these people who call up radio stations to request for a fucking song?

Now more than ever in this planet’s history, anyone who has the jones for a specific song and want to hear it straightaway has got a myriad of options to go about in achieving this rather simple feat. Maybe twenty years ago these choices weren’t available and if they were in some basic shape or form, there was great difficulty involved. But now? What the fuck?

You can go to the mall and buy the CD. Period. I don’t have to say that malls are as ubiquitous as callboys who have had sex with Mystica. They are just that many!

If you’re too cheap to fork out PHP450 for a CD, then you can buy a pirated copy for ten percent of that.

Even more convenient is downloading the MP3 of the song from the Internet in the comfort of your own home. In Kazaa, at any one time, there are over 800 million files that are available for downloading. Fucking “Itsumo” has got be one of them, right?

Is it really worth your time trying to dial in a number of times to a fucking DJ? Think about it. The resources spent on your part (not to mention the telephone company’s) just so your phone call will come through. That’s valuable time you will never ever get back. And for whom? A DJ? A pompous self-centered self-important ugly cocksucker who thinks he’s so hot because his voice sounds seemingly attractive with that affected Southern California accent. This is an asshole who was picked on the whole time during elementary and high-school and is only now experiencing the feeling of significance only because you can’t see him through that wall of invisibility which only sound waves can breach.

It’s payback time for these asshole DJs and guess what? You, hapless song requester, are his bitch.

Possession Obsession

BBC World is running a series of hour-long documentaries on art and culture called Imagination. I saw the episode last Sunday which was called “The Man Who Destroyed Everything: Michael Landy.” Now, I had no idea who Michael Landy was and I thought he was some guy fixated on wiping out the world like some James Bond villain.

Well, it turns out that Michael Landy is a British artist who destroyed everything he had. Yup, that’s right. EVERYTHING: birth certificate, passport, love letters, photographs, even his Saab. His mother at one point talked about this jacket which was a hand-me-down from his dad. She poignantly remembered that she bought it for her husband after they got married and that it took her one whole year to pay off. Now this jacket was also part of this systematic destruction of all of Landy’s stuff in an art exhibition called Breakdown. Systematic because the manner of the annihilation was through an assembly line. This winding conveyor belt carried his roughly 7,000 possessions where hired hands arranged these into eight categories and then ultimately fed into this huge machine which grinded everything to bits. It took two weeks in a shop in Oxford Street to accomplish the destruction of all that Landy has accumulated in his 37 years on this Earth.

So, do you possess your possessions or do your possessions possess you? Landy’s certainly become a hero of mine for giving the biggest fuck you imaginable to consumerism and materialism. However, I don’t think I’m at that point in my life yet where I can be as ballsy as Landy, even in a miniscule way. Hell, I sweated like a crack whore on spontaneous remission when I thought I lost my cellphone last week.

I also think that it was Landy’s choice to go through with the destruction of his possessions. He had nothing to his name after. But what about that family living under a bridge huddled together, with sleep as their only means of escape from hunger and exposure? Like Landy, they also have nothing to their names but it’s not their choice, this deprivation and poverty. Have they experienced the great truths Landy was seeking with his extreme exercise? Probably not. The only great truth they’ve come to realize is that nobody gives a shit.

Well, I do own stuff. I’m not any happier as I thought I would be before acquiring these. However, I’m also happy that I’m not living under a bridge. I do think I get the point. I shouldn’t get nuts over losing something which I can buy at the fucking mall.

Coño

Aha! I’ve finally learned how to type the tilde. That’s the squiggly thing on top of the letter n in niño.

The tilde is an accent. The other common accents found in foreign words include:

Acute - é
Cedilla – ç
Circumflex – ê
Umlaut – ë

Why am I writing about this? No special reason. I’ve just been busy the past few days - as much as Michael Jackson would be in a cub scout jamboree - and if it isn’t completing and submitting my documents to get my Schengen visa, it’s this pride swallowing siege called work. You know, boring drivel which I would prefer not to vicariously live through again by writing.

Anyway, I got this text from someone and I just thought it was fucking hilarious:

What’s the name of Julius Caesar’s older brother?

Eh di, Kuya Caesar!

The Lonely Guy

Whenever I feel depressed I just think back to the time five years ago when I met the person whom I consider to be the loneliest guy in the world.

He’s the keeper of the Cape Borjeador lighthouse in Burgos which is a town on the way to Pagudpud, Ilocos Norte. I’ve only remembered him as Manong but I can never forget how unreasonably friendly and excited he was to see my friend and I.

It was around three in the afternoon when we invaded his sphere of tranquility. We got to the main entrance to the lighthouse and started hollering for attention because the door was wide open. We heard footsteps coming down and then he stood before us with a radiant smile on his weatherbeaten face. His shirt had big holes like the plot of an M. Night Shyamalan movie and you could tell that his denim shorts were cut from what was a wornout pair of pants.

He gave us a rough history of the place but it was mostly descriptions of what used to be where at a certain location of the lighthouse. He pointed to a bare room and said that it used to have a table and chairs and was some sort of receiving room. In an empty corner, he said that there used to be wooden shelves where memorabilia from the lighthouse’s history were kept. The only piece of furniture I could spot in the room was an old unpainted wooden bench.

Shit, I remember thinking, this guy has a sucky job. But this was before I went up the long spiral staircase leading up to the lighthouse’s beacon. When I got there, the 360 degree view of the sea and the mountains from the promontory was absolutely breathtaking. I only use the word “breathtaking” sparingly and this seemed the perfect occasion for it. (well, I did use this word yesterday when my friend sent me pictures of Lindsay Lohan accidentally flashing her boobies) Wow. Manong gets the chance to see this view everyday.

When I got down, I asked Manong why they had to have a human being present there at the lighthouse 24/7 when there could just be a computer in his place to electronically switch on the beacon. He said that there was no budget for this “computer” thingy I was referring to and that, hey, he needed a job. The only thing that bites he said was being away from his family. He simply said that he didn’t have an alternate which could afford him the opportunity to take his vacation.

So I asked him what he did all day and he said he just sat around. Did he like to read? He said he couldn’t afford the local comics that he was fond of reading. He has a radio but it didn’t have batteries. And then he asked me if I had any batteries in my backpack that I could just give to him. Tang ina, as rotten luck would have it, I didn’t. It still haunts me to this day that I couldn’t give the old guy fucking batteries for his radio.

I made a mental note to drop off some batteries for him on our return to Laoag from Pagudpud but we were just too stinking tired to make any stops along the way back.

It gives me slight comfort to know that I’ve met the loneliest guy in the world and that I can conveniently use him as a benchmark when I’m feeling depressed. I just hope that he’s not right now sitting in the dark in that lighthouse thinking of his family. If he is, I hope even more that he’s listening to his radio.