Monthly Archives: December 2007

Baskets

Posted on by Marocharim
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   If anything, my brief episodes in Psych Ward taught me a valuable lesson on complaining: there are men without shoes, and there are men without feet.  In that imposing structure of concrete and iron bars, there is a lesson to be learned in handling the weight of the world.

   Every time I go there, I rub shoulders and share prescription pads with the poor, who take the brunt of mental illness in the country.  I know some of their stories: depressives who became so because of defeat, maniacs who became so because they were misguided, and schizophrenics like me who were dealt what seems to be the wrong hand.  I know how some of them attempt to pay the psychiatrist’s free services: in baskets.  There are baskets of bananas, baskets of lowland vegetables, baskets of dried fish.

   Before the building of the Department of Psychiatry was finished, there was an informal economy that revolved around baskets in the hospital: hawking.  You would think that the old woman selling kakanin and vegetables for pinakbet is only doing it for extra cash, but then after a day’s worth of making the rounds and selling at the hospital perimeter is done, you would see her sitting down on the benches for a prescription for her sick son.  Her apron is half-full – or half-empty – with coins and twenty-peso bills: hopefully enough for that pink pill that would save her son the indignity of dog’s chains.

   From what I recall, I never did once see a new basket.  They were old ones: the kind of kamalig worn from trips between mango trees and the market.  And then I wonder why: these are hard-working people who are worked enough to die of their own labor.  Why them?  Then I realized why.

   Nobody in Psych Ward’s outpatient department ever opened up a hand for a handout: there’s always a hand up.  There were always questions about work to be done, like construction work or laundry.  You would see calloused hands everywhere: fresh wounds from fresh work.  These are hands that would be worn to stumps given the sledgehammers and scrubbing boards that would buy the lifetime medication necessary for the sick to have a normal life.

   Why them?  Heck, why not?  Life was never the fairest of bosses.  They’re here pushing around baskets, and whoring themselves to whatever economic prostitution there is in building houses or taking in some lazy family’s laundry.  They’re here: whether they deserved it or not, whether it is a punishment for some long-lost sin or not, is out of the question.  It’s never the question.  What matters is the here-and-now.

   Then it hit me: I thought I had it bad when my hallucinations were diagnosed not to be a “third eye,” but an extreme illness.  I thought I had it bad when I figured how much it was going to cost to “heal” me.  But as I looked around, I realized how bad and extreme I had it compared to these people.  They are decent people: hard workers who tilled the fields and cast the nets to earn a decent living, and here comes one of those challenges people wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies.  And I don’t pay in baskets: cold, hard cash passes through the cashier’s window.  So what do I have to complain about?

   The weight of the world, as I always thought it to be, was that everyone carries crosses.  But when someone carries your cross for you, there really isn’t a weight to speak of.  Not a damn pound.

Oh Captain, My Captain

Posted on by Marocharim
11

   I would post pictures tomorrow about yesterday’s trip to the beach at Bauang, La Union.  After all, I’m a terrible photographer, and I would be picking some of the best pictures tonight.  But for now, I’d like to rant about the sea.

   Because I’m thalassophobic, I fear open water.  As long as I could still feel that I’m wading on water shallow enough to stand on, the open sea scares the shit out of me.  But then again, there was the boat ride to another beach that purportedly had “white sand.”  That, if anything, was the ultimate scare for me.  Not only can’t I swim: I’m not an adrenaline junkie.  I did rapelling and commando crawls back in high school CAT-I by force.

   Being a full mile away from the shore for a 20-minute motorized banca ride was enough for me to pee in my shorts, but thank heavens I already took a leak.  Sure, the sea was calm, but being in a Frankenstein-ed wood-and-fiberglass skimmer with a generator’s diesel engine and five other people – and my chubby nephew Christian onboard – didn’t help.  I also sat at the very back, clinging on to the wooden frame for dear life.

   “Relax,” said the fisherman who owned the boat, noticing my pale nervousness as we were going to the middle of the sea.  How could you expect me to relax when I’m hallucinating about being encircled by sharks?  How could you expect me to relax when the very shores of Vietnam are visible on the horizon, that I’d be washed away and probably be abducted by Thai pirates when I end up marooned on the delta of the Mekong River?

   Twenty minutes of sheer thalassophobic hell may be OA for some people, but when even the gentlest of waves and the mildest of gales rock your boat, you automatically think of being capsized.  We’re not talking about a gulf here: we’re talking about the South China Sea.  Besides, my uncle Melo told me some grim news about a fisherman who, two months ago, was in a capsized boat and ended up a bloated corpse at the Hundred Islands.  Oh great: if anything happens to this boat, I’d end up washed away in a deserted island talking to a volleyball.

   It’s not that I haven’t been on a rickety boat before: I’ve rowed friends from one end of the Burnham Lake to the other.  But this was different: this was the open sea.  Walt Whitman came to my head: I would probably be implored to wake up from death because we finally saw land.

   Then I got to think about a different Captain altogether… yes, Captain Kirk.

The Old Man and the (F'n) Sea

Posted on by Marocharim
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   I’m having second thoughts about going to the beach tomorrow: I have a rather severe case of thalassophobia (fear of the sea).  A vast expanse of crystal-blue water can aggravate my mild psychosis: I automatically think of drowning.  The mere sight of a big wave – that’s not on TV – not only makes me nauseous, but makes me think about tsunamis.

   Outside of my fear, I have a rather low opinion of the sea in general.  It’s so serene, so boring, so flat, and so blue.  Many writers – particularly Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad – have tried to capture the essence of the sea in their novels.  “Lord Jim” was a particularly harrowing experience for me: not for the conflicted personality of Jim, but for how Conrad described the sea.  So vivid, so moving, so… pardon me while I hurl.

   I’m more of a mountain man: the rugged mountains give you a sense of towering power over those who live down below.  The jagged, forested edges that frame both sunrise and sunset forces in you the sound and the fury of being so close to heaven.  The sea, on the other hand, forces in you the sound and the fury of being close to Hell itself.  Ah, my first ride in a ferry boat…

   While it’s a distant possibility that I’ll drown, I hope I’m alive by Friday to post pictures of how I survived the deathtrap that is the open sea.

   Catch you on the flipside.

Infernal Boots

Posted on by Marocharim
2

   For the first time in four years, I’m back to wearing boots.  But they’re not combat boots: they’re dress boots.  Black suede-leather boots.  Boots for the modern, fashion-conscious cowboy.  I suppose I should dress up in my leather pants, one of my black shirts, my trench coat, my Harley-Davidson bandanna and my cowboy hat, and be the dystopian version of Clint Eastwood in the 1992 Academy Award-winning film, “Unforgiven.”

   Outside of money (the gift that keeps on giving… in more ways than one), the boots were part of my Christmas gifts this year.  In the beginning, the idea of wearing boots appealed to me, and I looked forward to breaking them in today.  But unlike new shoes, new boots need more in the way of getting accustomed to.  It has a pretty high heel for a man’s shoe, and there really isn’t a lot of freedom of movement for your toes given that the shoe tapers toward the front.  And because it’s a leather boot, breathability is out of the question.

   There is an upside to wearing boots, though: it makes ass-kicking a hell of a lot easier.  With my pointy boots, I can deliver podiatric sodomy to my enemies better than any ordinary shoe.  And once you get used to boots, they really ain’t that bad because they correct your walking motion.

   So the next guy who crosses The Zone will literally and figuratively be brushing my boots with a toothbrush.

Walking the Line

Posted on by Marocharim
1

   As happy as I am with the way my life is going on right now, I can’t help but be a bit anxious.  It never occurred to me until now that next year is the beginning of the rest of my life: I thought I was struggling then to make a career, but 2008 will be a year I bet I would never forget.  Or that I would do everything in my power to forget it.

   Oh that’s right: 2008 didn’t happen yet.  As my mom says, I’ll have to cross the bridge when I get there.  But I’m already at the bridge: crossing it is a whole different story.

   What’s getting me really, really anxious is the ICWSM conference for March 2008.  There still isn’t word on whether my paper got accepted or not, and I’m working on my poster presentation just in case.  I took a gamble on it, knowing that I don’t have the credentials or the academic backing.  It’s me going for the kill, but there are a few things in the way.  Few, really big things, one leading to another.

   I did some calculations a few weeks back, and did them again today, and figured that I would need at least P100,000 for everything: plane tickets, registration fees, accommodations, and pocket money.  I understand the apparent reluctance of funding institutions when it comes to matters like these: I don’t have a masteral degree or a doctorate, and given the state of the economy, I am asking for too much.

   I could write the powers-that-be at school to ask for money, but UP is hard-pressed for money, too, and I could understand that.  I understand that the priority when it comes to conferences are faculty members, and I understand that there are still “political” things involved in getting funding for anything in UP.  I should know.

   So I decided to take up a job to earn what I can to partially cover a prospected trip to the US.  But I can’t earn that much in two-and-a-half months: I’d be lucky to cover my pocket money or my registration fees.  But I won’t hear from the company until January: even if I saved up every cent I can in my allowance, I wouldn’t be able to pool up the money in time.

   I’ve pulled rabbits out of the hat before, but this has got to be one of the toughest challenges I’m facing right now.  I laid it all on the line a few weeks ago, knowing that whatever I’m going to do back then maps out not only the rest of my life, but my place in the world.  And it makes me – no, forces me – to think about where I am and where I’m going, and how many times I forced myself back in line when I was way off it.

   Come to think of it, I always followed my own line, if not the line I always thought to be mine.  As I moved back, forward, sideways, and all ways, the line moved.  When I crossed the line, so did it cross me.

Dirty Little Secrets: An Assessment of Porn

Posted on by Marocharim
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   Disclaimer: I’m not a sexual beast, nor am I sexually preoccupied. 

   Yesterday’s entry was about a hypothetical porno movie about lechon, and it makes me kind of rethink the whole idea of porn in general.  Even if pornography is a multimillion dollar industry, it’s still pretty much illicit.  “Immoral,” even.  The conservative right would rather have it that the mere possession of porn be made illegal and criminal: Sen. Loren Legarda, for example, made waves in shutting down BoyBastos.com.  “Investigative reporters” with weekend shows make headlines out of busting porn rings and nightclubs.

   Like marijuana and herpes, having porn is one thing: hiding it is more important.  DVD hawkers, for example, sell X-rated DVD’s behind displays of pirated martial arts movies that feature Jet Li or Chuck Norris.  In Internet shops, surfing porn means really small browser windows.  Internet-sourced porn are hidden in folder trees or in ZIP files.  There’s no shortage of gay and lesbian MPEG files in the Internet.  This basically means that if you really have to have porn, you have to hide it.

   Rather than talk about porn movies, I delimited this experiment to kinds of porn accessible to many people: novels, magazines, and Internet porn.

Smut novels

   Before the Internet, “porn” was more of “smut.”  This basically meant sexually-charged novels.  (Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is not “porn” per se, but a classic piece of 20th century literature.)  Novelists like Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace, for example, became famous in discount bookstores for their very libidinal works that dealt with showbiz and sex: Robbins, for example, peppered his novels with sex on every chapter, and Wallace’s formula for sexing up his novels was to do it in each quarter of the novel.  Sidney Sheldon’s familiar solution was to put mild descriptions of sex in the beginning and towards the end, but puts graphic detail in the middle.

   But even before the romantic American novel, there were really “pornographic” novels that surfaced and made their marks in literary history.  The French are particularly famous for this, like Pauline Réage and Anaïs Nin are particularly good examples.  Réage’s “The Story of O” dealt with sadomasochism, and proved to be the quintessential model of hardcore porn films in the 1970s to the 1990s.  Nin’s “Delta of Venus,” considered by many literary critics as the most erotic novel of the 20th century, was basically a collection of short stories that talked about sex from a feminine viewpoint.

   While Réage and Nin are considered to be the mistresses (no pun intended) of porn, I think that “real porn” was “invented” at the turn of the 19th century by the Marquis de Sade, in his works “Justine” and “The 120 Days of Sodom.”  “Sodom,” in particular, would have even the most perverted of Literotica.com subscribers cringe with its graphic descriptions of torture, rape, and murder.

Tijuana bibles, “Heavy Metal,” and smut periodicals

   “Playboy,” “Penthouse” and “Hustler” are tame, and even classy: there’s nothing morally wrong with the photographic portrayal of nude women in my view.  There are, however, certain exceptions to the rule: in this section, I tackle a few of them.

   Tijuana bibles – or “Playboy of the 1920s” – are short pamphlets that tackle such sexual themes as bestiality and interracial sex, among others.  In “The Green Mile,” for example, a Tijuana bible is shown being read by one of the prison guards, concealed under a thick book.  Basically, a Tijuana bible is like a “Bazooka Joe” strip.  With the advent of glossy magazines, porn really came to fruitition.

   In the 1990s, the comic book “Heavy Metal” was the dirty little secret of many an elementary school kid: back then, some of my classmates were corporeally punished for having the magazine.  It’s more like hardcore sci-fi that involved muscle-bound women and machines.

   For the masses, though, P5 street tabloids became their dirty little secret.  Until now, sex tabloids represent a powerful force in shaping public opinion.  While “Bulgar” and “Tiktik” represent the archetypal smut tabloid, more and more tabloids have surfaced that serve the public right to be informed… about sex.  You have “Nightlife,” “Ang Playboy,” “Toro,” the list goes on.  National issues take fourth fiddle to the things that matter more to the readership: showbiz, sex crimes, and sex.  The reportage encompasses rape, sex scandals, and tips on sex.  There is no shortage of “news” in 75-year-old women getting raped on a news week.  “Xerex Xaviera” and “Roma/Amor” became part of Filipino popular culture for sex stories.

Internet porn

   With the Internet, porn became much more ubiquitous, even omnipresent.  Havoc was wreaked in flash drives and computers all over the world for viruses that came from searching porn.  With the Internet, porn became readily available and readily consumable: it’s no longer like an awkward moment in a drugstore to buy condoms.

   Internet porn made even illegal and morally-bankrupt porn readily available, raising global concerns on the proliferation of child pornography.  Global legislation and action made watchdogs like Cyber Angels and the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).  This raised – and continue to raise – debates on the matter of censorship and free speech (more on that next time).

Porn: quo vadis?

   The debate on porn raises so many questions: is porn the cause of sexual crime?  If we see porn as an effect, what causes porn?  With the Internet, new directions for porn have risen that it almost becomes a Quixotic struggle to battle pornography.

   As a passing “anthropologist,” I look at porn as not a dysfunction of society, but has become a function of it.  I did not define porn here because there is a certain stigma attached to porn: a moral stigma, an ethical stigma, a political stigma.  Sex, hidden from view for so long, has taken the character of the monster under the bed.

   Like I said before, if you have porn, you have to hide it.  Not because it is meant to be hidden, but because the function of it in society is to be hidden and deemed to have a corrupting value.  Porn is like many things we hide: corruption, Angst, among others, that contribute to how our society works.

   Eliminating porn, to me, is not only a matter of factoring out porn from the complicated equation that is society, but to reconfigure society in general to situate where porn belongs in the order of things.  This will involve a lot of critical assessments and debate: meaning we should take all sides into account.

   The dirty little secret that is porn will continue to hamper free and open communication.