Mean mean Me

People are mostly monsters of selfishness and egotism and vanity. It’s nice to be poking fun at them, giving them different shapes and fates other than what they like to be famous for.

If you are hatching something illegal, or at least mildly bohemian, like smuggling yourself out of unpaid rent, or giving your landlord a to-your-face shot for getting a crush on you, or dumping your luggage in your brother’s house for your sister-in-law to see to while you gad about planning lesbian conventions and cultural productions sans funding and sans bus fare money, surely, your making-both-ends-meet friends and poorer relations – no matter how iconoclastic or subversive they think of themselves theoretically – are the last persons you can discuss life with, much less map out escape routes with. Right?

Right. Better hire your landlord’s househelp, instead.

Jean Genet and me

The American health care system, Time or Asiaweek says, is tops at the higher end. I would end up a bag lady if I were there.

My poet friends there went into carpentry, care giving, backhoeing, then one, the best of the lot, to business writing for a computer company, and then real estate. Real estate doesn’t make her a real estate broker, only rich; she is a poet and will always be.

Jean Genet was a thief and his distinguished compatriots who think highly of their radicalism call him poet-thief, sometimes, criminal-poet. I asked, why not a broker- poet? If you want to distinguish yourself as a poet-fuck, sheilfa, said she, that’s your business.

I sometimes wish I were just plain me. Then maybe, just maybe, she can love me?

But maybe Jean Genet was just a mediocre thief, and like me he only stole books and bric-a-brac to get free board at the penitentiary. A place to be warm in, with table and chair, warm bodies, too, that he may write the plays he wrote.

And that’s why he never completed a novel; prison term didn’t allow him that breadth.

kung minsan naghihinala sila

The most violent wars are fought on the ideological plane. Bakit kaya ayaw nila aminin yun. Kaya yata kapag gumagapang na mga salita ko papalapit sa usaping kapitalismo, umiismid at umaawit na si Ganet. Sila lang kaya ang may karapatang magsalita laban sa di-matakasang pananalanta ng dambuhalang korporasyon. Usurper, dapat magpaka-socdem ka, sa isip, sa salita at sa gawa, magpaka-western feminist, stop na ang pagpretend-pretend na may pakinabang ka sa usaping tunggaliang uri.

Hindi ako napatawad nang dalhan ko ng Puti na feminista at isang bag ng female condoms. Ni hindi ako nagkaroon ng pagkakataong sabihin sa kanila na ang pangalan niya ay Gwenola, at tulad nila ay may boypren na Maoist na karantso ni Joma at may mga sinu-subsidize na mga foot soldiers ng The Shining Path. Doon pa ba naman nag-opensiba sa upisina nila ang mahadera. Nilektyuran ang cashier na walang ideya tungkol sa usaping programa sa birtud ng pagpuputa, na hindi malayo, aniya, sa kalagayan ng maraming asawa at asa-asawa. Sex workers nang sex workers, e di nagalit sila. Prostituted women, ayon sa kanila, ang dapat itawag sa mga babaeng nagbebenta ng aliw. Ka-classist third person impersonal plural. Hindi ko raw kasi alam ang sinasabi ko dahil hindi ko alam gaano kadumi doon sa putahan. Ang dapat pag-isipan pa'no iahon ang kababaihan mula doon.

Parang si Lobregat ang programa: Ahon Badjao.

my last duchesses hanging on the wall