Home is the road. Maybe I should spend more time traveling, rather than arriving. Maybe I should stop buying discounted plane tickets. Now look I found time to talk to the dead. A plane ride doesn’t allow you that.

So many things crying out to be done, other people's accomplishment reports the least of them. I do not know what to do with the bunkhouse at Baliwasan Chico. Clean is all its claim to fame, Mary laughing all the time, liking it and not liking it. At a moment's notice they all want to come, and even the uninvited like to invite themselves in.  A space to be lesbian in, a room to smoke in, to sleep all day if they like, the air clean, the food good if people get up to cook. No TV; no crap, and they think even loud music is not allowed. Crazy old dyke is what I am to them.

World peace at our doors

They have time to rack up an incest rape case they once slept with and claim this is the scandal, not peace money. As though there are no sex shows, no boobs shows in peace shows. 

How do they settle sexual harassment cases in Calgary? Like they settle gang rapes in Congo? Elders with slimy hands alhamdulillahing, admonishing the erring girls not to wear this or that, you are peace advocates, not sluts, don’t go motor-riding with Muslim boys,                don’t sit alone with them in a room. 

But this is the 21^st century, and that outside your window is the pavement, that the mall. What idiot can you con with tribal or Islamic law? 

And suppose all a curious lesbian engaged in interfaith dialogue wants to know is if her Muslim friend is circumcised, should she call a party? Should she be raped?

World peace must be at our doors if lawyers and shamans who ordinarily blink at incest in their own houses are now crossing class, culture, and geographical divide to help one party to a post-coital conflict. What I look forward to is for the MILF to get Feminist Solidarity nominations. My own candidate is the rapist’s daughter. 

They sell soaps at the UN, and the consultants are making a killing.

Where have all the flowers gone

Have all the cadres relocated to FB? And what disgusting things everyone is  up to, like selling spiked bead bracelets and fuchsia pink ankle boots, though I recall there was a lot of moonlighting work too even in those days, from lotions and underwears to malongs and Ibaloi bedspreads in between illicit loves and workers strikes and ED sessions on LIC (if your past served you right, you will remember what that acronym stands for).

But now, victory can be counted in 20 likes. Jesus O. Kuraiyzt.

So you report to FB like FB was your regiment, your company, complete with presentation shows and when someone pinches you saying she misses you, you feel like crying, as though you were once trenchmates in WWII and didn’t meet across the toilet of a plush resort. Then one you met in-person during your hardy university days asks you to please remove the piece she wrote ages ago, she doesn’t want her boss to find it, doesn’t want them to find her mind out, she might lose her job keeping accounts for which office you now forgot, and that yesss, she assures you, you will not survive in America, you will not survive here dear.

Now G badgers you, why didn’t you blacken your profile pic there’s an online protest against this Cyber Law, you don’t know? for all the libel that you do? Lord, I wasn’t there most everyday, how am I to know about one cyber law? But abide you did, like there was ever any law that worried you. What annoys you is her turn of words, she could have said, like Schnapps, hating, couldn’t she? or maybe like your exes, she could have asked, cluelesslike and indignant, why are you always insulting? Why do you always write vitriol? Oh did I? I don't remember writing that way, I just don't remember.

Why do cats meow? Why do rains pitter-patter, why do dragons spit fire? why bleed why think ink. Why not be like dogs barking at all the wrong trees arf arf arf! But then what if that's how it reads, angry bitter writing, like you’re some wrinkly squash with a sore stuck butt ---- how right she is, isn't she, unless and until you have set down your opus, everything you do is fart, ineffectual. 

I love Cineuropa. You go out of the moviehouse craning because you were supposed to change the world and you can’t. But why are they making all these movies about massacred anarchists and suicidals and red flags waving marchers singing the Internationale at the height of capitalism’s irreversible triumph across the globe? Is it about the past or the future?

Then at Cybertown another surprise. A daughter reappears after close to twenty years of silence. You admonish her, careful not to show any family emotion at all, because love is a junkie, a hopeless junkie. Mommy! Remember Vigan? Lord, what about Vigan, that day I stole a book from the library? Eee si Mommy nagnakaw, nagnakaw ng book si Mommy! And aboard a kalesa exegeting on the politics of thieving they hush-hushed you. Shhh! Shhhh! Marinig ka ng kutsero! Nakikinig ang kutsero!  

Makoy has a baby now, she tells you, he is well on his way studying bar tending. San Fernando teems with tourists. It could have been worse. Once you thought he will never finish high school. Since the day you last called and turned him down, he never talked to you again. How hurt could a child be? And every time you spell-checked a cad in Jolo, you wondered if your son is any better in the way of the Lord. At least the dykes there long understood what they want to escape. Does he?

They had moved on, the children. Their days sunny, their bones young. You haven’t. Cannot leave, cannot disengage, Peripatetic Thou, forever trawling your dark! Arkkk akkkk.

And this blog, fuckingdamnshittingshit of a blog forever detaining me. Why do I have to report here each time? A way to say hey look, they haven’t cut my cabbage head off yet, have they?

I'm Nobody

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Happiness is a warm gun

I'm on a plane don't complain

Desires what of that. Those are for ordinary mortals. They eat they fornicate they use themselves up and then they die.  I’m no ordinary monster. No ordinary glutton, no ordinary fornicator. I don’t believe in death. That’s for my foes and friends to wish for me, for my own sake. I reject that.

What is your psychosis? Moira asks. Each ought to have one or one will not survive. Hers was supposed to be catatonia. That’s what kept her in the odd jobs that she seasonally took on in the US of A. Yes, you will never survive here, you will never, she tells me, after taking my foot size for a pair of sneakers she hopes to ship to my address, from which I got evicted, a couple of weeks after we chatted, then she logs out. 

I’m on the plane on our way to Coron in Palawan to attend a wedding, a good old friend texts. I message back. Hey wrong send. She said she and her expat husband are sometimes afraid their daughter will go hungry, like me, she is so idealistic. Couldn’t tell her that’s too much to ask of their daughter.

ROADKILL! (The Seven Brothers)

III


The Seven Brothers, according to Mhang, is a religious group, some kind of a cult composed of men ages between 30s and 60s. People go to them for help, as when an injustice has been done to the family; as when a daughter disappears. They are armed with kalis, a bolo meant to cut off heads.

"I see. Are they the ones that perform the parrangsabil?"

"Yes."

Yess my ass. And God help me, help me to be afraid of people, not of rapists and revolutionists with heads to crop.

It was the Seven Brothers that went looking around Takut-Takut and went looking for Tumba Lata, Mhang explains, because they wanted Ferhayda and Ridz. They each was carrying a kalis.

"They came to Tumba Lata all seven of them and they each was carrying a kalis?"
"Some stayed right outside at the gate to Takut-Takut."
"You saw them yourself? All seven of them?"

"The people in the neighborhood saw them. There were four of them, two waited outside."

I wanted to cuss. If I could just make a joke out of it all.

Maybe they were just on their way to chop woods?