Yesterday over dinner

My boardmates, when they like to compliment me, always tell me I don’t look my age. To be 49 and to be around them in an all-girls student dormitory, they must think me  freakish. Or maybe what makes me uniquely freakish is that  I’m pronouncedly  lesbian and I have an organization backing me up, too. So if there’s someone there who thinks I’m some kind of a perv espying on their young lives, their problem. But no. That’s dirty thinking. Most don’t care, really; the few who display some interest in my life and in what I do do forget about ages and sometimes ask: You have someone in Jolo? Because how come I do not show the least interest in the pretty girls in the dorm. It surprises me. Like, Ha? 

Because most days I feel like a shriveled old woman, a carton character straight out of Dickens, picking malunggay leaves from the roadside fence for the fish broth I like so much, chasing after the taho vendor, using up cans and cans of Alpine evaporated milk boiling egg, boiling water for a mealie, usually Quaker’s oats dipped in hot milk. The whole point is, I don’t eat what they eat, and don’t watch what they watch. The soaps on TV, for instance, and the advice columns on the radio. At 49 going on 50 who needs advice who needs anyone?

Yesterday Norma took me to dinner and bought copies of my Roadmap and talking about her daughter approaching mid-30s and looking every ounce it,  she asked, Are you 40 now? She looked genuinely surprised. Really? You will turn 50??? You look good!!!

I wanted to tell her she should have seen me last month, how toned I was, when I was doing weights daily, and on a green diet every morning;  when I was going crazy with carpentry work repairing the badly built bunkhouse I was renting at Baliwasan Chico, the backyard teeming with greens, camote tops and malunggays and tomatoes growing I felt like I could beat seven dykes in seven seconds, including Mherz. These past weeks I have not been feeling tops, the caretaker’s husband cut down the lone malunggay standing in the yard and the caretaker lied to me, saying someone else, the neighbor, who actually planted it, cut it. Wives lie to your face and they think they’re good for it I would like to slap them smack in the face.

I told Norma I am to vacate the house I am staying in, that’s why I am hauling all my books to Nico’s office where I hope they will be better kept. I did not tell her I offended the girls for saying I want my black pail back, if it were a man I am missing I would look for another man to go with it, but it’s a pail, I need it everyday, so the house full of mean girls turned cold on me. Not that I cannot live with the meanness and the cold, I don’t mind that. It’s the economic costs of coldness that beat me. On top of cutting the malunggay tree, I lost my only pair of dyke pants courtesy of my nephew the school drop-out who left school because there was no one to speak to there, he said, not even his teachers. I felt most privileged he took to talking to me. Now I lost all the good shirts he gave me and my Warren brief and my Triumph panty and someone turned my stove on to exhaust the gas I just paid for and so goodbye good broth, goodbye Kitchen, goodbye Boarding House it was just time to go.

So I started hauling the books to Nico’s office. Now Nico warned  Ryan and Germie might take  a book or two home and as he was speaking Germie was taking home my Mark Twains, which she did not really liked as much as she thought she would, and the Juaniyo Arcellana Sundial poems. Because those are the terms Nico spelled out. Books are bound to be lost or be borrowed and not returned, and if a book got lost, there should only be Germie or Ryan who stole them, no one else.

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.