Bisous, Bisous

For what it's worth, Happy VD.

Remains of the Day

My phone rang at 6:00 p.m.

It was Roman, my friend and one of my ex-business partners.

I winced and debated about taking the call or not. The last time I had spoken to Roman, he was still going on about the non-existent division of final profits from our unfortunate business venture that shut down two years ago. An unpleasantness  beyond remedy that I had already decided to bury in the past, but which he seemed determined to keep alive.

I bit the bullet and pressed Answer. I heard the discordant noise of what seemed like a child singing, so I thought he'd just butt-dialed me when his voice, full of his trademark happy grin, came on.

"Asan ka?"

"Ha?" I yelled over the din of what was clearly a videoke in the background.

"Asan ka? Punta ka dito."

"Bakit?"

"Birthday ko."


-------------------------------


It should be abundantly clear to anyone who's read this blog that I am hopeless when it comes to significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries. My success as a producer would be impossible were it not for the existence of PMs and PAs to constantly remind me of meetings and bookings and other schedules.

And of course, I have friends like Roman who thoughtfully remind me of their birthdays, like an annual tradition.



"Deretso lang ito, sa Intramuros golf club. Andito rin si Kiko, hintayin ka namin."


Kiko is another mutual friend. Roman's lieutenant, and another business partner in the failed venture.

I normally bail on birthday celebrations - particularly ones that feature live, tuneless singing as the primary entertainment - but it is a testament to how highly I value Roman's friendship that I managed to drag myself out of bed. Sure, it took three hours later, and fifteen minutes more debating whether to drive or take a cab to Intramuros.

Laziness won out, as usual, and another ten minutes were spent waiting for a cab.


And then it was off to see old friends.


-------------------------------



The undeniable sound of a live band - not a videoke machine, as I had surmised - was the only sign of life in the darkened fortress called the Intramuros Golf Club. I fumbled my way along the unlit, abandoned back entrance and eventually emerged at the roofdeck, awash in stage lights. 


"Asan si Major?" I asked the maitre d'.

"Who, sir?"

"Major Roman, the celebrant."

"Oh, si Colonel? This way, sir."


So it's Colonel, now. It really HAD been a long time.



-------------------------------

Roman was in his cups, but looking precisely the same. The unflappable smile, the boyish bonhomie was still there.

He bounced his 9-year old son off his lap as he got up to hug me.

"Is that your kid?" I asked, incredulously. "Grabe, ang laki na!"


My colleagues' children have had, of late, the annoying habit of turning into adolescents and worse, teenagers.

I've burned them into children in the CD-RW of my brain, but overwrites are as insistent and annoying as prompts for system updates.



-------------------------------

Bottles of San Mig Light instantly appeared and I leaned over.


"Halos one year na 'ko di umiinom!" I yelled at Roman over the din of the band.

"Bakit?"

"Sumakit tagiliran ko, eh. Yoko malaman. Para surprise."


Roman just grinned and, ever hospitable, had his minions produce a bottle of white wine, and graciously poured me a glass.

Kiko, still the irrepressible party boy - if getting a little thick in the middle - was the de facto Master of Ceremonies, alternating between plying everyone with drinks and harassing the female band singers.

It seemed just like old times - with the conspicuous absence of my ex-bff, Vincent.



-------------------------------

"Any news from Vincent?" I inquired as I tentatively sipped my first taste of alcohol.

"Ayun, nasa Vegas pa din."

"His press releases on FB say he's in Spain," I snickered. "Nice to see he hasn't changed."

"May bago siyang lover," Roman grinned. "Purong Pinoy."


I am perplexed. Then I figure the white guy he had been with shortly after his flight to exile was ancient history.


"Why is he with a brown boy when he could be swindling the locals instead?"

Roman grinned wider.

"Lahat ng credit card, nakapangalan sa boyfriend."


I'd forgotten that Pinoys are even easier to grift - especially when they're star-struck and madly in love.

And Vincent is an unchangeable aspect of nature, just like gravity, and just as irresistible. He sucks people in, and then they fall hard.

Nevertheless, I find myself slightly missing him, on this night so reminiscent of countless other nights when we'd drink ourselves stupid while lackeys and toadies of all stripes attended to us like kings. The promise of easy, casual sexual adventures ever-present in the air, the arrogance of our handsome youth, the oyster that was the world.


I blame the wine, then one of Roman's boys pours me a second glass as I try to recall the moment when I turned into the immovable object to Vincent's irresistible force.



-------------------------------

"Speaking of swindling," I segued into the inevitable. "How are our Chinese friends?"


Roman made a face.


"They stole P200,000.00 from us."

"Did the bank verify?"



Roman swigged his drink and poured out another.

"Sarado na yung account."


I'd long accepted my share of P200,000.00 as a very small price to pay for not choosing business partners more wisely, but it had rubbed Roman like a pebble in his shoe and he had been bruising for two years now.


"Nakita ko nga yung isang mokong sa taxi one time. Kinawayan pa ako."

"Why didn't you just shoot him on the spot? You do control Chinatown, after all."


Roman grinned.


I always did say "Kung hindi mo kayang ibaon sa limot, ibaon mo na lang sa lupa."



-------------------------------

But I'd long gotten over the bitter truth that the Chinese partners in our doomed enterprise had swindled us out of profit. Roman is a trusting guy - well, we all were - but the fact that Vincent was the most vocal proponent of that consortium should've rung alarm bells like Balangiga.

Because trusting Vincent with money is like trusting a fox with chicks. And he has a head for business the same way a mudfish has an aptitude for applied chemistry.

Nevertheless, even Vincent, shifty as he is, got shafted in the end, so I guess there's always a bigger crook.

We should've just burned the place down when we had the chance.

Still - it no longer really bugs me the way it did. We were stupid, the Chinese confirmed a stereotype and got the better of us, end of story.

I'd still dance on their graves, though. It's one of the few things that keep me alive.


-------------------------------

Kiko came over and whispered that the band was about to end its final set. But Roman was just getting started, and decreed that he would just pay the band for an extension.

Kiko scampered off to take care of matters, and the music switched to 80s hits as the band broke for dinner.

Roman and I both grinned like idiots as Seona Dancing's "More To Lose" came on.

"Kapanahunan!"

He grinned even more.


"So, kumusta naman si Colonel?" he asked.


-------------------------------


We used to cry
About the day when one of us might fall
Weak and blindly
Into another's arms
Demands all gained from jealousies
Would flow like water, drowning us
But leaving us with just another
Lover's false alarm


-------------------------------


I have too many Colonels in my life. Maybe I'm impressed by rank too much. Or conflating it with accomplishment, which I in turn conflate with worthiness.

Then again, I am the son of a military man, and grew up thinking we were the Von fucking Trapps.

Must be them goddamned daddy issues.


I shrug.


"Why don't you ask him? We never talk anymore."


Roman looked deep in thought, and for a moment seemed about to disclose a confidence to me. But I'd long learned not to ask too many questions, especially if there was a clear and present danger I wouldn't like the answers.

The moment passed.


"Tell him to go talk to General Trias," he finally said.


-------------------------------

A thousand tortured lives have fallen
Wounded, dying, cut down by the
Questions that we'd sharpened 
Just to save our losing days

We thought with nothing more to lose
We'd tear our hearts with jagged truths 
And everything we'd hung to for so long
Just slipped away


-------------------------------



But the wine had gone to my head by that time.

Used to be we'd drink people under the table. I remember the infamous Jagermeister launch, open bar. The first and last time I touched that German abomination. The first time I blacked out due to alcohol, the first time I had to leave my car behind out of sheer full-on plasteredness.

From the few flashbacks I recall, the night ended with me being asked by Vincent not to puke in his mom's brand-new car as he brought me home, where I would hug the downstairs toilet bowl praying for death to come.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of EDSA, Roman and Kiko, in a haze of digestif-induced mania, were peppering the pre-dawn air with semi-automatics.

Clearly, one of the few times Vincent was the lesser evil.


-------------------------------


And now it's over
Both of us through
And I feel older


------------------------------


But now, years later, two glasses of wine and I am undone.

Vincent in exile. No more private club to call our own little playground.

At least Roman's career seems to have recovered. Colonel Roman, now. He's a good guy and a decent man, and deserves it.

Some other officers arrive at the party - senior ones, from the way Roman greets them - and I take the opportunity to sneak off to the restroom.

And from there, tipsy with memories, I slip away into the night.


-------------------------------


And now we're moving to new beginnings
But as we move we look once behind
To see what we might find of
Lost loves and old thoughts 
Of our nights of winnings
That lunge, tear and grasp
At lost wanting minds

last post for the year.

I hated you 2013.

Hello, Young Lovers

For Desole Boy, and others who have not yet taken the leap of romantic love.

"It is also good to love; because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being; that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love; it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is-: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. 

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future?

And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that -), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer -.

But how can they, they who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?

They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is - convention. Whenever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, however unusual (i.e. in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit."

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Family

We just wrapped up our annual family Kris Kringle revelations - a goofy, rambunctious family tradition that we've managed to observe over the years despite the extended family wrangling and the general drifting apart  of once-close relatives.

I don't think of myself as an overly-sentimental man, but maybe because I'm getting on, I suppose I'm beginning to see family in a different light.

It's easy to take them for granted, especially when one is busy chasing one's ambitions.

But at the end of the day, being surrounded by material possessions - the trophies of success - one finds oneself still empty and unsatisfied.

And yet, one funny, laughter-filled day with my parents, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and my favorite dog somehow makes me happier than any flashy sports car or new addition to my various hoards of beautiful things.

I don't spend a whole lot of time with the folks nor my siblings, for various reasons. And I realize my reasons, at the end of the day, have little value.


Work is important. But family even more so.


I think that shall be my first resolution and epiphany for this new year.


I wonder what yours will be.


While you think about it, a good and prosperous 2013 to you and yours.

And may you cherish things of real value.

Like family.

Il N'y A Pas D'Amour Heureux

                                          Aragon et Nina Simone:Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux
                                            Vidéo fidjie sélectionnée dans Arts & Talents

Il N'y A Pas D'Amour Heureux was originally a poem written in 1943 by novelist and poet Louis Aragon. It was later revised and set to music by composer Georges Brassens. While the mood of both poem and song is melancholy and pessimistic, Aragon - whose work was deeply colored by his experiences of hardship during World War II - actually focuses on both the negative and positive aspects of love. His point, essentially, is that true love is not free from sadness or pain.


Hence, the titular "There is no (perfectly) happy love."

Rien n'est jamais acquis à l'homme. Ni sa force.

                                             Man never truly possesses anything. Not his strength.

Ni sa faiblesse ni son coeur. Et quand il croit

                                              Not his weakness nor his heart. And when he thinks

Ouvrir ses bras, son ombre est celle d'une croix.

Of opening his arms, his shadow forms a cross.

Et quand il croit serrer son bonheur, il le broie.

And when he tries to embrace his happiness, he crushes it.

Sa vie est un étrange et douloureux divorce. 

His life is a strange and painful divorce.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux.

There is no happy love.

Mon bel amour, mon cher amour, ma déchirure.

My beautiful love, my dear love, my torn heart.

Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé.

                                                    I carry you in me just like a wounded bird.

Et ceux-là sans savoir nous regardent passer

And those who unknowingly watch us walk by

Répétant après moi les mots que j'ai tressés.

Repeat after me the words that I have woven.

Et qui pour tes grands yeux tout aussitôt moururent.

                                                And which have already died in your bright eyes.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux.

There is no happy love.

Le temps d'apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard.

The time to learn to live is already long gone.

Que pleurent dans la nuit nos cœurs à l'unisson.

Our hearts cry in unison at night.

Ce qu'il faut de regrets pour payer un frisson.

What it takes in regrets to pay for a thrill.

Ce qu'il faut de malheur pour la moindre chanson.

What it takes in sorrow for the simplest song.

Ce qu'il faut de sanglots 

What it takes in sad tears

Pour un air de guitare.

For one tune on a guitar.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux.

There is no happy love.

Unlike the song, the original poem ends on a more hopeful note, acknowledging that sadness, conflict and suffering are integral, unavoidable components of love. And yet,if we are genuinely in love with a person, all the unhappiness that accompanies love becomes worth it.


Supposedly.

Il n'y a pas d'amour qui ne soit à douleur.

Il n'y a pas d'amour dont on ne soit meurtri.

There is no love which is not pain.
There is no love which does not bruise.

Il n'y a pas d'amour dont on ne soit flétri.
Il n'y a pas d'amour qui ne vive de pleurs.


There is no love which does not fade.
There is no love which does not live from tears.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux.

Mais c'est notre amour à tous les deux.

There is no happy love. 

But it is our own love.

The Tipping Point

When do you say "Enough"?

Many of us endure many things in the name of - ugh, just saying it makes me wince, but - love. But it need not be just about romantic affairs. We put up with many things in our varied relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and the general human race.

We forgive. We give second, third, fourth, almost unlimited chances. We turn a blind eye to the most obvious of deceptions and lies and somehow, deep inside, hope and hope that things will change, that he will change, that "love" is worth fighting for.

But to love is to be human, and to be human is to be fallible and weak.

And while love may start out strong, the erosion of eros starts silently, almost imperceptibly, until the cracks are too visible to ignore and the facade starts to crumble.


I've been an angry, angry man far longer than I care to remember.

And now I'm just tired.


Too exhausted to be sad enough to shed tears at a good-riddance good-bye I had known was inevitable.

Too worn-out to even reflect if I would ever regret the harsh but true words I sent.

Too weary to even worry about regret.


What a surprise.

Something as prosaic as fatigue turns out to be the tipping point.

I Love You Over And Over Again

I'm not a normally sentimental kind of fellow, and thus, I have never quite celebrated V-Day. But far be it from me to harsh on anyone else's happiness - fragile and fleeting as it may be.

Thus I share with you the following compilation, which I must shamefully admit almost moved me to tears. Because it made me remember that I loved, and loved deeply once. And how beautiful it was.

My own love may have run out, but love itself goes on.

Esposas, Posas

That's an old Spanish saying my grandfather was fond of reciting - usually when my grandmother was safely out of earshot. Then again, he lived a full century, while abuelita took advantage of the "till death do us part" escape clause at 87, so I guess he wasn't the only one chafing at the bit.

Making fun of my dead grandparents aside, I'm often curious and fascinated to learn about what it's like on the other side. No, not that other side - I mean what it's like being married. To someone whose genitals are different from yours.

We often work very late in my field, and while we have been doing this for years, it still amazes me when I overhear the production staff arguing with their wives on the phone over why he's still at the office and what time is he coming home and why,why,why does he have to stay so late. I'm pretty sure this is a conversation repeated ad nauseam all over the world, regardless of whether one is a garbageman or a senator - not that there's a world of difference between the two, except one takes out the trash, while the other generates it.

But I digress.

So during a smoking break in that recent all-nighter we pulled, I asked my PM and my editor this question: "What's the one thing you miss most after you got married?" Their answer was quick and it was the same: "My freedom."

Pressing further, I asked if they meant freedom in the sense that they can't see other people anymore. But then again, marriage vows have never been a reliable deterrent to extra-marital affairs, and men will always be boys. So that wasn't it.

An object in possession seldom retains

the same charm that it had in pursuit.

~Pliny the Younger, Letters

What they lost when they gained a family was the freedom that marks singlehood. The general kind of freedom to do whatever the hell you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, with whomever you want, as many times as you want. They lamented that even a totally innocent, stress-relieving couple of beers with the boys will inevitably become a raging issue with the raving missus. And it doesn't seem to matter whether the spouse is a housewife or a working woman, as their respective wives are. I imagined the stay-at-home missus, weary of being trapped at home living a life of monotonous domestic drudgery, would be the kind more resentful of a husband's relatively more colorful day (and occasional night.) But apparently, keeping tabs on a husband's whereabouts and demanding his soonest return to the coop is as hard-wired into a wife as the daily litany of bitching over the household budget.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract,

and then goes into it,  deserves all the consequences.

~Isadora Duncan

They shook their heads wondering what became of the sweet, understanding girl they once wooed, and why and how that shrieking harpy they wake up to in the mornings took her place. I wondered if this was a strictly-feminine thing, or whether it went beyond the battle of the sexes and crossed gender and sexual orientation.

That's the funny thing about what's meant to be a lifelong commitment. I don't think the guys understood that the person they made those vows to would not be the same person years down the road. She would become a mother, and her priority would no longer be them but their progeny. They themselves did not anticipate that they would not be the same person, either. From being carefree bachelors, they have chosen to fulfill multiple roles long played by many others before them : hard-working breadwinners, fathers, hen-pecked husbands, besieged son-in-laws. Marriage is certainly a life-changing commitment, but how dramatic - and acceptable - those changes might be is anyone's guess. Hence, the gamble.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

~G.B. Shaw, Getting Married, 1908

We, on the other hand, rail on and on about why gay marriages should be allowed, but I've never been too keen on formalizing my relationships before Church, State, and Society. Neither am I eager to seek their benediction. The beauty of a gay commitment, to me, is that it is precisely not legal nor religious ties that bind you. It is not the power of Christ nor the edicts of Caesar that compel you to stay together and stick it out through thick and thin, in sickness and in health. You are bound only by your mutual, conscious, and voluntary decision to choose to stay with someone, tempered with the freedom to walk away any day with no guilt over collateral damage such as innocent offspring. This freedom to stay or go away on a moment's notice is also what makes a gay commitment a double-edged sword of Damocles. It hangs by the merest of threads, the strength of which depends on the commitment of the two individuals involved.

Marriage is a great institution,
but I'm not ready for an institution.

~Mae West

This is in no way an indictment of marriage. It's an enduring institution and by Darwinian law, there is a reason it has survived for millennia. But even the fittest institution is not fit for all. Not all straight men are the marrying kind. Some notoriously fear commitment. Some fear making a big mistake that would be costly and difficult to get out of - if getting out is an option at all. And others fear finding out that, after all's said and done, love may not be enough in itself.

At family reunions, whenever I am asked that inevitable "When are you going to get married?" question, I have found a new stock response: "Bakit ako magpapakasal sa isang taong di ko naman kaanu-ano?"

Marriage means commitment. Of course, so does insanity.

~Author Unknown

All our lovers began as strangers; I wish they would not end as such. When you wake up next to a total stranger and it's not a one-night stand, then you know your relationship is in trouble. And not all of us have the freedom to just walk away. It's hard enough to uncouple from a lover. With a spouse, the knot you have to untie is of Gordian complications.

But lest you think I'm such a jaded old sourpuss, let me just end this ramble with a final, uplifting quote on the ties that bind. It applies to us all - single, married, gay, bi, straight, man, woman, mineral:

Chains do not hold a marriage together.
It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads
which sew people together through the years.
~Simone Signoret

As you sew, so shall you reap.

Chew On This

One of my favorite movies is 1998's "Dangerous Liaisons", adapted from the 18th century novel by Choderlos de Laclos and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer. (I never saw "Valmont" which came out the same year, but I'm pretty sure it'd be like comparing Charlize Theron to a horse's ass.)

Considering the many games of seduction, deceit, betrayal, and revenge we play, I thought the movie could easily have featured any of us, in any or all roles: schemer, victim, innocent bystander.

There are many gems in "Liaisons", but the exchange which struck me the most was the one between Madame de Rosemonde - Valmont's doting but wise aunt - and the love-pained Madame de Tourvel:

Madame de Rosemonde: I'm sorry to say this, but, those who are most worthy of love are never made happy by it.

Madame Marie de Tourvel: But, why? Why should that be?

Madame de Rosemonde: Do you still think men love the way we do? No... men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give. They are not capable of devoting themselves exclusively to one person. So to hope to be made happy by love is a certain cause of grief.
 
The ring of truth in that exchange resonates with me to this day. I chant it to myself as a shaman might recite his prayers whenever I find myself caught in the web of that four-letter word.
 
Love.
 
Love doth conquer all, and 'tis a victor that takes no prisoners.
 
Something to chew on at the start of the week.