and so spins the words away

my leave is almost over (isn’t me lucky? unemployed but with leave benefits, har-de-har). i can hear the story oven calling once again in need of some serious word-baking.

the weekend was wet and grey and an outdoor book and media fair where all books, CDs, and DVDs can be had for a dollar each, was cancelled. the good side was a cardio walk and another amazing race to the subway and this being a weekend, all route cancellations and track rerouting aren’t posted. double fucking fuck.

we watched *eagle eye* which isn’t even worth a single sentence movie review after a carbo load of homemade pasta and pizza bread. 

i’m just enjoying the rest of my leave days.

a varietal cut

the title is “all we need is five meals a day” and is slated to appear in the upcoming philippine speculative fiction IV this december. the following is an excerpt, copyrighted of course. enjoy and please pass the word. us starving writers need all the beer money we can have.

and yes, while this is spec fic, there are neither lusty vampires nor deprived virgins.

****************

A mountain of refuse separates the town from the city where a fire from never ending embers feeding on the forgotten and the discarded, the rotting and the dead spews smoke so black it seems to smudge the night sky as it balloons and billows heavenward.

Under the moonlight that’s made paler by the blaze stands Lukas, the boy with a mango tree growing out of his stomach and bearing fruits on branches that have sprouted from both his ears.  Asleep on the road is Luna, the girl with a thousand winged lice on her hair that can fly and transport her anywhere, except to the city.

While Lukas is grateful that the nearby fire hides the stench of decay, it also deceives him of the passage of time, its dancing flames and waving fumes rob him a proper view of the sky, casting everything with an orange glow.  Lukas has no idea whether the sun will be coming out soon.  Already, he’s getting hungry and the weight of the tree in his stomach doesn’t help.  He remembers their last meal and when his mouth waters he pushes the thought out of his mind in shame, although he doesn’t understand why.

Luna stirs in her sleep and Lukas sits by the asphalt and rubs her shoulder with his left hand.  He uses his other hand to comb her long hair where a few lice flutter their wings.  Lukas hopes that she’s dreaming.

In a moment, he too sleeps until the first few rays of the sun have pushed back the shadows.  The road to the city beckons but he stays still, not wanting to disturb Luna.

We are the last ones, he tells himself, we might as well wait just a little bit more. 

****************

a forthcoming publication

the thing that i did came my birthday – something that i’ve never done before – was to submit a short story for consideration to an upcoming anthology.

today, the email that may contain either confirmation or regret buzzed around 2 pm while the missus and i were at a used bookstore in soho. i nearly dropped my iphone and i’m sure i created a mini-scandal when it turned out to be a letter of acceptance.

more than anything, this validates that i’m not just jerking off and eating steak, specially that i missed the palanca deadline this year. it will also fuel the rest of the unfinished writings that should be attended to again (2 screenplays where i’m still in the process of research and a short story i originally meant to submit that felt just not right after seven revisions and clocking 7K+ words – thankfully i decided to write another).

so i guess this means that i’m a writer, a word that i take very seriously in this age when whoever has a blog and can reference movie quotes and song lyrics is a writer. now, if only i could make enough beer money out of this.

fall starts

in 14 minutes it would officially be autumn. my first ever when i get to experience the season that so inspires all of ray bradbury’s stories. farewell to summer, his latest book that i snatched for a dollar in one of the al fresco book fairs last spring also awaits right after i finish charles fort’s biography. sidebar: if tesla is to edison, then fort is to verne. huzzah for the misunderstood underdogs.

the temperature has already began to dip during the weekend making sleep happen even without air conditioning. i can’t wait to walk in central park with its carpet of dried leaves.

but wait, there’s more!

barnes&noble online has this idiotic policy that only a fucktard can think of. buying multiple titles with different release dates will be shipped only when the last to be released has hit the shelves. even if, as in my case, 5 out of 6 titles have already been released. and yet the in-store collats have this same day delivery in manhattan bullshit. i’m sticking to amazon.

events, unrelated (?)

thanks to monday morning’s news, the closest competitor of joy’s company has just let go some 1,7000 people in one sweep. more are expected in the days and weeks to come. the words “let go” are fucking misnomers – no one really wants to go no matter from what POV you look at it. on their side of the turf, things are still on an even keel though bonuses are frozen and increases are preambled with “times are hard” and “other companies are laying off”. at least joy, who’s handling technology clients, is getting a meager increase. a very close friend whose roster of clients belong to blue chip, wall street banking and finance houses was already given a verbal warning to prepare for any eventuality. news like this can’t be cured with steamed rice and special curry over an episode of fringe. and so this is the american dream morphing into a nightmare.

in other news…

the old man is still standing during the day at the corner and nodding off during the night across the street framed squarely by our living room window with no attempt at observing the law of the thirds. it has been this way since sunday. this morning before cooking my lunch, i went up to him and shook his hand. he took mine and i saw a pound of pride still lurking underneath his defeated eyes. i asked if he needs any help and he replied that he’s just waiting for some friends from the bronx. i then asked if he needs to go to the bronx, prepared to give him my metrocard and even my beer money if he wants cash. he said his thanks adding that he just needs to wait a bit more – all this in very descent english with a mixture of spanglish when he gets carried away. he hasn’t began to stink and his longsleeves are still tucked in his khaki pants. his leather shoes looked okay and three pens are resting on his polo’s pocket. he wears a leather watch with matching leather belt. a pencil pusher by the looks of it. i asked him again if he needs any help, emphasizing on the *any* and he said he will come to me if he needs help after profuse thank yous.

i don’t really know his story except that he doesn’t belong in the streets. i can only speculate and watch through my window. fuck.

achieving verticality

after the alien abduction, i was finally able to walk beyond the library, making it 17 blocks which means it was another 17 blocks on the way home. if i can do it tomorrow until thursday it will be good enough as a prep for a friday walk to times square with its 35 blocks one way (not to mention guiding icel and katheeeya next month, plus dog walking when winter comes). bradbury weather is coming, the cold and the chill have been making appearances and i actually needed a jacket and a sock for my sanuk to walk. sidewalk vendors have began selling unsculpted pumpkins, and some stores already have halloween themes.

i remember: this is the first time i’m not going to bicol for the feast of the dead.

i’ll miss going to the province and drinking over tombstones with my police and criminal friends while street urchins do a hamlet with the accidental skulls popping up from shallow graves. but, there’s always the thought of lacing apples with razors to distribute to the kids. hehehe.

dreams

i should be writing but fuck it, i’m on leave until october when bradbury weather descends.

from the many dreams last night, two were saved in my memory upon waking.

dream 1:

i’m in a quadrangle of rooms with doors that open to each other. in the middle of these rooms is an ancient piano. i sit down and play and notice that the sound is coming out wrong. i get up and open the thing that covers the strings and lo and behold – inside is a reptile, flayed and ready for the cooking (i somehow know that it was presented the way dressed chickens are displayed – dead but the thought of food is registered by the brain instead of mortality). this morphs into…

dream 2:

a body of water where two men are each on top of big, black rocks. the water is blue green, unmoving and deep. the rocks are jutting out of the water – they’re not riverbanks nor islets. so i go to the first man and i see that he is using his left hand’s thumb fingernail to carve a skull on the rock. the other one is also doing the same thing – left hand, thumb, fingernail, forming a skull. they completely ignore me as they go about their art and simultaneously, as if construction workers hearing the bell at the end of the shift, they stand up and leave.

i’m still not touching a single bottle this month.

no country for old men again

there’s this old man in longsleeves and khakis hugging his backpack as he slept on a bench in one of the breakfast places at the block. 

this morning, when i went with joy as she hailed a cab, he was standing at the corner as if waiting for a cab too.

an hour after, when chris and me had breakfast and even by the time that he needed to go the airport, he was till there at the same corner.

not ignoring the principles of rhythm and rhetoric, when i passed by the same corner for the third time to go to the library, lords, he was still there.

sights like this still bothers me. and even with warnings aplenty about approaching strangers and being kind and shit and only to be thanked with a lawsuit, i still feel useless like a limped dick. i don’t know – maybe this paranoia that nothing can prevent us from joining their ranks is still part of culture shock. 

so i’ll be noting things like this because by the time this no longer bothers me, it would mean i’ve been here too long.

like mulder’s 9 minutes but for 24 hours

we did it for science. the premise was: could the piss sold as beer get us drunk?

four pitchers and four bottles from 2 bars and 8 hours after, we were abducted by aliens and beamed back different. like, we triggered the carbon monoxide alarm by sheer breath power alone. achieving verticality took a major effort. the only missing symptom is the headache akin to pulling teeth without novocaine. the last time i felt like this was during the wake of my father-in-law.

other strange phenomena that night:

• i fell on my ass on the pavement – no evidence except for a broken watch.

• i allegedly checked the physical mailbox at 2 am

• chris allegedly is on the way out with knox’ skateboard and his luggage – at 2 am with no flight confirmation

• i allegedly puked 3 times – and swallowed the listerine that joy made me gurgle.

• chris puked and clogged the sink – this has some corroborating visual evidence the next morning.

gods, i’m not touching beer until november – including the three cans of pale pilsen chris gave me. 

thanks to sunny for the shirts!!! winners!!!

the enfant terrible of science

the thing that i love about the nypl is the variety of selections from fiction to non-fic, audiobooks, dvds, lit crit, biography, etc…the whole caboodle. 

when i returned another dvd (the descent – still gives me the heebies) i roamed about the library scanning the magazines and just as i was about to go vamoose, i saw this title in the new releases shelves:

as a long time reader of fortean times (the web edition at least)  i felt my loins turn to water again and checked the book out. 

i’m now ready for the weekend. which starts tomorrow with a drink at noon in the company of white-b whose presence, i have just learned earlier, will be under time pressure courtesy of an airport etd countdown. well, we can always order by the pitcher.

realms

i felt my dick move when i returned the DVDs to the library and found this still sizzling on the shelves.

i heart nypl.

doing a holden

sepember 9 did my day – rainy and chilly and windy. perfect for going out on a mission to drink. the missus took a day off and we had lunch at the place proven to have san miguel beer – momofuko. the lunch crowd was thinning when we arrived. no wait for both the table and the food. the usual pork belly on buns and noodles. san miguel rocked. only that my first order would be the last as the stocks run out. i settled for lagunitas, which i only drank half. we slept the afternoon off and the texts and calls from joy’s friends and officemates came pouring in. i whipped out a wokful of pancit canton. somebody brought a cake and the usual afterwork chikka ensued. a promotion, a bunos, a case dismissal, a visa approved, a notice of termination, the usual ofw drama. i was getting buzzed from one of the bottles of wine joy gave me so i tuned out surfing, updating my itunes. i played in my head what could be happening if i am at sa guijo this very day. well…i’m still grateful, very much so for the facebooks messages and the phone calls – sunny, whose voice i didn’t recognize and maia and cosico and katheeeya – the emperor is evil. so, thank you. 

we are living in a digital world – joy showed me transaction receipts of her gifts (aside from the beer and the bottles of wine) still lost in cyberspace: a MoMA membership and the ray-ban i’ve been obsessing with. yey! somebody also gave us wicked tickets. not bad for getting a year older.

four minutes before midnight

the one thing that i did to mark my bithday-something that i’ve never done before-was finally done.

no, leather and latex as well as minors and midgets weren’t involve.

i miss san miguel beer terribly and all the drinking this day usually brings. i miss my friends, too. 

that’s it. i suddenly feel older.

my weiner is bigger than your weiner

a fair at the nearest avenue spared me the effort of cooking lunch (although dinner awaits with a demand for menudo). the usual weiner with onions and pepper overload. bought a plant for the house and camo caps as modeled by the national guards for the legions of fans of this blog – all three of them. for myself, i got a CD from a subway musician, *heth and jed* who calls their music “jambient guitar.” doh. *sigur ros* has “slow-mo rock.” whoever is coming up with these terms has a future in copywriting. speaking of music, something rey (vocals, guitar, lyrics of mistula) said to me years ago while we’re still in basic advertising that if mozart is alive today, he’d be into heavy metal was just declared official:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080905/wl_uk_afp/lifestylebritainmusicpsychology;_ylt=Au7zsJavyOO5oW7GktWSVKoDW7oF

it can rain all the time

yesterday was a bit gloomy, the exact opposite of freshmen crowding the cheap pizzerias near union square where i picked up the breadwinner. that, after committing a sin of not buying a book at the strand – there was a tom picirilli paperback plus a reissue of *a canticle for leibowitz* but the backlog of reading books both borrowed and bought must be dealt with not to mention the bitch called writing. alas, the self-imposed deadline nears and i’m not even confident. not to mention the missus who’s more demanding than any creative traffic i’ve ever met, demanding to see a page every so often as proof that i’m not just jerking around.

so no pizza, but there was asahi beer plus a decent udon and maki for dinner before it became another amazing race at the subway.

today, the angels are into a pissing contest due to hannah’s cuba flight. the rains came at around 1 ayem and hasn’t let down since making it very difficult to clean the house. equally difficult is resisting the craving for sinigang. rain versus stomach and stomach wins and it’s a trip to the produce store manned by a pinay affected with a noo york accent. that comic relief was immediately wiped out by technostress. this all HD stuff is giving me a hangover without a sip of whiskey. (sidebar: a law has already been passed that all TV broadcasts should be in HD within the year – huzzah for the lobbyists!) a live chat with customer care that directs you to a phone number made my blood boil. at least we’ve got some sinigang na b.

apple – shift – 4

the thing that makes macintosh rule.

go, leave your shit in cyberspace, i am fucking watching you.

i know this will taste like shit but what the hell

they look cute, and that’s all. i don’t even know why i’m drinking this abomination called light beer. and the weirdness continues: after seven months and eight zits, the grocery girl asked for some ID.

i hope white b would come here sooner so that at least there’ll be two of us cursing this water sold as beer.

ennui, anyone?

and then we came to the end again

*the learners* by chip kidd was my reading material throughout the rhode island trip and it was advertising nostalgia overload, like *and then we came to the end* without the cynicism. i haven’t seen the tv show *mad men* but it think it’s of the same era.

and while on the trip, the inbox went abuzz with the AOY results. bbdo-g got it this time. what a surprise as i was hoping jwt would win – then again international wins only account for 5 per cent of best in creative. this came in my mind immediately: after all these years, the cheater in the class finally made it to the honor roll. only three more straight wins before the disruption record can be, well, disrupted.

and since this post is about advertising, one of the most anticipated TV event this fall is the relaunch of windows vista, done by crispin porter + bogusky, arguably the world’s coolest agency. eskimos have better chance of selling an ice cube than a mac based shop sell microsoft. but this is bogusky the man. i hope they pull it off.

behind the cut

the macbook has an *all images file*…managed to grab a copy of the pics. turned out that there are 1,417 pictures after all.

samples:

the destination is divinity itself.

tastes like water…but i got buzzed after two pitchers. pwede na.

what’s better than clams? clams deep fried in batter. my doctor’s gonna spank me.

true blood…i tried…but after two bites, i decided to have it remade.

cthulhu worshipper.

from the depths of the oceans rose a cthulhu overlord.

where the ancient ones will land.

an ancient car in an ancient town.

a carcass of a cthulhu minion…lovely.

the fog came at midnight.

read between the sign…

and know that cthulhu is everywhere.

goodbye cruel world.

some are born thinkers, sailors, soldiers, spies.

for some reason, i love this photo.

like finding nemo, the unanimated version. 

for dante.

one of the bills posted at a signpost at college hill.

a very popular school – lots of public sculptures. i suspect half the grafitti and stickers and tags and tattoo designs (there seems to be a parlor at every other street) littering at every corner are from studes and alums of this school. and then my 2gb became full that i have to borrow another camera.

so.

the weekend in rhode island, h.p. lovecraft’s (the only writer that neil gaiman calls as *rock and roll*) home for most of his mortal life. one item off the top of my lists to see and do (way above hollywood and vegas) in the US of A was ticked off. the only thing that i regret was not knowing where my favorite living author, caitlin r. kiernan lives. maybe in another time.

ps:

 

for rica…if the upper crust would stop passing the grey poupon, the beer would have been served sooner. he!

cthulhu

paid a visit to lovecraft.

the only thing that survived out of 300+ plus pics worth 2 gb were his memorial markers. 2 fucking pictures.

i hate ifuckingphoto.

must be the curse of the cthulhu.