TRUE PATRIOT LOVE

A rectangle of white, bordered by red, centred within by a leaf all in crimson. Maple in tone. The sight of which gives my heart a small jolt. From a young age, this surge of affection for all that I know, encapsulated so neatly in such an odd form. A tree's own debris, one that falls with the cold that defines our wide land? Why should this stir a young soul with an erotic full force. Perhaps we latched onto our country as we would to our mates -- because it was so damn familiar, recognizable. There.

Being abroad for so long only intensifies notions of sweet special access. This land is my land, not your land. I come from a zone that activates my emotions with notes from a song. I know, I know, you don't have to shout: you do, too. But this is the thing, the 'thing' you can't get -- my place is better, and fuller, and musical in shape, almost aquatic in tone. It does things to me, this place does. Your so-called 'country' may do the same, but not to me, and that distinction exists as the fence I can't cross. You stay on that side; I'll stay on my mine. We'll both sing our own songs, and tear up together, but I won't look over your way, and please, don't glance at my path.

Perhaps this truth that I sense is not as plain and banal as I once believed with such force; that we all hate our own neighbours, and despise those small gaps that remind us of us. My neighbour's fence touches my grass five inches too far; China's ships coast through waters too near to Japan. Cambodia fears (with a fury!) that Thailand covets its land; Canada grumbles at the States' indifferent ennui. The fences look different, their paintjobs unique, but come on. Let's be real. We don't like the looks of those folks in that house next to ours. That's all we need to be real to forge our small hatreds. I once saw this as simple, but now I think not. Something within us demands an allegicance to the land that sustained us.

Yet I think of a 'me' born in my country of birth, but elsewhere, a place that smells of fresh piss, and booze bottles uncapped, freshly drunk, then discarded. Hallways that echo and moan with the clump of tired shoes. Guns fired nearby; drugs snorted so close. My country exists as nature's playground and small lab, but the cities, too, are valid and squalid in equal small measure. Suppose straight from my birth: my land as that building, decrepit and dangerous. When I saw the police patrol those dank streets each night (or not!), what I would think, as a child, of this country so wide? Not for me, that breadth; not for me, that 'nature'. (Of course, urine is natural, as is the need for another small swig of that tiny brown bottle.) If I lay out in bed, and stared at my ceiling, and heard the fresh fight of the couple upstairs, would I feel the pride in my land that sticks with me still?

For now, I'll let the question subside. Easier that way. Best to stare at my flag, and feel that small lump in my throat and know it's not cancer. Instead, it's my country's sweet song rising up from within. Reminding me of my youth, and my hopes that this ground that I tread on allowed me to dream.

Easier that way.

ALMOST AN EXHALE

Into this new year we enter with awe. With trembling? Or resolve. Does the sound of the clock's tick as it tocks past its midnight leave us with dread, or a sense of remorse, a nostalgia for all that we did not get done in our past. Or: something larger, richer, the hourglass turned upside down, the white tiny crystals beginning their descent into the hard pit that awaits their quick fall. (Going into one door always leads to such thoughts.)

We know it's all arbitrary. The dates themselves; our lives, especially. One moment begins where the other must end. Your life finds its true groove just before it completes the last spin of some cycle that conveniently, intentionally, winds up its rotation where you least expect locks on a window that will open no more. I'm born, you're born; he croaks, she lingers on. Bitter at life for letting her live. Is there a pattern at play? Literally, I mean? A round of parcheesi for one, whose rules and small pieces are kept by a God as a child covets toys? Perhaps chance is the facade that masks its own pattern. With God as the artist who paints this sly shield. Protecting his board game, while we turn to mystics for solace and booze for some syntax, a grammar of empathy that gives us our due. (Or what we think we deserve.)

Yet there are moments when thoughts such as these feel as futile as punching the wind and expecting to hear a low moan in response. Life has a whack of its own, silent but present, that tempts me to doubt my own cynical ploy. The cool air of winter infects our old bones with a constant assault almost cheerful and coy in its relentless sharp jabs. How hot is the room that we enter after such a chill joust! That warmth of a house that welcomes us back from December's raw kiss, tongueless but slick with its own frigid spit. Off goes the coats, down with our gloves, our hands rubbing quickly, starting some fire.

In that moment when winter is shown the slam of a door, something inside of me shifts and then settles. Almost an exhale. A battle has been, if not won, at least postponed. Hot chocolate awaits. The clock by the fireplace does its slow thing. Mechanical, yes, but constant. Progressive. Spring, far off, approaching. I can feel time as my ally, at least for that moment.

Happy New Year.

June 2, 1962

An old musty book will always have charms, but one whose front page has a date handwritten in ink wields a strange special power that yanks me back to a past. Not my past. Not your past. Somebody else's past. That person who owned this same book that rests in my hands once had a strong urge to mark and reflect on a time that is dead. Days long ago can't help but die out like a species whose end is unfortunate but still real. Time takes everything, eventually.

June 2, 1962.

That's the day in red ink that is written on the first fresh white page of an old copy of D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love I picked up in Baguio a few weeks ago. In neat, legible script. A women's script, is what I'm thinking. Some stranger who I'll never meet once had a new book, and wanted to write that day down for some reason that's lost.

I'm already mourning. Who, I'm not sure, and what, I don't know. My father was thirteen, almost fourteen years old on that day. My mother not much older. Me, not yet here. It was a day that I'm sure had some sunshine to lighten one's mood. The book's owner was looking for a something quite serious. You don't dip in and out of D.H.Lawrence. I hope he or she found what was needed and wanted.

1962! The Beatles were not yet the Beatles we know. John Kennedy was still alive with the hope of all hopes. The moon was a crater we'd not yet embraced. Vietnam just a country, and a far away one at that.

Oh, I wish this woman had jotted down her first name, and not just the date. (In my mind she's a woman, young and carefree, her school year all done, the summer arrived with a blaze of bright sun.) She may still be out there, this woman. If she was, let's say, twenty at the time of her short simple jot, she now would be sixty-eight years old, with most of her life already lived and endured. She is no longer young, but I can imagine, today, at this moment, she is reading. In her bed. On the couch. Content. Anonymous, but alive.

As I type these words on this screen, quickly, in order not to forget what I so want to say, I hope she feels a strange twinge in her head or her heart. A jolt from her past, from her hand in mine and back once again. That same hand that held a red pen with a strong central grip. An odd psychic shock may give her a zap. Women In Love, she'll think. Why, I haven't thought about that book in quite some time.

And then she'll stand up and stretch and pour her parched throat a good glass of water. Just a thought, passing. But enough of a moment to link us somewhat. That book is still here, I hope that instant can whisper, not in words but in essence . It's still here, and so am I, and so are you.

WE ARE ALL STEVE MARTIN'S ORIGINAL AUDIENCE (IN THE COSMIC SENSE)

In Steven Martin's wonderfully entertaining and insightful (as the critics might say) memoir Born Standing Up, he discusses the origin of his early stand-up routine, a performance that left the audience more than a little puzzled, if not pissed. Martin had once learned in a university class that the punchline of your classic joke was designed to relieve the tension that had been built up through the telling of the tale; Martin's genius was to ask: What if you didn't release that tension at all? Told punchline-less jokes, in other words? Today we're used to comedy that comes in various abstract, even unfunny forms -- but Martin was one of the first to make jokes that were so bizarrely unfunny, in the conventional sense, that they thereby reached a whole new level of hilarity that had never been truly seen, nor attempted, in the western world. He pulled our legs, and it took us awhile to figure out what, exactly, he was yanking, and why.

Which gets me thinking: Is God doing the same thing?

Perhaps we -- meaning us, the world, the galaxy, the universe, space and time and all its divergent variants -- are merely a joke without a punchline. All of our searching leads back to ourselves. Most of are yearnings are left unfulfilled. We have learned more about science than any other culture in the history of humanity, yet the divide between believers and rationalists has never been wider. Everything is separated.

Most of our thinking is that of the traditional-joke variety: we set up (or are given), a scenario, and we follow it through to its inevitable conclusion. The result is usually not funny -- but it's always there. The test is taken, the score comes back. The vows are made, the marriage is legal. The punch is thrown, the cops are called. Cause, effect, period. The result may make us uneasy in the deepest parts of ourselves, but we are given an ending that decides things for us.

Except.

That greatest of endings, our lives, remains a mystery. The final punch-line we're waiting for, dreading, longing for, evading. A great joke is all about withdrawal, withholding, not giving up the treasure we hold dear, so perhaps the last moment of life will leave us in stitches.

I wonder.

What if we're all part of a grand cosmic scheme whose plan is in part a joke left untold? We may be Steve Martin's original audience, writ large, for eternity. Waiting for the gag to begin. Bewildered when we realize that the act has not only begun, but it's over, and the headliner has already moved on to the next puzzling bit. Time is so relative that even a god may contain within his pinky finger a span of light years that passes for him in the length of a piss. Perhaps this god is telling a joke whose answer, when (of if) it's revealed, will puzzle us even more than we're puzzled already.

I just hope that it's at least a little bit funny.

REVIVALS

Strange are the weeks when the days bring rain on a regular cycle. Round about three, four o'clock. Every day. Often a light, sometimes heavy, the rain comes down and does what it does. Slickens things up. Cools things off. Departs an hour later, waving goodbye with its wispy wet fingers and promising to return as soon as it can. I wait for its arrival as one waits for a friend who picks you up without asking.

Relatives are always strange, but 'strange' is also relative. It's only odd because I come from a place where the seasons are textured and tailored to suit everyone's fancy. Don't like snow? Wait four, five months -- you'll get some spring sunshine to melt off your slush. Hate the heat? Be patient, child -- the fall's crimson colours will dot the sky in scatters of vivid small dots, making everything cool, or as much as it can. (Don't believe me that the leaves somehow affect the weather that arrives? That's your pregorative. Me? I trust in the illogic that transcends all our convictions.) Where you are born is where the world sets its standards and your own sense of balance.

What to make of place that has, for me, only two valid seasons? A wet one whose water is sporadic but steady; a dry one whose heat is intense, flawed but not fatal. And up in the mountains, here, in the north of the country, the weather is pleasant, almost cordial in nature. Down south, five hours south, in the heart of Manila, the heat is a jacket that rests on your shoulders. Not the bludgeon-style heat of Tokyo in August; the Philippines' heat will sap your energy, to be sure, but also leave dignity behind as nature's one courtesy. You can still feel like a person in the heat of this capital. I can exist far up here in the country's one north, or shuffle around in that heat but not drop like a dog at the end of a hunt. These seasons perplex me, but not because anything about them is especially complex, or peculiar, or even intrinsic -- weather is weather, wherever you are -- but because my body's own rhythms are jolted, then broken. I knew that time has a way of breaking such standards; until I travelled, I didn't know that distance, too, could punch a little damage.

Invigorating, though. Early October, with shorts and a t-shit. The prospect of the Christmas to come and a sun that's still shining. Something inside me knows that I'm still quickly aging, that the mirror's harsh truth is vivid and valid, but living away from my home, from weather's bored clockwork, provides a tilt to the years that somehow allows my dead youth to revive, then endure.

ALL BEFORE LUNCH

Rare are the days when scenes from a cop show come into your life. The boys in blue do not often ask you to help lift a corpse that was found in the alley beside your fish shop; the detective in charge, with his bedhead of hair and an unlit cigar dangling from tiny pursed lips will not ask you questions and look for deception. The police that we see are usually driving quite slowly through quiet side streets, or pulling us over to ask for I.D. Would we want it any other way? To ask for upheaval is to invite the untidy, and who wants more chaos in this fucked-up old world?

Unless, of course, such an intrusion is an oddly benign interruption that surprises, then perplexes, then gradually shifts into that pleasantly puzzling offshoot of the status quo that every so often asks us to pull up a chair and take in the show. No matter how brief it may be.

Just beside the Jollibee chicken franchise at the corner of Session Road a group of old and young women sit and sell fruit. Fresh fruit, I'm presuming, with varying varieties of bananas and strawberries, apples and oranges, alongside some other small food that I don't know how to quite name. (One of the unexpected pleasures of living in various Asian countries is that you come across an inordinately astounding numbers of fruits that you didn't know existed.) They sit there so often -- meaning, constantly, forever -- that I never take much notice of them, unless I decide to grab a bunch of bananas for an afternoon snack.

Last Friday, though, I sure as hell caught wind of what they were up to, and I suddenly realized, roundabout the time the police truck slid to a halt with a surprisingly quick jolt, that there are layers to life here above and beyond me. The truck stopped; a handful of men and women in faded blue uniforms leaped out, if only half-heartedly; the young women behind him, the ones with the fruit, leaped up from their perches and, giggling, grabbed their boxes of goods and raced across the street and somewhere not here, laughing the laugh that you laugh when a game that you know is played well and played often.

And me, standing there, watching two forces at work, two groups that were partners in one all too strange new game. Strange, for me. A game, for them? I don't know. What I saw was this: A handful of cops jumping out of their ride in a half-hearted, half-assed, completely half-whatever manner. A few of them seemed to have billy-clubs raised; a couple of them looked like they'd rather be watching cartoons or cockfights. Their gait was casual, their pace rather slow. They didn't run so much as lope. This all happened in the span of five seconds and ten feet. (Life's confusions usually are that short and that narrow, I'm finding.) Within that time, the ladies bundled up their boxes of fruit and raced away -- 'away', being, literally, ten, fifteen feet away. Within sight of the cops. Who didn't chase them. Who watched them run. Who smiled and laughed themselves. And me, wondering.

Seems like, somebody was going through the motions. The usual bunch of somebodies, maybe. Official, anonymous ones. They were told, I'm guessing, to go check out what was going on at the corner with the fruit-sellers, who, presumably, were not supposed to be there, had no permission to be there, and yet were there, as they've always been, every day, forever. I've seen the same thing happen with English schools run by Koreans and staffed by the locals. Somebody comes to inspect the place where nobody is supposed to be, yet the people who shouldn't be there are informed of this inspection, and so they hightail it out of there before the inspectors come to inspect. Simple. Circular. The rules are followed and then flouted in a few easy steps. You do what you're told to do.

And me, thinking I've come up with a solution. That I've figured it out. You look at the foreigners as they look at you, and you devise your own theory, and hope that it's true. If it's not, who cares? The day's first few moments have offered a new set of standards. Chips in the china of this still foreign land have been spotted and pondered, and all before lunch.

CONSTANT SOFT FUN

Nine dead (or was it eight, or was it ten?) including the gunman. Blown away. Shot through the heart. A bullet in the head. The details all differ, there to be tracked down and mourned over, discussed with the calm of yesterday's strange weather. I haven't done it. The specifics, I mean. I'll leave such a morbidly clinical task to the police and the families. I speak in generalities, initially, because to mention the names and the weights, the heights and the hair colour of all these poor vicitims begins a long process whose end has no end. How do you classify a person's whole being? Alive, that morning, deceased by their usual bedtime that night. Who can collect all the dreams and sweet heartbreaks that filled each of these souls as a child fills his bucket with sand at the beach? To, and I quote (from whom I'm not sure, the nameless and faceless void of our culture), 'count the human cost', is a process which, if done properly, must topple us over with its own absurd weight.

The cynic inside me throws down the newspaper and rolls his tired eyes, disgusted at the incompetence, at mismanagement, at tardiness, at laziness, at the slow-burning rage of a policeman who turns his own gun on those people he once swore to protect with his life. Dismayed at his own disgust. For here we have weariness, writ large. An oversized example of a soul -- the gunman's -- that has been battered, if not destroyed, by the life that he chose, corrupt as it became, and a soul -- this writer's -- weary of people in general, their weaknesses, their selfishness, their cruelty, their indifference, all that contains and surrounds them, and this comparison between himself and a killer can only disturb this writer even that much more further. Who wants to compare oneself to those that have lost the will to succumb to life's subtle disappointments or grand it's-not-fairs?

For modern psychology insists that we look at this mind and this act and probe them with care, to seek out the dark secrets that led to this end. Perhaps not literally, of course. This man's brain, I am certain, which once was attached to a body that fell to a sniper's swift bullet, is still in the head, in the grave, in our earth. No need to weigh it or slice it to see who he is, the true self, organic in nature, tactile in tissue. No Einstein -- not here.

What is so special about a man who kills eight other souls and their spirits? Nothing! Yes, of course, indeed, it goes without saying, as a matter of course, a bus full of Chinese from Hong Kong held hostage all day in the plaza where the nation's new president spoke mere weeks ago has a quality of pathos, albeit a tabloid one, that creates a good story, international in scope, and allows an example of provocative themes to unfold as we sit comfy on couches: the safety of SWAT teams untrained for such chaos, unfolding live on TV, while countries away these hostages own relatives watch their hurt loved ones while we munch on our snacks. A story that demanded an ending in blood. (Isn't that what prime-time TV offers on each weekday night?) Which we get -- a sniper's sure shot that takes down our mad foe, but this movie-type climax takes place only off-screen! A disappointment as precise as the one that we feel when finding the car window half-open after the first storm of spring.

Suddenly, it's over. In the rain, in the confusion, in the tilted camera angles that hint at access only partial and skewed, we're left with exhausted announcers to fill in the blanks that lead to an anti-climax that offered us death, muted and distant. The days that come soon will give us our fix: nations at war with their words and their sorrows, a movie script's denouement played out for much too much long. We've long since left the theatre behind to piss our sweet piss in the lobby's dank toilets, but the story goes on in the endless end credits that rise up from the screen and into eternity.

What are we left with? A third-world country's soft pleas for understanding and patience. Perhaps I'm not as angry as I should be. I've grown familiar with the pace and the lag between my home and this one. And something larger is at play, even greater than nations, and their frequent huge squabbles. We are, in the end, left with a man and a gun, and a bus full of people. Fill in the name of a country, and watch what would happen. To quantify how to deal with a man at the end of his rope is tantamount to predicting our own fragile ends. We work with our brains, and he works with his, 0nly he has that trigger he can so easily pull. Ba-boom. Cosmic questions of life are reduced to gunpowder. Tour bus heroics end in dark endings. To make sense of the senseless? To prevent one's mad rush to his doom?

I can't follow these roads, for I know not where they lead, nor, should I follow them, how to get back to the start of this land's constant soft sun and its light that can soothe as it burns, turning white skin to red in subtle slow shades.