HOGWARTS RELIVED

This is the story of 6 angels and a mischievous imp, of dead cats marinated in formalin, beaus that came and went, and a frayed toothbrush in the back pocket that smelled of the BPI Enigma being escalated for mediation --- moments reminisced during a lunch of kare-kare, tiim na manok, and lumpiang sariwa at Lingap Kalikasan where once upon a time, a memory vomited Tanduay Rhum through his nose.   

It was unfortunate that the enthusiasm for a full reunion was hostaged by a petty domestic tiff whose intensity was measured by indicators of tinumis, kaldereta, and reheated lechon --- the prologue and epilogue for a compendium of impact stories and the procurements in Phnom Penh in response to the inquiries from Melbourne.

 

The acacia tree still stands, a Zen garden has sprouted from the seismic fractures of Room 305 where tilapia and carabaos are now raised for an aberrant ice cream that is sold at the Old Market --- a brand that will stay despite its relocation, an upgrade, and a post-evaluation angst that echoed from the walls of a diner in Munoz where the Water Boy from Bakal 2 supped on 3 cans of beer.   

 

Our Hogwarts predated Harry Potter by 6 years --- the Pensieve where memory strands from the last 36 years were revisited including the Phantom Biker's daily morning ritual of disposing trash on the way to the bazaar, to the Siever that now stands guard at the Main Gate near the place called Marketing where the ageless Polly Jacob holds court prior to the reenactment of a 1990 moment at the Admin that was celebrated with an ice cream-topped banana cake in Talavera. 

We are D'JARMMS and reliving us in Hogwarts concluded with Episode 5 in the shadows of a subterranean garage  where commuters traversing a cutoff road by-passed the community shopping mall for a direct route to a nature park and a legal counselling of the 3rd Degree.

THE BPI ENIGMA

Dear Bank of the Philippine Islands,

You should take down your slogan of "Building a better Philippines --- one family, one community at a time" because it does not reflect what your people actually do.

Pressuring me to pay 342,270.65 pesos of disputed credit card charges that I did not authorize, execute, and gained from despite plausible explanations, and premised on "archaic, and legally untenable adhesion clause" within your Terms and Conditions is a misanthropic, uncompassionate, and callous manisfesttion of your corporate parasitism that only reinforces the prevailing impression of banks being heartless corporate beasts.

I dispute, I depose, and I protest such inequity in the presence of Craftsmen and the Thursday Group.

This is gross injustice, a Strava glitch running over empty egg trays, an erronous water bill snatching a purple bag of provisions from the streets of Bakal 1 and Bakal 2 to evolve a final workshop and procurement in Phnom Penh into flavors of a reheated lumpiang shanghai, sweet pork barbecue, fried tilapia, and three interpretations of the pata.  

The evil shadow of thhis monstrous adversity stole the alleviating sense of relief from succesfully petitioning for reinforced concrete design, the approval of Year 5 goals, the resolution of a persistent reimbursement, and the confirmation of a hybrid work arrangement that got the inbox purged through the initiation of a consultancy extension and the clarification of indiators that will measure Swiss and Nordic donors.

I pray that the other bank will be easier and reassuring like a recent ultrasound result diagnosis that justified Friday's sinadag for a straightforward medical reimbursement submission to avoid the infamy of BPI,  a memory best forgotten and glossed with a surreal afternoon in the park one rainy Sunday afternoon in Zaragoza where the first episode was casted.

THE RICE BASKET

The rice baskets were invisible on that particular day, sheathed in cheap Christmas wraps to be traded as gifts.

Large baskets for a tub of pinispisan na kambing and a drum of inihaw na bangus, medium sized for a pot of sinigang na hipon, and small ones for a case of  light beer and a flask of Irish whiskey, refreshments shared with friends as antidotes for a scuttled  meeting in Bangkok that exposed the fickleness of the RoP and rudderless boats lost in cash strapped currents that should be enough reason for tansformative partnerships to step in as the EU trends and cuts for Asia loom.  

Strava worked once but went kaput thrice despite a precautionary safeguarding broadcast of a late night JET narrative to a community of practice about a case and and a scoping, synonyms of weekly and fortnigtly meetings that were convened to ritualize a change prospectus, accept edits to an influencing strategy, and address the remaining vestiges of Kuningan.

There was an extension before the interview on how Malayantoc's crisp currency teleported a case of red wine to Lupao.

Christ's blood drawn thrice not from green bottles but tubed as glycated hemoglobin, fuel for an azure beam of light that burned glaucomic eyes with the aroma of toasted leftover lechon and kaldereta in Bakal 2, gaudy as the Munoz holiday lights but fatal like fried siomai, cheese sticks, flavored french fries, dull nachos, reheated barbecues, and pretentious shawarma.

Thousand bills were disbursed from city hall on Sunday but one is not enough for a rice basket of a month's medication that a lotto win can have by the truckload, ample like a butcher's mammary glands, flavorful like a chauffeur's nilagang baka, haunting like a headmaster's carnal soft lips...   

THE NARRA TREE

We were Batch 89-B, saplings like the narra tree.

The narra tree that accepted us after the final initiation.

An initiation that relegated the 7th edition of the AWG to a welcome slap to the face and a paddle upon the posterior thigh where purple theories of change popped out.

Changes that drew carnage from my palms and cultivated bruises in my back as the ASEAN was spoken to about JET and civic space.  

Spaces, like a 2-minute station for catching up on SP that was rewarded with a royalty of $1,650 as full payment (October) for elevating the I-JET project. 

Projects that are the equivalent of a mental torture prompting refreshers on the code of conduct for an Indian Run and a GDPR package.  

A package that smelled of Samar burning from 5 biking raids to the dilapidated park and a barrage of pledges for a catered lunch codenamed Oplan SSS for me and her. 

Her unemployed, my stale peanuts, reheated paksiw na bangus, tinned corned beef, a birthday party for the dead, and deep fried lapu-lapu  within the vicinity of Bakal 2. 

It's been 46 years and the Narra tree has matured.

Matured and dead but not the old friends I met again after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or even 30 years.

Years of absence that were crooned by a fat pussy singing into half-empty brandy bottles amidst the crunch of danggit from Lubang Island, the sweetness of patupat from Pozzorubio, and the acidity of kinilaw na bangus from Manaoag...

THE TAROT CARD READER

There was a journeyman who travelled the world in search of life, a poet who fancied Nora Aunor and ate banana cue for lunch in his younger hungry days, an eccentric guy wearing a combination of old-style barong and jeans who invited me to a Century Tuna dinner in his blacked-out apartment once upon a time, someone who has learned to divine our lesser and greater secrets by simply shuffling Tarot Cards in Kilometer 0, who honored us with a dinner in fancy Provenciano along pricey Maginhawa Street.   

I would have wanted to ask him to read the cards and discern what we were thinking during our last bike rides of the holiday season.

Or perhaps where can I find the best dinakdakan at the SIDCOR Sunday Market, or a Lao beer mug that may be for sale in one of the stalls, or if Bulan will be able to complete his Psychology-Sociology course in the 4 years that we have agreed for him to do?

And whatever happened to Bulan's novel?

What was the fate of Paula and Claudia after the war?

Was Don Perico a Mason who later collaborated with the Japanese like his brothers Jose Laurel and Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo?

What would have happened if the spinster sisters sold the portrait to the American buyer?

But we talked only about old times, of LAHAR and the people who changed our lives, of growing old and the upcoming essay workshops.

Then it was time for the Tarot Reader to go.

So I consulted a Tarot to find the shortest way possible to his hotel.

It's called Waze.

KILOMETER 0

"0" for Oxfam in Myanmar at 
34 Aung Taw Mu Lane corner Govel Hill Avenue Road
Golden Valley Bahan Township, Yangon

where I took my shoes off, wore a sash, waved, and had a meeting with a Caucasian, an Asian-Caucasian, and an Asian. 

But was that at Hotel M instead at
29 KanBawZa Avenue Street
Buhan Township, Yangon

where we broke bread and documents with a Filipina and a Myanmarese and came up an agreement?

Or perhaps at Changi Airport at
Airport Boulevard in Singapore

2,995 kilometers from Yangon
2,378 kilometers to Manila

Kilometer Zero for SQ flights
where I finally caught up with a Hong Konger and Task 3 of a work plan. 

Finally Kilometer 0

at Willy's Place 
in one of the Abars of San Jose City
with an all-Novo Ecijano cast

where the Prophet autographed his books
after Kilometer 0 in CLSU
and a sojourn to the memories of Capintalan. 

Kilometer 0 in Ground 0

where it all began
where Balong came face-to-face with a Mad Hatter
perhaps thinking "what is so with my Ninong"?

SHAKEN, RATTLED, AND ROLLING

July 16, 1990.

There was a sudden jolt followed by a long shake and a dreadful moaning sound. Powdered concrete burst from cracking walls and we all ran out to open space. I remember vividly --- the first person out was the Secretary of the Board of Regents who was pitching for our History professor, something I always remind him when we became frequent mahjong protagonists. The Dean of the College of Arts Sciences was killed by falling debris when a wing of the University Library collapsed. Hundreds more died that day in Cabanatuan City and Baguio City.

These remembrances came during the Metro Manila-wide earthquake drill and I wonder if we could be as calm and organized when the real thing hits us. From my experience, the instinct is to run out for dear life.  

July 26, 2006.

I posted my first blog and 527 more followed across 9 years after more than 200 colonial churches and thousands of miles across the world. I was running out of old churches, I sometimes get tired of the pansit, but I blogged on. In personal commemoration of this milestone, I treated myself to a lunch of pansit palabok and avocado...

...and with AGT broke another 68.8 kilometers, to rattle the bones, through Munoz, Guimba, and Sto. Domingo. The world after all, at least according to me, is measured in terms of old churches documented, the variety of pansit taste-tested, and the biking kilometers earned.

Then came August and the annual bowling tournament. The General came, as always, leaving his stars and cares behind, very casual, obliging the the usual request for photo groupies, moving from one table to another, bantering. He would usually ask for a cigarette but he quit smoking. He was indeed a Big Man but to us, he is just one of the boys.  

And so the bowling pins rolled, inside, while the beer bottles keep rolling, outside. 

THE [REAL] SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

Walter Mitty is not Walter Mithoff.

Neither is he that "ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs" which Wikipedia cited The American Heritage Dictionary to have defined.

Walter Mitty is in fact an Ilocano-Tagalog born in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya some 45 years ago.

And he was first named Super Lolo for his seeming penchant for unmatched segunda manos, not because he liked it but because he had no other choice then, before jersey No. 6 of the legendary Jawo-era Ginebra San Miguel bad boys transformed him to the infamous Ampalayo whose fondness for the Holy Smoke and rustling free ranging poultry eclipsed the only two points he scored in an amateur basketball league, thus ostracizing him from those who determined what's right from the wrongness of it all.

In Hogwarts, Walter Mitty metamorphosed into Kimat T. Amianan who wrote poetry for an unrequited love, sometimes plagiarizing a line or two, and whoring left and right as the Sons of Lam-ang battled the Triskelion Knights and the ghosts of his sad story.

Thus was begotten Bertong Langis of the Kingdom of Pee who chased shadows until daybreak, gorging on tons of kapal muks and crispy pata and chicharong bulaklak which earned him his name and the stones now swimming inside him, until he reluctantly and then happily retired from it all.

Today, the real Walter Mitty is nameless.

He likes to lunch on sashimi at Dad's and recently Sambokojin, and prefers to wash down his lugaw and tokwa't baboy with ice cold Mountain Dew.

Walter Mitty, aka xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx of the present day, also enjoy watching the sun rise as he goes on chasing shadows with Ariel [Marana] [Carlo] Guieb [Ryan] Tangilig.  

Because he who was born and raised in Bambang prefer to play hide-and-seek with the sun in the uncertain trails of the of the mountains, detesting the boring predictability of the flat lands, regardless of the places where Major Tom took his protein pills and wore his shirts...    

ANG PAGBABALIK NG GOBERNADOR atbp

Siya si Bagis Henry [nakapagitna].


Kilala din siya sa palayaw na "Ukop" (halimlim sa Tagalog].

Si Brod Henry alyas Ukop ang ninong namin sa aming final initiation sa frat noong 1989.

Ngayon lang ulit kami nagkita buhat n'ung grumadweyt siya.

And'un din si Bagis Leo [nakapula at umaabot sa bote ng Emperador Lights] at Bagis Tiki-Tiki [nakaberde, napangalanan dahil madalas daw magsuot noon ng t-shirt na may markang American Tiki-Tiki].

Watalubs pa din si Brod Leo [siya si Leovin Cojuangco noon].

Madalas kong ka-chat pero matagal ko na ding hindi nakita sa personal. 

Dumating din sina Bagis Romeo [PNP, nakapula] na gustong maging Mason, Bagis Rod [PAGASA, nakaputi] na isa nang Mason, at Bagis Darling [nakabughaw at nakatayo, Darlito ang ngalan niya kaya gan'un ang palayaw niya] na hindi Mason.

Siyempre, may long table ng kung ano-ano [tsampiyon ang dala ni Brod Darling na inihaw na baby balyena].

At sabayan kaming kumanta [nakatayo pa, kasi anthem ng frat] ng "Today" ["...while the blossom still clings to the vine..."].

Matagal na panahon bago ako ulit nakadalo sa anniversary at homecoming ng frat.

At napansin kong madami sa mga batang brod and sis ang Tagalog na ang lengguahe...