Society is a Wall

“There are enough social commentators with low-level brain power now. Why should I add my high-level snarl?”
- from "The Big Pot Game", in Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski.

Because these are tales of the ordinary, Bukowski only makes it seem easy. Not all storytellers succeed in putting a high entertainment value along with philosophical depth via a distinctive literary style in the triumph of drunks, exhausted workers, slackers, race-horse gamblers, rapists, robbers or so-called "degenrates." There is an effortless, out-of-this-world and unsociable genius this makes this collection distinguish itself. They say it's called "transgressive fiction." It's a compelling fiction that sees society as a wall that we need to leap over. This is how green the grass is on the other side.

He sometimes spoke in the tone of a spiritual incarnate of Carlos Castaneda (Don Juan: A Yaqui Way to Knowledge) and Robert Prisig (Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I've only read two of his works (The first being Post Office), but my personal take is that while Bukowski's work is not Beat Literature, it beats the hell out of the Beat Literature of Kerouac and Burroughs. And I say that because it has a lot less of a pretentious appeal.

Bukowski had that knowing, that maturity, that freedom in his willingness to be unembarrassed. His is a drunkenness that deserved following. Like his characers,I'd like to see him finally get the Nobel Prize.

The truth that the text reveals is that he got drunk and saw through drunkenness. This is an enlightenment that cannot be blurred by the bevy. What’s between the lines is a counter-punch to alcohol. Each time he gets knocked out, the writing is a beautiful bounce back. The insights remain sharp and relevant up until now.

All the other drunk or high writers never wrote like him because they barely saw through the drunkenness. If anyone else wrote this, it may have just come out as annoying.


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At some point in life drinking has brought me to many low points. My confidence builds, and it oversizes inevitably to arrogance, and it leads me to the eventual regret.

I look at my face and the lines have gone deep. There are wrinkles in my eyebrows and my hair has begun the protracted process of thinning out. While I am growing the ambitious goals of lessening my drinking, I’ve also grown the natural humility after these thirty years, and drinking since my teens. I still drink as though I have not picked up anything after these years, six bottles on an empty stomach, or mixing dark/clear liquor, outpacing myself. And all that arrogant talk.

So maybe I’ll get drink alone, and in secret. Alone do we battle the devils that are bottled up inside us. Alone should we drink.

So from now on.

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And it was true. The workers were hardly human. Their eyes were glazed, stricken, insane. They laughed at anything and mocked each other continually. Their insides were stamped out. They had been murdered.
p.88, The Stupid Christs

We are putting a lot of priests’ robes on some of these revolutionaries and some of them are very sick fellows bothered with acne, deserted from by their wives…
p.131, A Quiet Conversation Piece

’Hell I worked hard all my life!’ (they think this is virtue, but it only proves a man is a damned fool.)
p. 223, The Big Pot Game

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My "best" picks:


Animal Crackers in my Soup
My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage
Would you Suggest Writing as a Career?
The Great Zen Wedding
Rape! Rape!
A Quiet Conversation Piece
The Big Pot Game
Purple As an Iris
A .45 to Pay the Rent

The Good and The Greed

A few months ago in this not-so-quaint global village, the remains of oil-rich Libya’s four-decade ruler is displayed in a grocery’s onion and vegetable compartment. Before his end, he begged mercy for his life, and he was killed with his son (one among many of his family who got killed by NATO airstrikes). Weeks ago, he commanded his loyalists to fight to the death. He was an eccentric fashion icon, and more importantly he overthrew a monarchy in his younger days as a revolutionary.

The wind has blown us to a season of Arab Springs. In the West, there is a new ideological space being created in the Occupy Movements. That space will be there, even if the Corporations try to crush them or respond by censoring social media or the internet.

Our own country, hungry for a share of righteousness, stops our 9-year President and incumbent Congresswoman from leaving the country to face charges of plunder, electoral fraud, extrajudicial killings, among others. She was in a wheelchair, face covered in a surgical mask, her neck & back supported by an iron brace, looking stripped of leftover dignity. She didn’t get to leave in the many flights she booked that day. After bouts of TROs and Warrants, the drama leads to a Hospital Arrest and a new national soap opera begins in the history of a forgetful country. Her mug shots should be in the front pages of dailies as of this writing. She was the same president who succeeded a preceding president who got pardoned on a plunder case.

Tired, middle-class workers like me will open these pages in Starbucks branches that’s peppered all over the city. Every cup of coffee earns a sticker. They are collecting these stickers, spending their hard-earned two grand on coffee to get a journal that’s supposed to represent their prestige. This is under the guise, of course, of making a charitable donation through a very small portion of the earnings. The earnings should have belonged to those who worked for it in the first place: the third-world farmers who grew the beans, the supply-chain laborers who transported it, and the contractual servers who took the orders and put them in red cups.

If you go to the counter clutching a book, the barista will ask you about the book you’re reading. So much goodness turns into so much greed in this little global village. I show the Barista my book. He mispronounces Bukowski. And then upsells for pastry. Somewhere in the world, a low-level manager tasks his team to gather observations and feedback. He draws some charts, writes his analysis and recommendations. Behind that feigned interest in my book was a module, a script that’s supposed to make me feel engaged as a consumer. It’s supposed to make me feel good and return to this store, or any other branch. There’s another manager who oversees this practice as a standard is set to all stores. That is even taken to another level, because satisfaction is not only measured by desire to return to the store, but to have me recommend and promote the store to my friends. Superficial Corporate politeness will eat out what’s left of genuine human interest and sincerity.

There’s good, and there’s greed. I imagine, looking out to the bay, drinking imported Arabica coffee thinking about the world and its leaders and its springs and movements. How peaceful the water can look, as excrement underneath it mixes in and invisibly seeps.

Running Against

300 or so runners. That's the number of runners who, back in 2008, gave a flying fuck about the Nike 10k Human Race. It was my first, and so far worst 10k at 1:08 in an official race. It's the one that sculpted my backbone, the one that reinforced my metaphorical outlook of running. In the 2008 run, registration was free.

8,000. That's the limit of registered runners allowed to join the 2011 Nike We Run Manila.

Registration fees are up to PHP1,300 per participant. I arrived almost an hour early, but this orange dri-fit tee-clad crowd was so thick I only got to cross the starting line 3 minutes after the gun start. This choking-hot afternoon race was not the race to earn your best 10k PR. But yes, with the running bug gone viral in the city a lot of people are a lot faster.

Nike is one of the corporations we love to hate. The swoosh is part of one of the logos in that 1% Occupy Wall Street is struggling against. Nike must make gazillions selling cheaply manufactured shoes at expensive price tags and exploit laborers in the process. Needless to say, they invest heavily in branding, advertising and marketing and I must be an idiot for buying the idea and slipping comfortably in invented fictions such as "Hit the road, not the wall" or terminologies such as "Dynamic Support" or "Lunar Glide." I even felt like it was designed for me.



It's immature to admit I don't like it. The 1% is positioned towards increasing their profits, influence and marketing capabilities. Nike also sold ideas and ideologies that they put on their shoes and shirts. They were good and we bought them. We enrich the 1% and keep ourselves to the 99% And yes, that is something I should run against. At the same time, I won't fool myself and say that I'll protest on buying a good product.

Besides, I've got ideas of my own that were born of out my running. To run along is what's important.

Thinking of my own immaturity, I've hit a lot of walls and no longer think of what I am running away from, but what I am running for. And never to forget what I am running against.

I still wear them, but I also struggle to keep my Nike shoes and shirts off. As one of their ads say, Running is always a beginning.

LiveStrong Run (10k) 2011

Imagine a World Without Cancer.

The weather was inclement the night before, and the 4am assembly time was too ridiculously early. A diligent-enough runner would have to wake up at least 2am to get ready, eat a little, stretch, drive to the race venue across town. All the hopes made the weather clear and I arrived a few minutes before assembly time. A couple of runners clad in the same yellow singlet were sitting by the gutters. This was the Fort at 4am. Around the corner, a group of young, mestizo teenagers were still huddled around a set of car loudspeakers thumping dance music. The race organizers, on the other hand, had just begun setting up their starting arch and lining up their orange cones.

By assembly time, they moved everyone to the other side of arch, the announcer pleading clumsily, "We run to that direction." It was already past the supposed gun start. There was no fancy ceremonial launch, except for everybody chanting something like "1, 2, 3... go" with the guy who held the microphone.

Despite the catchy campaign materials and the profound relevance of its cause - this was the smallest, most barely-organized race I've ever ran. It's also been a while since I've ran the Fort-McKinley route and I've always found the uphill roads a little cumbersome. Not to the merit of our race organizers, parts of the running path (particularly around the cemetery) were literally pitch-black and zero-visibility at past 4am. Maybe it actually helped quicken my pace. If I didn't run fast enough to follow the guy ahead of me I would have been led off-track. The roads weren't entirely closed, so there were also vehicles along the route that increased the perils in this run.

But it's not like I'm not used to that, because I've ran alone in similar avenues or highways. Hydration was also bad, sure, but I know that all I really need was at least 1 quick and decent gulp for a 10k. And ulitmately: more than half of the registration fee was paid for my wife's company, and she paid for the rest. That's on top of all the encouragement and inspiration she gives to my running. I was really after the slick-looking singlet that said Imagine the World Without Cancer. I was running for that idea.

I remember what I was running for, and in organized racers - what others were running for. People had this stuck at the back of those slick-looking singlets:







However bad the route was or how poor hydration and runner-safety is, I managed its longest distance 10k category in a good-enough 55 minutes. They seemed to hand me all that I needed at that time: a banana, a bottle of water. This button was a welcome bonus.


The morning was beautiful and the strangely good cosmic vibes reverberated. Imagine a world without cancer.

What I ran for was an idea. The remembrance of seeing all those names in the stickers at the backs of runners I chased or passed. However this race was organized, these runners I finished with all look seriously proud.

What I Ran For at the Rizal Run

Sesquicentennial what?

I prepared an all-OPM play list that lets me begin in a controlled pace: Up Dharma Down and Taken by Cars. Then the play list lines up local rock superlatives like Franco and Wolfgang to blast through my brains during a run that honors the 150th of National Hero Jose Rizal. Dragging songs to the new play list, my blood pumped and endorphins started to ooze with the distortion and guitar riffs. It will be a perfectly flat race route, and the starting line is walking-distance from my house so I will enjoy a home-court advantage in Roxas Boulevard. I've had several servings of spectacular sunsets here, many of them while running along baywalk.

The 16k distance is a step below from the 21k races I’ve previously joined, but its good preparation for my next shot at my sub-2 hour 21k goal this November. While I’m not in serious training, I’m in a good enough condition to finish 16k in 1.5 hours. I just had every reason to run my first organized of the year.

There’s been a great deal of grinding pressure at work with a launch of a new account and client visits so I could use some pavement-pounding to run these worries away to oblivion, at least for a while. And before the run begins, the yearning is just as thrilling.

It also develops before going into full blast, like how molecules begin to boil in a kettle. That’s how excitement built up in the 16k coral in front of the landmark Rizal Monument. On the way to the starting line, you hear the snare drums from a University Cheering squad. Before gun time, the National Anthem is sang, the National Historical Commissioner speaks, and everybody goes for a last- minute muscle stretch. This is a relatively-simpler organized run, as there weren’t any fireworks or fancy laser-light shows at the starting line, but it had enough good fuel to rev up the runners.

I run alone, but sometimes you get sentimental about sharing this happiness. It’s similar to how you wish someone else read a good book you’ve read. I thought of my brother who works overseas, in Bahrain. He also runs, and I would have loved to run this race with him.

Pink and blue 5.30 am skies, the proximity of the sea, boulevards that are closed for your convenience, and an equally excited crowd reminded me of why runners give up Saturday night-outs to wake up for a Sunday morning run. Having run mostly on afternoons, I almost forgot how good the early-mornings feel.


I executed a conservative game plan. I didn’t push or try to pass other runners, but made sure I ran between a 5’30 to 5’45 per km pace. With that, I finished within a minute of my 1:30 goal. Towards the end, I felt like I had so much strength left. . I was sprinting towards the finish line and I was probably running a 4’00/km pace towards that stretch. I should’ve ran more with what they call “pure guts” and worked harder. I realized, this time I was enjoying myself more than working hard on a race.

At the finish line, an usher in Filipiniana costume puts a medal around my neck.

I never bother to line up for those loot bags. I walked towards the Rizal Monument and did my post-run stretch. It's a symbolic bow, this stretch. And this one, for Rizal, in front of guarded monument. We've read your work, put your face in coins and t-shirts, and now we've ran for you. Happy Birthday!

After the stretch, I went home immediately.

I’ll be in time for breakfast with my wife and kid. I’ll get some chocolate milk at a convenience score. I read from somewhere that it’s an awesome drink to mend these muscles. Man, I’m still high and giddy. It’s still a long road ahead and I plan on enjoying myself.

Goings On About Town

Manila may have one of the world's worst sewerage systems, shanties that sprout like mushrooms, potholes on main roads and you'd normally get mugged or robbed here, but it's never bereft of culture and art that courts controversy. It's not exactly squeaky-clean like Singapore, but despite the corruption in government there's a freedom of expression that Death itself couldn't gag. Not a lot of people supress their opinions.

As a bonus, cigarettes and alcohol aren't as badly taxed relative to other Asian countries. Books aren't taxed at all. It's not New York, of course, but ultimately this is just where my soul thrives. This is where I was born and where I was raised. Represent!

I was registering for a 16k run commemorating our National Hero and right by the counter there are a few flyers on what's happening culture-wise. There was an Independent Film Festival (Cinemalaya) a few weeks back, an International Silent Film Festival, a Jazz Festival at the Cultural Center, the controversial "Kulo" Art Exhibit, a Beethoven Piano Sonata Concert, to name a few.

The town may be shabby, but you will not have a "culture point" deficiency. And it isn't just the museums, heritage sites, world-class musicians and artists, bootleg DVDs of "art house" films or our inclinations to poetry and literature. There's always something going on in this town. Out here everyone's (or everyone pretends to be) a writer, photographer or foodie. And even this third-world city has its hipsters. Even our Senators call a special hearing about an art exhibit and imagine themselves to be art experts.


Self-promotion is shameless so I'm going to self-deprecate and say, even a home-office-family-oriented person like me gets to have an article on a respectable Music+Culture magazine. It must have made a mark, because it also gets to be on the band's facebook status even after a year from when it was written.

I would have wanted to experience and perhaps write (for myself) about the goings-on about this town. Sponsored by the Goethe Institute, the 6th International Silent Film Festival was on a few weeks back. Razorback performs a live score to the screening of L'Iferno (1911, Guiseppe de Liguoro) and I went as far as a mental outline. In my mind, I can hear them paying a toned-down version of "Diwata" breaking the silence of the movie as the demons of Dante's Inferno flicker in the history of cinema's first few attempts to have special effects.

I imagine the crowd. I'll judge them by appearances and by the snippets of conversation I 'll overhear. I'll assume that they are unpleasantly eccentric, I'll assume they are kindred spirits. I'll assume they are true patrons of art, I'll assume there are hipsters and pseduo-intellectuals amongst the crowd. They are all in this town.

Except that I didn't get to be in the festival. But I'd still like to think that whatever lifestyle you are on, you should never be on a culture point deficiency. Maybe one of my lunch breaks count. It was one of those busy days, and you get stressed out and hungry, but there was nothing close to edible in the pantry. So I decided to head out for lunch. In my world, lunch can happen between 4am - 6am. I drove out to the Subway at the gas station and got a Subway Melt with an upgrade to large calorie-free Drink and calorie-full Lay's Potato Chips. I ate it by the table they had outdoors, and lashed out E.M. Forster's Howard's End from my bag. I fed myself with a full chapter in a slumbering city. This may not count as a culture point, but it couldn't have just happened anywhere.

Around this time, the runners are already out in the streets. Pink light cracks through the sky as I drive back to the stressful hell of an office, and I say you've got to love this town.