I have learned a lot of things today, one of them is, if you eat durian ice cream in the afternoon you would end up burping until late at night with a durian after taste. And the other is, a life in the arts presents huge opportunities for success and even more titanic trip holes for failure.

I was awoken early in the morning by a commotion in our neighbors house. My neighbor was recently discharged from the hospital because of a mild stroke. Apparently sometime between his bath and breakfast he had an accident of some sort or probably just a minor fall. I am the closest thing to a nurse that they could think of so I was summoned to supervise fist aid.

It was a reality check for me, because once there I was completely clueless to what a nurse would actually do. I ended up taking his blood pressure and I slowly made my way out and faded out from the scene.

I went back to my bed and slept on until I was awoken up again by a honk from a sedan. The driver was calling out my name and I was bewildered because I had no idea who would look for me, since I have made myself a vitual recluse these past few weeks.

It was my client who was looking for me and she asked me why I didn't meet up with her at eight in the morning at the designated meeting place. I told her I don't have an idea what she's talking about. She assumed that I probably haven't received her message and told me that she needed my "expetise" on some matter. She then told me that since I am still in my underpants with no shirt on that I should dress up immediately and meet her at some odd place in the city.

"Meet me in Javellana residence in Jaro in one hour, you should know where that is. It's near the Angelicum school", she said.

Oh Angelicum, yes, I know that place.

She was my client to whom I sold some of my paintings recently, a nutritionist from Manhattan who has a taste for expensive abstract expressionist paintings. She's a fifty something and single. It was from her that I learned the term "rogue art peddling".

We had a conversation way back and she related to me a story when she was approached by a struggling Filipino artist who made his way to her New York apartment. She didn't know the guy but he introduced himself as John Santos and he made a painting just for her. She was surprised and though it was a "rogue art peddling" she bought the 4 x 6 ft. sucker out of delicadeza. It cost her some whopping five figures.

After hearing that story, I immersed myself in abstract expressionism and positioned my self as a struggling, starving artist. After a week I had paintings and was ready for some "rogue art peddling". And that's how she became my client.

~~~

In less than an hour, I was already there in Javellana residence drinking juice from fancy glasses with my client, her sister and Doña Maria. The Javellana's are old rich people and the house is full of paintings by the owners children, the floor hardwood and everything spells socialite. I wondered if Doña Maria likes abstract expressionism too.

The whole afternoon was spent hunting for really expensive furniture in the downtown area and there I was strutting beside them offering my "expert" advise on minimal design, what ice cream flavor is best on a hot sunny afternoon, how to make more money from fine art, how not to lose money from fine art and mentioning every now and then how abstract expressionism is the hottest art in these contemporary times and giving a reference to abstract expressionism in almost any topic that they talk about.

They would talk about Junjie Lopez's blue poodle and I would butt in, " oh how abstract expressionist that is". While eating durian ice cream in Crave Misono, I exclaimed with a burp, " this is Abstract Expressionist Josef Alber's favorite ice cream flavor you know?". They would test a sofa and I would say, "this would look good with an abstract expessionist painting, and I have just the right painting for that". I knew by mid afternoon that Abstract Expressionism is finally seeping into their psyche when even the driver would exclaim how cool Jackson Pollock is.

The day went great, though I haven't sold another Abstract Expressionist work. I had an interesting day on what would have been a dismal Monday on an ordinary week, splaterring brutal layers of red paint on an otherwise serene looking canvas and wondering if I could get anywhere painting distorted figures of naked women.

It has always been dark ever since the sun began its collapse. Some say, one day might come that it will ultimately turn itself into a blackhole. Others say it will devour us all for all eternity, engulfing us and transporting the entire galaxy to some godforsaken parallel dimensions. 

It is as if everyday is a twilight.

Today is thirteen thousand years since the end of the last ice age. Today is the beginning of a new ice age.

People roam the streets like they are hundreds of light years apart. Everyone is a stranger. Even to themselves.

I look at the mirror and I see nothing. Only darkness. I am stanger. I don't know myself.

Everyday, no, it is not fitting to say everyday anymore. Humans live by the hour. Hour? Humans don't even have a concept of time anymore.

Every now and then, I would scourge the streets for food. Or anything that might come valuable.

And every now and then, our paths would cross. We would bump into each other. It's dark and I can't see your face. But I know it's always you.

You always carry those books around with you.

Useless! How can you read?

You carry on and I carry on.

~~~

Today, no, this time I'll go fishing for beached whales in the estuary. I might be lucky today. The last time I bumped into you I got lucky and I found a can of tuna from 2008.

I ate half of it and left the rest by your cardboard box house.

But this time I found nothing. Only this baby grand piano that got stuck in an islet in the estuary. I used to play the keys before and tried to remember Beethovens 5th from memory.

I played. It's a little off key.

Dammit.

Something's stuck in the keys.

Oh, just a flashlight.

It reads: This is a flashlight that will illuminate the world. Haha. What a mockery.

I turned it on. It's bright but I doubt it could even illuminate the insides of bathroom.

But I had something. I had a light. I could dive the deepest sea and the angler fish would be jealous of me.

Hungry and rustrated I went back to my shack and I passed you by. Reading books over a candle light in your cardboard box house.

Its the first time I saw your face. The first time I saw anyone's face in weeks. You are a stranger and to me you are beautiful.

I went over to you. And you smiled. I smiled back.

You were reading Gustav Klimt and Renoir. Picture books.

You liked art you said. I thought, what a dummy. Everyone's hungry and cold and you still had some time for art appreciation.

You said you really wanted to see the paintings for real and for the last time.

I held the flashlight over my hands and told you "what if we tour the Louvre before the battery dies. Or before the sun swallows us", I joked. You didn't laugh but you smiled again.

~~~to be continued

A columnist once wrote, " in Jose Rizal's time, the Pasig River was both EDSA and SLEX". The Pasig river is a highway of sorts. Long before the streets were crowded with jeepneys and buses that belches rancid smoke, the mighty river was the passageway of colossal steamboats, dugout canoes and other spindly watercrafts that fed the chinese black market.

In Rizal's novel, El Filibusterismo ( The Filibuster ), begins with the steamship Tabo's "unsteady progress up the river, arduously sailing upstream through the winding course of the Pasig, carrying numerous passengers to the province of Laguna".

For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Philippine history , Jose Rizal, one of the late 19th century's most infamous famous Filipino, is the country's national hero. He is an illustrado. A native who have friends in high places. He is fortunate enough to get himself educated in Europe, have high tea in cafe's in Florence and chat with intellectuals in Oxford. He is also well hung enough that legend says he had bedded thousands upon thousands of Europeans across the continent. From French schoolgirls to English ladies, from Irish farm lass to German housewives, he had a taste of them all. Legend says that he bedded so many German women that he fathered Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler as half-Filipino and half-German is quite plausible because der Fuhrer enjoys a speisewagen(buffet) of adobo and balut. How more Filipino can someone get?

Rizal is so great a man that he's the first Mr. A - Z, and not the musican of the same moniker. For (A) Rizal is an Architect, (B) a bingo player, (C) a circus acrobat and so on. The list is endless that I could write another book about his awesomeness.

He wrote El Filibusterismo, set in old Manila where once the legendary Pasig River was still in it's prime. He captured the beauty in his novel where he wrote, " a busy thoroughfare, a lively scene, a fertile fishing ground".

I'll quote more antique words here, "the steamship Tabo threatens everything in its path, now seeming about to crush the salambaw", a scraggy fishing contaption which in their movements are not unlike skeletons " saluting an antedeluvian turtle now running straight against the bamboo brushes and against the floating..." - and so on.

Picture the Pasig in Spanish days. It looked like a cross between the Amazon, the Everglades, Venetian Canals and the French Riviera, snaking it's way across the old city of Spanish occupied Manila.

The water is so clean and serene, you can see the riverbed twenty feet below from the highest level of the steamship.

But today, anyone who makes his or her way by night or by day up the Pasig would be satarized, not lyricized. The Pasig today is only a shadow of it's once glorious existence. It is now a black, muddy, murky current, something one crosses over to get from one place to another.

No fish can live here anymore. You can only see rows upon rows of shanties lining its shores. Garbage is everywhere, floating just like lilies on a a crowded lilypond, floating like millions of man-o-wars in the Carribean.

I wonder if Jose Rizal has got something to do with it. In a popular parable about Rizal when he was a young boy, he rode a canoe with his father down the Pasig River. Once there, one of his slippers fell from his feet and on to the river. He could not reach it, so what little Pepe did was he threw the other slipper into the river too. Asked why he threw his other slipper, he replied that if someone saw one slipper, then it would be useless. But if he threw the other slipper, some person might see the other half and can still use it.

Scholars and historians thought the mentality and reasoning for a young boy is brilliant and just plain genius. Many young kids did as Rizal did and thought  as Rizal would have thought.

It is only last last week that I realized the full extent of his slipper throwing legacy.

The entire world saw the onslaught of two tropical supertyphoons named "Ondoy" and "Pepeng" who apparenty had a simultaneous and preplanned attack on our islands. Heavy rains was followed by heavy floodings that left thousands of people stripped naked and without homes.

In the aftermath, they found the culprit, among the obvious was garbage that got stuck on man holes, sewers, canals and dams.

And majority of these garbage were slippers. Yes, millions of slippers of all shapes and sizes. 

Havaianas, birckenstock, nike, dragon, islander, bakya, adidas, tsinelas, simagol.

And I strongly think that, that one sunny Sunday afternoon, that one simple slipper throwing episode, that one brilliant and genius thinking triggered it all. It all gave us a reason to condone throwing slippers on the river. And slippers are just one of them.

          " It's nine years after the doomsday and we're still alive. I guess God must not been into numerology or kaballah blah blah's. Truth be told, I'm waiting for the day that the gravity of Earth would die, then, that would be the day that I could truly be sky diving for stars.

          Imagine gigantic whales floating in mid air, wrapped in lard that has wrapped them before, suffocating, gasping for breath. Water they scream. But the ocean is empty. Water has dispersed into trillions of tiny drops suspended in the huge expanse of space. Cars explode into hundreds of parts. Bolts loosen, windshields break apart, engines still vibrating. Planes have no use anymore. Now I join them in the air, as well as the flocks, the bees, the butterflies, billions of little lightning bugs, the bears of the poles.

          Darwin once said, all creatures, humans included, engage in constant struggle for existence, ruled by a natural order over which they have no control.

          Now we are no longer disparate little creatures bound on different journeys. Rather, we are all fellow passengers to the grave"

The essay i wrote above has got nothing to do with why I'm in love with a wallpaper. "I'm in love with a Wallpaper" is the title of my latest artwork because I'm in love with a wallpaper. I have worked on this for a little over half a decade or so already and it just feels so good to atually see the finished piece.

2004 first attepmt

2005 - 2008 2nd attempt

"I'm in love with a Wallpaper"(with two people on the foreground)

October 22, 2009 3rd and finaI I hope

What am I thinking?

Fuck it.

When I start thinking,

Everything's lost.

What am I feeling?

Yes.

I am beginning to feel the hallucinatory effects,

Of rectified Turpentine.

My dreams are more vivid.

And I wake up very happy the next morning.

I've never felt like this before.

That's why I paint in the morning.

That is why I write at night.

Coz,

I can't get the motherf*****g creatures,

Out of my  freaking mind.

I can't live without the rancid smell,

Of my rectified Turpentine

Must see movies for sleepless nights

Pan's Labyrinth

Where the Wild Things Are

Alice in the Motherf*****g Wonderland (starring Johhny motherf*****g Depp)