All the rage

Destruction was a destination over the long weekend. To my fight-and-flight-minded friends and I, the enchantment and senselessness in breaking things seemed to be worth the two-hour drive to Gerona, Tarlac, where a restaurant has become the site for such a curious attraction.

Having pursued the art of letting-things-get-to-me through the two-year-old whine of this column, I had finally decided on a tour of letting go. I would flee this toxi-illogical city for a few days, remedy my restlessness the way we Filipinos know how — through beer house KTV, of course — and cap this road trip of release off by making a pilgrimage to the Isdaan floating restaurant, where one can chuck dishware at its Tacsiyapo Wall for a minimum of P16; the price of three Enervon C capsules to throw a mug against a cement wall (it’s P30 for plates, P350 to hurl a vase, and P1,500 to heave an old television set), which is a lot more happy-making than OD-ing on ascorbic acid, if you ask me.

Mortality Combat

Maybe you’ve noticed it, too, but more than a year of loss (and in some cases, because of it), 2009 has been a year of losing it. Our lives online may keep us in the all-encompassing loop of things, but with the coursing stream of status message sewage and our ever-constant national news feed of negativity (you know, virulent tweets on what shitty things politicians did today), that loop has become the noose we pull tighter ‘round our necks daily out of distress.

Social networking has, at once, allowed us to keep our friends close and our enemies closer; its being a necessary evil more apparent when we become witness to a Facebook contact’s revolting status messages (“OMG, just spent $2,000 on a belt”) or in their pain-it-forward manner of exposing us further to the grimness of what’s around us. Another day, another R.I.P. shout-out for someone who’d just been sprayed with bullets in his apartment or outside his condominium. Or a re-posted news item that renders a TV Patrol-type downer on our day. Last week, it was how a Cebu Mayor’s son left his girlfriend’s BFF the artful death threat of a bullet hole through her digicam. A couple of days ago, a barrage of blog posts reporting the stabbing of the family that owned the resto-bar across rock joint Saguijo. All of this lending to a new kind of Yodic cause and effect, where fear leads to a lot more status message anxiety and anger, which leads to hatred and more diss-communication through reactive comment or otherwise, and so on and so forth — everyone getting more terrified and ticked off in the process. 

The Upside of Anger

So has the world become more brutal or is its brutality just communicated more efficiently these days? I asked my friend this once we’d arrived in Isdaan, settling into one of its pond-bordered huts. “Let’s just blame Mercury Retrograde again,” he said, prompting chuckles at the astrological explanation for calamitous miscommunication; one that many a status message points a finger at for everything from PLDT DSL’s connection inefficiency to the intensity of one’s hangover. But then Mercury couldn’t account for the always-on-the-offense demeanor the world seemed to have assumed in the past months, like it had become a Kanye West outburst in itself. “I don’t know what’s happening, but people seem a lot nastier these days, a lot more violent,” my friend continued, a somber tone taking over.

My trying to make sense of the world’s general sense of turmoil at this point seemed to suit the restaurant’s dystopian ambience — a post-apocalyptic water village where goats pulled kids along narrow walkways and monumental, Mayan-inspired statues of tribal fisher- folk stood forebodingly up front.

We had come here for the projectile unfurling of our frustrations, which seemed to dissipate as soon as the ceramic had slipped from our fingers and the sound of shattered crockery thundered of catharsis. Three saucers, five cups, and two plates was my damage, falling upon the growing heap of shards from patrons past; the topmost target painted with the word “Magnanakaw!” sustaining most of the tacsiyapo (kapampangan for “shame on you”) blows I would have wanted to give actors-turned-politicians, idiots-turned-politicians, idiots packing steel and small penises (the two aren’t mutually exclusive), and the owner of a “KTV” bar in Olongapo who’d tried to milk us for about three times what we needed to pay, realizing, after the fine points we made on Manila-Olongapo “VIP room” price differences, that none of us were drunk enough to be taken advantage of.

The Big O we all need these days is an outlet, something that gives the pool of blood we’ve kept on boiling point a good draining. But as much as the rage relief I got from the Tacsiyapo Wall, I found it a bit lacking. So before anyone else reaches for their guns or bolos and goes Calvento Files on random passersby, I’ve created the Hot Fuss Let it Outlet for you to flick, poke pencil holes through, or aim spitballs at. Best attached to corkboard for anger management by pinprick.