Road to Nowhere
October 31, 2003 | 12:00am
It was getting dark. The potholes in the road beckoned, their broken mandibles illuminated by the pale yellow orbs of oncoming headlights. With grinding teeth and faltering halts, traffic standstilled to the buzz of a hive of horns, anguished cries, and pedestrians splattering in muddles of flood. The moon did a time arc across the sky, and the traffic lights went on the blink, signalling its "bahala si Lord" attitude, reflecting some of our most common prayers.
The intersection was blocked by idiocy. Instead of leaving a cleared path where the two roads met and crossing at a more opportune time, cars blatantly punctuated "screw you" by sticking their asses out where it don’t fit, surging forward at the last vestige of green even though not a single vehicle ahead was moving. Now that it was my light, I couldn’t go, hemmed in on all sides.
There was no escape, soon idiocy would creep up on me, knock down my windows and choke me like a self-induced hose of carbon monoxide. It was getting dark, and in the darkness idiocy easily slips by unnoticed, as it wears many masks and cavorts with its many pals, hooliganing up the town, pissing on walls, slinging mud, doling bribes, siphoning funds and scaring the children...
I am actually quite a serene driver, despite the typically nightmarish scenario above. I can wait indefinitely, having the patience of a hundred sainted cows. At the merest hint of navigational difficulty, my mind switches off and lets the engine do the running. However, I have also realized that this shouldn’t really be. Being mired in traffic is no day at the spa, and is not excusable by getting all meditatingly contemplative on the zen-ness of collective suffering. Debilitating traffic is a symptom of our illness, just like hyperfast bullet trains and efficient, functioning mass transpo are the telltale signs of other nations’ healthy libidos.
We compensate with these excessively-sized Expeditions that rampage all over our crappy roads, racing alongside artery-clogging jeepneys and bus behemoths with suicidal tendencies. But who drives these things? And did they even go to driving school? Lane-straddlers, parking-snatchers, rude cutter-offs, pedestrian-lane blockers, female drivers – all hazards to the morally considerate driver fending for one’s life as it courses through Edsa. The root of undisciplined driving is no different from the root of the many other things that plague our country.
...Back up there in my driver’s seat, night is still falling and I begin to see the transformation as light reflects through the windshields, darkly. Clothes suddenly burst forth in rags, skin decrepitates, and clumps of hair falls out, substituted with patches of a graveyard-like type of soil. And the eyes! Pus-filled, congealing pupils, a sore, sore sight, screaming red bloody murder. Emerging from the stalled cars zombie-like, they trawl though the streets with impassible faces, bumping into each other and piling up in a groaning heap, pulling each other down if one tried to get up. It is fright night. It is thriller. It is Manila.
It’s not just the streets that have been affected. Up in the palaces of the ruling class, the setting has acquired the rabid air of an escaped circus. 28 Days Later plus 12 Monkeys equal one messy Halloween from hell, a masquerade massacre. The shock of the full moon reveals a haunted House full of politikbalangs, minions of a more sinister source. A cackling kapresident, smoking cigars over the wreckage of beasts tearing each other’s flesh apart. It is like we have always suspected. Our deepest fears, childhood folktales that keep our eyes shut against creaky doors and shadowy rocking chairs, my subconscious premonition that Michael Jackson really is inhuman and has come to exact his revenge for a dozen botched nose jobs...
A honk. Telling me to shove it. I suppose my light had turned green and red and green again and I had forgotten that I was driving, waiting. I can cross the intersection, finally. Things are as they always were – depressing, but no, no zombies here, just the usual contumacious citizens going about their business – with a lot of sadness, a lot of cynicism, not enough hope, not enough pride, and definitely not enough care. Perhaps too much idle talk, too much greed, as can be gleaned from the headlines. And a very limited view of the world, a view that only contains one self, the vampiric "I" in what I can suck dry from my country.
I manage to reach only the next intersection. Traffic na naman. One inconsiderate act is all it takes to arrest the whole flow of things. I’ve been told that Bangkok traffic jams, while similarly bad, at least moves. I’ve been told that the Philippines ranks down there with Indonesia and Bangladesh in corruption ratings. I’ve been told that ours is the only Asian country actually regressing economically. We tradeoff being a country with long-term goals for being a nation ridded with terminally living ghouls. It’s not surprising. When we dream bad things, they tend to manifest themselves in our feelings. When we speak ill things, they tend to materialize in our lives. When we dig ourselves graves, we tend to get buried.
The intersection was blocked by idiocy. Instead of leaving a cleared path where the two roads met and crossing at a more opportune time, cars blatantly punctuated "screw you" by sticking their asses out where it don’t fit, surging forward at the last vestige of green even though not a single vehicle ahead was moving. Now that it was my light, I couldn’t go, hemmed in on all sides.
There was no escape, soon idiocy would creep up on me, knock down my windows and choke me like a self-induced hose of carbon monoxide. It was getting dark, and in the darkness idiocy easily slips by unnoticed, as it wears many masks and cavorts with its many pals, hooliganing up the town, pissing on walls, slinging mud, doling bribes, siphoning funds and scaring the children...
I am actually quite a serene driver, despite the typically nightmarish scenario above. I can wait indefinitely, having the patience of a hundred sainted cows. At the merest hint of navigational difficulty, my mind switches off and lets the engine do the running. However, I have also realized that this shouldn’t really be. Being mired in traffic is no day at the spa, and is not excusable by getting all meditatingly contemplative on the zen-ness of collective suffering. Debilitating traffic is a symptom of our illness, just like hyperfast bullet trains and efficient, functioning mass transpo are the telltale signs of other nations’ healthy libidos.
We compensate with these excessively-sized Expeditions that rampage all over our crappy roads, racing alongside artery-clogging jeepneys and bus behemoths with suicidal tendencies. But who drives these things? And did they even go to driving school? Lane-straddlers, parking-snatchers, rude cutter-offs, pedestrian-lane blockers, female drivers – all hazards to the morally considerate driver fending for one’s life as it courses through Edsa. The root of undisciplined driving is no different from the root of the many other things that plague our country.
...Back up there in my driver’s seat, night is still falling and I begin to see the transformation as light reflects through the windshields, darkly. Clothes suddenly burst forth in rags, skin decrepitates, and clumps of hair falls out, substituted with patches of a graveyard-like type of soil. And the eyes! Pus-filled, congealing pupils, a sore, sore sight, screaming red bloody murder. Emerging from the stalled cars zombie-like, they trawl though the streets with impassible faces, bumping into each other and piling up in a groaning heap, pulling each other down if one tried to get up. It is fright night. It is thriller. It is Manila.
It’s not just the streets that have been affected. Up in the palaces of the ruling class, the setting has acquired the rabid air of an escaped circus. 28 Days Later plus 12 Monkeys equal one messy Halloween from hell, a masquerade massacre. The shock of the full moon reveals a haunted House full of politikbalangs, minions of a more sinister source. A cackling kapresident, smoking cigars over the wreckage of beasts tearing each other’s flesh apart. It is like we have always suspected. Our deepest fears, childhood folktales that keep our eyes shut against creaky doors and shadowy rocking chairs, my subconscious premonition that Michael Jackson really is inhuman and has come to exact his revenge for a dozen botched nose jobs...
A honk. Telling me to shove it. I suppose my light had turned green and red and green again and I had forgotten that I was driving, waiting. I can cross the intersection, finally. Things are as they always were – depressing, but no, no zombies here, just the usual contumacious citizens going about their business – with a lot of sadness, a lot of cynicism, not enough hope, not enough pride, and definitely not enough care. Perhaps too much idle talk, too much greed, as can be gleaned from the headlines. And a very limited view of the world, a view that only contains one self, the vampiric "I" in what I can suck dry from my country.
I manage to reach only the next intersection. Traffic na naman. One inconsiderate act is all it takes to arrest the whole flow of things. I’ve been told that Bangkok traffic jams, while similarly bad, at least moves. I’ve been told that the Philippines ranks down there with Indonesia and Bangladesh in corruption ratings. I’ve been told that ours is the only Asian country actually regressing economically. We tradeoff being a country with long-term goals for being a nation ridded with terminally living ghouls. It’s not surprising. When we dream bad things, they tend to manifest themselves in our feelings. When we speak ill things, they tend to materialize in our lives. When we dig ourselves graves, we tend to get buried.
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