A few days ago, you were chasing after taxicabs. The cab drivers started getting more evil when the malls got fuller – around the time of that gray November of your soul. It’s synchronous. It’s proportional. It’s something Darwinian and unavoidable. You get hold of a cab, and you watch the driver turn into a weatherman ("Malabon? Bumabaha dun!"), a cash register ("Mga P500, ayos na tayo!"), a corrupt pubic official ("Hindi ko na bubuksan ang metro ha!"), Nostradamus ("Mata-trapik ako dun!") or Beelzebub ("Hindi! Hindi! Hindi!").
You feel rejected. It’s horrible to be waved away like a gnat. Suddenly it’s high school again, and you’re the dweeb wearing glasses and a horrible crew cut; the dweeb with a stamped-to-death library card who just got dumped by a girl with heavy metal braces; the dweeb who has a million ideas on how to fly away from his humdrum town. Only now, you can’t fly, much less get home in a cab. You try calling a government hotline to report the series of unfortunate taxi-rejection incidents. Well, you have more chances of being struck by lightning twice, or winning a brand new car in a raffle thrice, than getting those fat assed officials to do something about your (everyone’s) problem.
Exasperated, you get on a rickety bus (one of the units of the Wheels of Destruction bus company) – nervous all the way. What if someone announces a hold-up? What if the driver overshoots a bridge and the whole bus tumbles into a ravine (yes, there is one in this supposedly modern metropolis)? What if you encounter people from the Church of the Spaceship 2000 Alien who pester you for love offerings, but not before preaching the end of the world and spewing threats of the Apocalypse upon your doorsteps? What if you accidentally stare into the eyes of a drunk and incur his ire? (They are oh-so brave when possessed by gin, which is like the elixir of stupidity.)
You ride a jeepney, and feel frustrated by how PUJ drivers stop by every, and I mean every single person standing on the curbs. Everyone’s a potential passenger to these guys. Even if you take a corpse and tie it beside a lamppost a driver would try to pick it up. Even if you put up a goddamn hologram, even if you let Jose Velarde and Jose Pidal (two non-existent creatures with huge bank accounts) stand on the sidewalk. At the 12th station, you see a snatcher take off with a co-passenger’s gold chain (must be from Saudi). You watch the thief run while listening to your seatmates discuss the incident to death. Plus, color commentary.
Stuck in heavy traffic, you are appalled at how 10,000 vehicles try to inch their way into slim roads. Leave the Laws of Physics out of this, the damn trucks seem to say before inching into a piece of road as wide as Aubrey Miles’ waistline. You spend approximately 10,000 hours stuck in traffic each year (give or take a few thousands). Well, with those figures you could practically meet someone, get married, have kids, maybe take up a hobby, grow old with your partner and live happily ever after. I am exaggerating, of course. No one lives happily ever after in this country.
At the mall, you are amazed at the delirious number of shoppers. It’s like the end of the world as we know it – and there you are looking for cheap finds. You see the items that you want, but don’t have the dough for them. You could buy some of the products but have to practically live on instant mami for a decade. You don’t really need those items anyway, but since your brain has been bombarded with messages that you do, you shell out the money. There is a forthcoming paycheck, anyway. A fat paycheck, or so you thought, but all you get is a bulimic piece of bank paper. "Yippee," you say with the enthusiasm of a fighting cock fated to bathe in hot water, sayote and ginger after a 24-cock derby.
You read in college how Karl Marx came up with the equation that wages are just enough to keep the worker alive, for him to subsist so he could generate more accumulated labor – so that his capacity to work will be preserved. Before, you deem all this as cock-and-bull. Now, Marx is starting to make sense, just as apolitical idiots who get off on house/dance/techno/trance music wear his image (along with Mao’s, Lenin’s and Che Guevarra’s) on trendy shirts – all in vain, a very hollow fashion statement. When the revolution comes, you would have to destroy them all. "Joke! Joke! Joke!" you tell that drunken boy dancing to a DJ fresh from the assembly line.
Come to think of it, philosophers (even if you read them via Barron’s or Cliff Notes) make perfect sense. Your job has alienated you from your true self (unlike tadpoles who grow up to be politicians). You like Nabokov and Dostoevsky, yet ended up as a ghostwriter for a society columnist. You like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, yet ended up in a record label peddling Vaness Wu. You like Kubrick and Scorsese, yet ended up making ads for the MMDA and the Department of Health ("Iodized salt, iodized salt, mag-iodized salt tayo…")
Wait, there’s more. You are a salesman, yet can’t even sell a trip to life everlasting. (Kasama na discount and freebies, bokya ka pa rin.) You are asked to service people who have defective cell phones or have problems with their credit cards, yet you can’t even help yourself or figure out what the hell you want to do with your life. You are asked to write about something, anything, to fill up space, yet you’ve said everything there is to say… and no one’s reading or paying attention or gives a f*ck, anyway. You are asked to celebrate Christmas, yet you’re too damn depressed or fatigued to even remember what the celebration is really about. Is it the heavy traffic? Is it the asphyxiating shopping? Is Christmas supposed to be symbolic of something?
You just can’t put a finger on it since you’re too strung out. Life has worn you down. Switching the radio on, you listen to Jingle Bells and other Christmas carols. Somewhere in the world, there is a one-horse open sleigh trudging down winter wonderland. Somewhere in the world, all is calm all is bright. But it’s not here.
A Christmas article as sure as hell this is not.
Special thanks to a Chinese girl whose despair inspired this article. For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.