Slip of the Pen

When I write, I write about something — a day in a bastard’s life, a tragic comedy, a comic tragedy, a poem, an essay, a whitepaper, an emotion succinctly portrayed in polysyllable words. Today is different; I can’t find anything to write about. But that will not stop me from writing something, because when you think about it, I can write about nothing and you will see it as something. Here’s the something of this day’s nothingness, captured in less than a minute. Ready?

tick The blankness of the digital page tock staring at you from your monitor tick appalls you, rendering your fingers frozen tock above the keyboard in stupefaction. tick Face it — you can’t write anything, tock much less a dazzling piece tick of literature (literature governed tock by you, omphalos of the world). tick After all, the cursor blinking tock on-screen is your Freudian id, insistent tick and irksome to an extent, prompting tock you to type something, weave tick something from nothingness. tock Heed your blinking id, gratify tick the primal writer in you, delve deep and type, tock type type type, then dress up tick your writing with fonts (times new roman tock or comic sans?), breathe into it tick red passion, green freshness, black tock simplicity, then decide if you’ll tick skew it to the right, to the left, or tock be page-centric as your egoist self. tick Take your time, decorate your writing tock as you would yourself (admit it). tick But when you’re done, better make sure tock it’s good without the appurtenances tick (blame your blinking id!), because tock the unadorned text is nothing but tick you. tock


[Adapted from my poem written this very day, titled "It’s Cliché"]

Might as well put a marker below it: Since May 10, 2005.

Credit a close friend for this remarkable career choice of mine. The friend gave me as a birthday gift some sort of “Today’s Advice” poster which neatly presents more than a hundred pieces of ‘advice’ in tabular form. The instructions say: “Close your eyes (no cheating!), turn around, and then point at this poster and follow the advice your finger lands on!”

Certainly for idiots and the cheesy-types. But then the Corsarius is prone to moronic and yummy-cheesy tendencies from time to time, so forgive me if I indulged myself with this self-advice poster. And guess what? It sure is one treasure trove worthy of a corsair! Here are some jewels for your perusal:


June 23: “Don’t be Late”

My 10AM classes always suffer from my delinquence. Grooming myself takes about half an hour; the trip from Mabuhay Rotonda to UP Diliman is another 30 minutes. And I wake up at 9:30AM.

Solution? Ride a taxi. The catch? A hundred pesos down the drain.

My wallet goes kaput.


July 1: “Expect a Miracle”

Downstairs in the backyard, I know my favorite dog lies dying. But with this advice nagging at my mind, I hurry to the yard. Tough luck; the dog is still sprawled on the ground. Bleeding. Dying. I turn my back on him.

Suddenly, our maid lets out a cry. I swiftly turn around. Lo and behold, the dog is trying to sit up! He looks at me with glassy eyes, as if pleading for help. I rush and force-feed him another dose of medicines and nourishment.

Minutes later, our dog throws up all of his medicine and sustenance.

The next day, he is dead.


June 11: “Be Gentle”

Don’t tell me I’m going to do it with an untouched lass. Uh, come again? Ah. So that’s what the advice really means. Sorry for my greener-than-the-greenest-grass-and-greener-than-yours mind. But before you throw me out of my own blog for this overly “male chauvinist pig” paragraph, here’s a last advice –


July 19: “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.”

Here’s a couple of announcements from the Corsarius:

1) My personal website, The Corsarius, has moved to http://kimpo.fil.ph. The same goes for the online version of The UP Parser, which you can now find at http://upparser.fil.ph.

2) The multi-awarded Association for Computing Machinery - UP Student Chapter (UP ACM) is now open for membership. The application form can be found here.

3) For those interested in the progress of our thesis — secure video streaming from a server to a mobile device, both real-time and non — you can visit our group blog, The JSP.

4) Lastly, Slippy* now has its own WAP companion site! For more details, visit my other blog. Here’s a few screenshots to sate your interest:

*My nickname for this blog, Slip of the Pen. Catchy, I think.

I was disgusted by my writing. The words didn’t flow freely, the hand didn’t move an inch, and the mind had the creativity of a cadaver’s.

So I left my ‘writing mode’ — sitting in front of the PC, fingers poised above the keyboard, eyes staring at the blank digital paper flashed on the monitor — and went down to the living room.

By chance, a big-time, Las Vegas boxing match was playing on TV. The bout was furious and vicious. Oddly enough, I somehow imagined myself as a boxer pummeling his opponent. My foe was a collection of papers bunched together in the shape of man; credit my deprived my mind for that. He trash-talked me with phrases, “Write something, you fool!” or “CW 10! CW 10!” (I had a not-so-pleasant experience in my Creative Writing class, or CW10, last summer). I retaliated with a mighty arsenal of Pacquiao moves: left-hook, right-hook, uppercut, straight punch. Bam-bam-BAM!

Weird? I concur. That’s why I said ‘my deprived mind’.

But I couldn’t knock-out my paper adversary. It was resilient, just like the two pugilists battling it out on TV. Neither one kissed the canvas. The match was in the tenth round, and the commentators still had it tied for both boxers.

The bell rang, marking the round’s end. I snapped out of my bizarre reverie. Both pugs trudged to their corners with bloody and swelled faces. As commercials began to flood the TV screen, I looked out of the window beside the TV.

A child (let’s call him ‘Boy Angas’) was making his way to the front of our miniature gate. At first, I thought he was going to buy ice from our maid (you know, those two-peso frozen blocks in plastic bags, thirty of which you could pack into a small freezer). Boy Angas was a suki, and when he bought he would yell in the loudest of voices his young throat could manage: “Bibili ako ng yelo! Yelo! Yelo! Yelo nga!” He wouldn’t stop until someone showed up at the window and take his ‘order’. And when someone did, even if that person was my father (who is a government official, proudly middle-class because he doesn’t practice corruption), Boy Angas would talk to him disrespectfully. He didn’t use po or opo, he spoke in bossy tones, he didn’t use the word ‘please’, or the Pinoy equivalent of that (to illustrate: “Bibili ako ng yelo!” instead of “Pabili po ng yelo”).

At his young age — I guess ten years — Boy Angas was, well, a little too boastful for his own good, maangas so to speak. And that irritated me to no end.

And so when I saw him by our gate, I was determined to give him the cold shoulder, never mind the two pesos. But then he sat on the concrete sidewalk and began to rub his eyes, which I belatedly noticed to be wet, a little red, and slightly swollen. Boy Angas was crying!

I didn’t know whether to be glad or sympathetic. I didn’t like seeing people cry, but here was the bossy dude, king of Cordillera Street, emperor of yelo…in sorrow!

Boy Angas was sobbing as he rubbed his eyes. Picked upon by children bigger than his size? Possible. Received a monumental scolding and spanking from his parents? Who knows.

But as I heard the sounds of the boxing match return to the TV, Boy Angas stopped rubbing his eyes. He had stopped crying. He wiped his nose. He squared his shoulders in true maangas fashion. He let out an unreal, furious “Hah!”, then loped off to the street, vanishing from my sight. I think he didn’t even see my observing him.

I was duly impressed. To think that when I was a child, I used to cry for an hour, until the tears dried up or I fell asleep! Truth be told, how ill mannered he might have been, Boy Angas was also Boy Astig. The kid had come in crying, but after a minute, he left with a smirk plastered on his face.

Somehow, his brief act stirred something within me.

I suddenly felt that I needed to overcome my own adversary, that I needed to knock-out the paper boxer who was cadillacing around the ring’s mat, trash-talking me, waiting to be thrown down. Crying and writing are two different things, but my deprived mind seemed to find a thin string that connected both. As the saying goes, “Fight your own dragon.”

And so I turned off the TV, never bothering to finish the match. I had a bout of my own to decide. I went up to my room, returned to writing mode, and buckled down to work.

[In memoriam.]

We weren’t supposed to give them names.

Of the eight dogs of the Zoo on Cordillera Street, four were puppies. Three 4-month-olds belonged to the same litter, waiting to be given/sold to people looking for free/inexpensive half-Dalmatians; one was nearing his first birthday. The last one was Elvis (yes, I know — dad is such an Elvis Presley fan), while the little ones were affectionately called Kambang, Tisoy, and Tisay. Funny nicknames, no real ones. The reason? We didn’t want to get too attached to pups which we’d be disposing in few weeks time. Disposing — some silly term always used by my dad.

If only we knew what was in store for us.

*****

I was the first to notice it. One morning, Kambang (named so for her black patch on the right side of her head and ear) had a fever. Aside from her high temperature, she seemed lethargic, didn’t want to eat, gave no reaction to my whistles and gentle coaxing, and occasionally vomited small amounts of fluids. Though alarming, we’ve experienced those clinical conditions before with other pups, and so I didn’t really worry too much about it. All she needs is rest, I thought.

Just before I left for UP, I checked up on her. I was slightly surprised when Kambang, in her illness and all, wagged her tail as I patted her on the head.

That was about nine in the morning. Less than twelve hours later, I arrived home from school, and the first thing I looked for as I opened the door was Kambang. But it was my Dad who greeted me with the simplest of greetings.

“Kambang is dead.”

*****

I found her in the backyard. When I got over the disbelief, I spent some time observing her before she was properly “disposed” of. Her face was contorted in pain, with her blue eyes and jaws half-open. Wet, blood-stained stool stained her tail and the ground. Certainly a violent death, from within.

Right then and there, as I squat beside the stiff body of Kambang, I gave her a name. “Espy”, short for Esperanza, Spanish for hope.

Why?

Because two of our puppies were already showing Espy’s symptoms, and I was fervently hoping that they wouldn’t end up like her. Elbits, as I fondly called Elvis in “baby-talk”, was the adolescent “successor” to our true-blue Dalmatian. He was already having liquid feces with high concentrations of blood, which was of course very, very bad.

Panicky, we called up our local vet, and she gave the necessary (and expensive) prescriptions, not to mention injecting ’something’ into Elbits and Tisoy. The latter was still alright to an extent — Tisoy even yipped loudly when the vet stuck in the syringe. It was Elbits who was in a dire state — laid out on the ground, glassy-eyed with breaths coming in deep, rib-shaking heaves.

And so Elbits was given medication — anti-diarrhea capsules, antibiotic syrup. Because he wouldn’t eat and was losing body fluids quickly through his feces and occasional vomits, we force-fed him with water-and-sugar solutions. This went on for several hours, with the family hoping that Elbits would stop vomiting, stop defecating blood, and simply recover. We even brought him out to the backyard so that the other dogs couldn’t bother him in his ill state.

But the situation worsened. Elbits’ jaw began to resist our attempts at force-feeding, snapping together with unnatural ferocity. He threw up virtually all of his medication and the remaining fluids in his body.

I ran upstairs, opened the PC, did a quick scan of a dozen websites, and found the culprit — Parvo, the feared virus fatal to most untreated dogs below the age of one. The clinical symptoms were the same; more frighteningly, it often kills within a day or two after the onset of the symptoms. We were asking then: What could we do? We couldn’t bring him to an animal hospital. We didn’t have the money.

But damn, there was still hope. Espy, no, Elvis won’t end up like her. This dog was a fighter; he was the sole survivor of a whole litter which died. He was our Dalmatian’s heir apparent, with the excellent tell-tale spots and lean and mean body. Most of all, he was the wackiest of them all, and as such he was my best friend.

That’s it. He was my best friend. And I was not going to lose him to some devil-kin, unintelligible life-form.

I was patient in administering the vet’s prescriptions; sadly, the virus wasn’t. By 2 AM Elbits’ mouth was tightly clenched, and two grown-up men (me and my dad) weren’t able to force-feed him anymore. His stomach, which was convulsing from time to time, obviously caused him a lot of pain (Parvo causes the intestines to slough, thus the bloody stool). I spent some time talking to Elbits, scratching his head (especially the prominent black spot right smack on his forehead) and even picking off some mites and ticks. Later, I left him to my dad’s care and hesitantly went to bed, fatigued beyond expression, both physically, emotionally, and mentally.

*****

Unbelievably, I was able to have a wonderful dream.

I was standing in the backyard, looking at Elbits perched upon some platform. He seemed to be alright; after all, he was sitting, not sprawled on the ground!

But in the most painful of moments, I suddenly heard our maid’s voice in the background, saying, “Elbits has passed away.”

I woke up, shaking off the drowsiness and headache. I slowly made my way down to the ground floor, opened the door to the backyard, and knelt in front of a friend.

Amidst the strong stench of bloody stool and the buzz of flies, I paid my last respects to Elbits. As I ruminated over what could have been and what would not be, I patted him on the black spot on his forehead.

Moments later, as I readied to leave the house for UP, I paid a last visit to the backyard. There, I laid my hand on Elbits’ head for one last time, and said, “Goodbye, dear friend.”

At the same time, I silently apologized to him, and cursed and damned myself for letting him die.

*****

While I was away at my thesis class, they buried Elbits in our small garden box (garden box, not garden). True, it was an unprecedented move to assure the virus’ survival for months to come, but we had to give him a decent burial, not throw him and leave him to rot on some vacant lot.

By evening that day, Tisoy (with his blue eyes, beige nose, and chocolate-brown spots) became more sick. His frame degenerated into almost a skeleton. We brought him out to the backyard to isolate him from the other dogs. Hours of force-feeding again took its toll, and I slept early that night, still not having recovered from the previous night’s ordeal.

Again, I had a wonderful dream.

The dream-state Corsarius opened the door to the backyard, and Tisoy came rushing into the house, galloping and yipping like crazy!

When I woke up, they told me Tisoy had already died when I was asleep.

*****

Tisay, as she was called (she really looked like a Dalmatian), was A-OK the day her sibling died. She was as ravenous as a tiger, and as active as a tadpole. But the following day she showed the symptoms of Parvo — lethargy, depression, bloody stool, vomiting.

For three days I patiently force-fed her with Gatorade (to supply her with electrolytes) and medicine. She was a strong pup, able to survive longer than her buddies. But as her illness progressed her condition swiftly regressed — she was having liquid feces more bloody than those of the other pups’.

Morning of the fourth day of her sickness, I was horrified to Tisay discharge a pool of reddish, liquid stool, feebly walk towards my direction, and collapse to the floor.

More than an hour later, while I was in a distant library in UP preparing for an exam, the last of our puppies died.

*****

It is always hard to lose a friend to the shadows. More so for four friends.

And as always the case, God has a reason for all of these. A mysterious reason, that is, one which is worth a million crap-ollars for many of us, including me. As church doctrine goes, we should soul-search for this reason; it is our responsibility as children of God.

But if I need to oblige with this, then I’ve got a request for Him in return, a little plea of a corsair who isn’t accustomed to pleading with people at all. I will plumb the depths of my soul to find Your reason, but give Elbits and the rest of all departed animals their own souls. Make every crying kid’s animal heaven a reality. With that mountain-moving, sea-dividing might, give them this simplest of requests, the greatest of dignities. Give them their souls, so they can meet their masters in the end, and blissfully frolic in the fields of Elysium. Please. For me, and for the millions of people who, at one time or another in their lifetimes, mourned beyond mourning for their dear friends.

I’m not sure — heck, no one’s sure — if this small request of mine will be granted. But one thing’s sure.

The Zoo on Cordillera Street is a much more boring place now.

Farewell, Elbits, Espy, Tisoy, Tisay, and the others. Wherever you are, know that you’ll be fondly — and lovingly — remembered.

Till next time then.

July 1, 2005 (Evening) - Espy (”Kambang”), 4 month old half-Dalmatian
July 2, 2005 (Dawn) - Elvis, 8 month old half-Dalmatian
July 3, 2005 (Early Dawn) - Tisoy, 4 month old half-Dalmatian
July 7, 2005 (Morning) - Tisay, 4 month old half-Dalmatian

*Stop, traveler. Latin. Used on tombstones.