Unfinished draft.

It is a shame to wake up by an alarm clock. Not only is it a shame to wake up by an alarm, but it is shame to even just wake up.

My alarm blares a familiar circus chime and my roommate wakes up with me. I shoot at her in her puffy-eyed disrupted hibernation, and squeak, "Sorry to wake you up... again!" She drops back to sleep.

Back in the big city wasteland, the alarm winds up the clockwork robot to force himself out of bed, force watery coffee in his mouth, force his body in the shower against cold water, and force himself in the train, among thousands of other automatons, to work.

With all such forces involved, I stopped working.

Where I wake up everyday now is on a tiny bone-shaped paradise island of slanted coconut trees, long stretches of white sand, shallow crystal blue water, and spectacular sunsets. I'm in Boracay. Just how the hell did I get here?

Every time a newcomer arrives to live here, even temporarily, the first thing I ever say is: You will get bored. After you've seen and dipped your ass in ocean from the 14 beaches on the island, you will get bored. After you've tasted all the exotic local and international cuisines, you will get bored. After you've gotten yourself smashed and wasted on every bar and club, you will get bored. After you've tried all the watersports activities--windsurfing, kiteboarding, scuba diving, snorkeling, helmet diving, fly fishing, bananaboat, kayaking, paddleboarding, cliff diving, jet skiing, and so on--you will get bored. After you've gotten a henna tattoo, a hair braid, and a sandcastle carved with your name by a nine-year-old Ati boy, you will get bored. After you've tried everything every tourist must do, I'm telling you: You will get bored.

The newcomer who hears this laughs and says, You are saying this on our first conversation as if you just want me to leave. Jesus, I traveled all the way from the US just to hear that.

I say, I'm just saying. I say, I'm just warning you. I mean, it's a tiny island. In the long run, it's like a prison here. Surrounded by vast waters and separated from the rest of the world. I say, If you don't preoccupy yourself with something on a regular basis, you will get bored.

Okay, okay, I got you, the newcomer says. What do you do to ward off this boredom then?

For a split-second I'm rattled at what I'm about to say. I've almost forgotten what boredom means. How do I remember what I do when I don't remember what's it like to be bored? And then it dawns on me like a parasail from the sky. I tell the newcomer, I do dragonboat.

Shameless plug, fuck. But I love this photo, whoever owns it.
And no, I do not live in a paraw, silly.

This boring introduction is supposed to talk about the sand, the water, and the sunburnt tourists toasting their backs on White Beach. We will veer away from that for a moment and view the island from a rather kickass perspective: from a helicopter!

Imagine yourself on a chopper ride over south to north of Boracay. Your heart is thumping and the chopper lifts off from Caticlan. As the chopper leaves the huge island of Panay, it hums over a kilometer of deep blue sea that separates Boracay Island from Panay Island. Pumpboats that ferry tourists in and out of Boracay cross that strait right below. Scattered around the same strait are tiny fishing boats shaped like rice grains. Farther to the right are islets that are also considered part of Boracay: the Laurel Islands, one of which is the park-like Crystal Cove Island, and Crocodile Island, which is a popular dive site. The islets look like jagged rocks hurled by a giant into the sea.

As the chopper enters Boracay's territory, two cream-white beaches are fringed with coconut trees and flecked with sleeping pumpboats. They are the jetty ports of Cagban and Tambisaan. Straight ahead, the 1,032-hectare ax-shaped island lies diagonally to the left. Either end is wide, hilly, and green, while the island slopes down to a flat narrow center. Brown huts and low-lying houses with iron roofs pepper along the roads, even more thickly along the concrete main road.

The main road, on the other hand, is busy with passenger motorcycles and tricycles, the Filipino version of the Thai tuk-tuk. The same main road loops around the island like a go-cart racetrack, interconnecting the three barangays, which are Barangay Manoc-Manoc down south, Barangay Balabag in the middle, and Barangay Yapak up north. From the center of the island, either end is just 3.5 kilometers long and a fifteen-minute tricycle ride away.

The helicopter drifts across the center where the hustle and bustle of the island is. Vegetation thins out down this neck, while the coconut trees and tropical palms are pushed out towards both sides of the island. Down below are matchboxes of different sizes and colors, making up most of the 200 establishments, restaurants, bars, and resorts and hotels with tiny blue puddles of water that upon closer inspection are actually swimming pools. Meanwhile, greenish murky water makes up the mangrove swamps at the east. The swamps comprise the sunken Dead Forest, so-called because of the salt water that leaked into the area and murdered the trees. The swamps come together to a channel whose mouth opens into the Sibuyan Sea.

At this neck of the island, the famous White Beach stretches four-kilometers long of talcum powder-white sand at the west. The popular beach is sprinkled with ant-like humans, and dotted with shops, restaurants, and bars facing the Sulu Sea. The establishments here make up a shopping center called D'Mall. Farther out, triangles of sailboats, locally known as paraw, are puffy with the wind. Nearer the horizon, motorboats tug along through an invisible string tiny colorful parachutes up in the air.

At the east side of the island, however, lies Bulabog Beach, a 2.5 kilometer strip of coarser white sand. While this side is often grim with seaweeds and docked with fishing boats, Bulabog is popular to itinerant adrenaline junkies, the seasonal kiteboarders and windsurfers. White Beach and Bulabog Beach are just two of the 14 beaches on the island. Clockwise from White Beach, the rest are Diniwid, Balinghai, Punta Bunga, Bunyugan, Puka, Ilig-iligan, Lapus-lapus, Lugutan, Tulubhan, Tambisaan, Manoc-Manoc, and Cagban Beach.

The chopper leaves the busy center and glides over the quiet northern hills of the island. Once again, the island greets you with its lush vegetation of shrubs, wild vines, and trees. The copter swerves to the northeast and almost kisses the peak of Mt. Luho, which at 100 meters, is the highest point on the island. Resorts and hotels perched on this elevated terrain are touched every morning with the first rays of glorious sunshine. After Mt. Luho are sloping verdant hills that comprise a 180-hectare 18 hole par 72 championship golf course.

As the copter nears the northern end of Boracay, there lies the provincial idyll. Nipa huts peek out from the sprawling forest, whose ground is perfumed with guano. Bat caves hide beneath a thick tangle of untamed vines and trees at the northeastern part of the island. The caves are the roosting ground of three species of bats in Boracay. The one that looks like a flying vampire dog, the endangered Golden-Crowned Flying Fox, is endemic to the Philippines.

You reach the northernmost tip of island, where the dreamy shores of Puka Beach glimmer at you with a melancholic goodbye. Waves roll on the beach and slam against the walls of the limestone coral reefs. You imagine the rhythmic sound of it, now distantly away, as it cradles your pulse to a similar relaxing beat. The blood that rushes through you is the same as the waters that rush through the island. You figure, hey, you're alive, and hey, you're in Boracay. It's time to land and celebrate.

_____

Sample article from my new work, which starts on January!:D And no, I haven't stepped in a helicopter my whole bloody life. //edit: I have no work on January anymore. :|

Happy Birthday, Jom.

1. Next to blood, the most valuable liquid in the world is urine.
2. Moonbathing for eight consecutive nights will grant you skin cancer.
3. A public toilet seat is 35 times cleaner than paper money.
4. Letting red wine dry on your face will get rid of all whiteheads and blackheads.
5. Ants don't sleep.
6. Closing one nostril, you'll find bitter food sweet.
7. 12 billion years ago, the sun used to be a twin of stars that collapsed into one.
8. Monkeys can lick their elbows.
9. More people die from falling trees than from car accidents.
10. Human tears can easily heal fresh wounds.
11. Michael Jackson has a tattoo of himself on his left shoulder blade.
12. An orgasm has the same neurological effect of taking heroin. The only difference is that sex is legal.
13. The word "god" has the most number of definitions in the dictionary without referring to anything provable.
14. Your fingertips formed the horizontal lines on your palm when you were inside your mother's womb.
15. Cats prefer to eat lizards than mice.
16. Your sphincter (asshole muscles) can stretch to as wide as a dinner plate.
17. Mating two donkeys together will produce a horse.
18. Watering apples with coffee makes them grow faster; watering them with beer makes them grow slower.
19. Bears can bend over and lick their own genitals.
20. Kids ages 8 and below find swallowing chewing gum and eating their booger normal.
21. Bismuth briefly turns into gold once it's at zero degrees centigrade.
22. Attaching a magnet to your mobile phone will charge a call only a minute whatever the duration may be.
23. Our moon used to be Jupiter's moon.
24. A whale's fart can kill a person swimming on the water surface.
25. The chemical composition of each person's sweat is unique.
26. Lindsay Lohan has a pierced G-spot.
27. A rattlesnake's venom can reverse baldness.
28. Cellular aging halts at zero gravity.
29. All computer systems are hackable.
30. The most googled keyword is "porn".
31. Necrophelics who fuck frozen corpses are less likely to acquire sexually transmitted diseases or infections.
32. Next to sex, the most beneficial and pleasurable thing in the world is laughter.
33. Only numbers 1, 12, and 30 are true. Everything else I made them all up. How much of everything you read do you believe in?

You rubberneck at the towering Oblation from the outside: a statue of a naked man facing the watery gray sky, palms up, arms spread like an eagle. It says outright: Look at me! I'm free! And I'm naked! Except for the leaf covering my genitals.

It just rained. The street is wet and muddy. Vehicles speed by to splatter black mud droplets on your pants. An ambulance siren is wailing distantly away. Vendors have claimed property of the sidewalk. Around you is the mixed smell of vehicle exhaust, roasted peanuts, and boiled sweet corn.

Inside the gates are oxygen-generating trees. The air is cooler and nose-friendly. There's the overcrowded parking area bordered with rusty chains. The main building of Philippine General Hospital is redolent of Rome's Pantheon. You step inside the grand entrance, tread on red carpet reeking collectively of people's feet, and begin working on your olfactive sense. The guard greets you a pleasant morning and frisks your bag with a magic wand.

Instantly there is a whirlwind of people shuffling around and queuing from teller windows. They smell of sweat, cheap cologne, and bathroom soap. The walls are painted haystack-yellow, hanged occasionally with oversized paintings. There's a whiff of sneeze and Jollibee hamburgers. A middle-aged woman dragging along a little boy approaches you and says she needs P18 for fare home. But you don't hear what she says. You're attention is focused on her missing upper teeth. I'm sorry, what? you say. She walks away.

You realize your bladder is about to burst so you scuttle to the nearest restroom. You queue before five women all covering their nose. The restroom is badly lit, five out of six fluorescent lights broken, and it smells like a stockroom of hoarded piss and roach droppings. Your turn, the toilet is at floor level. You notice a string of a mop's thread on the floor in between your shoes. You unzip your pants and sit to piss. Upon closer inspection, the string isn't really from a mop's thread; it's actually a dead brown worm.

Your consultation with your surgeon is an hour away, and you dawdle along the corridors to kill time. You pass by the Obstetrics and Gynecology ward which reeks of talcum powder and breast milk. Two maintenance men block the doorway rolling out six giant garbage bags while saying, Makikidaan lang. May trabaho din kami. The four people walking against them flatten themselves on the wall.

The walkway to the next ward is filled with the dull hum of air-conditioning. A uniformed boy mops the floor and the odor just reminds you of a claustrophobic locker room cramped with unwashed monster mops. You pass by the Trauma Division ward and your nose is stuffed with the stench of rotting fish and undusted mattresses. An autistic young boy plods on the corridor, seemingly spellbound by the sound pattern of his heavy leather sandals. Two doctorate interns talk conyo, one of them wearing a sunday dress beneath a lab coat. Her face is freckled, melanin-deprived, foreign, but she speaks with a thick Filipino accent. She has the height of a beauty queen, and her skin is as white and soft as toilet paper. She appears the perfect lady to take home to mommy. That is, until you see her horribly hammered toenails.

At your left is the morgue, its glass windows obscured with grime and protected with metal wires. A stone appears to have been hurled at its glass exit door, leaving a hole where you can peek into. You shut one eye and lean toward the peephole. Inside is a morgue converted into a kitchen. Next to kitchen sinks and stoves heating giant pots and pans are the morgue drawers. The ceiling fan filters the light casting fluttering shadows everywhere. People in dark uniforms roam around staggering like zombies. Kick in some satanic chants and a zombie soundtrack and this could pass off as a cannibalistic horror video. You move along.

Contrary to popular belief, Philippine General Hospital doesn't smell entirely of antiseptic, isopropyl alcohol, and festering open wounds; only the Emergency Room smells that way. Some wards smell of scented air-conditioning and oxygen tanks. Some smell of lemon and hand wash. Some smell of wet paint and concrete dust. At a particular ward, the Pediatrics Department, there is the omnipresent smell of soiled diapers. And there standing on one bed bunk, a kid with protruding ribs and a swollen belly is dancing while singing the Madagascar theme song: I like to move it, move it. She likes to move it, move it. He likes to move it, move it. I like taaah. Move it!

The hallways have the incessant stench of wet earth and those filthy rags used for wiping tables in restaurants. The canteen smells of fried rice, silog variants, and sizzling salisbury steaks. Occasionally you come across someone with a balloon neck or someone with a tube plugged up his nose. Then a polio-stricken doctor passes you by like a macho dancer trying to walk and wave his body at the same time.

You glance at your watch and figure you still have fifteen minutes left. Straight ahead are two ATMs, one being refilled with bills ten inches thick. Three gorilla-faced bodyguards wearing black combat suits stand feet apart looking for suspecting assailants. Tied at the nozzle of a guard's rifle is a misplaced white ribbon. What is that innocent white ribbon doing there? The owner of that rifle stares at you staring at the ribboned nozzle which is pointing at the other guard's foot. The guards look at each other, look at you, and you all look away.

You head toward your surgeon's office at the next building and pass by the Immaculate Conception chapel. A broken car horn is blaring forever from the parking area. There's the smell of rubber and plastic flowers. You glance at the altar and notice the pot of tulip flowers looking like a congregation of sex organs. The Jesus on the cross is Caucasian, and his abs reminds you of an abs-toning curling machine from Home Shopping Network. The priest is saying, Do not wait to get rich to help others! Do not wait to win the Lotto to donate to charity, to the orphanage, to this chapel! Do not wait to get rich before you start helping people because you can start helping right now!

Then you realize it's raining again. You take a folded umbrella from your bag and press a button with a flop. But the moment you step at the wide open space, the rain stops. It doesn't even grant your umbrella a bloody raindrop. This pisses you off, but you move along anyway.

The first thing you ever do is kneel before him. He is your god and you are his minion. You strip off his pants and filthy underwear and bow down to worship the phallus that completes the hole in your cunt.

The first thing you ever write is the title The Anatomy of a Penis. You are not a scientist. You are not a biologist. You have nil knowledge about anatomy, much less a penis. But you do know "penis" derives from the same Latin etymology of "pen" and "pencil". The penis is the fountainhead of all generations of humans since the Big Bang. The pen is the fountainhead of all literature spilled from its infinite inkwell. The penis is the extra body part that fulfills your missing body part. The pen's ink fulfills the blank pages in your head.

You take his hairy balls and put each one in your mouth. You nuzzle it. You lick it. You sniff it. It smells of sweat and shit and piss. It tastes of salt and grime and dead skin cells. It is soft and stretchable with folds of skin. This is the factory of the millions of sperm cells that has bred mankind.

Of the pen and the penis you must choose only one. Either you satisfy the hole in your head, or satisfy the hole in your cunt. Back in ancient history, the pen and penis were one and the same: the prolific instrument of men. Women were banned from writing. Their sole function was domesticity. To cook and clean and scrub and wash the dishes. To watch their stomach grow and tip their swelling breasts until the water breaks and their vagina is ripped open. To nurse little dumb humans and raise and nurture them without question, without denial, just because they are their blood and bones and flesh. You suffer twenty, thirty, forty years. Pump out more babies, who will pump out more babies, who will pump out more babies. Then once again you turn to your blank sheets of paper. But before you know it, it's too late to write. Your children have sucked all the juices. You are barren and empty and useless. Furthermore, you are fat and old and ugly. The thought of a wife-mother-grandmother-writer is just unacceptable. It's not just unacceptable, it is impossible. You are a female writer, and your immortality lies one way: to swell and burst with babies, or to swell and burst with ideas. Either you follow the normal course of life: working, breeding, dying. Or the one you have in mind: living, writing, publishing. You can't choose both; either bear children or be an artist. You have a calling.

You take his limp penis and wet it with your mouth. You lick from the balls up to the head. You are a kid and this is your first ice cream. You lick it slowly, but instead of melting, it hardens. His penis is the darkest part of his body. It has the same color as your lipstick. The color of your lips represent the color of his penis. And in the art of fellatio your lips and his penis are one and the same. Inseparable. Fused. Liquefied.

You are what you eat. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. You are what you wear. You are the films you watch. You are the music you listen to. You are the books you read. You are the places you go to. Everything that you do is a reaffirmation of who you are. He wants to settle down. You don't. He wants to get married. You don't. He wants to spread his genes, have babies. You don't. You can't be a housewife and daydream instead of cooking dinner. You can't read books instead of cleaning the house. You can't develop your writing instead of looking after your kids. You can't think of revolutionary ideas instead of jumbling grocery items in your head. You can't express your creativity through the recipes you experiment with. Your taste buds lack the sophistication of your vocabulary. Words are your world. A family is not. Ideas make you excited. Sex, only temporarily. The pen is an extension of yourself. The penis you are sucking is not. The idea of children just doesn't appeal to you. They're no more than a bore, an irritation, an unwanted responsibility, a termination of your freedom. Who ever told you you should live your life just like everybody else? Have you ever heard of vibrators?

The most sensitive part of the penis is not the head but the frenulum, the strip of skin at the underside of the head. It looks like the skin beneath your tongue. You hold the shaft and trace your tongue up the underside of the penis. He begins to relax. He closes his eyes. The penis elongates and stiffens. The veins around it thickens and become more bulbous. You circle the head with the tip of your tongue, clockwise, counterclockwise, reverse. The head pushes out, its skin smooth and taut. Behold, the penis rises.

You are to give pleasure to this phallic god. He is your muse, your object of obsession, the phantom of your dreams. No matter how ordinary he appears to be in other people's eyes, he is your religious icon, the paragon of your superstitious idolatry, always powerful, always omnipotent. You want this penis more than anything in your life. This penis is what you should be having. As a body part, that is. Not this hollow cave in your cunt. You should've been born male, not female. You should've been created an Adam, not some cloned specimen from Adam's ribs. You want to be a man not because you're a lesbian but because it grants you the right to become an artist. But the closest thing you can ever have a penis is to put it in your mouth, the orifice right next to your brain. Your mouth functions what the pen cannot. But in the act of fellating, your mouth is elevated to the status of some superficial purpose: to make him come. Semen, like speech, flies in the air for a moment, and dies. Words on paper do not; they are immortal. Words will outlive you long after you are bones and ashes underneath the ground.

You encircle the shaft with your fingers, your middle-fingertip connected to the tip of your thumb. With your free hand you fondle his balls. You caress them, tickle them, tease them. You wet the entire penis by putting all of it in your mouth. You will not gag. You will not choke. You will not vomit. You glide your fingers up and down, and twist your wrist as you do so. You suck the penis in and out, while massaging his balls. You follow this rhythm with the internal clock of your heartbeat. It looks easy but it's actually more complicated than you think.

You are not a slut. You are not a whore. You are not a prostitute. You are simply a lover. The greatest pleasure you can ever have is to give pleasure to someone else. His pleasure is your pleasure. Together you complete the yin and yang of hedonism. Your submission is your domination. He moans and forces his eyes open; he is under your spell. You are liberated, but for a moment you are his slave. Freedom and slavery are blurred out of focus. But really, freedom is all you ever want. You don't want to be attached to anything, to anyone. You have no concept of possession and possessiveness. But the contradiction is that you are attached to this man and his penis. Your pen is the height of your freedom. His penis is the height of your slavery. And the only way to merge them together is to write something like the anatomy of his penis. P is for pen. P is for penis. P is also for procreation, pleasure, pride, and power. Unfortunately, P is also for pregnancy, which is the loss of control over your own life.

Think  of
multitasking: your
hands, your lips, your
tongue, your mouth,
your heartbeat, and
your brain are
all  at  work.  Up
and   down   your
hand, in and out of
your  mouth,  the
penis slides at the
roof of your mouth
and  at  the  tip  of
your   tongue.   It
turns into a moment
when  nothing  else
exists. Every second
is   amplified   and
intensified such that
even  time  ceases
to tick. Both of you are
in heaven where everything
is pleasurable, eternal, pure, holy.
Suddenly, you cream on your pants.

Sex is the closest thing you can get to immortality. It's not health. It's not youth. It's not beauty. But the worse part is that writing is your salvation, the only thing that can cement and seal your immortality. His penis' semen is not the same as your pen's ink, however you want to fuse them together. Sex is power the same way words are power the same way wealth, health, youth, and beauty are power. What humanity wants is power, except that power manifests in different ways. Virility is power, stability, force, and muscle. Femininity is impotence, instability, submission, mood swings. The term female writer has words that cancel each other out. You are in your twenties, with raging hormones, perpetually horny. You are a nymphomaniac and you are a writer. How do you compromise the two? The thing is, you can't. Writing is a calling that equates to priesthood if you have a cunt.

After enough rhythmic sucking, the penis hardens in its full glory inside your mouth. It thickens in a diameter that your fingers break off its circle. Its head puffs up like a balloon that's about to burst. He represses his moan, and all you hear is his heavy breathing, his heart palpitating, all his blood rushing to the tip of his penis. His breathing synchronized with your sucking synchronized with your heartbeat. It goes in a loop that ends with his penis spouting jets of semen in your mouth. You suck his penis dry of all its contents, and then you swallow.

The real problem with you is that you mustn't go on always trying to adapt to men's theories of what a woman should be. A woman should be soft, sensitive, compassionate, understanding, yielding, emotional. You are phallic, narcissistic, castrating, domineering, rational. You don't possess any female quality, except for having breasts and a cunt. Long after you've realized you can never be a wife, a mother, a grandmother, domesticated and always homebound, after you've decided the pen is mightier than the penis, after you've accepted this and let go of this man and his procreating instrument, after spilling your thoughts and creativity on sheets of absorbent paper, will it be worth it? How could you compare domesticity with being a writer if you haven't tried both? But then you take the option all other women won't. It's worse to do what you hate; worst you can do is nothing.

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