the zeppelin of burning dreams

*This is based on the proposed Republic Act 32501 of science fiction writer Ian Madrid, an effin genius in his own way. This is also a work in progress.*

---

I'm an old man. I was old when I was sent here to the Mindanao Geriatrics Containment Zone fifteen years ago. I'm turning eighty next month.

Eighty years old ain't so bad, says one of my neighbors. "Lookit me, I'm almost as old as the century itself, and I'm still working a tractor in the farm."

"But doesn't your heart bother you with all that effort?" I ask him.

He grins and weakly pounds his sagging, old man chest. "I get a stroke nearly every month now. Back at the turn of the century, that would've been a problem. But these days, all you need is a heart muscle, a sample of your DNA (easily taken from the government's main databanks), and a good biotechnician."

That would mean a new heart after five working days. A new blood pump after a week.

"Your pension can afford it Boyet," I tell him. "You were a hotshot stockbroker back in the mainland. You think a teacher like me can afford a heart transplant every month?"

He shrugs, and leaves me alone in my rocking chair. I don't know why, but the governments ships us oldsters here in the middle of nowhere, expect us to wear our bones down working for a generation that had us thrown out here in the first place. Got a heart problem? We'll replace your heart. Got a bone problem? We'll fix it. We just want you where your age won't get in the way of progress.

In our previous lives, our expertise tended to vary, but here in this godforsaken quarantine, we only had one working title: so and so, farmer.

A farmer. Me, a well-respected educator. That's a laugh.

We don't get the hard jobs, thankfully. It was the new deportees that handled things like harvesting and delivery. The older you got, the easier your task became.

Well, that's not entirely true. Boyet's nearly a decade older, and he still takes care of the motorized plow. This was all due to the magical wonder that is science. Funny, since it was the same thing that landed all geriatrics above the age of sixty five in Mindanao, harvesting rice by the blimpfuls. I remember how those Philippine History vids at the turn of the century videos when the legislative ratified the Geriatrics Act of 2015. The then-incumbent senate president, Jose Davila, had to face a riot of oldsters (mostly those without pension or tenure) upon exiting the doors of the Senate building. It was a metropolitan disaster.

But for some reason, the scientific community supported - no, spearheaded - the Act. Nobody really knew why, but now, almost sixty years later, they say that back in the mainland, society had learned to live with a certain joire de vive attitude that can be attributed to the age limit.

Life ended at sixty five.

"I never really thought about the Act much," says my section chief whenever we have enough time to sit about in the fields and shoot the breeze. "But then, how would us old folks survive back at the mainland? We'll be dead before a day was out."

Truly.

But then, anything was better than living out your usefulness in this neck of the woods. You tend to feel the gears wearing down your soul after a couple of maintenance operations. I don't know how people like Boyet could put up with the torture. Old science fiction books dealt with cyborg replacements parts and mechanical inplants, but those were made of virtually


(gaddemit. i hate mental blocks.)

My words have dried up. There is no more poetry flowing from this once-vibrant tongue, the music of language vanished as though a dream, some nightmarish taste of the majick behind those who have mastered the Dreamcatcher. Cruel, this twist of reality is cruel, this twist of reality is, as the full impact





slowly





hits






ME.

Normally, when people find themselves tongue-tied, they stutter, shake their heads, and try to remember what it was they intended to say. Or they laugh ruefully, and shake their heads whilst still laughing.

I've found that I prefer to stop and let the other guy continue the conversation, or change the topic as well as I can. Mark of a good conversationalist? Maybe not. There isn't much conversation achieved in multiple conversationgs (wherein the multiplicity ocurrs in the number of topics / time alloted for the said conversation). It's like the difference between a small barrio's network of streets and a superhighway. One's quaint, interesting, but fairly troublesome to navigate, without mentioning the amount of time, gasoline, and energy you'd have to spend just to get two blocks away. The superhighway's, well, you know. The opposite. But it's boring.

There's the same evolution happening in online journals nearly everywhere. There are some journal keepers that have this habit of superkilometric entries; these are daunting. More so when it just happens to be an account of someone's day, past weekend, or god forbid, his previous classes. No slamming here, online journals are public property and can be mangled whichever way you please. I'm just saying that there are some others that actually have something more interesting to say, or a better way of saying things.

Now here's an analytical quandary: four general situations, namely:

• long story, bad storytelling
  
• short story, bad storytelling
  
• long story, good storytelling
  
• short story, good storytelling
  

And the question is, which is best?

Long stories are annoying, in a certain manner. Let's say we're looking at a long drive of around two hours, from Cubao (point A) to Pasadena (point B) in Little Baguio. Considering how the traffic builds up at the Cubao area, plus having to go through that hellish series of one-way streets in downtown San Juan, the amount of time given (two hours) isn't improbable. Now, consider the distance: you can get from point A to point B in about fifteen minutes, given light traffic and 40 to 80 kph. That's the long story with bad storytelling.

Short stories badly told are annoying too. That's like having to go around the block to get to the street behind your house just to buy a pack of cigarettes. There should have been an alley connecting your street and the other street, but you just happened to be born unlucky. You have to walk a block to buy your cigarettes, and a block back in order to smoke them in the privacy of your own home. No impact, no trouble, just plain useless. Why'd you bother to write anything in the first place?

Any story told well enough is worthy of praise. Long and well-told stories are like that long bus ride from EDSA to Baguio in the dead of night. You meet the most interesting of characters during pit stops, there isn't the babble of frenzied travellers to keep you awake, and the elevator music is an experience best served with a bottle of tea and crackers. I'd buy those albums if I knew where to find them. And the pit stops aren't half bad either. Good 2 am coffee in some spots, and the halfway houses are usually scenic in themselves. There's this really cool stop in Ilocos Sur where I ran across a bunch of guys discussing Ben Cab with Red Horse as company. I think the word I'm looking for is quaint.

Short good stories are like the spike of rhum in your punch bowl. They illuminate the high spots in your life, and they have an edge in brevity. It's easier to remember something that didn't run like a ten-page article.

Which leads me to the trouble of why I'm having a hard time maintaining this blog. It's a question of why I'm writing in an online journal, for all the internet to see. It's like a destiny thing, choosing which path you're on, what exactly you want to dish out to your readers.

If you haven't caught up with the rationale yet, here: if you own a blog that's open for public consumption, you're expected to dish out something that's blogworthy. And I don't mean an account of your fucking life. My life sucks. If yours doesn't, kudos to you but that doesn't mean I give a hoot to what happens to you unless it affects me in any way.

Some bloggers don't seem to get this. They just blog away, drivel after drivel without any attempt to give the readers something to actually chew on, acting as if their life was the center of the world. The blog is yours, but our attention's still ours.

There's where my problem lies. In a nutshell: I don't know what to talk about anymore. Well isn't dry, and I'm still writing, but I'm not the kind of person who makes his life the story of the day and dresses it up for the consumption of the public. I like to zero in on a single topic, and write an honest to goodness entry about that. And I'm also one of those kilometric writers. Most of my more interesting entries (at least to me) happen to be the longer ones (yeah, the ones people don't really reply to, hehe). My shorter entries stink. I don't believe that life fed to the people through the filters of bias and editing is worth reading. I'm more of an idea person. But it's either I'm a terribly boring writer, or some of my ideas are too unweildy to actually grasp and think about (even for a nanosecond). That's what my problem is.

Or maybe I just write extremely wrong entries. Ahuh. There is that.

Jeez.

Mag-timpi ng kahit kaunti, meyn. Don't ever do something like that again. There's something to be said about being too brave.

I just like these paragraphs. :D



"IT’S funny how you can get a bucketful of philosophical insight from something as simple as kids playing with a magnetic arm in a junkyard," said Trish.

This was much later into the night, me with a tub of tofu and a Coke. "How the hell can you get philosophical insights from a pair of runts?" I asked.

And there was an electronic pout. "Let’s just say that kids are an open book, writing down experiences for the very first time in their lives. They don’t really know anything until they experience something, which is likely to happen, but highly dependent on the situation. Now let’s take any normal kid who lives in a family (of variable situation), goes to school (another variable, with some constants), and has friends (real or otherwise). Now, say you introduce the idea of jousting to these ‘normal’ kids, they’re sure to grasp the concept like everybody else in the world; appreciation of ideas is something everybody’s been taking for granted, just because a certain set of meaning has been inundated to the reasoning of the child. But what if you work with a tabula rasa that had been exposed to eccentricity as a concept of normality?"

“Whatever you say, they’re still just children working with a magnetic arm. Movies have been made about astounding, extraordinary kids. There was this child who wrote an entire musical once. How about that for astounding?”

“You don’t understand,” she replied. “Those kids are exceeding the expectations of the society we live in – in other words, you’re working with a conditioning that more or less conforms to what you have been taught to understand as normal. But think: what if those junkyard cabbage patch kids have had it drummed into their heads that the normal state of living revolved around the glorious automata known as the magnetic arm? What if a writer like you were brought up to the practice of ritualistic murder for inspiration to grow? Is normal what other people see, or what you see?

Blogging too truthfully about your whole life is, anyway. There's more truth to those words than anybody could ever have imagined.

(On a side note, I can't help but refer you guys to one of my more recent posts. Around three posts back, as a matter of fact. Can you say I told you so? Hehehe, gloating is so much fun.)

The meat: a student from a certain prestigious school (I shall refrain from mentioning names) has been suspended for blogging.

And no, I am not kidding.

The circumstances: the student posted certain slanderous emotions regarding heads of the educational institution in his weblog, which was discovered by agents of the chief (I'm guessing we're talking about the computer professors here) during one night of sleepless web surfing.

The offending entries were then promptly forwarded to school officials, and soon afterwards, the student was apprehended and duly suspended for slander against authority.

Now, this is stretching the imagination, but I find it easy to believe that around eighty percent of the blogging population find no fault in the student, believing that the institution was in the wrong of the matter. After all, blogs are supposed to be public properties.

The same thing holds with newspapers, supposedly. Writers aren't supposed to control what they print; what the public demands is king.

But that isn't how true journalism works.

Half of the publications circulating en masse in the print / newspaper market today are carting newspaper stories rich in information and entertainment value. You read a copy of, say, Vogue, and you can bet that for a Vogue reader, the magazine will appeal to you because the information is seemingly correct, and at the very least, a group of masses concur with whatever is printed. You, the Vogue reader, might actually be one of them.

Thus is the power of marketing.

No, wait. Aren't we supposed to be talking about writing?

That's basically the same tree.

Although the stories aren't really the mutilated, vile, slanderous lies I oftentimes wish them to be (for a score of reasons, some of them being multinational bankruptcy) you can bet your grandma's knickers that they've been pre-conditioned to fit a target audience. And pre-conditioning isn't enough; there's reconditioning, rereconditioning, and then there's the editor's final approval. Which is supposed to be sound, since the article has been through a treadmill of biases, conditioning the content for proper and safe consumption by a multitude. Sort of like the Sermon in the Mount.

But the thing is, it still caters to a select group. The elite group, as far as fashion is concerned (for Vogue magazine, say). The truths for that elite group might not jive with the truth of the rest of the population. Whilst skinny bodies and small breasts might be alluring, a growing population of lusty, horny men are clamoring for more meat on their women. A friend from LiveJournal has attested to this by going through E! Online's forum boards.

I was asked by my editors from MMPI to write an article on the Chronicles of Narnia, in anticipation of the upcoming movie event of the year. Unfortunately, the article they asked me to write had to kiss up to the septology, which I adamantly refused. I lay down my idea of writing a devil's advocate view of the Chronicles of Narnia (since I really prefer CS Lewis' Space Trilogy to the Chronicles). She (one of the cuter editors) refused the article, and I haven't heard from her since. A couple of days afterwards, I get what could possibly be my final cheque from the company, and I couldn't be any happier.

But despite my obvious disrespect for the authority of censors, even I'm sensible enough to say that the censors are there for a reason: information isn't for everybody to see, or to share. If a certain friend of yours had two penises growing out of his pelvis, that would probably be information you'd rather do without (unless you were female and a nympho, in which case you should leave your number down there where you can post your replies. I'll get in touch with you in two days. Haha, okay, so I won't.).

That kid had it bad, but generally, it was his own fault for posting sentiments against a legal authority in a public domain where everybody takes chances of being observed. I mean, we're all here concerned about private intellectual property in a medium where privacy is almost all but a thing of the past! You can't complain about a stalker online when you aren't really taking any serious means to shake the person (can you say Cyberspace hermit?). If you can't live without an Internet connection, then you'd better be prepared to face the dangers of a public domain.

I mean, Tabulas itself's like bloody Quiapo. Tangina, andaming tao, alang nag-papansinan, pero andaming nagnanakaw ng mga salita't ideya. Puta, at least sa Quiapo alam mo'ng nanakawan ka kasi may tama ka sa tiyan.

That kid who posted about his superiors refuses to publicly apologize to the Institution heads because of the mere fact that the slanderous information he posted in his blog is supposedly true. I'm hoping he's brave enough to stick to his words, because he's facing expulsion and a possible lawsuit for defamation of character.

If he recants, I will try my hardest to meet this kid, publicly revile him and laugh in his face. Tangina panalo sya sa kabadingan.

There's this growing interest within the local scene in a musical genre known simply as "progressive," which fascinates me to no end, seeing as to how the simple "progressive" subculture is perhaps one of the hardest to appreciate.

As for myself, my interest in progressive music (prog rock being at the topmost of my list) began with what Audiophile Component's manager calls "every amateur guitarist's wet dream," which was Dream Theatre.

Let me tell you how it felt, listening to Dream Theatre's "Overture 1928." This song is perhaps the greatest DT song to have ever been created; sans the vocal prowes of James LaBrie as it is, the entire movement (since it lacks the replayability and familiarity factor of your standard song) begins with a 19/4 time power D-chord action by John Petrucci on the guitars, John Myung on bass, and Jordan Rudess on keyboards. The intro then ebbs into a slower tempo, but with the addition of two other chords. The music then flourishes, with more notes added to the basic chords, shifting now and then to other root melodies and different time signatures, mellowing in certain parts and rising in others like a fist in the face. At times, you will be reminded of an orchestra, what with the rise and fall of the musical tension. At the very end, you will discover that the song has been cut; the next track, "Strange DejaVu" continues the story left off by Overture.

Overture 1928 is a good example of how technically efficient prog music is; note reading is almost always an important part of the music, since the musician is reliant to strict notation and direction - crescendos here, how the music should begin fuerte but then should slow down to a slight desfalto (if I remember my spanish and piano classes), getting back up again to speed after a few bars of music. This isn't to say that progressive is classical rock music - it doesn't even touch the ground classical music treads on - but is a blend of technical musical influences, mixed to achieve a sounds that, on the whole, can literally tire you out just by listening.

What makes prog rock hard to appreciate?

Why the technicality of the music of course.

In the Philippines, the only exposure to prog-like music we've had (mainstream) would come from the likes of Razorback's "Beggar's Moon - Tie-dye sky" combo, or the "Wurm" and "fruitcake" albums, from Wolfgang and Eraserheads separately. Pinikpikan's music has taken a progressive turn in recent years, after they incorporated rock n' roll influences into their world music sound, but back when MTV was a luxurious waste of time, progressive music was all but a myth. The standard listener was exposed to a plethora of rock acts, ranging from hard rock to grunge rock, settling into a comfortable alternative sound (thanks to the E'heads), which is music following a set of unwritten rules on how the music should grow as an entity (like Razorback: hard rock n' roll from start to finish).

Prog rock follows a different set of rules; musically, the horizons of prog music end only with what the musicians can't play (e.g. the bassist can't follow the guitarist's staccatto 19/3 Em-A-Dm chord progression with two second 16th note-leading in between every two chords). The rules are on paper. Notes bind you, but generally, the entire scope of music is within your grasp.

The average listener would find it hard to understand, let alone enjoy prog music; it would be tantamount to a twenty-five digit number divided by a 2-digit number, whose end result is factored to the 21st power mathematical problem.

Prog. Rock. Is. What. Infomation. Overload. Is. To. Scientists.

The beautiful Abby Clutario of the local progressive band Fuseboxx is, along with her band and a handful of rabid Fuseboxx fanatics who call themselves the Fuseboxx Colony, are holding a year-long progressive rock awareness campaign called collectively as "In Progression." The event would feature Fuseboxx, Eternal Now (another fantastic local prog rock act) and a score of other prog bands as the main acts.

Among the goals of the said campaign is to promote prog rock as a viable genre of music for the scene in the Philippines.

The fact that the prog scene is actually getting this kind of attention here in Manila is strange enough in itself. There was a time back in UST wherein we'd talk about prog rock and some of the people just wouldn't get the idea. Hell, even my drummer (who is a helluva good drummer and could probably play good prog music if he wanted to) doesn't get the idea behind prog rock.

"Hell," he says, "so they could play really well. I just don't see it."

That sums up the general emotion of the uninitiated public to prog rock. But despite this critical acceptance of the genre, prog has grown into something of an underground underground movement.

Fuseboxx was eventually turned down by a recording label with an excuse along the lines of "Your music is impressive, but we just can't find a way to market it." But then, Universal Records is distributing the Fuseboxx album; on the last count, M1 and Tower Records were reporting of shortages, meaning that the 300 units sent out by Fuseboxx and Universal Records actually weren't enough.

Is the Philippines really that unviable a market for prog rock?

I'm inclined to think so, but if In Progression - along with the boys (and girl) of Fuseboxx and Eternal Now - hit it off real well, then. . .

Prog might actually be your next variety show jingle.

God forbid.

Anyway, if interested in prog at all, check out www.fuseboxx.com for more details on "In Progression." I'm sure the kids over at the forum would be more than helpful.