~PABLO BANILA: EMPEROR AND NEW NATIONAL HERO OF THE PHILIPPINES MOTHERFUCKERS

How your “friends” think and what they feel about me are as irrelevant as their collective worth.

Your poem, Edgar Allan Poe in Rags, was written in the kind of style I’d been Dreaming to one day read from the coming Golden Age of Filipino Literature (:

While I fell in Love with the soul of a Filipina transfused in written blood, your talents symbolize to me a genuine form of hope.

One glance at your list of favorite Art betrays a life-long torture of “aesthetic alienation” equal to or greater than mine.

No, I’m not being sarcastic nor do I have deceptive fronts to hide secret agendas. Your friend Allen seems to think so. But you know how he thinks (:

I’m an asshole when it comes to exaggerated arrogance (it’s that form of playful arrogance which should be taken in the context of humor but falls into a form of arrogance nevertheless) but when I see something beautiful, God damn Mancrush I SAY IT!

And Man to Man, you are apparently the only other Filipino Artist in the Philippines deserving my respect and admiration.

No, I’m not the other one. My audience is the English-speaking citizens of the world.

(:

Jules Joaquin? It’sa me!

~Pablo Banila

P.S. And it’s just me. And I’m not here to ask for your participation in The Grand Masterplan however bad a joke that is. I’m here to join you.

P.P.S. I do not mean to patronize but I want to share some obscure and exclusive knowledge kept secret only by its inherent complexity, to anyone else capable of recognizing it (: FUN STUFF (Related to my job.)

P.P.P.S. Imagine we were stranded in a hundred-story building. Everyone else abandoned the world with just us two. Rid of homoerotic innuendos and the painful omission of any possibility of heterosexual romance, I believe that in such a world, I won’t ever die bored (:

P.P.P.P.S. No bullshit spy-speak. Secrets are for pussies. The only secrets worth knowing are not buried treasures but tales told by the dead.

Edgar Allan Poe In Rags: A Satirical Poem About the Condition Of Our Country

EDGAR ALLAN POE IN RAGS
Jules Joaquin

“Everything is going wrong.”

-Edgar Allan Poe from The Pit and the Pendulum

I.
EDGAR ALLAN POE stood next to the walls
Of Manila Bay to hustle a few coins with his poetry.
“Nevermore!” he says,
And the kindly lady with the fake eyelashes gives him two pesos
for a stick of Winston lights and a chance to flirt with the daughter
of the tindera.
He walks with new slippers he bought from Divisoria
To escape the smell of fish and the smell of fishy fishermen
And goes straight to manang and buys a Stork and cigarettes.
“Good morning.” He says and smiles at manong,
He doesn’t have teeth anymore and can’t afford pustiso,
And his bad breath keeps him from getting girls into loving him
“Oh Virginia!” Poe says with indignation.
It had seemed such a long time ago when he was in love,
Maybe too long ago or maybe it never happened—
Reality was too lucid to tell, and he walks back to Manila Bay
With a half-finished drag and a salivated Stork
And now he has to hustle a lot more coins to be able to eat lunch

II.
THE AFTERNOONS were hot in Manila,
And Edgar Allan in his shorts and his t-shirt saying “Tide Detergent Bar”
Would retire to the shade of a narra tree and watch the people go by.
Why had he not worked in a factory?
Was it the poetry or the apathy,
Or the dark probinsyano males and the dark city men and women
Who all smelled like dried sweat and 555 Sardines?

Oh, but they all live better than he!
They could at least afford electricity
And watch Mariel Rodriguez and Ding Dong Dantes
Smooching underwater on TV,
Or maybe watch tragedies unfold on TV Patrol with Noli de Castro,
It doesn’t matter. All he knew
Was that he couldn’t pay for these things.
He dictates a phrase or some form of mantra he learned from Siso the Divine Squatter
in his mind: “Isang kayod, isang tuka!”
And he doesn’t even know what it means,
For in this country, he was illiterate
And no one gave a shit about his English poetry.

But people spent good money on average quality overpriced clothing,
On magazines on magazine racks showing Joyce Jimenez
with no nose after surgery,
On melamine-laced milk bought from the Tsinita lady
who sold bad repackaged candy
On a movie starring a buffoonish Zac Efron and a whory
Vanessa Hudgens which was really shit
On a Hannah Montana Barbie doll with a miniature plastic
guitar that she can’t play
On crappy amateur porn bought from a Bumbay in
the tiangge section of Greenhills
On cheap gin and cheap brandy and synthetic cognac
which is really just cheap brandy
On a pot-bellied hooker haunting the streets of a desolate
Quezon Ave. at night
On siopao bought from Kowloon House West Triangle
that had already been ravaged by flies
On a book sharing awful text jokes you would find on the
Bestseller’s list in National Bookstore (only in the Philippines!)
But nobody had ever given a shit about his poetry
That’s crazy!

III.
AT NIGHT, Edgar Allan would go bar-hopping—
To the ones which required no entrance fee at least.

One time, he saw a washed-up old Mike Hanopol
Singing “No Touch” to a crowd of teenaged alcoholics
Who would’ve traded him without much thought
For the croonings of Cueshe or Callalily.
This crazy old man was another ghost in the history of this country
And he would never sing to a crowd of adoring female groupies again,
Those who would throw their panties at him;
Well, once maybe, but that would be a 50-year old waitress in Kampay bar
Along Katipunan Extension who would remember him from his old days

But at least he would be remembered,
Edgar Allan Poe would never have that.

Tricycle drivers would not even take Edgar anywhere,
For they thought he was a lunatic drug addict
with his mottled face and his drowning eyes
Although they would do shabu every Friday and they
would hit their children if they would dare cry.

And the policemen were even worse.
They would at first make fun of Edgar Allan for he was white.
They would say: “Mestiso ka ah, bakit ka pulubi at bobo?”
And then they would laugh and would spend the rest of the day
Scavenging for taxi drivers. The police men were all hustlers too.
With the right words to these uneducated drivers, they knew they would
be able to make 500 pesos quick,
And by midnight, they would then drive their police car
To the nearest comedy bar in Morato
And slap a cross-dressing, singing gay man’s ass with bottles of
San Mig Lights in their hands.

At around this time someplace else, Edgar Allan would already
Try sleeping under a blanket fashioned from cardboard found on a sidewalk
Would actually sleep on the sidewalk,
And in the morning, he would find a cockroach stuck up his crotch.

IV.
EDGAR ALLAN POE came to the city for he heard that the bourgeoisie and the elite
paid good money for art
That they in their well-educated minds would appreciate his poetry
more than the people from Bataan, or Batangas or wherever he came from did
Because these people were not savages.
He had heard about the painter who had married an affluent beautiful widow
for she had orgasms when she saw his paintings,
Had heard about a certain poet who traveled in the circles of the Ayalas,
the Urdanetas, the Go-Ocos and the Tantocos simply because
he was brilliant
What more would he, the master of meter get?
It simply was too good an opportunity to pass up.

V.
HE LEFT the province at around 9:00 EST drunk on lambanog
And full of sisig, pinaitan and pork barbecue,
With a still decent 6000 pesos in his wallet and a folder full
Of scattered poems—from Annabel Lee to The Bells,
To Dream Within A Dream to The Raven,
These were all brilliant works of art which had been overlooked
When he was still with morons in Bataan or Batangas or wherever,
And now he would be able to achieve with almost no difficulty
the fame and the success that he had always wanted

He imagined the elite embracing him with open arms and telling him
things such as “I understood and I felt the absolute isolation
that the persona in The Raven felt, and maybe the titular character
was just a facet of himself”
Things that were intellectual and succinct and poetic,
“Astig pare!”—none of that shit anymore.

He arrived in the city at 12:00 EST sobered up already,
Hungry from the three hour trip with no air-con and with a lady
constantly talking about Judy Anne Santos to her friend
With a still decent 5500 pesos in his wallet and still the folder
Containing what would be considered a magnum opus in the future.

But a city that never sleeps is a city that never dreams,
And the intellectuals that he had hoped to understand him
Had snubbed him, for they in all pretentiousness forgot poetry
And he had been reduced to a two-bit writer
Looking for a job in the city,
Now with only 300 pesos in his wallet, no friends nor lovers
(“Oh Virginia!” he says with indignation)
Reduced also to a two-bit hustler who would hustle for coins
Using phrases and dramatic performances that involved saying
“Hear the bells, bells, bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment, their melody foretells,”
People never caring, never listening only giving money out of fear
of the mustached lunatic in Manila Bay who thinks he’s a
poet,
And then he lost his money, his shoes, his socks, his long-sleeved polo,
his sarong, his barong, his necktie, his slacks, his leather shoes,
his suitcase, his watch
And he pawned the last piece of sentimental knick knacks that he received
from various beloved people to Tambunting.
Which would then give money to Tara, the heiress, to buy marijuana
and screw Chris Tiu someday, when they’re both forgotten
and screwing would not be scandalous anymore.

VI.
EDGAR ALLAN POE DRESSED IN RAGS walks around
Manila Bay in the morning, unwanted,
And whispers to himself with no lying cynicism,
with no money, nor food, nor clothes nor dignity
A half-hearted and a dying “Nevermore.”

Read this first:http://ocknarf.multiply.com/photos/album/68/Woe_Man-for-Others_Ateneo_Immersion_Scandal

I invited Miss Tracy Isabel Borres in Facebook, so I sent her this letter:

Pablo: The creator of Alf is a Man of Vision, with that Imagination to redefine Ugly.
Ioana: It’s not hard to imagine something ugly!
Pablo: But the UGLIEST?! You must be the Lord and Savior D;

I’m not rich yet, I’ve never been rich and lived most of my life in poverty. A part of my friends from elementary hailed from the slums in Katipunan — sons of UP employees enjoying their dependent benefits. My bestfriend’s family is one of the richest in Asia and occasionally came to school in a limousine.

I’ve always secretly admired how he can not be distinguished from my skwater friends (LOLOLLOLOL!!!) when we’re playing sipa and jolens and eating fishballs. We learned the baddEST Tagalog cuss words from him, words he assimilated from befriending their driver. During dismissal he’d leave the school amoy-araw and amoy-pawis with stains of libag all over his shirt as he enters another one of their luxury cars.

I’ve always found comfort in the fact that all the spoiled brats I have encountered in the Philippines can not even match my bestfriend’s wealth and power (his father, Rafael Morales, is the top corporate lawyer in Asia). It’s not that my bestfriend is the humblest, wealthiest egalitarian: He brandishes his superior intelligence like a crown as if he never needed money to be the coolest person in the world (: This is his only arrogance and mine d: Or perhaps his deviation from higher-upper class demeanor is another form of arrogance, stripping the right to superiority of sheltered hipsters who are rich but aren’t rich enough (:

I never hated conios. I loved it when I got to talk in English and felt like it was normal, without pretense, without minding my diction — indiscriminately choosing between the colloquial and the polysyllabic. Plus, of course, conios were always the Prettier people d:

What you, Miss Tracy Isabel Borres, have written, made me realize that extremely pampered individuals had always bored me with their impulsive shopping and monthly trips abroad consuming their blogs until NOW HAHAHA! YOU

YOU ARE PURE EVIL.

PURE EVIL.

It was a confession of hatred rattling from a skull like a caged animal.

The brutality was as sincere as the brutality of its sincerity.

It exhibited the ease of emotional expression provided by a well-established social hierarchy — a hierarchy, once demolished within your own code of values, will render you stale and lost.

I was much worse a racist than you are before I’ve gotten over my insecurities only last year. I have been relentlessly teased as an “Aeta” throughout my childhood for my complexion. I hated myself. I hated all the people who looked like me. When I left for the US I felt like Michael Jackson scrubbing away every trace of ethnicity from my body. I stopped talking in Tagalog and tried not to mingle with other Filipinos while in New York and Los Angeles:

“Again, originally for Stacey:

I don’t know if you know me and I know we’ve never talked before LOL but we are both strangers in strange lands. Yeah, “There’s a presence in what is missing.” ~Henry James. However, to me — yes, there is alienation, but I’ve always been antisocial LOL I’m bound to be alienated anywhere — to me, it’s more about the emergence of something you never knew you had before. Having been to California to New York and back in California, I’ve confirmed to myself a discovery of a part of me that had always been with me all along: my Filipino identity. Haha. You wouldn’t know how much similar you are with the rest of your ethnic group until you see how much different other groups are from you, and it is really, really, really depressing LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!”~Pablo Banila

My first love, the love that I carried with me overseas and kept for years was for my Russian-Chinese high school classmate. The rarest beauty in the Philippines. Even ordinary mestizas could not turn me on D;

Well, see, my first love was never realized nor had any clear conclusion when it ended last year — that day my life was supposed to go with it. But I didn’t kill myself: I fell in love. I fell in love with a Filipina who looks like me.

For the first time I felt that I was beautiful.

Of course I am omitting the details of why as of now I am tenfold the misery since my tragedy began.

Along with my ideals of beauty I’ve lost the feeling of being in love. My mind, liberated from Anglo-Saxon supremacy, no longer has the sense of the “ugly” that defines the beautiful. It felt like I can make myself believe that anything is beautiful or otherwise. Beauty was no longer a divination of emotions but the will of reason.

In other words, zero libido.

Your controversial account of your immersion experience reminded me of what I have lost. I’ve been searching for that feeling — searching in vain for I no longer knew what it was.

For one moment I felt myself in your place, in where I used to be. Remembering how I hated to see people who look like me for I hated myself and they reminded me of me, reminded me of that joke na may dalawang langaw na kumakain ng tae tapos yung isa umutot tapos nagalit yung isa. Yeah, “Why look down on someone when you aren’t any better?” Because I look down on myself.

Oh yeah, that, and that your experience was very similar to the two summer camps I attended back in high school. I accepted invitations to two “Youth Camps” thinking they were Fun Summer Camping stuff. The first camp was a Born Again Retreat. I was a hostile atheist back then, and my zealous cousin tricked me into coming. I had to sing hymns from my heart and pray with my head bowed down to the floor for one week, trying not to laugh while others do the same screaming in passionate cries of worship. It was the first time I respected Christianity.

On my second camp I earned a badge of honor for having survived the week-long ordeal: I got my Official Youth For Christ ID and membership.

I was a hostile atheist.

I rarely approach anyone and tell them directly that I found them hilarious. Normally I simply laugh at hilarious things, and make fun of things that aren’t funny. But your immersion experience a-la “Paris Hilton Visits the Philippines” was fucking hilarious LOLOLOLOL!!!!! Putang ina yung hindi mo alam kung madumi sila o hindi kasi maitim sila LOLOLOLOL!!!!

~Pablo Banila
is your fan d:

OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT TO ADD

THIS LITTLE STORY:

Emman: Kuha lang ako ng Ita balls.
Me: Anong Ita balls?
Emman: Yung nakakain.
Me: … anong itsura?
Emman: Ha? E ‘di nakaplastic.
Me: Parang Kulangot ng Igorot?
Emman: Ano? Anong pinagsasabi mo? Ita balls nga e nakapakete.
Me: Yung nasa loob ng maliliit na mga bao?
Emman: BOBO!!! EATABLES HINDI ITA BALLS!
Me: … ano?

~Pablo Banila

http://www.facebook.com/people/Tracy-Isabel-Borres/733497266

Pablo Banila is deliberately stalkable (:

You can find his real name, address, and phone number in public domain LEGALLY, in here:

http://pablobanila.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/s3xyassspread.jpg

http://whois.domaintools.com/

The name “Pablo Banila” invokes the same phonetic trauma as your alarm clock d:

~Rodrigo D. Morales

Gamma Beta Gamma Overmind

CLICK TO VIEW WEBSITE OF COLONY

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