Into the Abyss

After a year of camping out in an unfurnished 3-bedroom condominium unit in Manila, I packed up and headed for Makati. Well sort of, although the neighborhood is geographically and technically within Makati and shouldn’t be more than a 3-minute drive to Ayala Avenue, it is a different part of the city altogether. The neighborhood is separated from the Makati CBD by J.P. Rizal Avenue with Buendia Avenue providing a sort of a mid-gradation in between. It's astonishing that as you go farther away from Ayala Avenue, even if you're just a block away, you'd feel that you're not in Makati anymore.

It wasn’t the first time I lived in Makati though. It was in Makati that I first chose to live in after I left home. It was in Guadalupe Nuevo: specifically in Camino de la Fe Street and later in Anastacio Street. Guadalupe Nuevo was separated from the Makati CBD by the perpetual chaos of EDSA-- literally the wrong side of the street. To get to the good side of Makati one takes the pedestrian overpass either in Guadalupe or in Estrella, that is, if you could get pass the venders during the day and the hold-uppers at night. Then you take a short bus ride southward, only then will you be in Makati as the general population know it. The two neighborhoods I've been in exude the same mood with Guadalupe Nuevo offering a more edgy feel in terms of fear for your life and property.

The apartment I moved into was a block away from J.P. Rizal Avenue. It was a 2-storey house in the landlord’s backyard; the ground floor windows offering a view of the landlord’s laundry area and garage while the second floor windows offered a commanding view of their roof. After a while I transferred to a smaller two-level flat perched on top of the garage; here the windows offered a view of the other half of their roof and a glimpse of the street. I tried to make a go at making my apartment as normal as possible but no matter what I do it had that fly-by-night feel and ambiance; I tried to cook dinner but somehow it made me feel more miserable than I really was. So I got back to my diet of junk: early morning breakfasts at McDonald’s; and alternating between Jollibee burgers or Buddy’s pancit hab-hab and Lukban longanisa for lunch and dinner. It was just a short drive or jeepney ride to the Power Plant Mall at the Rockwell Center; a place which offered new weekend haunts. My usual weekend itinerary was: buy a book, coffee at Starbucks to read the book, walk around like a zombie, have lunch while still reading the book, walk around like a zombie, continue reading the book at a coffee shop while having dessert and coffee, take a long zombie walk, have an early dinner of Brother’s Burger, walk around till nightfall then repair to my crash pad and read some more. I have accumulated quite a number of books that I've stacked around my mattress, the books walled out the rest of humanity.

Then one night, as I was staring at my illegally cabled television the 9/11 attacks happened.

Thereafter, the 9/11 tragedy was casually included as a plot device in lots of insensitive fictional dramas in films and television series. I recently saw one of them: Reign Over me (--which comes from the song "Love, Reign o'er Me" by The Who, the film features a cover version recorded specifically for it by Pearl Jam), a comedy-drama film starring Adam Sandler as Charlie and Don Cheadle as Alan.

In the film, Charlie suffered terrible losses in the 9/11 attacks and he has completely shut himself off from the outside world; to cope he uses his iPod and headphones to selectively filter out the world. The film opens with Graham Nash's Simple Man and throughout the film Charlie listens to two songs from Bruce Springsteen's The River-- "Out In The Street" and "Drive All Night" and the music of The Who. People cope in different ways, I guess.

The film ended positively for Charlie; on the other hand, fate is not done yet with my life. My life will crumble further.