Pounding The Keyboard

        Last Friday, 26 th of this month, I was inside a mall buying some necessities, and as I was walking towards the BreadTalk kiosk, a man, who seemed in his mid to late fifties, and was eating some bread which I presumed he bought from BreadTalk, tried to approach me. He was talking incoherently and I could not understand what he was saying but the gesture of his hand (with his palm up) was unmistakable: he was begging for alms. I signaled for him to stop as his mask was on his chin and wasn’t covering his mouth and he had no face shield and was talking non-stop, which meant that he was firing lots of droplets towards my direction. He stopped from approaching me but he continued talking. I was a bit perplexed because this man was wearing nice and neat clothes: yellow polo shirt, blue denim pants and decent and clean shoes. I was wearing just an old black T-shirt, a pair of biking shorts and rubber sandals, so I looked a lot poorer than him.      I stepped away from him and

       When he took a peek at her Instagram account this morning, he saw that she was selling some items she owned. If they were still in good terms, or least had some polite communication between each other, he’d buy an item or two.      But it’d been ages since they last talked, and it was unfortunate as he would certainly love to own things she owned.     Would it be perversion or creepy if he thought that maybe he could smell her through the things that she owned or had previously owned, that her scent had somehow stuck to it. He had missed her scent; of all the things she owned, it was her scent which was his favorite. It had always sort of disoriented him. He grinned and shook her head to ward off the thought; he never thought missing somebody would make one’s mind go haywire.      Then he remembered that he already owned something she previously owned— a teddy bear.      She handed it to him when they were still friends after learning that he would donate some toys to

       Exactly a year ago, today, the first Metro Manila wide lockdown (the longest in the world) was implemented. And after a year, the severity of the COVID-19 situation here in the Philippines sadly remains the same (with recent cases reaching five thousand a day), and at the rate things are going, it will stay the same for many months to come, and some people still don’t know which to blame, the public which is being accused as stubborn and noncompliant to health protocols, or the government who is proving to be incompetent at everything they do, a government being led by a president who at the onset of the pandemic threatened to slap the virus, a president who just last week again advised the public to sanitize their hands with gasoline.      Every time I go out, I could see that the majority of people are following the health protocols regarding the virus. They are wearing masks and face shields and would try hard to practice physical distancing. So no, I don’t think the publ

       Went on an errand this morning to Binondo (we live in Tondo) and since I couldn’t bike (I have a painful trigger finger on my right thumb), I decided to just walk (safer than riding public vehicles this pandemic) and absorb the environment (which I couldn’t do when biking since I have to focus on the road ahead), and I noticed that the relentless clearing operations being done by Manila City Hall (they clear streets and sidewalks of obstructions like street dwellers, vendors, illegally-parked vehicles and illegal structures almost every day; truly a commendable effort) had sort of failed in our neighborhood as there were still vendors and vehicles and other obstructions on the sidewalks and the streets. I voted for Yorme Isko, incidentally.      But it was a different thing altogether when it came to Divisoria. You could walk unobstructed through previously-vendors' paradise Ylaya (though sidewalks are still occupied by vendors) and through the previously-vendors' sh