Pounding The Keyboard

       Last year, around middle of the year, a man in his thirties went viral on Facebook because he decided to bike to work—using a bicycle with training wheels. Yup, training wheels, the two small wheels attached to the rear wheel to stop the bike from falling. The public praised him for his resiliency and perseverance. Imagine, biking to work when you don’t even know how to properly ride a bike.      This morning, I saw him again on Facebook, and he’s still biking to work—still using a bike with (gasp) training wheels. But unlike before when he (not the one on photo) was using a small bike with fit-for-kids training wheels, he’s now using what looks like a newish 29er mountain bike with training wheels almost half the size of his tires.      What happened? It’s been a year, and he still doesn’t know how to ride a bike? Every biker will tell you that it’s very uncomfortable to ride a bike with training wheels. First, it will slow you down. It’s like walking with crutches. Second,

       A Facebook friend of mine, a certified animal lover as he owns several dogs, cats, hamsters, birds and fish, is mourning the death of his pet rabbit. He wrote a lengthy essay about it. A few posts from his post of his rabbit's grave, I’m seeing a funeral for a recently deceased beagle, and I scroll down a bit more and I saw a woman (both posts from a Facebook group of Filipino beagle owners) losing lots of sleep and frantically asking for help for his sick beagle.      This I why it took me so long to decide to have another dog, you get attached to it, and it becomes emotionally burdensome when it gets sick—or die. You see, dogs offer you selfless love, the kind of love that doesn’t ask if they’re getting anything in return before they love you and surrender themselves to you. They don’t ask questions like “Would this person give me the same amount of love I’d be giving him?” or “What if this person rejects me eventually and rehomes me?” or “What if this person brings me

  Say the word and you'll be free Say the word and be like me Say the word I'm thinking of Have you heard the word is… no ?        Our dog had another vaccination (kennel cough) this morning, and when we went to the veterinary clinic, we saw a huge aspin with a muzzle. It bites, said the owner. And while we were waiting for our turn, I could hear the aspin growling quietly at times at the other dogs. It reminded me of my own huge aspin which I owned many years ago. I named it Relic and yeah, he also bit. The only people he respected were those living with him in the house, the rest, all fair game. He bit, while we owned him, three random strangers. He didn’t just play bite, what he inflicted were real bites: deep and bloody. We also tried to put a muzzle on him, which was always a huge effort, and once the muzzle was on him, he would never stop trying to remove it, meaning, the mongrel would be whiny and pesky all day—so we’d always end up just removing it and just s

       Two days ago, our dog was up for a vaccination again so off we (me and my quarantine-pass-carrying companion) scooted to the vet clinic. I’ve lost count of how many vaccinations he had (and will have) while I don’t know if I had even a single vaccination when I was a child. When we reached the clinic, we saw two dainty-looking men (who gestured like they were lovers) carrying two cats. One was holding a kitten which was so small it could fit in his hand awhile the other one carried a pet space capsule carrier that contained a mature white Persian cat. They looked mightily worried (for the cats) while they waited for the veterinarians (two male veterinarians were in attendance at that day) to attend to them. The two vets were busy attending to a Corgi-carrying old lady. The Corgi wore a hoodie, by the way.      I heard one of the men talk about not being able to sleep because the cat was ill.      I don’t see myself owning and caring for a cat.      Cats, they say, have a