Dragging on

On Sunday afternoon time wades lazily through the heat, not wanting to build a sweat from the darkened cinema where I watched a matinee to the air-conditioned coffee house where I’m reading about Philippine mining exploitation.  The hives on my face, circle my eyes like rosettes, my tear ducts irrigate via premature crow’s feet.  Crow’s feet.  I didn’t notice them before the tropical allergies first visited my complexion, but now there they are under the puffiness- the beginnings of middle-age. 

Twenty-four hit me last month, dressed in drag, singing karaoke.  All of the activists had turned out for Pojas’s funeral the day before, and by Saturday (the day of the party) he was still dead.  The unpredictability of the life of a militant easily melded to a post-life as dull as everyone else’s.  Certainly Pojas’s being gunned down right outside of his office added a certain remarkablity to the dying, but afterwards he was only just as dead, not any more or less so.  That was the crime on the part of whatever agent ordered his death- that Celso Pojas would still be just as dead five weeks, five months, and fives years after they found him slumped by the gate in Ma-a, Davao City.

I ordered the beers in Visisya and wore a satin tie under a military jacket.  My boss showed up dressed as a woman and his wife like a lesbian (for some the drag only goes so far).  I spent US$ 75 feeding and liquoring my coworkers/friends, an unprecedented amount of money in a country where $1.50 buys a cab across town.  Sometime between that night and May of last year a thousand years had passed.  In the next thousand, Celso Pojas will always be dead.

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