In the same month as last year, the annual monsoon has afforded me two days of an unscheduled (and welcome) holiday. The past weekend has been rainy, and late Sunday evening it culminated in a tropical storm potentiating the effects of an Asian monsoon. Schools in many areas announced the suspension of classes, and I thought my son went to bed with a smile on his face. The coming of torrential rains was announced very early Monday morning by a deafening clap of thunder, which roused me and the wife from sleep, and as soon as I got up, the almost continuous downpour melted the already-soaked earth.
Because every possible route was under water, the first order of my day was informing my boss that, in the interest of personal safety (and common sense), reporting for work was simply out of the question. I'm quite sure that it was a situation when employers simply didn't have a choice, when nearly all roads were rendered impassable by flood, other than to let employees take the day off, in spite of it eating up at their margins. Mother Nature versus corporate greed, and the former wins hands down. Of course, astute corporate types managed to use the situation for public relations mileage by telling their employees the obvious: "Unsafe to go to work today because of the floods. We don't want you to take unnecessary risks. Stay in your homes." We are forever grateful. Sarcasm meets false concern.
And so I had all the time in the world, wondrous, unfettered time. Of course, I still had chores to do; the household had to be kept running; and I also ran some short errands. But these things were done without a deadline, one of the nastiest things on the planet, a major cause of life-truncating stress.
I strung up last year's holiday lights on the china cabinet in the kitchen, and played yule music from my phone. My wife and son, no strangers to my bouts of irrational behavior, were nonchalant. My neighbors and passersby, who could glimpse the holiday lights from a glass door at one side of the house, most certainly had their opinions and suppositions, but so like the person I've become over the past several years, I simply didn't care.
I then tuned in to the radio and television for updates on the floods and its consequences for the populace. I felt a bit detached, offering only an occasional exclamation for some sounds and scenes that excited my senses, like the raging Marikina River gradually inching its way up danger levels, carrying flotsam that raced past a bridge's girders; or vehicles almost totally submerged in flood, or those driven hood-deep in flood, by people who are either very adventuresome or total idiots; or the incredible scenes of my countrymen smiling and waving at the news camera, in the midst of their wrecked homes and lives; and not to forget the children turning the submerged streets into a kind of water park, cavorting, diving, swimming in brownish-blackish opaque flood waters contaminated by raw sewage; but as I've said, I was a bit detached. And who wouldn't be? The monsoon and its dire consequences are annual events in this country, a yearly soap opera of sorts, still possessed of a plot and an ending with entertainment value, but which has all become very predictable. Ultimately, they give rise to three distinct kinds of humans: The poor and the wretched who are the victims of this annual disaster; the compassionate (genuine or otherwise) who brave the elements and lend a helping hand, and the detached, curious bystanders, like myself, who choose to be safe at home, and who treat everything as a spectacle, worthy competition to disaster movies. I don't feel the slightest remorse of any kind, and I'm starting to worry about myself.
Being cooped up at home with the monsoon all around me, with substantial uncommitted time on my hands, I was less inclined to worry about how I looked or smelled (of course, I still took my daily bath), and I looked less at the creases and wrinkles on my face, and was less worried about my thinning and greying hair. I also didn't shave the entire time, and took delight in running my fingers over the prickly beard stubs. I wondered if there was some way I could make them grow elsewhere, say, on my scalp instead. I wouldn't mind having a head of stubby, prickly, mostly greying hair. For a while there, in spite of other, more pressing concerns brought about by the monsoon, I thought about my baldness, progressing like some kind of storm surge, slowly but surely creeping up on the land and devouring everything in its path.
But the worry was short-lived, and I resumed my enjoyment of my unscheduled holiday. I wondered how the combination of relative physical inactivity, cooler temperatures, and dark skies laden with rain could produce an appetite for food which is hard to ignore or resist. The unmistakable smell of fried tuyo wafted from my neighbors' kitchens; it could well be part of an "annual national monsoon cuisine" (pritong tuyo, pritong itlog, sinangag, and kamatis), if ever there was one. The combination is an irresistible one for a true-blue pinoy, as irresistible as maybe Gemma Atkinson in my bedroom. This statement could very well spell my doom, but I've made it in the spirit of literary license, nothing more.
And so I allowed things to flow as they would, without any intervention, like what I'm doing in this latter part of my life, just to let things be, to go with the flow, like rain water moving along gutters and downspouts, to estuaries and to maybe the grand ocean. I've discovered that life and time are like liquids flowing from birth to death, inexorable and unstoppable by any means not related to our destiny. We may think we make our own destinies, but the truth is we only discover what has been fated for us. They have always been there, and we either find them or not. The monsoon has been fated for this part of the world, to be both a blessing and curse, coming at almost the same time each year, bringing joy and grief, life and death, and, in my case, a bit of insanity. When it comes again next year I'm sure it'll bring the same things, the same consequences; dire, malevolent, hopeless, and insane.
