Love hurts… and so does rectal probing

Here, here. Grab a chair, heat up the coffee machine and prepare for the Apocalypse.

Morning, noon and nighttime I still think of you…

If you’re not familiar with the song, then there’s hope for you yet. What does “happy kind of sad” mean, anyway? Do you eat paper? Were you the guy who cast Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet?

Wait, here’s a little back-tracker.

Since I am a sucker for anything hellish, I decided to perform an experiment. For one day in February, I would listen to love songs and nothing but. Of the pop variety, not those beautiful country ballads by The Stones, or Beth Orton’s lilting electronic folk. Not Wild Horses, not Galaxy of Emptiness. It had to be something lame, swirling in saccharine sweetness. Like the magic that happened when the Captain met Tennille, with muskrats tossing themselves in a hairy, jitterbugging stew of rodent love. I assume “Sam” proposes to “Susie” with a ring of dirty cheese and all hell breaks loose. But I am darn sure these characters are merely symbolic of something else.

We are all muskrats. Muskrats in love, mind you. Just like Soylent Green is people.

I recently met a couple. The man has snakes for pets — full-length pythons. Half as long as J. Bocobo Street. I didn’t see them in the house, though, but I could almost hear them hissing in the dark. His wife takes care of the live animals needed in feeding the snakes: the rabbits, the rats. She has grown quite fond of them. Makes sure the rats and rabbits eat right. She practically, er, feeds the food. If that’s not love, I don’t know what love is.

And maybe the old songs can bring back the old times…

When I was young, I’d hear this song in our old apartment in Blumentritt and sing the opening line (“Candles burning, glasses are chilled and soon, she’ll be by…”), screaming this instead at the top of my lungs: “CANDICE BERGEN, glasses are…” Same way I misheard “Starry, starry night, Pontius Pilate blue and gray.”

Sometimes with pop love songs, the lyrics could be lifted from the list of ingredients on a detergent box. It doesn’t matter. It’s the melody that makes us long for the absent one, for the one that got away. It’s the whimsical piano at the beginning of Teri DeSario’s Fallin’ that arrives like the blue avatar piercing our red blood-pumping planet. Just ask Lionel Richie, the poet-laureate responsible for “Say you, say me; say it together naturally.”

“Awesome!” Leonard Cohen would say, rolling in his grave. And he’s (as of this writing) not even dead yet.

I feel the sunshine in the warmth of your smile/Till then remember me, somebody waiting.

Written on a concrete wall fronted by a mini-Himalayan row of garbage near the Port Area: “Sana ako na lang Emzzi.”

I have no idea as to who the hell “Emzzi” is. Could be half-Pinoy/half-American. Could be half-Pinoy/half-Pinay. The plot thickens like the sinigang with mystery meat served at the karinderia near my old house in Malabon. Could be pork, well, could be muskrat. (My friends and I invented a copy for an imaginary ad: It looks like swill, tastes like swill, so it must be sinigang!)

Whoever this girl is (assuming she’s a girl), another person is longing for her. A longing deep enough for Romi Garduce-lite to step over wrappers, diapers and the reeking discards of the day, hoist himself precariously just to immortalize his feelings. If that’s not love then it must be sinigang!

Cause my love has no walls, no ceilings, no floors…

This was my sister’s favorite song when we were growing up. She’d sing it sharply. To the point she could almost break glass. I was six at that time when I asked her what use is love if it can’t keep the rain out (what with the absence of walls, the ceiling and the floor). They’d be soaked. In that empty lot. They could sue the contractor. My sister said something about it being a figure of speech. “Oh, so the singer is just bullshitting?” I ruined my sister’s day, topping that incident where I put my pet bullfrog on top of her head. I never trusted love songs from then on.

Years later, I started liking Rush and Yes songs so I finally understood what Ursa Lia meant. I mean Yes’s The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) is at the doctorate level of popular music. Nous sommes du soleil?

Back to regular programming. It’s just a love song, and I will sing it all for you, a simple melody for two…

I often wonder what it would be like if you were married to a pop singer (say Imelda Papin or Victor Wood), do you tell her or him before you go to bed, “Dear, please sing naman for me Isang Linggong Pag-Ibig?” Or how about Pag-ibig Ko’y Nakatali Na? It would be like living with a vinyl hit single of yester-yore. Better than a CD or an MP3 file. He or she would be a walking gigabyte of FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) that you’d buy groceries with, bring the kids to school with, or watch VHS tapes of TV “guestings” together. Imagine having Eva Eugenio on stereo, April “Boy” Regino on sense-surround, Juris on Dolby DTS. Think this: You can ask your sweetheart Sitti to bossa-nova-fy Angel of Death (“Monarch to the kingdom of the deaaaadddd!”), ask your current flame Princess to acousti-fy a Black Flag tune. If that can’t make love stay, I don’t know what can.

This one’s for you wherever you are… To think that nothing’s been the same since we’ve been apart…

After work my friends and I head over to karaoke joints in Malate where waitresses are all named, strangely, “Sakura,” and where there is a DAM songbook filled with classic rock and punk tunes. Dude, once you’re onstage you’re not you anymore. You’re not the guy with a busted carburetor or a malfunctioning soul. You’re Johnny Rotten, you’re Amy Winehouse, and, toniiiiight, you’re a rock ’n’ roll star. But one time there was a forlorn dude with an inordinately large, round head. The girls promptly named him “Jimmy Neutron.”

Jimmy got up onstage and sang Korean pop and Shaggy songs with all the yearning and burning of Donny Hathaway, but with the voice of a thousand castrated goats. With screwdrivers up their butts. The bleating got more and more impassioned as the night wore on. We’d get up, sing Black Hole Sun or Cemetery Gates, but the people in the karaoke joint clamored for Jimmy, Jimmy and more elephantiastic Jimmy, Mister Lover-Lover himself.

Reminded me of what Conor Oberst sings in Road to Joy: “I could’ve been a famous singer if I had someone else’s voice, but failures always sounded better so let’s f*ck it up, boys, make some noise!”

If Jimmy had someone else’s voice, he could be in any Pinoy rip-off of American Idol; and if I had someone else’s writing skills, I wouldn’t be writing down this turgid pool of an article on that twilight time between Friday and Saturday. I’d be doing an epistle about how ripped-off and doomed our sad Republic is. Ah, or how bizarrely boring the impeachment proceedings are. Maybe poetically wonder who that beautiful lady is, shown on TV seated at the gallery whenever a particular Senator takes the floor — and write like Pablo Neruda with fire and forgotten fever. Ah, or how brazenly penetrating and Socratic the questions are: “So,” asks one prosecutor, “what does ATM mean?”

Just call me Angel of The Morning (ATM), baby…

My friend (a girl) likes another friend of mine (a boy). They dated, they had coffee at 4 a.m. after drinking at B-Side, and they look darn good together. But the boy is not head-over-feet with the girl. Her life is like a Sharon Cuneta movie, except she’s not Sharon. She’s more of that dependable best friend. Solid like a bank. A person you can trust with your last P900, your diminishing karaoke money. She’s like Molly Ringwald’s confidante, or a Eugene Domingo. So, being one of the evil minds of my generation, I thought of the theme song for the two: the Waka Waka song by Shakira.

“Why that song?” she asked.

“Because,” this rooster-haired Rasputin of relationships answered, “so many things are happening in the song, but nothing’s really going on.”

Ouch!

But instant karma promptly came and got me.

I met this girl. I liked her right away. Started texting her. I adored her “shark story,” and how she’s named after an American beauty queen whose 15 minutes of celluloid fame involved being eaten by sharks on Baywatch. “Quite a grim end,” I muttered. “A foreshadowing of things to come,” she said with a laugh. I could live with that laugh forever. I finally got what David Pomeranz is babbling on about, or what floats Barry Manilow’s boat. So that’s it! Could it be magic? Could it be — the horror, the horror — muskrat love?

Then, I had the gall to ask her a question. She replied with this: “:)” Ah, the smiley of doom. The Waka Waka of text messages. New methods of bringing old despair. So long, farewell. Not going to Hollywood.

In the distance I could hear Nazareth.

Oooh, oooh, crap hurts.