The Title of the this Book
By
Felix San Roque
© December 2007 by Felix San Roque
I. The Red Eye from Frisco International
I arrived at the airport in Frisco[1] a couple of hours early. My flight departs at 2105 hours. It is now seven in the evening, Saturday December 22, 2007, three days before Christmas. Check-in was a cinch. It took about fifteen minutes but that’s because I’m flying business class, and the line in the business class check-in counter was very short. Only three people were ahead of me when I arrived. I went through the security check and headed straight to the VIP lounge. I sat down, relaxed, and had some h’orderves and drinks. Everyone was cool and nice and minding their own business. Really boring. Another couple came in. They looked worthy enough to be written about so I grabbed my notebook and pencil and started writing. These people could provide me with some good materials to write about. I started doodling and writing about nonsense, pretending not to notice the couple that just came in or else they might get suspicious and keep their distance, staying as far away from me as possible.
Now, you may ask yourself, what is so dad gum amazing about the said couple to compel you to mention them and then start writing about them? And the answer is; there is absolutely nothing remarkable about these people, not one iota, not a single speck in the sand of an endless beach in the Philippine Archipelago. They just happen to fill a void in my field of view and thus became an unfortunate prey for my appetite for hyperbolic articulation. They are normal looking people, not any stranger than anyone I’ve come across in my entire life.
One is a middle aged gentleman, around the age of forty or fifty, something ridiculous like that. His wife - I’m assuming it’s his wife, she could be his mistress for all I know – is about the same age, dressed conservatively in black slacks and a red blouse, wearing a wire rimmed glasses, and ordinary looking. The middle aged gentleman is also dressed conservatively in a blue pastel colored shirt and polo pants. If the wife was ordinary looking, then this gentleman is so ridiculously ordinary that his very existence evokes no feelings of emotion at all from this observer. There is simply no way to describe him other than that a door knob probably has more personality than this guy. One look at him puts me completely to sleep. He is that boring! He could be a guaranteed cure for insomnia. The pharmaceutical companies can save all that money that they pour into their R&D[2] budget every year trying to find a formula that will put people to sleep. All they really need is a picture of this guy. Have people look at him if they’re having sleeping problems and in no time they’ll be snoring to no end for sure.
Well, I thought to myself, they might be ordinary looking but that does not necessarily mean that they’re uninteresting people. I haven’t even talked to them. Then again, would I want to? Come on, you can’t judge a book by its cover. I’ve come across many colorful looking people in my many years of travel only to find out what boring and pretentious characters they really were when I finally got to know them a little better after spending several days with them. So I figured that I should at least try to get a conversation with them to see if they’re really as boring as they look. The problem is how to approach them. I don’t even know them and quite frankly, I don’t think I have anything in common with these people. The weather would be a harmless and innocuous topic to broach so this was a possibility. The other problem is how to get that conversation going with them. They are twenty feet away from and they are completely clueless as to what my intentions are. Whether or not you think my intentions either are malicious or harmless, condescending or what not, they are for my on amusement and mine alone. I don’t really care if other people find them interesting or offensive, all I care about is to write them down and read them days, months, even years later and if they amuse me then as much as they amused me at that very moment when I wrote them down in my little notebook that I keep specifically for moments like these when I’m bored and have nothing better to do, then I will have been satisfied with my efforts regardless of what the general populace thinks of them. That’s how I roll with literature. Strictly for me and no one else but me because it is all about me.
The Mabuhay Lounge in Frisco is the VIP lounge strictly for Philippine Airlines passengers flying in business or first class. It is located on the 4th level of the International Terminal Boarding area at the end of the hall where all the VIP lounges are located for all the airlines. It is somewhat small but comfortable with plenty of glass windows and views of the runways and the mountains of
Me: “Thank god the weather will be better in
It was cloudy, gloomy, and drizzly outside, the kind of day where you’d rather be lounging around inside on the floor of your living room with the fireplace lit up, a glass of chardonnay in one hand and caressing your sweetheart with the other. The husband looked up at me and smiled, then went back to staring blankly at the mindless game show on the tube. This was not starting out too well, I thought to myself. Not only that, but this was somewhat awkward. It isn’t like this was some chick I wanted to impress and pick up; I’ve got plenty of lines in the bag for that occasion. This is more complicated and more difficult, to be perfectly honest. You just can’t walk up to a complete stranger whom you have nothing in common with and start asking questions about their lives without them thinking that you are some kind of a nut. With a girl at least your intentions are somewhat understood. You find her attractive so you go up and talk to her and try to see if the two of you could hook up. If you did that to a guy who is older than you, or any guy for that matter, he might think you’re a homosexual. That would be a bad thing, especially if you’re not homosexual. And even worse if the guy you tried to approach was a closet homosexual who happens to be a US Senator[3] or a highly respected religious leader with hundreds of millions of followers, who preaches against and condemns the moral decline of the our society and the decadent behavior of our youths[4].
A couple of minutes passed before I was about to start saying something again but then the wife got up to get some beverage. The only thing I have in common with this couple is that they are Filipino and they are headed to the
Me: “Where are you guys headed to?”
Husband: “We are from Pangasinan”.
Me: “Ah, good place”.
I lied. I’ve have never been to Pangasinan, I don’t even know where the hell Pangasinan is or if I spelled it correctly. I figured it’s in the province somewhere but I just didn’t know which province.
Again, after the terse response, the husband said nothing else and offered no other information about his destination nor did he inquire about mine. He simply went back to staring blankly at the mindless game show on television. His wife came back a minute later with a bottle of Evian water and sat right back down next to her boring husband and did the exact same thing, stare blankly at the mindless game show on television. Their faces were expressionless as they watched the mindless programming. The game show was Jeopardy. One contestant picked a Daily Double. Exciting stuff, a possibility of winning double the many thousands of dollars the contestant bet on the line on the subject of Geography. But the boring couple was not responsive to the exciting drama unfolding in front of them. They just stared at the television as if they were watching paint drying on a white wall.
“What is
“That is correct” said Mr. Trebek to the winning contestant. This was followed by the
wah wah wah wah,
wah wah waaaaaah!
wah wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!
wawawawawa
wah…..
theme song music of this stupid show. The studio audience crowd was cheering perfunctorily followed by an inset shot of the spouse and other family members in the audience. This was not enough to impress the boring couple however, and neither were the rest of the PAL passengers waiting at the Mabuhay Lounge in Frisco International. While most of the people were not paying attention to the television programming, they were at least jovially communicating with their fellow travelers and family members about their upcoming trip to the P.I.[5] Most of these people were going home to the motherland for the holidays and were eager and excited about the trip.
The holiday season in the
The
The energy and vibe in that little lounge at the
So there we were, me standing and looking out into the darkness of the Frisco International Airport runway, the boring couple sitting and staring blankly at Alex Trebek and his stupid show, and the hundreds of Balikbayan Filipinos - kids, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, their neighbors and everyone remotely related to them - gathered together in the tiny Mabuhay Lounge getting liquored up and having a whale of a time before boarding on Philippine Airlines’ flight PR105 from Frisco to Manila.
Finally, at 8:15 pm an announcement was made on the PA system that our flight was ready for boarding. I never even got the chance to have a lengthy conversation with my catatonic Pangasinian friends.
II. In the heat of the night
This seems like an inappropriate title for this section because it has nothing to do with the night or in the heat or any combinations of the words displayed above at the heading of this section. Nevertheless I gave it that title because I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything more clever or creative than that. All I could think of was that movie, In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. The movie is about a Police Chief in
I didn’t particularly enjoy that movie because I thought it was a little silly but it was played late at night in one of the local TV stations so I watched it until I got bored and then changed the channel hoping to find something more entertaining to look at. But it’s hard for me these days to watch television for any length of time because there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting to watch these days and the ones that do seem interesting I have already seen before, like In the Heat of the Night. Which is why being on a sixteen hour flight from Frisco to
I get out my notebook and start writing. This has always worked for me every time things get boring during my travels. So I write about the passengers on flight PR105 from Frisco to
I reread some of my old notes from way back. Here’s an interesting one, written on September 20, 2005.
Mission Analysis, how very boring. So I’m sitting here, it’s 3:49 PM, and I am absolutely bored out of my mind. I just missed a whole section of the presentation. Now, the guy is presenting the so called EWSK overview. I have no freaking idea what the Acronym stands for. Frankly, I don’t care. Thank goodness he is done.
Radiation & Something Analysis. So far, I’m not interested, nor am I impressed. Now ESD is presented. Boring! I am drowsy. This presentation is a guaranteed cure for insomnia. I wish I had a pillow. That would complete the task of putting me to sleep. The solar array will be isolated from Electrostatic Discharge. He’s not stopping, and there is no sign of him stopping anytime soon.
Finally, the presentation is over.
Now obviously these notes were taken from a design review presentation at work. I can’t reveal too much what they really mean because some of it is proprietary. Everything at work is proprietary. Well, almost everything, but in order to protect yourself from being accused of disseminating patently protected information to the outside world it would be safer if you assumed that everything that is generated inside the walls of the building in which you make your living as proprietary.
I don’t make a habit of writing about work and I’m not about to start now. The above nonsense will have to be my only mention of things that happened at work.
An older gentleman with a terrible toupee walks out of the lavatory. He is a short, pot bellied looking fellow of mestizo[9] extraction. I had also seen him earlier in the evening at the Mabuhay Lounge in Frisco with his mestiza[10] wife. They didn’t seem as boring as my Pangasinian friends. As a matter of fact they were yakking it up with some of their Filipino friends, speaking in rapid fire Tagalog and mixing every other word with English. Now, this is one of my pet peeves about Tagalog speakers. Some of them would start out speaking English and in mid sentence would abruptly shift into rapid fire Tagalog and completely lose me. If you’re gonna speak Tagalog, speak Tagalog. Don’t mix it up with English because I and other people who don’t understand Tagalog will not be able to comprehend what the hell you are talking about. This is common with Tagalog speakers only, I think. I haven’t noticed this as much with Bisayan speakers. I have no idea why this is so.
The old pot bellied gentleman is sitting a couple of rows down from me. His wife looks like she is completely asleep, as if she had taken a sleeping pill and is comfortably whiling away at 55000 feet above the Earth while I suffer the agony of being restless. The flight attendant comes over to ask if there was anything else she could do for me. I asked her if she has any sleeping pills. She answered no. She was peeking at my notebook at the same time so I quickly covered it up and put it away, perhaps fearful and somewhat embarrassed that she might find some of my compositions offensive. I then asked the flight attendant for a scotch on the rocks (Johnnie Walker Black).
So here I am again, with my scotch, my notebook and my pencil, writing about nonsense with my senses working overtime like XTC[11]. This is how desperate I’ve become aboard Philippine Airlines’ flight PR105 from Frisco to
And I’ve got One, Two, Three, Four, Five
Senses working overtime…
The song never made it far in the Billboard charts because I don’t think people were ready to embrace its quirkiness or its cleverness. The beat and the tune are fine but back then all the people really wanted to hear were either The Police or Bruce Springsteen. I like Bruce Springsteen myself because he wrote songs that most of my generation could relate to, songs like Born in the
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking that I am probably an X-generation type of guy, the generation that followed the baby boomers, the no good for nothing generation of slackers lacking direction and motivation, no ambition, no originality, no creativity and generally being useless to the entire human species. I must confess that I am guilty of all these generalization but at the same time I must also differ on the labeling. Yes, I was born after 1964. Yes, I lack ambition. Yes, I am not fulfilling my civic duty to society by being ambitious, aggressive, and goal and career oriented. These are the things that society would like all of us to be so that we can expand the empire of humanity and completely dominate God’s green earth with our avarice and our increasing appetite for conspicuous consumption. These are the things we need in order to maintain the stability of our society. I have no problem with that. My only beef is that I just find the label X-generation rather objectionable. It doesn’t sound cool and it implies a misleading connection to Malcolm X, at least it appears like that to me, as if we were a generation born during the reign of Malcolm X. No, Malcolm X was never the leader of our free world, only the leader of the Nation of Islam. But the Nation of Islam didn’t want him to lead them so they promptly shot him and replaced him with somebody they feel more comfortable with, like Louis Farrakhan. So what should the generation who here born under reign of Louis Farrakhan be labeled with? The Farrakhanian generation? That would be great, I’d be all for that. All these bright and clever kids who came up with Youtube, BitTorrent, Google, Yahoo, Napster, MySpace, and a host of other internet applications would be forever known as the Farrakhanian generation because they had their rites of passage when Louis Farrakhan was the supreme leader of the Nation of Islam. We could alternately call them the Farrakhanian kids, the Louis Vuitton Farrakhanian, or simply the Louis, whatever works. Quite frankly though I think the Farrakhanians label is catchier. You could sell advertising around such a label. You could design urban style clothing with such a label. You could manufacture black colored ball caps with a big white F label above the bill of the cap followed by arrakhanian in small lettering and market the hell out of it and have movie stars, professional athletes, musicians, artists, and general celebrities without specific professions like Paris Hilton promote it, and have inner city kids who look like gang bangers wear it crooked to one side of their head combined with their baggy pants and their wild and far out hairstyles. Corporations could generate gazillions of revenues with these Farrakhanian products and make billionaires out of these fat cats who are already suffocating with too much wealth anyway from the backs of the poor inner city youths who wear their products and convince suburban kids that by wearing the same kind of ridiculous outfits they too could become cool like the inner city kids.
I am on my second scotch on the rocks and the alcohol is beginning to slowly work its effect on my cerebrum. I am slowly beginning to notice a delay between thought and action. Is this just fatigue or the effects of alcohol? I don’t know and quite frankly, I don’t care. I only care about getting through this fourteen hour flight with my sanity intact. So I write some more. Now the cabin is completely dark except for the single little light bulb above my head. I am the only one awake in the business class cabin at this moment. Even the flight attendants have gone to their resting area. I don’t exactly know how the flight attendants work their schedule out. I know that once the airplane is up at cruising speed a meal is served, whether that’d be breakfast, lunch or dinner, they serve it. Then they clear the trays after serving the meal. Then they serve some more drinks to the passengers who, like me, want to get liquored up for the rest of the flight or until they pass out, whichever comes first. Then they disappear until they have to show up again a couple of hours before the plane is about to land. But what do they do in between, when the rest of the passengers are finally resting, the whole cabin is dark, and there’s no one else to serve? Do they go to their bunk beds in the back and get some snooze or do they just wait around for some idiot like me to buzz them up and make their lives miserable? I’ve always thought they were on station, ready to respond to a passenger’s request at any time during the whole flight. But then again, I could be wrong.
I turn on the monitor in front of me to see if there are any good movies to watch. Channel 2 is showing a Filipino movie with no English subtitle so obviously I have no interest in watching it. Channel 3 is an old black and white movie from the fifties. It’s an American movie called From Here to Eternity. It is a military movie, about an Army troop based in Schofield Barracks in
I’m not sure if there ever was a horse’s head in bed anywhere to scare the living daylights out of the producer which convinced him into casting Frank Sinatra as the lowly corporal who gets bullied by a hulking, menacing looking sergeant played by Ernest Borgnine. Sinatra is no more than 5’ 7” something at barely 125 lbs compared to Borgnine’s 6’ 250 lbs plus frame, so this was no match physically. But Sinatra’s character in the movie is one of those runts who won’t back down from nobody, the kind you see in the schoolyards who is friendly with anybody but can hold his own when attacked no matter how big the opponent is. Thus, the character was a perfect fit for Sinatra because he was basically playing a part that he knew so well, himself. In one of the movie’s many poignant scenes Sinatra confronts Borgnine in a dark alley in
The next channel, channel 4, is just like channel 1; blank, no show, no dice, no nuthin’. I never really understood why TV stations in the
Channel 5 is nothing but a global display centered at the
To this day I still don’t know what caused the heated exchange between the stewardess and the old lady sitting next to me, and I don’t know if the old lady was already in a bad mood before take off, but I knew one thing for sure. That old lady made every second in that flight a living hell for everybody around her, and it didn’t stop until we finally boarded out of the plane either. She was still yelling at the stewardess on her way out of the plane and everyone could hear it from Hong Kong to
Channel 6 was also blank. Channel 7, blank. Channel 8, blank. Channel 9 is showing an American movie which had been released months earlier. It is called No Reservation, a story about two
If you get caught between the moon and
The best that you can do…
The best that you can do is fall in love[13].
This movie is not to be confused with the television show No Reservation on the Travel Channel starring Anthony Bourdain, a chef, who travels around the world and eat wonderful food. That show is terrific! It is much better than this silly love story movie where the lady chef, who of course is gorgeous because she is played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, meets a male chef with shaggy blond hair and who is also obviously wonderful looking. No surprise there.
There are some wonderful kitchen scenes in the movie, if you’re into that Food Network kinda deal, but the plot is predictable and inane. I didn’t even pay attention to the dialogue, much less the plot, because all I was thinking about was how wonderful it would’ve been if an episode of Bourdain’s No Reservation was shown instead of this movie. I would’ve particularly like to have watched again the episode where Bourdain goes to Cambodia accompanied by his restaurant business partner who is French and is not afraid to try the most exotic and strangest looking food available on the streets of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. They go around eating bugs, tripe, crickets, and end up having dinner in someone’s Cambodian house on stilts in the river. Now, the house is just a simple looking abode with no running water and no modern plumbing. They get their water from the river, they wash their clothes, their dishes and themselves in the river, they dump all their wastes, including solid and liquid human wastes, into the river and they get their food from the river. Bourdain notices all of this while their meal is being prepared by their Cambodian host. The French restaurateur digs in enthusiastically at the food being served in front of them while Bourdain looks somewhat skeptical at first but ends up digging in anyway as if to say “what the hell, I’ve eaten in worse places”. I don’t know if they actually liked the food or if they just pretended to enjoy the food so that it’d look good on television. For all I know they might have actually abhorred the food and ended up with diarrhea afterwards and are confined, for the rest of the trip, inside their hotel rooms and spent the rest of their trip running to the bathroom every thirty minutes to defecate all the nasty gastronomy that they consumed from the river. It would’ve been funny if they actually showed scenes like that on television but I doubt if it would sell. I don’t think the general public has the stomach to consume that kind of raw reality programming on television yet. We are still not sophisticated enough to appreciate such nastiness. Eventually though we will be desensitized enough such that these kinds of raw material will be commonplace and it will be shown all over the world without much protest or outrage, but simply yawn and search for something more enlightening. Then we’ll know that we have evolved to a higher form of thinking and thus we can advance to a level of intellect that is beyond extremism of any form and will demand intelligent simplicity in our choices of entertainment. I can only wish. That will probably never happen in my or your lifetime.
Speaking of two ugly people in a romantic comedy, because
If Holly(wood) never would then the independent film industry can’t make enough films portraying two ugly people, if not more, in any kind of movie, whether it’d be a romantic comedy, comedy drama, romantic drama, or any combination thereof, and not only are the people in the leading roles ugly but more frequently nowadays the people in a romantic entanglement are of the same sex. If Holly never would is one extreme in the spectrum of filmmaking then the real Hollywould, the independent film industry, is at the other extreme, and the real loser in all of this are the casual non angst ridden ordinary Joes and Janes of the world who go to the movies for entertainment’s sake and not so they can be educated, enlightened, proselytized, patronized, or manipulated by some other hidden agenda so that the fat cats can make their gazillions or the artists can expose themselves to a wider audience that they wouldn’t have access to in the first place if there was no mass medium such as film, television, the internet and the radio.
I like eggs. I also notice the lack of coherence in my thoughts. This is probably because I am working on my third scotch on the rocks (Johnnie Walker Black). But the liking eggs bit is not just random babble, it actually has some basis of deep and meaningful thought. Back in the day when Billy Crystal was funny he often mimicked famous black personalities like Sammy Davis, Jr., Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Muhammad Ali, and Larry Holmes, just to name a few. He was very good with his impersonation of these black celebrities but my personal favorite was his Larry Holmes impersonation where Billy, talking like Holmes in that deep southern black accent of his, says nothing meaningful at all except “I like eggs”. Here’s an example of Billy Crystal impersonating a Howard Cosell interview of Larry Holmes:
Cosell: We are here with the current WBC Heavyweight Champion of the World…Larry Holmes. Larry, what can you tell us about your next fight?
Holmes: Awhhh,…., y’know….,Ah like ayggs. Ah like ayggs.
Cosell: Do you now? Well, that’s absolutely amazing Larry, I like eggs too. Tell me Larry, do eating raw eggs help you in your training regimen?
Holmes: Awh, whale Howud, y’know, Ah like ayggs. Ah goes down to dee resh traunt at dee ho tell an Ah like to orduh me a alm ma let.
Cosell: So let me get this right Larry, you don’t actually eat raw eggs, you just like to order an omelet from the hotel restaurant?
Holmes; Das rayt Howud, das rayt. Ha ha ha. And sometimes Ah like my ayggs sunny side up too, so Ah orduh dat, and sometimes, ovah easy, and Ah orduh dat too.
Cosell: Have you ever tried boiled eggs Larry?
Holmes: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha……ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…., nah Howud, nevah had, ha ha ha ha ha ha….
[Holmes continues laughing for the next fifteen minutes. Finally, when Holmes settles down, the interview continues.]
Cosell: Now Larry, getting back to the topic that I brought up earlier, what can you tell us about your next fight?
Holmes: Ha ha, awh whale Howud, y’know, Ah like ayggs. Ah really do, ha ha ha, …not boilt dough, not boilt, but Ah like ayggs Howud, ha ha ha ha ha….
Larry Holmes was a good boxer back in the late 70s and early 80s but he was a poor interview not because he didn’t have much to say or that he didn’t want to do interviews with reporters but because nobody could understand what the hell he was saying other than that he liked eggs, or at least it sounded like that to me when he said something. When he was talking about his upcoming fight against Leon Spinks he could’ve been saying something completely different which had nothing to do with eggs. He could’ve been saying something like
“I think Leon Spinks is a really good boxer and it’s going to be a huge challenge for me to defeat him in our upcoming fight”
but when it came out of his mouth it sounded something like
“Ah like ayggs, y’know, ha ha ha, Leon Spinks don’t like ayggs cuz he ain’t got no teeth to eat dem ayggs so Am gonna beat his ass”.
At some point during my third scotch on the rocks and while writing a made up dialogue for a mythical Howard Cosell interview with Larry Holmes I fell asleep. This was a good thing only if it lasted until we finally reached
There’s a thin wall of separation between the conscious and the unconscious which at times can be noticeable if you just close your eyes and count to a million. First, you will notice that you never reached a million counts. Second, you will not remember the last number you counted before you dosed off but you will remember dosing off while trying to count. This is a form of hypnosis but since no one is sending subliminal messages in your ears to perform a murderous act at the snap of a finger then there’s no need to worry about being brainwashed to assassinate a
I’m not exactly sure what the reason was for Sammy’s conversion to Judaism. Maybe he thought he had something in common with the Jews being perpetually persecuted and all but I don’t think that was the case with him because he was a popular entertainer and had a lot of fans and even ended up marrying a Swedish actress. So I don’t think that he felt the brunt of racism as much as some other black folks who were stuck in poverty and living in the inner cities. He was not a very big fella, probably no more than 5’2” and 115 lbs, and not particularly attractive either. He was no Billy Dee Williams for sure but he could sing and dance and make people laugh because among other things he was funny to look at, especially while singing and tap dancing, one eye bulging out like it was about to pop out of its socket, and jaws jutting out like Jay Leno’s. That’s another thing about Sammy Davis, Jr. He had a long ass jaw for a little guy. But the important thing about Sammy is that he could sing, and a particular talent like that can trump out many flaws. You could be physically unattractive, have bad breath, be the size of a midget, lacking intellectual capacity, be uncoordinated, and have plenty of bad habits like chain smoking, alcoholism, carousing and womanizing but if you can sing like Wayne Newton women from all over the world will adore you because women love men who sing and dance well. Singing fills the heart with joy and uplifts it to unimaginable heights such that while in the act of singing you actually feel like you’re flying above the clouds like an angel on the wings of love. If you don’t know how to sing then the next best thing is to hear somebody sing really well because a beautiful sound sends the spirit soaring high up in the sky and takes it to the limit of eternity. A voice like Sammy Davis, Jr. singing The Candy man is one of the best toe-tapping tunes this world has ever heard. There is no way to resist the urge to start wiggling the posterior once Sammy gets The Candy Man tune going and by the time he’s belting out the chorus
The Candy Man
Oh The Candy Man can
The Candy Man cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good
your face will be grinning so wide and far, your head will feel as light as a feather, and your heart will beat like a twelve year old with a crush on the girl next door. There is absolutely no way to escape this unbearable lightness of being.
The plane lands in
[1] Frisco =
[2] R&D = Research and Development. Companies waste a lot of money developing new products that people won’t buy.
[3] Senator Larry Craig of
[4] Rev. Ted Haggard of
[5] P.I. = Philippine
[6] A Barangay is a the smallest political entity in the
[7] Balikbayan means homecoming in Tagalog, a language in the
[8] Rodney King was a small time criminal who got beat up by white cops in
[9] Half breed - male, typically of Filipino and Spanish combination
[10] Half breed - female
[11] The group XTC wrote a song called Senses Working Overtime which was released way back in 1982
[12] Hotel Street is
[13] Theme song from the 1980 movie Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli.
