To say that SE Asia was a wild and whacky place in the 18th century would be an understatement.

Burma and China fought a running border war. Thailand and Burma fought a full-on war. Potentates didn’t conquer for territory but for slaves and tribute. War elephants occasionally wander into the frame. People make words that stack consonants and vowels into uncomfortable, long words.

In 1767, the Burmese took Ayuthaya after a siege that lasted over a year; explosives planted under the walls detonated, soldiers entered, killed a lot of people, took 30,000 (skilled) captives, chopped the heads off of Buddha statues, looted everything of value, and hauled ass back to Burma.

The 30,000 captives infused Thai culture with Burmese. The razed city yielded resurgent Siam relocating to founded Bangkok. Thais are still upset about the whole thing, BTW.

Ayuthaya stands as testimony to those ultra-violent days (not so far from our own). You can almost hear the sound of the battle echoing in the distance. It’s a wonderful place to saunter the fine ruins.

Sandwiched between fleecing tourists on the one hand and elaborately staged selfies on the other, there is walking around. Brisk mountain air, Igorot villages situated in valleys surrounded by rice terraces, rapid descents, brutal ascents, diesel fumes, pine sap, brewing coffee.

Overheard in Lembongan, Bali, some years ago, “Dogs must be very happy here.”

This was an occasion for me to reflect on cultures that embrace reincarnation. Maybe our spirits float into the celestial species assignment machine, which tallies our life and automatically drops our souls into the next appropriate marmot, wildebeest, Dali Lama, or puppy birthing.

I’m reserving judgment on that one, but dogs do seem to gravitate toward abundant food and evolved people. So with Sagada .

I humbly offer some dog selfies. They’re people too, after all.

A father-daughter ramble through the Mountain Province: Bontoc, Sagada, Banaue passing through Baguio to and fro.

I believe that somewhere in the Marvel Universe, there is a space-time continuum where a city’s quality of life is marked by the percentage of Vespas on the road relative to the population.

According to this calculus, Bangkok (in the regular universe) figures pretty high.

My favorites are the ancient machines, resolutely carrying cargo with their two-stroke engines growling and sputtering all the way.

Camiguin Island | June 4-7, 2022

COVID Travel Restrictions: Not

Thanks to imminently expiring travel credit at Cebu Pacific Airlines, I’m on my way to Camiguin to snatch some time at the beach, encounter a new place, and the chaos of provincial internet + remote overland travel. All that.

This is my first non-work travel since before COVID, and it’s long overdue.

The Trip to Camiguin

The Simple Joy of Layover Buffet

I’m enjoying one of my favorite, irrational, and guilty pleasures: Seated at the Waterfront Hotel across the street from the Cebu-Mactan Airport, eating better than average hotel buffet food. The Waterfront buffet has been an anchor when traveling from Dumaguete to Moalboal to connect to another destination. More comfortable than Cebu’s domestic terminal, you get food, Internet, charging, coffee, and clean restrooms. With the travel downturn, management pared back the buffet, costing 1/3 less these days.

Cebu Airport

The domestic terminal is closed for renovations, so I hike to the international terminal. If the new domestic terminal is anything like the new international wing, Cebu airport will be nice indeed. It’s Cebu Pacific’s hub (naturally), and while the airline is comedic in its near competence, it should have a nice hub.

My favorite upgrade: canned announcements are straight from a Pizzicato Five track. Bond villain redoubt-in-imminent-destruction countdown voice in English, Mandarin, and Japanese. You’ve come a long way, Philippines.

Cebu to Camiguin

The flight to Camiguin was short — a hop really — prop plane up in the air and then back down. It’s another dreamy flight over the archipelago’s waters dotted with atolls and small islands. Metal roofs sparkle like jewels in the afternoon sun on the inhabited islands. You feel like you can see the earth’s curvature as you watch the ocean laid out below you, the turquoise blue rounding under the pale blue sky.

The Ride Around Camiguin

Stefano, one of the owners of Nypa Style Resort, has organized a scooter for me. It’s a Yamaha Aerox and a technological wonder. The LED dashboard shows fuel in bars, and everything is slickly displayed. It’s whisper-quiet and cat nimble.

With this cool ride and a full tank of gas, I have two agenda items: diving arrangements and island exploration. The ride is a long-overdue tonic — a breezy adventure. Camiguin exudes Pinoy Provincial charm.

The jungle pulses green verdant on my left. To my right, a turquoise blue ocean meets the sky, punctuated by concrete road and landslide barriers and explosions of color red hibiscus, orange bird of paradise, pink and fuchsia bougainvillea, yellow Lakers jerseys. Under the green pulsing ferment, I imagine decomposition as a million time-lapse films. The jungle consumes everything in the end.

The road winds back and forth in tight turns, inclining and declining. Dogs lie in the road napping away the heat; tied goats eat grass and anything else. The smell of ocean breeze, cow shit, and trash burns. Above all, curing copra coats the air with sweet coconut tang.

Philippine National Police wave me past checkpoints where no one stops, but I err on the side of caution. Boys play basketball in covered municipal ball courts, which double as voting halls, vaccination centers, and public meeting halls. Small children run across the road, chickens run across the road, and men buy beer and rum to celebrate their wins at the cockfights or forget their losses.

Between shimmering rice paddies, girls take selfies: arms extended straight like hieroglyphs, millet drys on plastic tarps taking one lane of the road, adolescents head into Saturday afternoon to night walking in little gangs, all the while people waving and saying hello as I pass.

The place has a Balinese feel — granted, the climate and geography are the same, but also, there is a sense of timelessness that arises from the volcanic bedrock and infuses the place with impassive majesty.

An Unplanned Dive

My last trip in 2020 was to Coron for a bit of wreck diving and island exploration. The lock-downs and dozens of dramas mean I’m far from fit, packing on extra weight over the past months. The road back to conditioning starts with a bit of motivation, so I decide to grab a quick dive to start the move to healthy living.

While mulling this notion, Stefano helpfully guides me to Roman, who runs Coraya divers. I meet him at a resort he also seems to manage, Balai sa Baibai, an upscale resort. We discuss our dive for the next day.

Sunday arrives with a strong tropical rain storm, and I postpone the dive. I get it: aside from visibility, diving in the rain is pretty much like diving on a bright, sunny day. For my first dive in a while, I want cheerful, sunny weather and excellent visibility, so we push to Monday.

The dive is good, aside from some tank rigging lapses and the laughable amount of additional weight I need to hit neutral buoyancy — lots of macro life, which Roman locates easily. When we reach coral surrounding a scuttled fishing boat, we see occasional box fish, several fat scorpion fish, sea snakes, and a territorial bannerfish.

The highlight is a large field of garden eels planted in the volcanic sand; as we approach, they retreat into their tunnels, and as we pass over them, they reappear, growing out of the sand like reedy ghosts.

Surprising Survival of Syncretic Buildings

Try as I might, there is very little information online about this architectural style. These houses combine Precolonial and Spanish architectural styles, and their density is a welcome surprise.

I’ve frustrated other drives more than once as I stop and dismount to grab shots of these places. The doors, windows, and details are arranged like large, inhabited abstract art pieces scattered across the island.

All I know about the houses is that they date from the colonial era, and the elements and WWII destroyed most. Some of those latticed window panes are made from the windowpane oyster, Placuna placenta, called Capiz in the Philippines.

Homing in on Accommodations

The Resort

Nypa sits about 15 minutes from the airport and the island’s capital, Mambajao. It’s about a dozen structures arranged around an open courtyard dominated by a large tree in the middle with a circular stone patio. The circular stone patio and the wall remnants of some old, long, crumbled structure give the place a vaguely pagan vibe. You might think you’ve landed in the Secret Garden.

The owners, Ilenia and Stefano, curate the land as a bonsai writ large balancing order and organic. The grounds are beautiful: manicured, tranquil, a million miles from wherever you came from.

Checking past reviews of Nypa Style, someone complains about the cats and dogs that enjoy the run of the place. Yet, they are a pleasing feature of the experience. The cats scamper across the courtyard, and the dogs roam around the property. They are well-fed and content in the knowledge that this place is really all about them.

My experience one might call glamping, in my bungalow, at any rate. Predictably, I’ve selected the Nipa bungalow furthest from the central restaurant structure, where I tackle the odd task and eat most of my meals. On the next visit, I’ve staked out my bungalow selection.

Morning Cacaphony

Anyone who has traveled around the Philippines knows that morning belongs to brother rooster. On Camiguin island, rooster crowing lays the atonal foundation for loud, orchestral bird song.

An auditory treat. It’s a party: birds sing, hoot, shriek, whoop, and call out to eligible companions in avian dialects. The performance is so vivid and varied that my phone alarm, set to birdsong, goes off unnoticed.

Notes, Links, and Details

Notes

Camiguin isn't cheap, which keeps the backpackers at bay but it drives up the travel somewhat.

Cebu Pacific flies direct from Manila to Camiguin on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — but the schedule can change at the last minute sending you on a long travel day, connecting through Cebu.

Budgeting

• Flight - ±P10,000 (I used travel credit, but this is an indicative rate)
• Accommodation - P7,290 (booked through Agoda)
• Dive - P2,500 (with BCD, regulator, and dive computer)
• Scooter - P1,950 for 3 days
• Meals - P4,320

Travel Links

Cebu Pacific

Nypa Style Resort

Coraya Divers Camiguin

Reference Links

Yamaha Aerox

Pizzicato Five, Nonstop to Tokyo

Time-lapse Decay

Tucked into nooks throughout Makati, little stores packed with shrink-wrapped instant noodle cups, fruit-flavored soju, infinite ice creams, homemade kimchee, and bags of frozen dumplings await.
Most don’t call attention to themselves beyond window signage, they materialize as I round a corner, walk through the litoral from a mall parking to basement, or chance upon one silently wedged between a money changer and an apartment building.

Versus Amalgamation Syndicates of Globalism

Manila offers endless convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.
Convenience stores in Asia are slightly different than in the US. They are generally more food-oriented with a few plastic booths so you can eat fried chicken and rice, or a hot dog, or pass the time drinking coffee.
All convenience store chains are naked copies of 7-Eleven, the colossus of the quick purchase. Ministop, Lawson Station, and FamilyMart all follow in its wake, differentiating though appealing heat-lamped meal options. Uncle John's Fried Chicken at Ministop, Iced Matcha Espresso Latte at FamilyMart, Waygu Siracha Cheeseburger at Lawson Station.  The Waygu Siracha Cheesburger actually sounds pretty good.
With the profusion of fast food outlets, you’d be forgiven for confusing Manila with Southern California. Streets abound with KFCs, Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and the homegrown version of McDonald’s — Jollibees. Malls host fast-casual dining: Kenny Roger’s Roasters, TGIFridays, Chili’s, California Pizza Kitchen.
Far be it from me to disrespect Jollibee, which occupies a special place in the hearts of Filipinos (my daughter included), or those other chains (a friend owns the local franchise for TGIFriday’s and CPK). But they aren’t very foreign to my eyes.
Sure, the service is friendlier and the menus cater to local tastes: extra sugar for spaghetti, rice on-demand, and so forth. But the model remains the same: the test tube food and the store layouts patterned on plastic-ey Skinner boxes.
Taken together, they are part of a relentless, creeping homogeneity.

The Joy of Brightly Lit Korean Groceries

When I can, I drop into these oases of extra-firm tofu, frozen dumplings, or tasty bansang snacks for home. I like to stroll the aisles and check out the goods.
It’s like inserting a little foreign travel into your day under the guise of grocery shopping — a welcome dose of the other in these travel-restricted times.
The aisles are longitudinal bouquets of cheerful product packaging sandwiched between ultra-fluorescent lighting and eat-off-the-floor cleanliness. The packaging colors are relentlessly Warholian with Korean script — no condescension to English subtitles to be found
My favorite is Bigmart where the owner circles the store, talks up her homemade snacks and generally fusses over the action. The snackies are tasty. Throw them in the fridge and it’s like a meal at your favorite Korean restaurant without the bulgogi.

He's probably dead, so I don't think my father is updating his Facebook page. Still, it's there — a picture of his 80th birthday three years ago.

A picture of his 80th birthday. A group picture of our third trip to Dumaguete. A picture of him in Singapore in a noodle bar. A group picture with me and the granddaughter he barely acknowledged. Fragments of his life in the Philippines.

I don't know that he's dead.

I do know his caregiver moved him out of my condominium in the dark of night, months after they disappeared, odd requests asking for money appeared in my cousins' inboxes. I know that the legal system in the Philippines won't touch this sort of thing because it's just Kano stuff.

I suspect that my father is dead, but I don’t know.

The Best of Intentions

My father is struggling financially. It's been this way for a long time.

I suggest the Philippines. It's cheaper. I have resources. His social security is ample. And he moves here with my step-mother, and they live.

In what turns into a recurring theme, I install him in my Manila apartment and move into a studio above our offices. He inherits a couple of maids and my car and driver. Eventually, he moves to his own place. His household staff goes through various permutations and combinations.

A Caregiver is Hired

Caregiving in that household is a very, very hard job. At this point, he is easy to handle, but my stepmother is a problem.

She is depressed, mean, and manipulative. She is seriously overweight and addicted to painkillers and antidepressants. She drinks Starbucks frappuccinos incessantly, making her fatter, rotting her teeth.

She is relentless with the household staff, and my father's caregiver steps up. The caregiver is responsible for overseeing my stepmother's care. My father charges her with limiting the pill intake.

I know what it's like. I was raised on her daily psychic assaults. She has mad skills. A friend meets her and tells me that he's surprised that I'm not a serial killer.

She passes away. Everyone is relieved except my father. His raison d'être is gone.

The Best Intentions Chorus - Relocation Rhapsody

I suggest that my father move again. This time from Manila to Dumaguete. It’s cheaper. It's nicer. I can see him more.

My girlfriend and I find a bungalow outside of town on a well-managed cluster of rental houses on the ocean. It’s paradisal. There is a gazebo on the water at the edge of the property, and this is a good walk for my father, there and back. I bicycle the 20 kilometers two or three times a week. At one point, I’m going over every day. Sometimes I bring food like tacos or shrimp from one of the restaurants in Dumaguete.

It’s good. It’s tranquil.

In the aftermath of my stepmother’s death and the move to Dumaguete, when my father’s cost of living should go down, the demands for additional funds spiral upward.

Culpability

The fact that someone is looking after my father, whom he trusts and who is sturdy enough to lift him, takes me off the hook for day-to-day elder care. So if the caregiver is skimming or making some poor decisions about using funds, I’m okay with that.

A few hundred dollars every month is a small price to pay.

The Best of Intentions Chorus

It’s good until a conflict arises between the landlord, a formidable woman from Negros Occidental, and the caregiver. In the Philippines, these conflicts get nasty and protracted. The caregiver’s side of the story is that the landlord pressures her to marry my father.

Knowing that tranquility is gone, I suggest they move.

Finding a place for my father is an issue. He insists on two canes when he needs a walker. This makes it key to find a place where he has easy access to support — especially in the bathroom. (The bathroom is an increasingly lethal place.)

The caregiver looks for houses and doesn’t find anything that I think is acceptable. I’m not in Dumaguete all the time anyway, so I cede my apartment to them. Bathrooms are customized, and the move transpires.

Reality of If/Then Bites

If I had come to Dumaguete and overseen the house selection, this would have been a small matter. If I had been more insightful about the border war between the landlord and the caregiver, I might have seen it for what it was. If I had supervised the household budget more assiduously, I might have prevented the whole affair.

On my trips to Dumaguete, I stay in a hotel two buildings down from the condominium.

I visit two or three times a day to spend time with my father. I recover his passwords frequently, deal with his computer, remedy Internet access, and so on. I’ve bought a smart TV which outsmarts him with too many viewing choices.

My father expresses his intention to marry the caregiver — to help guarantee her access to survivor’s benefits.

Probably on the precipice of dementia, my father espouses recidivist notions on race and the Civil War. He becomes distrustful of a world that has evolved beyond his ability to understand and cope. He endlessly regurgitates Fox News sputum.

1. We discover the bills, including rent, are in arrears.
2. I insist on financial controls.
3. They disappear.
4. COVID happens.

Refreshing Guilt

I tried to locate my father.

This was complicated by the complexities of expatriate life in the Philippines. Western men make the voyage here, hook up, and then grow old. No one in authority wants to insert themselves in these dramas.

When I see his Facebook profile updated, it recalls the whole sordid affair. He returns to haunt my dreams and my remembrances.

Do I mourn his death? No. I mourn his life.

He watched his brother grow up in an idyllic household that turned nasty and brutish as loathing born of infidelity colored his childhood. He sought out people who manipulated him. He felt cheated out of an patrician life conjured out of a southern gothic narrative writ small.

Food: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches pronounced "pee-nee-butter sandwiches', boiled shrimp, Coca Cola pronounced "coke cola", McDonald’s french fries.

Films: The Lion in Winter, A Year of Living Dangerously, S.O.B.

Kindnesses: After a particularly nasty pounding from my stepmother, he returned from work with a Saturday Night Fever album. Taking friends to breakfast at Denny’s after a sleepover. A visit to my high-school graduation.

Travel: An extended business trip to England. Our first trip to Dumaguete because he hadn't seen the ocean after three years in the Philippines. The Blue Ridge Mountains.

Pride: A Ph.D. Patents in organic chemistry. Whiteness — betrayal and outrage as equalizing race relations erodes entitlement.

I mourn the things I never said to him, and he never said to me.

I mourn the grim obligation of our relationship, shared DNA stirred by sins of our fathers, of their stillborn hopes and expectations.

I wish for a closure I will never have.

I wish I’d done it all differently.

My first time in Dumaguete since early 2020 way, way back in when it was a shiny new year filled with the promise of work, travel, and diving. It’s my first legit travel post-COVID.

It’s a bittersweet return back to the province. I’m walking a lot, basking in Dumaguete’s provincialness, and I’m thinking about hard things that need doing.

The Life We Have Chosen

I’m here to announce the end of a program. This is the harsh side of offshore outsourcing. Programs end. Jobs end. Unless you can garner some fresh work in a hurry.

I give myself the lecture I learned at the knee of a former boss, the this-is-the-life-we-chose bloviation quoting Hymen Roth in The Godfather Part II. This version is platitudinous self-talk of taking the good with the bad, bad with the good. More often, it’s the lecture you give someone when they complain or push back on difficult or harsh directives.

Bliss & the Offshore Outsourcer

“Offshore outsourcer” can apply to the person who outsources and the entity doing the work. Maybe we need more precision: outsourcer/outsourcee. Even so…

I’m walking and thinking about how great it is to see most of our team, albeit under disappointing circumstances. I’m walking and thinking about Joseph Campbell, who had a lot to say about elemental human inclinations. His book, The Power of Myth, is a wide-ranging, endlessly entertaining, and strange book. It’s stranger because it’s a transcription of television interviews with Bill Moyers.

Anyway, I’m thinking about the chapter called Sacrifice and Bliss. If you subtract the deeper parts of this chapter, it’s an ur-text for the influencer tribe and the self-help-book cabal.

Bliss is a pretty explicit concept, Campbell tells you to find it and follow it. He says it in his elegant manner, “Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” Somehow he links bliss to sacred sites, the power of place, what Campbell calls the “sanctification of the landscape” in mythology. Of course, the place can be conceptual, anything that evokes a sacred or the generative.

This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Walking

Maybe in a holistic sense, Dumaguete is my place of creative incubation.

Being in Dumaguete feels correct. Wet market for fish. Wednesday market for fruit and vegetables. Fresh air. Languid, luminous sunrises and sunsets. Strangers’ greetings.

Manila is many things. Like capital cities everywhere, it’s schizophrenic. Like many Asian capitals — Bangkok, Phnom Pehn, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur (to an extent) — it’s a full-on, cursed by absurd traffic, swirling stew of chaos.

Parts of Manila look like a Bruegelesque Soylent Green remake. Other parts are fortified neighborhoods with armed guards and walls neatly manicured oozing wealth and privilege. Some parts are ancient Chinatown, and others are modern towers inhabited by the parvenu Chinese mid-managers of online gambling operations and smuggling rings.

Robert Kaplan’s not exactly wrong when he starts his description this way:

…the cityscape of the Philippine capital of Manila is … one of aesthetic and material devastation. Bad roads, immense puddles of rainwater because of poor drainage, beggars at stop lights, neon nightclub signs with letters missing, crummy buildings with the look of broken crates bearing no architectural style and none matching with any other, old air-conditioning units sticking out of this and that window like black eyes, jumbles of electric wires crisscrossing the twisted palm trees: these are the visual facts that impress one upon arrival.

When you look deeper than this first impression, you see a city flush with the dividends of the call center industry and remittances from offshore workers. The diaspora care for the aged in Japan and Israel; perform in lounges everywhere; nurse in hospitals across the US, Canada, and the UK; toil below decks aboard ships on all of the seven seas.

If you look still deeper, you see a society trying to emerge from a nasty, brutish history in conflict with itself.

The Philippines’ modern history starts with Magellan’s “discovery” which opened the door to a Taliban-like Spanish regime of Catholic friars who learned the local dialects rather than teach Spanish for fear of literate subjects. Events move briskly with potential independence proffered and snatched back by America’s violent, world-power coming-out party.

Japan’s ultra-violent arrival placed the Philippines under the Asian Co-prosperity Sphere upending the social order (such as it was) heaping payback on the US colony for mainland restrictions on Japanese colonial designs. MacArthur’s return — itself promoted to enhance his image for a future political career — destroyed Manila in order to save it.

Add several helpings of inept politicians (with some notable exceptions) navigating a corrupt political infrastructure led by the double-decade kleptocrat Marcos regime, uneven infrastructure, crushing poverty, years of brain-drain, and you get a sense of the recursive national trauma that Manila embodies.

History serves Manila deep, wide smorgasbord of misery and half-baked colonial ambition but optimism keeps finding a way.

COVID has been many things. One of those things is a catalyst for change. In the Philippines, COVID accelerated a slow-moving commerce industry.

To be sure, home delivery has always been a feature of life in the major cities here in ways that drive-through pick-up is a feature of American life. When I arrived, two comments American ex-pats would make to illustrate the curious alternate-America aspect of the Philippines was McDonald's (and all fast-food) home delivery and that 911 would connect you with Pizza Hut, not emergency services.

Lock-downs in the Philippines compressed the infection curve (across Asia) — at a massive cost to the economy and mental well-being — but it pushed home delivery and online commerce to a new level.

Packages strapped to mopeds from flitting around all have something in common: a compulsive need to box, wrap, tape, box again, bubble wrap, and tape any delivery.  A quick scan of reviews on Lazada or Shopee (the two major online shopping platforms in the Philippines) shows a definite bias for the well-packaged.

The packing, sealing, securing compulsiveness propped a friend visiting from Israel to ask, "what's with all the plastic and tape?" On arrival, it seemed that the propensity to seal, tape, and then staple an envelope seemed like overkill.

The first, a remnant transexual prostitute seeing a lone expatriate walking at 04:45 and makes certain assumptions that leave aside the thirty-pound rucking pack on my back, my sweating intentioned stride, my attire suggesting little in the way of ready cash. There’s an urgency to her pleas, “Hello…sir…hello?”

I  hear her clacky shoes on the concrete behind me; their rhythm intrudes on music from my headphones. Protecting myself from a pointless conversation, I pick up the pace. I  hear her rushing behind me, calling out, as I execute a series of turns on dark streets, calculated to take me to a more residential area of Poblacion. To safety.

Serendipity. Barangay police float past. Three to the side-car bike, they greet me good morning. Chummily keeping the peace putting along on their rounds. They disappear into the morning haze, off to fly the flag of their little constabulary.

I’m walking to a wealthy enclave called Rockwell, where private security stand on cross streets dressed in dark blue fatigues and yellow safety vests armed and ready to enforce traffic regulations. Rockwell forbids street wraiths but hosts a ghost from business-past.

He walks as I do, ineffectually denying home-sloth-waistline from recursive lockdowns. An ex-military, white refugee from African lands, an aging, walking reminder of sins of omission.

Another (my second) run to the Ceremony. I’m there for San Pedro investigation. A good thing, the journey was enlightening in a hundred ways. All luminous: some easily parsed, others more opaque.

I’m placed on the right side, sort of close to where the guides and minders post themselves so they can quickly help anyone having a hard time. Baby Jesus is on my immediate right, so I’ve scored a pretty good co-pilot. On the downside, I’m in the general proximity of the fire that goes all night, occasionally smoking out when it lacks coconut husk fuel. This means I’ve got a ringside seat for all kinds of psychedelic appropriate imagery as the fire and the smoke perform, but I’m breathing noxious fumes which conspire to keep me on the edge of nausea.

The Ceremony is consistent. Tobacco is blown up your nose, burning eye drops administered, everyone in white t-shirts, didactic instruction, a drum circle fires up.  You imbibe the tea.

I and two others start earlier than the rest of the group participating in a mushroom ceremony. For San Pedro, the preparation is a noxious, pasty concoction of water mixed with powdered cactus skin. We start around twelve noon. The experience can last for 8-12 hours. The guides offer fresh quantities at two-hour intervals of San Pedro absorption.

Later, we dovetail with the mushroom folks as we receive a tumbler of mushroom tea. This is two hours after my second dose of San Pedro. The combination must shift the San Pedro experience. It’s hard to know. The tea purges me after diligently working to keep the San Pedro down for over 5-6 hours.

Purging at ceremonies is part of this ride. Buckets are everywhere. Purging nausea and hurling conspire to keep you plenty humble. Evacuation noises augment the overall soundtrack as the cavalcade reacts to the tea.

Lots of smoke. I am swept into a vigorous rush of insights. An entity and I converse and tussle. He shifts me from hallucinated experiences of my own pettiness and general nonsense to whipping insights at me pell-mell. He’s a prankster: silly psychedelic pyrotechnics designed to distract, a malevolent entity hovering off my starboard bow, lines of inquiry dead end.

The entity remains nameless, a wizened, timeless trickster pushing/pulling me across boundaries of perception, time, perspective.

This handsome guy is all over the Philippines. He and his brothers have actual lives, but they also live in the background of a thousand customer service calls happening right now. There is another source of their fame: cockfighting.

I have never been to a cockfight, but I've passed cockfighting arenas in the province dozens of times. These rowdy affairs are called sabong for (usually) legal contests and tupada or tigbakay for illegal fights.

Sabong: roosters kill each other with spurs on their legs and men smoke and drink and gamble, often spending money they can ill afford. The atmosphere is the attraction, allure of quick cash on a whim, on a whispered confidence, on your pride and joy — your rooster.

I've witnessed cockfighting arenas from the outside — hundreds of mopeds parked, men drunk on Red Horse and Ginabra, staggering victorious with a pocket of cash. Or despondent, dead combatant cradled in the crook of their arm girding for the long ride home and uncomfortable explanations.

I don't know anything about cockfighting. I did pay attention to the relevant episodes of the Shield and Justified, and I'm pretty sure there is a Harry Crews story about cockfighting somewhere in his oeuvre.

Crews wrote about cockfighting in 'merica, but I'm surprised to learn that cockfighting Magellan's crewmen first documented cockfighting. Wikipedia reports, "…it was during Magellan's voyage of discovery of the Philippines in 1521 when modern cockfighting was first witnessed and documented for Westerners by the Italian Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's chronicler, in the Kingdom of Taytay." This begs the question of modern cockfighting vs. the ancient version, but that's a question for another day.

Besides being pleasantly surprised by a pair of cocks attached to the wet market where the buko juice guy sets up later, cocks are a constant pain in my professional ass. Nothing says "professional" like a rooster crowing his lordly authority and virility while a caller tries to cancel their online subscription since they've lately been disenfranchised due to COVID or lost their job to outsourcing.

Thankfully we've solved the issue with noise suppression software and upgraded headsets, and I can simply consider these roosters and hope their fighting days are behind them.

04:00 is better than 04:30 because I get started before sunrise. At the Philippines’ latitude and longitude, sunrise is closer to 05:00 during the Summer and closer to 06:00 in the later months. It’s also quieter since traffic kicks up towards six o’clock.

Morning walks in my enclave is better when it’s early risers, other walkers (dog walking or just walking), runners, bikers, night security guards shaking off the rust with coffee, construction workings on the way to their job sites, and so on.

Each day starts when it starts. When it starts is something you can leave your internal clock or insist that you get up at a prescribed time. I think we all have an internal clock, it's a matter of how we use it.

For a morning person like me — or maybe it’s just me — it’s of paramount importance what time I get up and start the day. It starts with ablutions and morning journal where things just get onto the page with a notebook and a pen.