The New Year is a time rife for firecrackers: before I left the house to buy fish food, I had to negotiate my way around a warzone of “piccolo,” “pla-pla” and “Judas Belt.”  While I like violent explosions as much as the next guy, I prefer to watch them from a safe distance.  Any residential back-alley on New Year’s Eve is a scene straight off a bad Chuck Norris movie, if you asked me.  Besides, I don’t want to be the next guy who goes to the emergency room not for actually lighting a firecracker, but for being a mere passer-by.

   Sure, I’ve lit my own fair share of firecrackers before, but after seeing somebody being mortally-wounded from a New Year’s explosion, I laid my hands off fireworks for good.  But I’m still pretty much guilty of handling boga, a plastic air cannon “powered” by compressed air and alcohol.  It’s explosive fun for the first few minutes, until firing blasts of high-pressure air becomes a bit boring.  Besides, there are a lot of interracial penis-related jokes you can make out of it, and it doesn’t make for a good bong.  Not that I condone or condemn the use of marijuana, though.

   Watching news reports from emergency rooms filled with people who lost their fingers from firecrackers has become an annual ritual for me.  Bloody carnage is something you would expect from suicide bombers a’la the one that claimed Benazir Bhutto’s life in Pakistan, but here it’s something you would expect on the first day of the year.  There’s something about carving spring chicken with these news reports on: the sight of a dismembered finger is enough to remind you of homemade hamonado.

   But I’m thinking that I’m better off celebrating the coming of 2008 playing old music by Prodigy.  Hence the title.

   This isn’t about that old French porn movie shown in MEGA that involved erotic acts surrounding cheesecake and French actresses play-acting and role-playing Japanese geishas in a lesbian scene.  Nor am I saying that you can make a Filipino art-porn movie that involves lechon.

   If anything, I like lechon.  Yet whole roasted pig can only go so far: there’s a certain limit to the consumption of it.  The crispy skin eventually degenerates into a chewy unappealing mass, and the meat becomes a chore to eat.  There really isn’t anything you can do to resurrect an appetite for lechon, when all there is to do after is to make lechon paksiw.  As such, as a holiday dish, it is overrated.

   Of course, I’ve been known to despise a lot of foods in my time: pizza, cake, banoffi pie made by chain restaurants, gourmet coffee, pancit canton.  Lechon should be served sparingly: piling it into your dinner plate is not only scandalous, but strangely unappetizing.  I wouldn’t have problems eating the head, however.

*     *     *

   I have the feeling that this will develop into a sexually-charged entry.  A sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.  After all, I started it: on this day of days, of all days.

   I can’t get the image of making a pornographic film centered around the theme of lechon out of my head, but of FAMAS or MMFF material (the latter sounded so wrong).  Something like “Lechon de Leche,” perhaps.  I’m not talking about another gay indy film that revolves around “Brokebacking” the whole idea of lechon roasting, but the kind of bomba film that would draw dirty old men into dank back-alley cinemas and have another taste (so to speak) of the 80s.

   Films like “Kangkong” and “Itlog” were disappointing: water cabbage or eggs didn’t really develop as central themes in both movies.  What I’m planning to do with “Lechon de Leche” is to capitalize on the heat of the roasting yard, the stench of the pigs, and sprinkling in liberal amounts of raunchy, filthy sex.

   I’m thinking of the kind of dumb porno in Filipino sex films: perhaps a scene near a pit of smouldering coals, a kinky scene involving a roasting spit.  For those who like idiotic seductive scenes, I have plans for my leading starlet to dance with a crispy roasted pig and end up so oily, greasy, and dir(r)ty.  I even thought of some really, really stupid dialogue involving a jock selling the lechon and the starlet buying it:

Jock: Malutong.  Kaluluto lang.
Starlet: Malaki.  Mauubos kaya?
Jock: Mauubos yan.  Masarap ang sarsa ko.
[Jock and Starlet lock eyes, then have sex on the chopping block]

   And then there’s this:

Starlet 2: Pakitanggal mo naman yung bituka.  Gusto ko laman lang.
Jock 2: Sandali lang.  Kikiskisin ko lang sa loob.
[Starlet 2 and Jock 2 lock eyes, then have sex on top of the lechon]

   This will resurrect careers.  Or kill them.

   Like many unemployed 22-year-olds who happen to be convenient uncles, people don’t understand my limits.  Especially my nephews and nieces: until such time that I have a source of income, I can’t give away aguinaldo.

   And like many convenient uncles, I kind of feel that children are too smart in Math.  Even a four-year-old kid would know the value of twenty pesos: nowadays, your nephews will kick you in the shins and your nieces will wail like banshees for anything less than two one-hundred peso bills.

   It’s not like I’m complaining, though.

   Of course I am.

   Merry Christmas, monkeys.

   In the spirit of the holidays:

• To the call center agent reading my blog while working the night shift at some outsourcing company;
• To the OFW reading my blog wanting to read about what’s up in the Philippines while six or so time-zones away from these shores;
• To the student reviewing for his or her exam scheduled for next year;
• To the foreigner who reads blog in the morning of December 23;
• And to all of you who have been reading me for the month that Marocharim.com and have followed me in Original TMX for the past three years…

   A MEANINGFUL AND MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU!

   I had a lot of fun last night.  Too bad I didn’t bring my own digital camera, so the pictures will have to wait until next time.  Although I must point out that a few things didn’t go according to plan:

• I didn’t get really drunk and wasted;
• I didn’t get to watch the UP Baguio Lantern Parade, much less attended Pasiklaban, and;
• Because I’m not drunk, I’m blogging with a really benign hangover.

   With bullet-points over and done with, let’s get to blogging.

*     *     *

   Last night, me and a few friends from high school got together to celebrate Christmas the best way we could: good food, good drink, and good companionship.  There was Dette and her boyfriend Bep, our two engineers Lincoln and McJames, our future engineer Chedan, our registered nurse Aaron, our future registered nurse Mickey, our insurance agent Haidee, our future events-planner Katz, Jayson and his wife Inin, and our future pharmacist Rhoda.  My good friend Noel couldn’t come to the party because he had a company Christmas party to attend, but showed up for a couple of minutes to say hello.

   We started off the night by having dinner at Kubong Sawali by Military Cut-Off Road.  “A bite to eat” is a nuanced expression: since it’s Christmas, we ordered three bilao’s of mixed seafood platters that included octopus, grilled squid, tuna sashimi, steamed mussels, steamed tilapia, and rellenong bangus.  While I’m not the biggest fan of seafood, I had a particular liking for the squid.  The tuna sashimi, while not very fresh, was quite good even if the wasabi obviously was the kind that comes in a tube.

   Because it was about time I treated my friends, I decided that a round of beers at 18 BC at Legarda Road to prime our stomachs was just the way to do it.  Then, at Aaron’s suggestion, we headed off to Samurai Comedy Bar, found at the basement of La Azotea.

   I can’t say that I like comedy bars: I’m not a fan of gay humor.  But if anything, there’s something enjoyable about comedy bars if you’re not dragged into the stage to interact with a gay dude.  It got very funny when both Jayson and Bep were dragged into said stage.  I just hope that that they didn’t hear me calling them “animal food-trough wipers” on the way out.  Ah, what I wouldn’t do to find a comedy bar inspired by “Monty Python.”

   We headed off to Nevada Square to end the night.

   Pictures to follow… something tells me this will be better if I posted pictures.

   I’m not counting on being sober enough to blog tomorrow: today is Pasiklaban at UP Baguio, and I have a Christmas party to attend, so I’m planning on getting drunk tonight.  It’s been a while since my last good drink: the last drink I had was a can of San Miguel a couple of days ago.  I’m missing out on the joys of hangovers.

   Really, I’ve missed out on a lot of fun this year: while writing my thesis was fun and all, I think I need to have a bit of the fun that there is in the bottom of a liquor bottle.  I deserve it: a lot of good has come my way for the past few days that I don’t think a blog entry, much less the copious flow of liquor, would jinx my good fortune.  For everything wrong that happened this year, there was always something right that happened.

   Nope, my fortunes do not come from fortune cookies enveloping dubious passages from the Confucian Analects.  I subscribe to Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical existentialism: my life is what I make of it.  I wouldn’t have the life I live and lead right now any other way, because I’m finding happiness in places I’d never thought I’d be happy from, and happy for.  Wiping off the sick smile on my face would require surgery.

   Yup, fortune smiles on Marocharim, who’s gonna get wild and drunk tonight, baby!

   I don’t know what’s up with my mom and my sister when it comes to decorating the Christmas tree: with cockroaches and mice running wild inside the insides of walls, I find the whole plan of an “edible tree” dubious.  Before I left, my sister was taping up yarn and chocolate coins to add to the already gaudy display of a Christmas tree with candy canes and small oranges.  I expect to come home today to the tune of a brightly-lit Christmas tree that has chicken drumsticks hanging on it, covered with the tinsel of oily adobo flakes.

   My idea of the perfect Christmas tree is a sexy prostitute dressed in a risqué Santa Claus outfit decked in frosty beer cans and Christmas lights, but that’s for a floor show in a nightclub.  There are other perversities like Santa-fetish bukkake, but that’s for another time.  I don’t know about this year’s Christmas tree at home, though: maybe there’s room in it for glittery scales of tuyo.  It is, after all, a time for economic crisis.

   Like many people, I have a small collection of mugs and picture frames from Christmas parties where the rule for kris kringle is “unisex.”  I know that it’s the thought that counts when it comes to giving gifts: it’s hard enough to think of a good gift to give to some name you picked off the hat a week in advance.  But when you do the bunutan right then-and-there during the Christmas party… it’s a whole different story.

   I suppose that I have every right to be a Grinch or Scrooge: it’s not like the mugs were made in amateur Pottery class.  Or that the picture frames were made out of used popsicle sticks from pinipig icedrop.  My small collection of “unisex” photo albums weren’t even made from paiper-mâché.

   Disguising said gift in a smart-looking gift bag doesn’t help, either.  Even adding candies or chocolate bars inside the mug only adds to the thoughtlessness of things.

   Look at it this way: Santa Claus gives a lot of thought to “naughty or nice,” and takes a full year to have his elves mine coal somewhere for brats.  Santa Claus doesn’t harness his reindeer and fly to chimneys all over the world to put mugs on Christmas stockings.  It’s not like I’m a 22-year-old man who still believes in Santa Claus, but you get the picture.

   But it’s not like I’m a very thoughtful gift-giver myself: because I always seem to pick girls’ names from the kris kringle hat, I head off to the mall to look for stuffed toys.  The reason being is that they’re so easy to buy: what girl doesn’t like teddy bears that come inside cans, or teddy bears that come with perfume?  They go ga-ga over the seemingly cute bear and how much thought I apparently put in it.  Maybe a couple of hundred bucks, and the humiliation of being at Blue Magic for fifteen minutes.

   I miss out on a lot of bibingka and puto bumbong because I don’t attend Simbang Gabi, or the nine days of early morning Mass to celebrate Christmas.  In hindsight, I never once attended Simbang Gabi: not that I have anything against the Catholic Church, but I’m not a morning person.  I’d rather catch up on much-needed sleep than to brave the cold and lethargy of the wee hours of the morning to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ for nine days.

   Ooops, I hope that didn’t sound offensive.

   Simbang Gabi is a time ripe - and perhaps even rife - for chick-hunting under the guise of piety.  It’s also a time for dates on early mornings: perhaps there’s something remotely romantic about Mass being some form of romantic interaction, or sharing puto bumbong with your significant other while waiting for the sunrise.  And they accuse me of being a sinner.

   Among different forms of special masses, I would rather look forward to flaying and self-mutilation come Good Friday, when my sadistic tendencies get the better of me.  You won’t see men whip themselves with barbed and knotted leather straps on the time when Jesus is born in a cave (or stable) in Bethlehem.

   Whatever.