It's that time of the year again! (and i don't mean Christmas)

Well, the nth anniversary of the EDSA "people power" revolt is upon us again. Also upon us today are the revolting never-do-wells who are out in the streets making nuisances out of themselves as I write this. I saw the TV news about an alleged aborted coup (I don't know which is alleged: the coup or the attempt to abort it....) and as I drove to Megamall to pick up some infant formula and medicine, I saw that the streets were empty of life.

I got emails from a friend from abroad who is worried sick about the country given this new round of idiocy from the "people power crowd ". Oh yeah, I was there in 86, back when I was in the university. I camped out in the street, waved the flag, basically stood down the dictator's black host and helped restore democracy to the Philippines. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.

I wish this were a fairy tale so I could write the next line which goes: "And they all lived happily ever after".

But alas, life in these pitiful islands is anything but a fairy tale. I think it is more of a contemporary passion play, with the hard working middle class dude trying his best to make an honest living ending up carrying his cross from day to day to day....

After the 86 revolt, we congratulated ourselves. Why should we not? The whole world was saying: "good show..." The commies were pardoned by Cory Aquino and they promised to behave. Cory Aquino was superwoman and she had the rare singular chance to turn things around for the better. People like Guingona were there, writing books and promising to change things for everyone.

Fast forward to 2006. I went to law school two years after EDSA 86, I passed the bar exams (no mean feat there with an average 15% passing rate), got a steady job in a law firm, married a fine woman, settled down, and we had a baby. Oh, and I continued playing Dungeons and Dragons too (well, not exactly, today, I play Gurps...)

What about everyone else in EDSA 86?

See for yourselves:

Cory Aquino, well, she weathered lots of coups and basically squandered all the goodwill she had when they kicked Marcos out. Last year, she made a singularly and spectacularly stupid decision to back the hysterical widow of a near illiterate action star who didn't know parliamentary procedure if it bit him in the banana. That same near illiterate action star came within a hair's breadth of becoming the president of this country (boy, what a real doomsday scenario that would have been....) -- thank God for small mercies! Man, I thought those good for nothing politicians who had the gall to force upon us a dunderhead for president were bad. I guess our heroine of 86 got down to their level by joining them and attempting to force upon us the dunderhead's equally idiotic wife. Great going Mrs. Aquino....I wonder what your hubby is saying up in Politician's Valhalla: my wife is now in bed with the crowd who supported the man who had me killed.

Guingona, ah, I thought he was a good guy. I even read his book about the valiant Filipino. Oh and I liked it too. Now, he's a bitter old man who spends his time yakking about how we should kick GMA out. Wish he'd just buy the farm so we'd be spared of his crap....

So here I am, 20 years later, older but not too old, and seeing that as a people, we never really moved forward from where we were in February 1986. The truth is, we Filipino working middle class professionals, businesspeople and entrepreneurs just wish the hysterical politicos and their patsies would leave us alone and give us a chance to make an honest living. Really. 20 years ago, the EDSA crowd fought for a larger purpose. Since then, we'd gotten our lives together and made something of it.

But not for the politicos and their ilk who were with us in EDSA. Sure, they're still at it.....making our lives miserable and destroying every good thing we'd worked for since 1986. I have this nagging feeling they'll still be at it in 2116.

So with this, should I even say "Happy anniversary?"

ps. As I write this, the air is rife with coup rumors. All this when we have to take Josh for his shots at the doctor tomorrow. How's a decent family going to live and bring up their kid when so many people out there just insist on acting like a bunch of irredeemable idiots?

Dreaming of Mutants

About two weeks back, I got some old friends together on the net and asked them to get back to some RPG-ing (the dice and paper variety). While I'm glad most responded positively, the last week saw a truckful of work cascading down on me and leaving me with another weekend and week of deadline beating, paper pushing, cruchtime dodging work. Ah well, I aint complainin' as too much work beats too little work anyday.

I hope I can make it up to my players who I can see believe in their referee to give everyone another afternoon of fun and whacky dice rolling in Neverwhere.

For the past few days I'd been immersed in Omegaworld, a take off from the old 70s RPG Gammaworld. Omegaworld came out in TSR's polyhedron magazine and is the solution to a referee with too much on his hands in terms of work and real life commitments and too little in terms of gaming and prep time. It looks rules light and pretty straightforward for a d20 game. Plus, more importantly, it looks like FUN!

Alas, my projected epic of an intrepid band of explorers in the post-nuclear wasteland of the future will have to wait till I live through the epic of a struggling lawyer and his deadlines in the urban wasteland that is Manila of the present.

At the back of my mind, I'm dreaming of a four armed mutant with bandoleers of scavenged powercells, grenades and bullets criss-crossing his smooth scaled torso sitting on a pile of ancient rocks. He doesn't know it but that pile of rocks he's sitting on used to be part of the Pentagon. Somehow I think that in between trying to find stuff to eat and staying out of the way of giant mutant spiders which shoot black deathrays at their prey he muses on how it must be fun to have been born in the time of the ancients. If his granpa's tales were true, he'd have been sitting before a magic box with a glass window which comes to life at the touch of a crypitc button. Different images appear on the glass window depending on how you pound the crytic buttons in front of you. I guess he'd think that sure beats having to scrounge around the desert for edible roots while dodging giant mutant spiders and their ilk.

Then again there'd be no way for me, an ancient one from the time Before the Bomb to tell him it isn't really all fun and games living in this time. After all, we all know there are worse monstrosities than giant mutant spiders which shoot deathrays at their prey in 21st Century Manila.

Yes my mutant friend, here, our monstrosities are called Politicians.

Best to stay in your own time even if it is in the world After the Bomb. It still pays to count your blessings.

Argh, I still wanna run a game...

Itenerant lifestyle and the paper chase

For almost a week now, we've been living at my mother in law's house in Makati. The water started leaking into the ceiling from bathroom in the flat right above ours causing our bathroom door to warp. That and brownish pools of water on our bathroom floor, the purity/cleanliness of which I refuse even to contemplate drove me to ask the unit owner above to take action. Luckily, they did and since the repairs are a bit long, we've been living in Makati. All that hammering and the smell of paint won't do good for the baby.

Strange but I feel like a pastoral nomad. Everyday, I get up, have breakfast in a different house and drive to our flat to check up on things. A day at the office or court or meeting with clients or all of the above follows and then another trip to the flat, again to see how things are going. Then, a trip back to Makati and at night, to bed in a strange room which does not feel too strange anymore.

Its been a vacation for Ana who does not have to worry about what food to prepare for the day. Joshua, on the other hand, is beginning to enjoy it as his grandma, aunts, uncles, cousins and others are there for a never ending round of chit-chat and play.

The repair guy tells me all will be finished by today so I guess we'll be moving back home tomorrow. Its been a nice change of scene but now, we find ourselves missing our flat.

Daytimes including the last weekend was spent here in the office frantically studying contracts, doing research, typing and re-typing draft contracts that simply refuse to conform to what the clients want. After all this, I sort of expected things to quiet down a bit. After about ten years or so of legal practice, I noticed that volume of work tends to follow a rhythm of its own... like a set pattern with its highs and lows.

But this week, it appears that the cosmic flow is being disrupted somewhere. If anything, the volume of work is not slowing down....it seems to be picking up. I have this nagging feeling that I'll be working through Sunday again this weekend.

I keep telling myself the rhythm of the paper chase will eventually stablize once more. So maybe I can finally get to run a game of Fading Suns for my players again.