as the only surviving hominids in this planet, we humans are the only species capable of producing garbage.
besides our voracious appetites for anything at all, we also have this mindless preoccupation to produce trash unlike say canines or the wooly mammoths before the ice age chilled them to oblivion. (or maybe because of our wolfish cravings that we have no recourse but to chug out trash, i should say.)
going home this morning, a snarl held our bus for almost a quarter of an hour as ems and csi vans hogged the four lanes in the claremont section of morris avenue.
watching the local news later, i learned that a naked body of an unidentified black woman was found in a dumpster somewhere there. her head, her torso, stuffed in one industrial strength trash bag; the lower limbs, in another.
look, not that i am squeamish about this. for god sake, i used to live in a metropolis where the most watched tv show is this primetime newscast that devotes exclusively the first half of its 30-minute run to showing unsolarized, unpixalated clips of decapitated corpses and sloughing off bloated bodies floating like lazy manatees along garbage choked pasig river.
and besides, i am of a people that has contributed several new entries to the ever expanding english language lexicon, the most noble specimen of it all being salvage. salvage, as in to summarily execute someone and not to save the poor soul from ruin, destruction or eternal damnation.
it's not the universality of life horrible - from poverty ravaged manila to ground zero of this century's scourge otherwise known as big ass obesity - that saddens me. i knew that early on. most of us did. the others who didn't are probably in the asylums or better yet, the graveyards.
in the novel for young readers the princess bride, farm boy westley said life is pain, princess. . . anyone who says differently is selling something.
in the news clip, a man on the street interview was slickly inserted by the producers hoping for that ratings uptick. the interviewee, another black woman, was saying that even if she did not know the murdered lady, she was certain that she must have been a good person, her own words.
i flipped off to another channel thereafter. i knew where it was going from there. this facile and sham look at life.
gruesome as it was, i do prefer the evening news of my manila. oh, but it's so sensationalized, so callous, you'd say.
callous, unfeeling. that is when one flinches away from this princess bride truth. and sugarcoating life as something else is nothing but pure trash that only humans have somehow the thinking minds to conjure.
i remember a dog i once had. an eight wheeler coca cola delivery van struck him one afternoon and maimed his right front paw forever. healed of his wounds, my dog now walked with this cringe inducing hop-skip gait.
and strangers, everytime they see him limping, would commiserate. oh, you poor thing, a stranger would almost always say while patting my dog. and my dog, wagging his tail expectantly, would warm up to the stranger, not knowing he was just tossed some human tripe.