Almost sinful

What Budoy does with song and the Cebuano language is almost sinful. It is the same thing Bruce Conte, formerly of Tower of Power and Earth, Wind and Fire, does with his electric guitar. When they mix it up in a night of funk at Magellan’s Landing Pub in Lapu-Lapu City, the result makes you wonder if you went over the edge of sinfulness hours ago. Not to worry, the beer and a few tiny shots of brandy have gone to your head and made you forgetful. Indeed, it has transported you to a younger time when all things seemed impossible except for this one particular night where anything is possible.

And you wonder to yourself, Is this the whole point of entertainment? To make you forget? It must be. You relish it wishing all your friends and family were here this night, even the dead whom you love and still remember. Do they watch from a distance? Oh, you are only a bit drunk. But you deserve it. For these have been times of great burdens to carry and great responsibilities. And they grow sometimes heavy on you. And you can always think about them after the night wears off, after a bit of sleep.

There will be hell to pay, of course. There is the next day’s deadline of a column, which you will be writing through a headache. You will be dehydrated. You will want to sleep all morning wishing to stay inside the dream of last night when Budoy had his birthday concert, his funk attack with Bruce Conte. You will want to stay as long as you can inside the dream, the music, the crazy dancing, the friendly holding each other, the hugs, but they will be nothing more than a sweet almost-sinful memory by morning. And you will ask yourself if you did anything you might regret.

You might still smile but there will be the computer before you and important things to write about. It will be around these times when the University of the Philippines Board of Regents will begin hearing Dean Enrique Avila’s motion to reconsider his dismissal from UP. It is an important case for all of us, but few realize fully why. And so the issue may as well be reduced to its most fundamental form. Wherever there is a case of injustice against even one person that we know of, that case is not intramural politics. It is a case for all of us. For anything can happen to any man that we allow to happen to one man. And do not say anything, or say instead: This is not a case that concerns me. Let somebody else handle it. Or say, I have had too much of this. Let’s move on.

“Moving on” has become the great theme of Philippine politics in our time. Somebody declared martial law and took away all our freedoms and we said: Let’s move on. Somebody stole the elections and hundreds of millions of pesos of our hard-earned tax money, and again we said: Let’s move on. Another journalist killed somewhere not far from where we are, another priest killed in the hills of Mindanao, make no mistake, soon we will again say: Let’s move on. We will not hear the crunch of bone beneath our feet. We will not remember: We move on over the graves of the forgotten. And justice is still not served. We move on as if to say, there are more important things than that. But what can be more important than one person getting the justice he deserves? If you can do nothing about those you can do nothing about, at least do something about those you can. Do not keep silent. Do not let this day pass.

For if you do, your night will be visited by nightmares. You will not know how to enjoy the evening where there is only the dancing poet up on stage carrying on the tradition of the late Yoyoy Villame, bringing it finally here to contemporary times with a new twist, a new awareness, doing wonderful things to the Cebuano language even if he is native-Waray, making us laugh, as if through a veil of tears, reminding us, there, too, is a good time for forgetting, for laying down arms, or as it were, the computer, and just listening and dancing the night away while Bruce Conte makes almost-sinful love to his guitar.

This night of Budoy’s un-numbered birthday you look at the world through a dionysiac haze, the smoke rising, filtering the lights until you can hardly see anymore. Is it the smoke that has put the wetness in your eyes? Ah, better to close them and just sort of move your body even though you don’t know exactly how. This is after all the magic of Budoy’s music. It is a letting go he brings to a point of genius. It is a letting go that moves your eyes to close so you can listen better although the volume is already turned up quite a few notches.

You are searching for something inside the silence in between the notes and the syllables of uttered sound. It is the realm of imagination where you can ask yourself: Can I ever type these words as well as Budoy does the stage? Can I ever type them the way Bruce Conte does his guitar? If I only could, will they have some effect? Will they unburden someone out there, another victim perhaps, just like you and me?  Will they help save anything?