Skip to main content

Viagra au naturel

IT LOOKED eerie—a blaze of fireflies pulsing like stars in the nippy air, throbbing with mating passions. That show of lights somehow eased the shadows of a Holy Thursday night on a dry river bed a few kilometers trudge up Mount Makiling.

It’s likely that no river has lain in sleep for months on that moss-grown, boulder-strewn bed—except my 20-year old kid Kukudyu and I. We were out to spend the night, do on-site learning sessions by the next day. Usual father-and-son bonding. As the late Benjamin Franklin once begged: "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

Past noon from the foot of the mountain’s northern section, it took us four hours ploughing non-stop through prickly bushes and forest undergrowth to get to that site. We got there in one bruised piece. By then, dusk was falling; the sylvan air hummed with a trill of crickets, cicadas, critters nameless in choral orison. That incessant “sh-r-r-e-eemmm---“ layered with “k-kr-r-eeengg--” if memory serves me right, are seed words in eldritch Sanskrit to invoke Hindu deity of prosperity and beauty, Lakshmi, and the goddess of death and destruction, Kali. Cool healing sounds.

Then, the fireflies came. They were a shy swirling drizzle of stars from the canopy of tree branches as darkness washed in.

Told my kid that two lines of poetry my grandfather recited to me--I was a toddler then-- was a query to fireflies: “Alitaptap, alitaptap dala-dala’y liwanag/ Saan ka ba nagbuhat at sino baga ang iyong hanap?” From his cupped palms, lolo also gently plucked out a firefly for me to wonder at. Impressionable me learned a lesson from that gesture: playing with fireflies won’t get you charged for arson or any similar fiery felony committed with a well-stacked female.

Lolo’s lines plied out something romantic about those lightning beetles—not flies, these critters, they’re bugs whose presence serve as reliable gauge of ambient air quality. See: fireflies can’t thrive in polluted air. Unlike cockroaches and such kotong collecting vermin, fireflies don’t stand a chance of surviving the man-made gas chambers of EDSA, Quezon and Ayala Avenues or Alabang-Zapote Road in the metropolis. That also explains why no firefly ever fell in love at first sight with the ember of a lit up cigarette.

Say: Bugs, a 1970s movie take-off from Thomas Page’s 1973 work “Hephaestus Plague” had this biotech savvy mating off a tectonic plate-dwelling pyrotechnic cockroach with its household counterpart. The induced union produced a highly intelligent species of cockroach that would likely frown on voting dullards into high office. The critters chucked more heat than light. Probably aghast at the voting population’s foibles and failures, they rearranged a suburban lay-out setting off fires here, there, and everywhere before taking their creator with ‘em down into earth’s bowels. They were for reel, those real fireflies.

Say again: the Sailor Moon anime heroine Tomoe Hotaru translates as “firefly of earth.” That’s one firefly my lolo ought to have snatched and given to me as plaything.

Now, Lolo’s two-bit poetry echoed an Aztec belief. They saw fireflies as sparks of knowledge in a world of ignorance or darkness. Say, the word “hell” comes from helan—abysmal ignorance that can touch off the infernal in any milieu. That’s also a throwback to Manuel L. Quezon’s curse—“I’d prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.”

Lolo meant well, going out into the nippy night to snatch a firefly on the wing and giving the critter to his beloved apo. As it turns out, most of those bugs are males—about 50 males to one female in some species—trying to outshine each other. That’s tough competition. A light bulb gives off 10 parts light and 90 parts heat—a male firefly all fired up for fornication emits 100 percent light.
The nitric oxide content of cells in a firefly’s belly has been tagged as the culprint for such blinking signals. Such cells crank up nitric oxide. The chemical shuts down the operation of mitochondria, mini-organs inside cells that use oxygen to produce cellular energy. The work stoppage frees up floods of oxygen, which then fuels light production. When the burst of nitric oxide subsides, the mitochondria power up and consume the oxygen again, which turns the lantern off. Ah, nitric oxide’s the same chemical in Viagra that causes a limp staff to go stiff like a flourescent lamp—and it’s been known that fireflies can go at it for at least five hours non-stop.

In his time, my lolo dished up verses poetic. This time, I relied on two-bit natural history and pharmacology to impart a lesson or two to my kid.

So I told him it’s much better to chew unsightly critters as Korean bugs than catch sexed up fireflies for their belly hoard of natural Viagra.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Every single cell of my body's happy

I got this one from Carmelite Sisters from whose school three of my kids were graduated from. They have this snatch of a song that packs a fusion metal and liebeslaud beat and whose lyrics go like this: "Every single cell of my body is happy. Every single cell of my body is well. I thank you, Lord. I feel so good. Every single cell of my body is well." Biology-sharp nerds would readily agree with me in this digression... Over their lifetimes, cells are assaulted by a host of biological insults and injuries. The cells go through such ordeals as infection, trauma, extremes of temperature, exposure to toxins in the environment, and damage from metabolic processes-- this last item is often self-inflicted and includes a merry motley medley of smoking a deck a day of Philip Morris menthols, drinking currant-flavored vodka or suds, overindulgence in red meat or the choicest fat-marbled cuts of poultry and such carcass. When the damage gets to a certain point, cells self-de

ALAMAT NG TAHONG

SAKBIBI ng agam-agam sa kalagayan ng butihing kabiyak-- at kabiyakan, opo-- na nakaratay sa karamdaman, ang pumalaot na mangingisda ay napagawi sa paanan ng dambuhalang Waczim-- isang bathala na nagkakaloob sa sinuman anumang ibulwak ng bibig mula sa bukal ng dibdib. Pangangailangan sa salapi na pambili ng gamot ng kapilas-pusong maysakit ang nakasaklot sa puso ng matandang mangingisda. 'Di kaginsa-ginsa'y bumundol ang kanyang bangka sa paanan ng Waczim. Kagy at umigkas ang katagang kimkim noon sa kanyang dibdib: "Salapi!" Bumuhos ng salapi-- mga butil at gilit ng ginto-- mula papawirin. At halos umapaw sa ginto ang bangka ng nagulantang na mangingisda, walang pagsidlan ang galak, at walang humpay ang pasasalamat sa mga bathala. Nanumbalik ang kalusugan ng kabiyak ng mangingisda. At lumago ang kabuhayan, naging mariwasa ang magkapilas-puso na dating maralita. Nilasing ng kanyang mga dating kalapit-bahay ang mangingisda-- na hindi ikina

Cal y canto con camote

FENG shui (literally, wind water flow) lore has it root crops embody a hidden store of treasures. Say, a local food conglomerate needs yearly 35,000 metric tons of cassava for livestock feed-- the available local supply falls short of 13,000 tons. Cassava granules sell for around P9 a kilo. Demand for the same root crop to be used in liquor manufacturing is hitting above the roof. Why, raising cassava is a no-brainer task— this is one tough crop that can grow in the most hostile patches of earth, providing sustenance for ages to dwellers in sub-Saharan parts of Africa. While the hardy cassava is nearly pure starch, the lowly sweet potato or kamote is considered by nutritionists as a super food, the most nutritious of all vegetables— kamote levels of Vitamin A are “off the charts, rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties.” A fist-sized kamote can supply a day’s dose of glucose to fuel the brain, muscles, and organs, so they claim. Count the country lucky