MANGKOKOLUM!

W OOZY and a bit crazy from having a beer too many, I spat the question to Dennis Fetalino: “What’s a 75-year old man who has 10 kids doing on the roof? Flying a kite? Kids nowadays don’t know a rat’s ass about flying kites or frying pans or do they?” My beer buddy shook his head clearing cobwebs while I mumbled to myself a monologue scratched off ‘Fiddler on the Roof'… “Dear God, You made many, many poor people. I realize, of course, that it's no poor to be shame. But it's no great honor either! So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune…?” In these tropic parts, a 60-degree incline—a whistle-bait gradient in feminine waist tapering to sumptuous thighs-- to tin, tile, or thatch roof assemblage assures neat water run-off. So what’s a septuagenarian doing at the rooftops except acting out a metaphor from the Broadway musical? It’s an earnest try for a firm footing over precarious circumstances while scratching out a lively tune to flout the risks to life a...

I T took about two or three years before the three resident toads in our home garden turned from egg globs to full grown croakers. A pregnant toad mom must have strayed into our home yard one night, hopped into a rainwater-filled Vigan jar there to latch a jelly-like nursery sac replete with eggs on the jar’s rim. Delivery done, she had hopped on to parts unknown, never seeing how her eggs hatched into tadpole-youngsters to swim with several damselfly nymphs and daphnia teeming in that jar… That soft-shelled turtle found at a nearby creek, brought home, and dumped in that jar by my youngest child, that turtle must have gorged and grew fat on the hundreds of hatched tadpoles before crawling out scot-free…thank goodness. Out of less than a dozen tadpoles, three toughed it out hanging on to life. ‘Twas odd that their metamorphosis took 2-3 years. It only took weeks for toad eggs to turn up as fledgling princes-to-be… our resident toads must have taken their time enjoying the security of a...

THE late mathematician and author Isaac Asimov wrote sometime in the 1980s about the growing imbalance between matter and energy in this neck of the universe—so much energy is being turned up as human flesh, breed in abandon and feed upon resources which grow scant through the years. ‘Twas a mind-blowing mode of squaring off with growing population pressure upon the planet’s dwindling resources. A potshot at the quality of people teeming like maggots upon the land’s moribund carcass: fuck and shuck… wipe off the plate, fornicate… fornicate… wipe off the plate… Human activity has spawned global warming which, in turn, has whacked out global timetables in crop production to feed earth’s billions—hey, Thomas Malthus missed out on people fucking up the reality of our planet’s clime that, in turn, screwed up food production. Malthusian fears were limited to people cranking out more and more people until food supplies, renewable and non-renewable resources dwindle to a murderous minimum. So ...