The Salamander

To steer your attention away from the fact that I have no update worth your time today, here are some old drawings stored in my hard drive. I drew most of these as monster designs for !okA tokaT and Nginiiig! Suffice to say none of them ever saw the light of day. Well, the tikbalang did in an episode of !okA tokaT, but that’s about it.

When people ask me why I draw only in black and white, I always say it’s because I’m a great fan of old-school lithographs. Makes me sound more like an artist. The real reason is because I’m no good with colors. But you don’t have to know that, right?

Anyway, click on the pictures to view the full-sized images.

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I remember that day as clearly as a screaming vagina. Meaning to say, if ever I do see a vagina actually screaming I can pretty much bet both my testicles that I’ll never forget it until the day I die. A sight like that would probably ruin my sexual appetite so thoroughly that the mutilation of my reproductive organs wouldn’t be a big issue anymore. Might as well tear out the horrible little thing and be done with it.

As I was saying: I remember that day clearly. There he is– little Squid– coming home from gradeschool one November afternoon in 1987, all snip and snails and puppy dog tails. Little Squid is in the mood for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a treat he plans to devour in his room while he reads Moby Dick. So far, he doesn’t understand half of what he’s already read in that lumbering beast of a novel since he’s only eleven years old, but at that age he already recognizes that what he’s reading is really crazy shit.

Little Squid enters the house humming the theme from the Transformers. He doesn’t see anyone in the house but knows his mother is somewhere around. He goes to the refrigerator for the peanut butter and passes by a window overlooking the backyard. There’s something strange going on there. Little Squid sees his mother crouched on the ground like a heathen idol, burning a pile of oddly familiar scraps of paper. Then little Squid recognizes the green plastic envelope with the He-Man stickers melting atop that pile…

OH YES SHE DID

I had a meeting with my boss– the same one I was talking about in the previous post– in a bar called 77 down in Kamuning. Kinda artsy-fartsy, if you ask me. Of course, this is coming from a guy who was a regular patron of Sanctum Unmasct in Intramuros back when it was up and running so screw me, right?

Anyway, it was one in the morning, the boss was tired, and I was trying to perk him up by making small talk. I mentioned that I’m a blogger and it just so happens that he’s the subject of my latest post. The moment I gave him the URL of Songs of the Salamander I had a short flashback of the things I’ve posted here.

OH GAWD NO

Some days ago I met ABS-CBN’s maverick Business Unit Head Enrico Santos over dinner at some snazzy restaurant in the Podium. Needless to say, he treated. I couldn’t afford shit like that. There was a time when I could, sure enough– but a writer’s financial state is a beast of many faces. Some days the money pours in the way the Human Condition pours into Ernest Hemingway’s scotch glass. These days the money is barely a trickle of piss from a gigolo’s infected pecker.

“I’m here to liberate your mind,” the man said.

Now one thing you must understand about Enrico Santos is that he’s not an easy man to work with. He’s got a brain in a perpetual state of creative seizure and he expects his people to keep up. Oh no, he’s not an easy man to work with. In fact, it’s downright suicide trying to keep up with that brain. I’d leave his unit if not for the fact that the man’s a fucking genius. And in that snazzy resto he verbalized his desire to liberate my mind. That’s easily the most frightening thing he’s said to me in all the seven years I’ve worked under him.

COOL JIVE, MAN

One thing that never fails to amaze me is how much our entertainment industry loathes us television writers. Think of Pharaoh and the Hebrew slaves around the time Moses was born. Yep, Jews under the terrible yoke of slavery, that’s exactly what we are compared to other workers in this biz.

Take talent fee, for instance.

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