Tooth and Claw

Dinner was great tonight. Manang Tessie made me some grilled skewered shrimp basted in her secret barbecue sauce with fried eggplant and vegetable soup for sidings. I’ve always suspected that she was the best cook in Concepcion. For the most part, she’s the mayor’s cook, and as with feudal tradition, the lord of the land keeps the finest house staff. Her skills in frying shrimp and squid are only to be matched by Bubba Gump’s Bucket-of-Boat-Trash. But since The Bucket does not include squid, her fried calamari stands without equal.

Dinner was made even better with the thought that the municipal malnutrition rate has gone down to 19 percent from 25 percent a year after I arrived in this town. I’ve been tabulating health data this afternoon, driven by the curiosity of how my presence benefited this place, and a big part of our advocacy this year was directed against malnutrition.  Of course nutrition is multi-factorial, but we all can’t help but secretly feel that we’ve been a good part in the things that make the world a better place.

I usually eat dinner alone these days. The mayor has been busy networking with the developmentalese in Manila and other parts of the world lately. So for company I have the sound of the nearby videoke bar frequented by what else. It was then when it came to my attention – the legacy of White Lion.

Well, for those unfamiliar with White Lion, it’s the band who sang “You’re All That I Need” – a cloyingly cheesy sellout rock song from circa 1992. Sick as some of us are from rock sellouts, one can’t help but notice how songs like these have leached into the soul of our culture after 15 years of being played and replayed on radios, small town videoke bars, and badly decorated prom nights. It makes you wonder how many men fought with tooth, nail, and gin bottles in bar brawls spawned from its singing, or lack of it - or how entire display cases of ladies underwear have been spirited away from their wearers on many a starry night under the influence of the song’s mush.

For some, it has become the soundtrack of their lives – like the music that plays in their heads while they imagine themselves to be in some music video as they episodically recall the things they like to remember. Apparently, this applies for music in general, but not every song makes it to the playlist of the rural videoke machine 15 years after its conception. It is a place reserved for the elite few who managed to play in synchrony with the heartbeat of a nation.

Mr. White Lion, probably now only a shadow of the rocker he was, might be one of those people right now playing “You’re All That I Need” in his head, trying to remember his glory days, wondering if his music ever made a difference in this world. Well, Mr. White Lion sir, for all it’s worth, you’d be glad to know that your song will be among the echoes forever to be remembered by the timeless hills of one small town, in one of the 7,107 islands of a tropical country.

At last… my own blog.  I somehow felt the need for this because of the ever shrinking pool of user names, proprietary labels, and in this specific case, blog site names in the Internet.  Ten years from now, someone just might offer to buy out this blog’s name.  Originality sells, it’s just a matter of foresight.  You see I could have used my name, but that wouldn’t sell now would it?  Unless of course I become someone famous, but chances are, I’d be dead by then.

Come to think of it, my original blog site name should have been "Food for a Crow".  I tried to create a blog for two months now with that name, and every time Friendster would send an error report.  I thought all this time the blog engine was under repair.  Serendipitously I tried another name and here I am writing about it.

To give justice to the origin of the phrase, it’s part of the lyrics of Sting’s "I Was Brought To My Senses":

It’s written in a sky as blue

As blue as your eyes

As blue as your eyes
If nature’s red in tooth and claw
Like winter’s freeze and summer’s thaw

The wounds she gave me

Were the wounds that would heal me

I don’t know if ten years from now the same phrase would still sound as cool as it did now.  In fact, ten years from now, "cool" would probably be just as uncool as hearing our parents say "groovy".  Too bad they didn’t come up with "un-groovy" back then.

Frontage of Malangabang Elementary School, Barangay Malangabang, Concepcion, Iloilo