one4pops.

the one that makes my mom's fake smile look like a beam of sunlight, that's my dad.

It’s my Dad’s birthday.

Hmmm.  Write about my dad.  Ok.  Fuck it.  Let’s go!

Luis turns 60 today (October 14th), which officially makes him old.  Not THAT old, but our birthday’s are only four days apart and where people are always telling me I’m a baby with my whole life ahead of me, you’d be insulting my Father’s intelligence if you tried to tell him the same.  After countless conversations in the car, just us, where the silent parts are more profound then the words spoken, I learned we share the same view on life.  That’s that simply existing can often be a pain in the ass and that having to do it mostly in the presence of other people is more a chore than a pleasure.  So you gotta give him props for making it this far.

When we immigrated to Canada I was 6 months old, my Dad left the up and up lifestyle he could have been living in Manila.  He was a journalist.  And that’s the coolest job you can have in The Philippines, because all the great ones were journalists or writers.  In the 70s and 80s there was a hint of danger added to it because the great ones usually got jailed or were already martyrs.  I stopped thinking Pops was cool when I was around 14, so it was great to go back to his hometown and hear people tell of what a smart and good-looking guy my Dad was at my age.  The chicks he got and his cool job.  He was the kid from the small-town that moved out to the big-city.

Then he became the man from the third-world moving to the big-shiny first-world.  I learned a term today used at the University of Toronto, instead of saying third-world they say “Global South”, which is like saying the “World’s Crotch/Ass”.  And Pops might as well have come from the Ass of the world, because for ‘THEM’ <— interpret that however you want- to consider him on the same level, even after all his top notch big-city education and experience, he had to go through parts of high school and all of University all over again.  We’re talking about a guy who speaks perfect english, reads EVERYTHING and had to live with my Lola as his mother-in-law who was pretty much the smartest-meanest woman alive.

So he worked odd jobs during my infant and toddler years.  The story goes is that he used to bring me along to interviews because there wasn’t anyone to watch me back then.  One of the odd jobs was being a busboy at the now defunct Montreal Bistro (legendary jazz bar in Toronto).  A gig he’s particularly proud of and one that mirrors my own journey through Toronto.  He finally ended up working a desk at Air Canada for around 20 years.  Nothing exciting really happened during that time.  I guess that’s where ‘existence’ got him.

I owe a lot to Pops.  I owe my near obsession with Filipinoness to him.  When he taught me that basketball was a Filipino’s favorite sport I made it my own.  He taught me how to shoot on a net he set up in my room.  Gave me loonies to blow on basketball cards.  Drove me and my friends to our games.  And didn’t deny me my dream of being the first Filipino in the NBA, even though he knew I sucked ass at sports and he really wanted me to be nerd like he was.  But back in the nineties, we were the only two people who knew that Micheal Jordan wasn’t the best shooting-guard in the league, it was Joe Dumars.

He still never denies me my hopes and dreams, even when he thinks they’re a bad idea.  Like this trip to the Philippines.  And he’s always bailed me out of the shit when I needed.  Which is probably why I walk through life happy go-lucky and seemingly invincible because I know I can always fall back on my Father when I’m bound to fuck up.

I never asked him why he came to Canada and what it cost him, I imagine it was a great deal.  I have to thank him for doing it because being Canadian grants me the opportunity to be a fuck up all around the world and makes ‘existence’ more of an intellectual pursuit and not a matter of survival.  We don’t talk much, so I can never be sure if he’s ever been proud of me.  I’m sure when he used to take me along on those interviews, put his palm on face, and tell me stories of ‘back home’ he never intended on me becoming this strange less-serious cartoon-version of himself.  To that I say “maybe you shouldn’t have left all those dirty garage sale novels lying around and maybe you should have insisted I study harder instead of telling me to marry a rich girl.”

Just kidding, Pops.  Congratulations, you made it through another one.

peace,

-mlv aka BOOM-BOOM

~ by mlv on 15 October, 2009.