JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Petard, as in “Hoist with his own petard.” (Shakespeare again, bitch knew all.) A bomb-maker is blown up—lifted into the air—by his own petard or bomb. Image from Wikipedia.

My weekly parole—the one-kilometer walk to the supermarket—was cancelled. I was so looking forward to it, but I’m committed to my paranoia. While I was getting ready to go out, I got that message—the one about how we mustn’t go out, not even to buy bread, because the incubation period is over and it’s the most infectious stage of the disease. Before I’d even pondered the logic of the message my survival paranoia kicked in and I cancelled my own parole. However, I still needed some supplies before I switched to bomb shelter mode so I went to the convenience store in the next building. On the way there (mask, gloves, cloth bag) I walked past a soldier in fatigues patrolling the street corner. He nodded politely and did not ask for my quarantine pass (“Your papers, please”).

The 7-11 was well-stocked and I was the only shopper. A sign on the door said No Mask, No Entry. There were two cheerful cashiers at the counter and a stockman inspecting the shelves. I got my toilet paper, liver spread, crackers, and bottles of juice and hurried home. I put a bottle of juice on the planter beside the soldier. He declined it at first, but I insisted. Skipping the supermarket turned out to be an excellent idea. My friend says the lines were very long, so she went to another supermarket where she wasn’t admitted because their barangay hadn’t issued her quarantine pass. She finally got in at the third place she tried, but the whole experience left her spooked.

The rest of the day was eaten up by the latest contender in the extremely competitive Ultimate Douchebag Reality Competition now playing on social media. As the TV variety shows are all airing replays this is the main entertainment during lockdown. By “entertainment” I mean the gruesome wreck you cannot look away from. Today the Typhoid Mary of the Senate made his play for the title, and judging from the collective rage and revulsion of the audience, he’s a shoo-in for the semifinals. Bonus points for gymnastics routine in the talent contest: self-hoisting with petard, a.k.a. Le self-own. The head of the Makati Medical Center put out a furious denunciation of the senator’s rank stupidity/thoughtlessness/sense of entitlement/arrogance/all of the above that should be taught in schools as How to speak to dumbasses in power.

So the day began with the “normal” anxiety which escalated to panic, heightened fear and paranoia, then to rage and revulsion. If the virus doesn’t get you, rage-induced spontaneous combustion will. But the day wasn’t over yet; there was grief still to come.

My friend Adel Gabot, Little David on K-Lite in the 90s and early 00s, died of a stroke. He was in his mid-50s. We did a radio talk show in the late 90s called Twisted on a Sunday with Jessica and Little David—the title was his idea, we are…were…he was…a Sondheim fan. You can’t do a show like that on the radio anymore: four hours of unstructured conversation, with or without guests, usually without sponsors or commercial breaks, and occasionally interrupted by whatever music we felt like playing whether or not it was on the station playlist. The only reason we had that kind of freedom was because Adel was the station manager. (The owners cannot have been pleased to be wasting that valuable airtime, but we went on for years.)

Our guests were friends who dropped by to drink too much coffee and shoot the breeze: Budjette and Brandie the Alamat Twins, Dino who went to the convenience store in his Imperial Stormtrooper uniform (pre-second trilogy), Noel who had a metal plate in his head and could recite all of Spartacus, Henry (RIP) who had that astrology booth in the basement of Megamall, Jobert who saw dead people. Adel wasn’t just my friend and colleague, in my mind he is inextricable from the 90s, the last decade when the world made sense to me. And I associated him so closely with that era that I lost touch afterwards. The last time I saw him was at the premiere of Avatar (or was it Prometheus), and we made vague plans to get lunch.

Don’t let your friends drift away, people. In apocalyptic times, they’re all we’ve got.