In the spirit of panicking from the thousands of new cases reported daily, and some of our own patients dying from other diseases, my friends and I rekindled–with much enthusiasm–our discussions on death. The past few months we have forced ourselves to be cheerful and optimistic, but with things turning from bad to horrific no amount of ube cheese pandesal or baked sushi can keep our spirits up. The season of doing videocalls with the baso filter, gorging on dalgona coffee, plastering “We Stayed At Home For You” on pictures, and doing PPE selfies have come and gone along with our self-imposed state of being zen. These days we are mostly full of rage, which is directed at nothing in particular. We’ve been trying to come up with a weird emotion that could capture something like a mixture of apathy and rage, sort of like blase anger, but we think that’s too high a concept. I’m sure there’s a German word for it.

Smoketh, who does hemoperfusion on COVID patients in QC, told us that she has written her own last will and testament that we can immediately look into should she suddenly drop dead. It has a bonus feature of burial/cremation plans, so those left behind won’t be hassled as much. “It’s in the third drawer of my clinic desk,” she declared. “I have also drafted my list of post-death endorsifications, but it’s in the second drawer of my clinic desk,” I said. She then ordered me to transfer it to the third drawer, just so we would easily remember: “third drawer” now means we are dead, all my endorsements and secrets are there, I hope you won’t have a hard time procuring a coffin, or an urn. No flowers or eulogies, but you may conduct a video conference reading aloud some of our favorite blog entries. Vanity till the end.

Bello Padilla has a different philosophical perspective when it comes to discussing death. He said that now that there’s a very real chance that we can be in an urn tomorrow it is no longer healthy to be so casual about it. It’s like by talking about it we are already increasing our chances of dying, unless you knock on wood first. This reminded me of when we were kids playing scrabble–nobody’s allowed to play “CANCER” even if it will win you the game. Doing so would automatically trigger oncogene mutations.

This being my first bloggeth entry in WordPress I thought I would be more jovial, but look how it turned out. I’ve stayed off essaying for the past two months, and wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I suddenly die and my last entry was about Derek Monasterio fucking on top of a washing machine. In the intervening two months I’ve finished the short story I workshopped in last month’s Writing Bootcamp. It is called The Mansion very loosely based on the life of my good friend Smoketh, and I decided (rather cheaply!) that I would give it to her as my birthday gift (well she already got twenty cakes!). I worked on some of my older short fiction–some I still enjoy, some I totally cringe at. I backed up my twelve-year old This Could Be A Job For Mulder And Scully blog in this wordpress blog and decided to be mature and use my own name this time. Using my name also has the extra benefit of not having to explain why the blog’s address is called Specialagentfoxmulder.blogspot.com.

Back to discussion on death. If death is a competition in endorsement Smoketh already has one leg up, as I don’t have a funeral plan yet! Anyone with a good offer?

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