Massage

Stop reading this and go out and get yourself a massage. Really. They are the best thing since back-muscles. In Manila, masseuses are everywhere. They drive around in cars labeled mobile tension relief units or something like that, looking for sore shoulders. They live in basements, massaging old pipes for practice. Street corners. Trees. Everywhere. Masseurs are harder to find.

Now I am not talking about the "happy ending" sort of massage you hear about. (Truth is I have never even been offered one. A function of my hygiene?) I am talking a good old fashion rub down, about a woman, generally one quarter your size, trying to push her thumbs through the back of your skull. Last ight I swear my tongue moved. The massage is all about thumbs; you want someone who could punch a hole in a concrete wall with theirs.

Spiders

Just when I think there is nothing to write about, I hit the keyboard and dozens of tiny spiders burst from beneath the letter 'k' and start swarming over my hands. No bites so far, but here's hoping. Seriously, how better would the next entry be if I were to report a massive Philippino spider was growing in the space behind my eyeball!

Cockroaches were never a feature of the house where I grew up. Not even at university, when I lived with a large number of young men whose hygienic concerns were, shall we say, not foremost, did I have many day to day dealings with cock roaches. But here in the Philippines the cucaracha is indeed a force to reckoned with.
They fly, and word has it they bite and will drink from the corner of a sleeping child's mouth. One smack with a flip flop, for example, is rarely enough to get the job done, I have read they can live for a month without their heads. They eat paper.

Sandy walks keenly to the beach, turns at the gate to wave to me eating breakfast, safely out of reach of the guys selling coral necklaces.
His father was a fisherman pulling crayfish from the sea. He reels in pink fleshed Germans with tattoos on their shoulder instead.


The worst part of scuba diving has to be the dying. It is, after all, easy to forget you are under water and not flying in the tree tops. Though a lung or two of brine is a fishy reminder. I have often wondered what you would last think?
Probably that you’d paid too much for that coral necklace, or not enough depending on who you are, and that here at twenty meters, with the entire reef around your neck, it seems colorless by comparison.