This not about one nation’s embarrasment and another nation’s outrage, although those are understandable and very real reactions, most of us being accustomed to living in just one country with people of the same race and nationality.

So even in this age of instant global communication, the us-and-them reflex lingers.

But this is not about race or nationality. It’s not about us and them. It’s not about incidental labels that we put over our essential humanity.

This is about people killing other people – and those whose duty is to prevent it failing to do so.

We can win all the boxing matches and all the beauty pageants all over the world. But that would only prove how good we are at boxing and beauty pageants, and naturally make us feel good about us.

Meanwhile, those people whose last tour stop was the Quirino Grandstand are going to stay dead.

That’s a fact that their families and friends are going to have to live with for the rest of their lives, while the rest of us, as embarrassed as we may be, can afford to wait for the next big story to rant and rage about.

If we must mourn, then let us mourn – for the dead and not the bruise on our national pride.

I don’t pray. So all I can say is this: May they all rest in peace.

And may we all learn to live in peace.

Until then, I hope policemen, wherever in the world they may be on the beat, can reassure us that we can rely on them for protection, if necessary, from each other.

[You can find the timeline for the Manila hostage crisis here.]

Rolando Mendoza, a former police officer, decided to arm himself and take a busload of tourists as hostages.

Why? He claimed to have been a victim of injustice and he wanted that corrected.

How? By doing an injustice to total strangers so that the authorities would hear him out.

We all saw that on television, heard it on the radio, traded posts about it on the Internet, and today, just a few hours later, will read all about it again in the papers.

What he did was clearly a matter for the police to handle. But as many of us witnessed, the police failed to handle the matter successfully.

An agitated Mendoza shot some of the hostages, eight of whom were reported dead as of this writing, after which he was shot dead himself by one of his former colleagues.

They have their reasons for their failure, no doubt. But I’d hate to be the cop who’d have to explain what happened to the relatives and friends of the dead hostages.

Who to blame?

Well, if Mendoza had not taken those tourists hostage, we’d probably be grumbling about some other headline, like the floods caused by constant rain.

Whatever his reasons, sympathetic we may be or not, he was apparently “pushed over the edge,” as President Aquino put it.

It was he who started the whole thing. Let’s not forget that in the sound and fury of the buck-passing that has already started.

But that’s why we have cops – so they can prevent people like Mendoza from hurting other people, and if possible, even themselves.

That could have been the ideal end of this multimedia drama, if only the cops had done their job well. So blame them, and by the principle of the chain of command, let their superiors share some of the responsibility.

Unfortunately, things always look easy in the commentary after the fact.

I guess that’s why it’s called a post mortem.

My sympathies go to the cops who, inspite of their limitations in training and equipment, might have really tried to make the best out of a really bad situation.

And my condolences to the survivors of both the hostages and the hostage-taker. We all wish this never really happened.

[Here are two links as a backgrounder: "9 killed on Philippine tourist bus" (an Associated Press report at the Yahoo! site) and "Hostage crisis ends in bloody carnage; 9 hostages dead" (a GMANews.TV report).]

“You have to live to write.”

The thought struck me in the wee hours yesterday as I was getting ready for bed, tired from grappling with a flaky WordPress site to change the themes of two of my blogs there.

And I thought so many writing teachers must have drilled that into their students’ heads.

The next day I googled it: “You have to live to write.” And this one link, a blog entry, got my attention. It’s titled – what else? – “You have to live to write.”

It’s the other thought that struck me the other night that’s harder to keep doing: “You have to write to live.”

That, of course, applies to people like me who have chosen to write for a living. It’s not very lucrative in this courtry, though once in awhile a one-shot, big-deal project may come along.

On another level, though, I think I’d still be writing even if I could make money doing something else.

Anyway, as my precocious 11-year-old daughter would say: “Deal with it.”

Between the two of us, we ended up putting away three bottles – much of it vanishing down his substantial gullet. He’s a big guy, a six-footer, which is why I’m a bit wary about drinking with him. If he gets drunk I’m going to have a hard time lugging him around, with my 5-5 sedentary writer’s frame.

Anyway, the next afternoon he was back and that was another three-bottle night. He got dizzy towards the end, and my bigger neighbors had to help me haul him into a taxi – for the two-minute trip to his apartment.

We had the usual chat about a wide range of topics, but as usual he’d talk about my late father, who became his friend and drinking buddy.

I first met Jacques at Easy Street, the bar I used to hang out in. He was having a beer alone, and as I had seen him around the neighborhood with some of the older people I knew, I introduced myself and he said: “Your father is the Kano, right?”

He put the stress on Kano – short for amerikano – on the first syllable, not the second as we Pinoys do it, with a glottal stop on the O. He has lived in the Philippines since the 1970s and has picked up some of the local slang, though he still prefers to talk in English with that Dutch accent of his.

Anyway, I said my father was as Tagalog as anyone from Laguna could get (and that’s Laguna in the Southern Tagalog Region, not California). So we had a few more beers.

When he met my father, they hit it off right away. In the meantime, I found a regular job and lost touch with him for a few years, until recently, when I went freelance.

As it usually happens with white foreigners, Jacques became known to most people in the neighborhood as The Kano.

“Hey, I saw your friend, The Kano, last night,” the guy at the burger-and-hotdog stand told me the other night. “I think he was already drunk. He was swaying as he walked.”

Yes, that’s him all right.

What gets me is this: The government already has, or at least will have, its share of MY money, and now it even wants ME to make an accounting of how much it has taken from me.

A mugger at least won’t give you the same hassle.

I got to thinking about income tax again because I’ve gone freelance and may have to file the damn return come April.

Incidentally, it just struck me why some laws are called codes – Tax Code, for instance: It takes some effort to decipher them. Lawyers are actually official decoders of this near-mystic information.

So now I have just a bit more elbow room in my tiny place, which is about as big as a hotel room minus the posh furnishing. Not that I mind. It’s more like an office to me now.

In fact, I’ve been spending more time at my writing table lately, which besides any table in front of the Ten 02 Bar, is my favorite hang-out spot.

Back in 2005, I did a pencil sketch of a corner of my kitchen-dining area, which you’ll see below. That cabinet, which was useful only for taking up space and gathering dust, now belongs to a brother of mine.

A corner of my apartment

I was able to rearrange the furniture more to my liking. And below you’ll see a photo I took of my working table , which has only the items that I need for writing. Well, except maybe that book, a paperback edition of The Collected Short Stories of Saki, under the ashtray, and that little black sketchpad I carry around sometimes.

My writing table

To start off the day, I listened to “I Saw Her Standing There,” one of the songs I like so much I learned to play it on bass while singing. I had a chance to do that on stage, in December last year at the Ten 02, with Edgar Avenir on guitar and Rene “Chong” Tengasantos on drums.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, for them at least, because I brought along my bass guitar with me, just in case.

There were just a few customers in the place, and we got so carried away we did about an hour of Beatles songs, ending with “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

It was the first time I ever played with these guys, who as band groupies will know are seasoned pros. And I’m just a journalist who likes dabbling in music.

I guess it was inevitable that I’d become a Beatles fan because I was born in 1961 and their music became part of the soundtrack of my life.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there’s no video of our jam. So here’s a YouTube clip of The Beatles doing “I Saw Her Standing There” in the Please Please Me Album.

On Saturday, still feeling wobbly, I had dinner with Alessi, my 10-year-old, at Ka-Booom, right across GMA Network. Actually, I had dinner of grilled chicken breast and garlic rice while I watched her munch on cucumber and carrot sticks, which she washed down with mango juice.

That baffled me a bit, knowing how she loves to eat – but not as baffled as she was by my shoulder-length hair, as I would l later learn from my wife when she picked her up.

Ani, the older sister, was just as baffled. She skipped dinner with me because she had dance practice the whole day with her gang. Teenagers.

Anyway, Alessi made up for that veggie-stick meal at the Ten 02, where we transferred, by devouring a whole plate of Meloflan, two scoops of vanilla ice cream with some leche flan encased in fried lumpia wrappers.

I had a couple of light beers. And night would have been fine if I had ended it right there. But then Abe and Noel texted me. So I went on over to 1962 to share two buckets of beer with them.

And then they headed for home, while I moved on to the back of Faustino’s, just in time to see Bing Austria of Juan Pablo Dream getting ready to leave. So we had a beer each and chatted about my song, which he liked enough to record as part of his group’s second album.

Not a bad night, despite another hangover.

Uploaded by A.T. Magno

On the invitation of Joe, the NUJP chairman, Neil and I did two songs at Freedom Bar last Saturday (May 3). So with just a quick one-hour rehearsal we did two songs. Neil sang CSNY’s “Long Time Gone” and I sang the Eraserheads’ “Ang Huling El Bimbo.”

I didn’t realize while on stage that LeAnne had been taking pictures, one of which appears here. And I guess Joe was taking a video of all the performers, but I haven’t seen it.

After that gig, at around midnight, I went over to Ten 02, a new bar owned by Myra Ruaro, who also goes by stage name Skarlet. It’s where I hang out a lot now after work. And Myra is usually there to chat with customers.