This is it, boys. This is war. You know when an amputated finger makes it to primetime news.
Or when you’re abreast with spiraling turn of events, rooting for your underdog team and dishing out diatribes via a TV program to salve our ego and chances.
If anything, we’ve just given China the finger. They can have it all day.
I told my girlfriend Edjen: We can all rely on the best so long as it’s just water guns and mere vexations. Eventually some really smart people upstairs will go down the table and negotiate it.
Talk is how we could have averted the last world wars.
But the problem with communication, you learn, is the illusion that it has taken place.
The country has long renounced war as an instrument of national policy.
It’s only wise, no matter wrong-seeming, for a sovereign nation without the guns to independently assert it.
Ram a boat, we turn the other cheek. But severe our members?
Stub our toes, it makes no difference. A chip of nail would be the last nail in the coffin, just the same, of my dead resolve to resist setting a course to intercept a doomsday invasion.
I’ve told Edjen my plan when the tides of war reach the apartment.
The lay of the house is strategic: corner room, long corridors, a narrow and steep flight of stairs we could lace with an elaborate network of booby traps.
They could try, and — kaboom! — welcome to the Philippines, fucking idiots.
There I’d be holed up prone on the landing, manning a Type 67 I would seize from an enemy soldier to mow down whoever survives the snare.
A sniper can buttress our fortress by nesting in the room next door overlooking the streets.
We could use all the grenades the government could spare, a first-aid kit, a bandolier, a military training for civilians like they do in Taiwan.
Because, in truth, we could only get creative right now about the things we could do with a skillet.
And sharp objects I’ve stashed in every side of the room so that Edjen could defend herself wherever she’s brought to bay.
“Whap! Whap! Whap!” I demonstrated. “Nick the jugular vein.”
Under the swaggering show of courage, I also advised it’s best to run each chance; I’d buy her time because the enemy would come first for the critical likes of me.
I had originally reckoned the measures would come in handy against thieves or an impossible zombie outbreak. Now we have a harder threat to dismiss.
Like always, I struggle to fixate on a more lenient outcome: We would be trapped for years on end in a tiny apartment with no food and water, and I would be hounded by regret they would come before I could afford to build Edjen a house with a bunker.
For possible contingencies, I’ve doubled down on my struggle for the legal tender because it’s expensive to dig, reinforce and furnish a trench with semblances of comfort and normalcy.
The bunker is not a place to start a family. Not where there’s a cold plunge pool, high ceiling, a La-Z-Boy couch.
But in an apartment we would be instead, snug between a rock and a hard place: a cranny of no more than 20 square meters.
We could have at least given the enemy search party a hard time.
“A mezzanine and a porch is all,” Edjen extended a hug for good luck; a kiss to drive the neurosis out, as if it’s a jab of sedative served alongside statistical hijinks each time I’m unusually prescient for a human.
What Edjen calls unusually prescient, I call unusually prepared.
It’s what living in fear does to you. You learn to hope less when the future is stunted. You begin to recognize you have long been invaded. For what is a free man without his peace?