SKIRMISHER

It’s not hard to imagine that the people who actually reach the summit of Mt. Everest experience a brief moment of crystal-clear lucidity. It’s perversely easy for me to see them standing there in the middle of all that ice, holding their country’s flag, then that crazy question suddenly popping in their heads:
“What the fuck […]

There’s this guy, let’s call him Knopf, who was running on the info superhighway Bill Gates used to call the “Interweb” back when he didn’t think something like Netscape could actually hack it. Back in those innocent years the Web was nascent and Gates treated the jerks who took the Web seriously as nothing but […]

I realize the reason why Da Vinci Code, the movie and the book, has been getting more flak than, say, The God Who Wasn’t There, is because it actually dignifies the belief that there was indeed somebody named Jesus Christ who once existed.

It’s okay if you’d just dismiss the whole Christian thing in the same […]

“What did he do?” the Guidance Counselor asked my teacher.
My teacher, let’s call her Miss Suni, simply said, “He stabbed his classmate with a pencil. The victim’s bleeding in the clinic.”

The Guidance Counselor stared at me from head to foot. She stared at the strip of Bandaid on my knee, at my shabby white uniform. […]

“You see that?” I’m pointing at a group of nuns ambling down the road toward us.
My buddy says, “Yeah, so what?”
We’re having coffee at this small roadside café. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, the cafe piping in Kalapana, the girl at the next table has blinding white thighs I’m gawking at. But this “idyll” has […]

Six years ago, I didn’t bother attending my own college graduation. I just didn’t care. I went straight looking for a job because at the back of my mind, I was intrigued and curious about how somebody like me would fare in the “real world.” I already had a vague idea: maybe I’d last two […]

[Salvaged from my early, now-dead blog]
“Don’t hurt it because it’s Jesus’ bird.”
So says my niece, her face pressing on the wire cage. She comes to our house with her father with that eager look that reminds you of a puppy. The niece, barely six, goes straight to my birdcage and begins admiring the bird. The […]