Time out.
Should you browse back, Dear Reader, you might notice that some of the write-ups I did here had been pulled out. It’s because the content didn’t match the URL and it’s only now that I find the mismatch irritating enough to make me do some fixing up.
When I first edited and rewrote some of the pieces here, I didn’t know how to get to the “delete post” app. So if a contributor said to me that the title did not suit her well or asked to please withdraw the piece as a reader just told her it’s not impactful enough, I’d delete the entire text and replace it with another so that at repost the URL looks like a wrong door to the site. I was able to figure out all of this only very recently. My fault. Most of the time I was just too impatient with links after links that seem endless until I get pay-walled and each time I’d rather do it the way I know how until I needed to know more.
I apologize.
Removed (unpublished) for having wrong addresses (wrong titles in their URLs) are the following pieces: “Joni at Portland” (it perhaps needs a more thoughtful rewrite, too, for all the love I claim I have for Joni Mitchell); “Comrade politician priest?” (I’d like to give it my own rereading before reconsidering a rewrite or a repost); “Postscript to a back alley abortion” (I might rewrite or translate to English in fictional form); and “Angry bird visits Rapunzel” (give it a rest in a cave).
I’m new to Substack. When I did my first post I knew next to nothing except that it’s a newsletter type and email-based and the most important thing is the text and so I need not worry about design and such. As most projects often go, something sometimes turns up between conceptualization and birth so that what grows does not always look like the baby you thought you wanted it to be.
When Café Armalite was first thought up, I was thinking along a book project, not e publishing, though certainly, feminist writing. I was thinking of Linda Bansil and her sister Nadjoua. Of Arlyn dela Cruz and Ces Drilon. Them and their kidnapped stories. I was also thinking of Nids Gentica. Of Dodong Lacorte. Of Itie and Ivie. Of Sally—his name was Zaiton Landasan, I got to know just today—and the Moro cadre-activists I met in South Cotabato who were liquidated by their fellow Moro in the CAFGU; of the peasants’ sons in Lanao South and North who were disarmed and strafed or strafed and then disarmed while doing UF work.
Before I could even finish packing up, get to the right people who I thought would help me get on with the project, demurrals started coming in. From all sides. K, proud feminist doormat and prouder wifey to a law office, made a call to issue an erratum, saying that all I heard about the case ain't true. Not true at all. Nothing like what I said happened, and that’s the word given her by the one involved, so to please relay to me. So full-stop to that sort of narrative. And that was after she winningly argued, all calm and poise as always she is, against the defunding of the police.
She wasn’t the worst, it’d turn out. Friends and erstwhile comrades who initially encouraged me to write, some even giving me names and numbers to help me get through, started doling out editorial advice instead, one even instructing a program director and peace editor to offer her editorial services to me rather than dole out money for publishing which was what I thought what was needed and what was actually asked of her. The rest just nicely excused themselves on the ground that they don’t want to be red-tagged or that they don’t belong to that world anymore that I so much want to wallow in.
A pandemic and several lost causes after, I would know that Arlyn dela Cruz had died of cancer; that Ces Drilon is voting for Leni Robredo; that Linda Bansil has reappeared on FB and is successfully running save-a-cat project.
Not bad at all?