Counting Potatoes

A Day at the Farm

There's something very medieval at the sight of people harvesting the farm. For one, while the city is full of lights, cars and new technologies, the farm is basically still being harvested the same way they have been doing it for the past thousand years - using a sickle. Of course, nowadays, equipments adapted to the standard gasoline generator partly ruins my medieval reflections. There's also no animals such as carabaos or horses in sight, which is just as well. My experience in riding a horse when we went to baguio doesnt exactly inspire me to repeat the experience in the near future - i'm sure the horse feels the same.

Being here though, its very easy to imagine how it would feel like living back in the medieval period. Even time runs a little slower. Walking around with a sword in one hand, hacking away the heads of peasants who rub me the wrong way or dragging home any woman who catches my fancy, he he (not that I see any woman worth dragging home here).

Anyway, there they are. Backs bent to the rhythm of cutting palay stalks from the ground as I view them from the shade of a tree. The rice fields stretch beyond the horizon and I wonder - how did the nobility of distant times feel as they watched the massive span of their fiefs? Did they scratch their itchy legs as I am doing now? Did they also find it hard to find a proper foothold in the muddy ground or swear and cuss as the ants and a thousand other insects cralwing or flying took tiny nibbles from their body? It sure doesnt feel that noble to me.

Standing here for hours f*ckin baking in the sun scratching my legs endlessly while I wait for the harvested palay to be cleaned, watching little harvest processes and rituals repeat themselves over and over and over again. I can't help but understand why Game ka na ba, wheel of fortune and now pinoy bingo are some of the highest rated TV shows in this country. With a sun baked brain and battered body at the end of the day, can we fault these people if they have become masochistic? Choosing to empty their minds over the grating sound of a whiny-nasal voice of the TV host instead of resting in blessed silence?

Now the rain pours in buckets out of nowhere. All of us are forced to hole ourselves inside a tiny hut, the smell of a whole afternoon's labor emanating from the cramped bodies. What should've only taken 3 hours max now extends indefinitely into the wee hours of the night. God save me from the little flying cretins that comes after dusk and God save me from deodorantless people.

Tiny shelled creatures [kuhol], palay eating worms, palay eating rats, palay eating flying cretins, palay viruses and fuckin palay eating kids, these have become the new stuff of my nightmares. How I wish I can just post tesla coils, or automatic sentry guns on the boundaries of our farm.
"Hold! This is a private area! Identify Yourself!"

"ahi hi hi" - sound of palay eating kids laughing at the novel human contraption.

"this is your last warning! Stay back, stay away!"

"ahi hi hi" - palay eating kids don't understand.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Palay eating kids blown to smitherins.. Cretins eliminated.

Rain's over and the laborers prepare to go out into the fields once more. Its amazing how much work, time and preparation this simple product. And this is just one end of the whole process. From here, the palay goes to the rice mill [which employs a whole set of different labor and processes], from the rice mill to the market, from the market to grocery and sari sari stores, from the sari-sari stores to homes and from homes to septic tanks where the palay is mixed with meat and veggie bits. I remember my bus trips to manila where our bus would arrive at the south expressway at around 4am, just in time to catch up with the delivery trucks and jeeps loaded with bananas, chickens, pigs, rice, etc, all headed towards a hungry sprawling metropolis. Cut that supply for just one week and I can just imagine the riots that will result.

This in turn spins off another thought.. playing our own little parts to keep the cities fed and grinding, is the great metropolis a living thing too? It grows, takes in sustenance in the form of electricity, food and water, ejects waste in the form of sewage and garbage, AND is made up of different sectors playing synegistic and interdependent roles like the different organs, tissues, cells and bacterial colonies in our body that has decided to work together eons ago. Maybe someday people would volt in too to form different body parts of a new superhuman (kinda like Voltron). Form legs and feet! Form arms and torso! And i'll be the head.... NOOO! NOT THIS HEAD! (wiggle, wiggle, spit... Spit)He he he

So much for that... I think the stiffling heat is getting to my head.. O well, back to counting them sacks...

	A Day at the Farm