T’was in fact a perfect day yesterday, just like that song by Lou Reed that goes “It’s such a perfect day; I wanna spend it with you”. Well, if you were a Mexican and one who reasonably loves boxing, it would have been one hellish day with lots of heavy feeling. But for every Filipino—whether or not he or she loves or is interested in boxing, whether old man or old woman, whether man, woman or child, whether lawyer or street vendor—it was certainly a glorious day when modern-day hero Manny Pacquiao becomes immortalized in a three-round knockout win over the legendary Eric “El Terrible” Morales.

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Note: Another retelling of a dream.

OGDEN KRONENGEKEL—such is the name of the main protagonists inside my dream, other than myself of course. Have you had yourself a vivid dream? In my childhood days, I had numerous dreams of these sorts, the kind that are so crystalline in clarity that some of them I could still recall until now. I usually dream about angels in the past, flying with them into tree-lined outfields, and falling off from cliffs if I lose some footings while in the act of flying. Every time I fall from the air in those dreams, as I lose control of my body movements, I also fall from my beds that the falling sensation felt so real and everyone in the house could hear me scream.

With the way he had performed all throughout the knockout stages, I had known then that it wouldn’t much of a surprise if he wins it all. Now, Ronato Alcano sits on top of the world after winning the 2006 World Pool Championship (WPC) held at the PICC and is now $100,000 (about 5 Million Pesos) richer. It was a bit ironic that he had been at the very bottom of the qualifiers after the first round that the commentator could not help pointing that out. It could be the first time that a player that went so low in the eliminations and then went all the way to the top—a sort of a Cinderella story. But Alcano is far from being a flash in the pan since his record boasts of two gold medals in the last Southeast Asian Games and had a spectacular showing in the last Philippine 9-Ball Open.

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Note: This is a retelling of one of my most memorable dreams in the past.

The cherubim ahead of me looked back and screamed towards my direction, urging me to speed up as the winged creature was fast catching up with us. I had burst into the branches of woods in the night forest and I had to cover my face with my arms in order to clear my view, otherwise the branches of the trees would harm my eyes and the feint illumination offered by the moon would not allow me to navigate properly through the dark woodlands, and especially if a winged creature that was blacker than the night was coming at us with full speed.

The night creature was an old woman with wired and mangled gray hair and eyes that was redder than blood. I kept looking into those fiery eyes every time I look behind me, checking out if the creature was already nearing or still farther away, and fear had never been so evident in me. The night creature had wings that were velvety, like they were made of black satin or a kind of a soft garment that are often used for curtains. I thought that perhaps those creatures knew how to sew and made their wings by themselves. I never knew exactly.

When I was a child, I had so many dreams where I was flying with cherubim or child angels. They never spoke to me in spoken words but somehow I could here them speak to me through their eyes, as if they had the power of mental telepathy. They just stared at me all throughout and I were just amazed at how beautiful and handsome they looked. The reason perhaps why I did not initiate conversation with them was mainly because of their foreign appearance. They had rounded faces and wavy blond hairs just like American babies that I saw in television back then. I reckoned that maybe they spoke in a different tongue. They were too young but their gazes seem to pronounce to me a much older and mature mind.

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SUDDENLY NOW, he becomes a progenitor of peace. Just days after he was meted the death penalty for unjustified violence and extreme cruelty against the Shi’ite populace in Iraq, Saddam Hussein calls for peace among the people he onced ruled with an iron fist; and even among the Kurds that he is now accused of having attempted to annihilate completely, gassing some of them in the now infamous Habaja Gas Attack in 1988.

Maybe this usually whats happens to any man who has gone through a very ardous trial, with all those agitated accusations and tremolous denials, that now even if the the punishment he had gotten was the most of what could be expected, the gravest of it all in fact, Saddam Hussein must have found some relief that now a judgment has finally come. Maybe, death is much more bearable than those endless bickerings and shoutings in a court he knows he would find no favor anyway.

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