Jesus Ouch Christ!

Another Easter has just gone by, and I was tempted to write something about it—me being such a fan of Christianity and all—but then I realized I wouldn't be able to top the Easter piece I wrote last year. A year ago I was living in the mountains of the northern Philippines, and a few weeks after Easter I dispatched the following missive to my personal mailing list. Enjoy.

* * *

Greetings, beloved congregation.

It’s your favorite recycler of literary waste, Glen Callender UFA, chiming in from the boondocks with another dose of unprosaic prose.

In today’s missive: You say you want a crucifixion? (Literally) foaming-at-the-mouth Catholics! And even more death! I warn you, if you miss this one, you’ll miss a lot of unnecessary bloodshed!

Philippines X: Jesus Ouch Christ!
By Glen Callender UFA
(Eternal rights reserved)

When I moved to the Philippines in October [2006], I vowed that I would remain in the Philippines at least long enough to watch the Good Friday Passion in San Fernando Pampanga.

This is a world-famous yearly event where an amateur theatre troupe re-enacts the Passion of Christ, complete with real, unsimulated crucifixions. That’s right, they actually nail the actors’ hands and feet to wooden crosses and hoist them up.

Sounds pretty crazy, eh? But as I learned, the crucifixions aren’t the craziest thing about this event. For pain, suffering and all-out gore, the prize has to go to the show’s warm-up act, the penitents.

FLAY YOU, FLAY ME
(or) THE NO-SKIN ZONE

Ah, the penitents. What some people will do to atone for their sins! For kilometers around the crucifixion site, processions of shirtless young men wandered the streets of San Fernando, wearing veils over their faces and flagellating their backs raw with bamboo whips.

And just in case the whips don’t do enough damage, they typically slash their backs with a knife beforehand to ensure that there will be plenty of blood. And there is.

Sometimes they pass out in the street from pain and dehydration and exhaustion—I know I would!—where they remain until some kindly bystanders help them up, massage their backs with ice and give them water. Then they go back on their unmerry way.

If you get near the penitents, you’re bound to get bloody too—because their blood-soaked whips spray droplets of blood about as they swing back and forth. This election poster was sprayed with blood, as was everything else in the street that day, including walls, the sides of cars, and, of course, my pants.


When I showed someone the blood on my pants, I was smilingly told not to wash it off, for the blood of the penitents is said to be good luck.

But in retrospect, I have to suspect that penitent blood perhaps isn’t so lucky after all.

Because not long after Good Friday, one of the penitents dropped dead.

Of rabies.

And it gets worse. Health authorities are very concerned, because several dozen penitents apparently used the same knife to lacerate the skin on their backs before heading out on the self-flagellation circuit. So there’s a considerable chance that more may have been infected. They’re currently tracking all the penitents down and giving them rabies shots.

Jeez folks, I’ve heard of foaming-at-the-mouth Catholics, but it’s supposed to be a figure of speech!

From Sky News: Rabies Scare After Ritual (April 18, 2007)

Here’s hoping that next year’s penitents will be more health-conscious and slash their backs with their own knives before whipping themselves raw for several hours in the blazing tropical sun.

In the meantime, it’s warming to know there’s a small chance that I was sprayed with rabies-infected blood on my way to seeing some crazy Catholic dudes get crucified. Just another Good Friday in the Philippines, folks!

YOU SAY YOU WANT A CRUCIFIXION?

So I made my way through the blood-sprinkled streets of San Fernando to the field where they performed the crucifixions. By the way, the church does not sanction or support this event, probably because it doesn’t cause nearly as many fatalities as the Black Nazarene procession, which the church does sanction.

After sweltering in the crush of people for a couple of hours—which was not fun—finally got around to nailing up their faux Christ, flanked on either side by a faux thief. (Or perhaps they were genuine thieves. They’re much easier to find than genuine Christs.)

In this photo you see Him getting His requisite wounds from the spear of a Roman soldier. Unlike the crucifixion itself, these wounds were, sadly, simulated.


After a few minutes they took the crucifees down and started nailing up a new group. But I was already on my way out, as was most of the crowd. It may have been the first time I’ve seen a public crucifixion, but it’s surprising how fast the novelty of it wore off and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Or perhaps I wanted to leave because I’d just had a soul-shaking revelation. For alas, dear reader, just a few minutes before the crucifixions began, a stigmata appeared on the underside of my left wrist! See this photo if you doubt me!


A message from God that I should halt my heathen ways and face my destiny in the bosom of the church? Or just the latest in an unending series of random injuries inflicted by a cold and indifferent universe?

Stay tuned for further Glen Callender UFA stigmata updates.

* * *

And that was last year’s Easter story. Hopefully next year I’ll come up with something better. Or at least something.

Until next time, I remain, as ever, the delicious shark fin in the soup of shame that is your life,

Glen Callender UFA.
Vancouver, Canada.

Streamy love scene

(or “Something that happened in Vegas that won’t stay in Vegas”)

So the other day I watched my friend and his pregnant girlfriend make love, live on the Internet.

No, unfortunately, it wasn’t that kind of love. I wish. The love I speak of is eternal love, or at least as close to it as we can get on this mortal coil.

Alas, they got married. In Las Vegas. At a chapel that specializes in broadcasting its wedding ceremonies on the World Wide Web, through the magic of live streaming video.

This was the first time I’ve attended a wedding via modem. The first of many, I hope, because web addresses are much easier to get to than street addresses—especially if you’re on the other side of the world.

And as it happened, this webcasted wedding was very much for the benefit of people on the other side of the world. Since he is American and she is Korean, the ceremony was set for 5 p.m. Las Vegas time, enabling the bride’s family and friends to tune in at the relatively convenient hour of 10 a.m. Korea time.

Ah Korea, my old nemesis. Cue flashback!

MEET THE (SOON-TO-BE) PARENTS.

I met Sean and his now-wife, Keum-Lan, in late 2004, during my year-long misadventure as an English teacher in South Korea. I remember Keum-Lan as a beautiful, good-hearted and remarkably tolerant woman—and believe me, the better you get to know Sean, the more tolerant you realize she is.

As for Sean, most of my memories of that wayward lunatic are obscured by the haze of mekju and soju in which we conducted most of our friendship.

But my most cherished recollection is probably the time we took the bus to Seoul for a night of partying. Sometime around 4 a.m., he drunkenly badgered me into lending my favourite sweater to some random Korean girl who sat down next to us in a sam gyup sal restaurant. The girl promptly took off, taking my sweater with her, and a few minutes later I angrily abandoned Sean—who was behaving belligerently, and so drunk he could barely walk—on a subway train. Three hours later I had just arrived back home when he called me, still drunk on the Seoul subway, and told me he had no idea where the hell he was. I just laughed, hung up on him and went to bed.

Good times.

Anyway, fast forward three years and there I was in my Vancouver apartment, preparing to attend the online Vegas wedding of Sean and a now-pregnant Keum-Lan. I sat at my computer, unwashed, unshaven, and clad in my finest wedding sweat pants and T-shirt. I poured myself a glass of white wine, and at 5 p.m. sharp, I clicked on the link for their live ceremony.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Twenty-five minutes had passed, and now I was getting concerned, because they were quickly running out of time—they only had a thirty-minute time slot, and another couple’s ceremony was scheduled for 5:30. It was starting to look like Sean and Keum-Lan would be a no-show at their own much-publicized Vegas wedding webcast.

Which, honestly, wouldn’t have been much of a surprise. My head filled with visions of Sean in a tuxedo, drunk out of his mind in a Vegas subway car, with no idea where the hell he was.

Wait, I don’t think Vegas has a subway. A Subway restaurant, then. Yeah, that’s it. Sean in a tuxedo, drunk out of his mind in a Vegas Subway restaurant. With his beautiful, pregnant bride standing above him in a bright white wedding dress, trying to get him back on his feet and over to the chapel before their time ran out.

And then it was 5:30. Their time had run out. At this point, after staring at a blank screen for thirty minutes, I was more than willing to watch a couple of complete strangers get married instead. Dammit, I didn’t put on my sweat pants and drink half a bottle of wine for nothing!

But then, about five minutes into the next couple’s time slot, the screen finally lit up and there were Sean and Keum-Lan, walking up the aisle. And there, in the sight of God, a handful of guests and at least three web-cams, Sean and Keum-Lan were briskly wed in a ceremony that took precisely 8.5 minutes.

Online wedding guests, for obvious reasons, can’t take their own photos of the ceremony. But they can take screen-captures. And I did.

Sean acknowledges the camera. I think he looks nervous, but Sean claims that he was in fact “extremely hung over” (surprise, surprise) and “felt like he was being watched.”

A goodbye wave to us in Internet-land as husband and wife walk back down the aisle.

Actually, what I said about not being able to take photos of the ceremony wasn’t quite true. I took this one, but I don’t think it’s very good.

So Sean and Keum-Lan are now wedded. Which just goes to show that things don’t always turn out the way you expected. Back when I had just met Sean, if you’d told me that three years later he would be marrying his pregnant Korean girlfriend on the Internet in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t have—um, uh, well, to tell you the truth, I actually wouldn’t have found that notion at all implausible. Now that I think about it, that’s exactly the sort of thing Sean would do, and I’m sure I knew that from day one.

So forget the clearly ill-conceived point I was trying to make in the last paragraph. Sometimes things do turn out exactly the way you expected, and this was certainly one of those times. (Damn me for carelessly employing that tacky old cliché at exactly the wrong moment!)

Sean and Keum-Lan, may your lives together be long and happy. Good on ya for finally gettin’ knocked up and married. And thank you for broadcasting your marriage on the Internet, so the likes of me could share in your moment of blissful union.

And speaking of sharing your moments of blissful union, it’s really too bad that you forgot to turn on the web-cams in your honeymoon suite, because I definitely would have logged into that.

* * *

And that’s the heartwarming story of Sean and Keum-Lan. Damn, I didn’t expect my first regular post on this blog to be so cutesy-wootsy and lovey-dovey. But don’t worry, dear reader, I’ll soon balance this one out with something thoroughly bitter and disillusioned, I promise. In the meantime, if you need some quality negativity and you need it now, why not read some of my old horoscope columns? They’ll get you sorted in no time.

Until next time, I remain, as ever, the superfly in the ointment of your life,

Glen Callender.
Vancouver, Canada.