Here’s Your Fucking Essay

Jay Manahan
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Lat. Long.

The decaying asshole of the Earth is at Lat Long. Pasay City, Philippines.

I get off at Lat Long roughly two hours after boarding at Lat1 Long1.

As soon as I alight the bus, I experience the whiff of 10,000 farts trapped in a 20 square-meter room. The perplexing sight of a Caucasian man in flip-flops, comfortably hanging around the vicinity of a balut vendor and carrying plastic bags of McDonald’s leftovers.

I ironically think of Tokyo as I go up a concrete-covered excuse of a pedestrian overpass that takes people across EDSA. Midway, there’s a staircase that would take you down to an "Emergency Exit" that leads right to the island in the middle of the avenue. It isn’t an exit to escape an emergency. It’s an exit that would create an emergency.

All around me, chaos and rat-like survival.

Piles of trash and their stink every five feet. Vendors sprawled on the filthy street amongst their wares and the day’s undisciplined rubbish. The train station is taken over by anarchy and squatting vendors, train passengers with no regard for the people they block or the inconvenience they cause.

The Filipino’s superpower is a superhuman tolerance for subhuman conditions.

I am them, a trashdweller in this decayed asshole of the Earth. Living in squalor, maintaining an unjustifiably exorbitant lifestyle on my meager labor rate. Clothes strewn across dust-covered furniture in an uncleaned apartment cooled by dust-covered fans and AC, suffering from a moldy bathroom and a partially clogged sink.

There’s your fucking essay. Asshole.

)
Jay Manahan

Written by

Semi-fictional off-kilter attitude on Career, Marketing, Technology & Outsourcing | www.jaymanahan.com

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