Uneasy and Unedited in Agusan del Sur

I have been downing an uneven dose of Paracetamol for almost a week now, not because I have been thinking too much about the Lotto results, but because I have a hard time dealing with the season’s unpredictable behavior.

Sweating profusely and having an erratic dash of headaches in the afternoon, I would find myself physically exhausted at the end of the day, and could feel a parched throat while savoring a cold glass of water.

At times when it gets breezy just before noon, the smell of my sweat would turn sedately sour, as much of the breeze that recoils the Agusan landscape has its own peculiar dust circling in the air. It is the kind that enables one to sneeze continually since it can clog the air that passes through the nostrils which gives a quaint release of breath.

I found this out after suffering some periodic sneezing when I first worked in San Francisco in 2003, and also after seeing some of my acquaintances suffering under the same circumstances. They always have this atmospheric theory that the air carries some sort of tiny leftovers from a grained rice.

The hot atmosphere has a sticky feel on the skin. Immediately after every shower, the intense heat would slowly cuddle a warm stroke of summer breeze, like a tropical heat wave nuzzling an impending drought. The sweat on my forehead seemed oily and my face greasy, and all the while wiping it with a hanky drenched in utter sweat.

In some instances, I would shake my legs casually just to provoke a mild puff of air inside my pants. Many times though I tried to avoid wearing long pants, so I could have that easy feeling especially during afternoons and in a tight environment.

With the exception, of course, of the Session Hall of the Provincial Capitol. That place always gives me that cold feeling, so cold I could even doze off for an hour. But most of the time I would spend my day trying to overcome that intense heat wave that has given me at least two nosebleeds for two months now.

I can’t remember how many times I would wash myself just to ease that heat sticking on my flesh. Close to being obsessive compulsive, a frenetic approach to water has come to be a source of security from that uneasy ambiance of heat and hell.

Somehow it is not enough to sink yourself in that rest room with a cold shower, and save yourself from a possible dehydration, that heat would still make its presence felt minutes after you have cooled that volcanic head.

Not only does that heat brought a parched throat under my mouth, it also has made a dessert out of my feet. The dust settling stealthily within that Agusan air cringes a dry countenance on my feet, enough for me to sketch some doodles on it, making my skin a little fairer than the average chalkboard.

Always on the watch of a possible toothache too, this hot atmosphere under the weighty air of the Caraga countryside, I think, may just be a prelude to a more burning environment enough to deduce various body malaise such as sore throats, bleeding gums and dehydration.

The unpredictability of the season is again heightened when after surviving a series of almost heat-stroking milieu, there followed a heavy chain of downpours, say, three days, that would normally tick your head off. I doubt if such environmental effects of this sort would find any worth in those surveys conducted by some government agencies, or even our own CENRO-DENR that the effect of this abrupt shift of climate is also affecting the performance of those thrill seekers in the jungles of Agusan while raining on those logs.

I am not thrilled at all when I am now experiencing hell while I’m still alive. That isn’t supposed to happen. Hell should be experienced in the after life, and not while you’re waiting for that multicab on your way back to San Francisco from the Session Hall of the Provincial Capitol.

That’s giving it an advance billing, if you ask any ghost employee about it.

I expect a lot of changes in the days ahead, and somehow most of these changes would come as a result of the season’s unpredictable behavior.

Either I am reacting to the pathetic state of our environment or merely fighting the effects of it, I don’t know. Somebody told me that it is just all in the head. But that’s bull. I may be hallucinating mind games out of some frustration and loathing of that recurring fever, but I have never wavered in my own private Agusan that this is such a gross effect of the warming of our planet and not just some chronic case of an incoming colds.


p.s. just an old article