Marc confessed:
You need to get away from Manila, Mattd. It just ain't the Philippines, any more than Paris is France.
So you're a captive of the rebels, too. I agree there's is no better life in the PI than being held prisoner away from the mainstream. In '63 on a Ford Foundation venture to the International Rice Research Institute at Los Banos, I was captured by local Commie bandits, as the faculty of the University of the Philippines were called by the fearful American enclave set up to woo the heathen away from Red China. It took about a second of Commie sex and rice wine to induce me to abandon Texas Baptist eternal horniness and join the enemy. After a week of ecstactic captivity, called by the minimal missionary sex Amercians, brainwashing, my future was set on the straight and narrow way of liberation, any kind of liberation so long it was anti-authority. I would still be there obeying my dick, drunk 24/7, with deep happiness had Ford not sent stand-by whitecoats to wrap me as they did with all wanton expatriates from with a canvas jacket and deposit me back in infernal Houston which was just awakening to the dream of making George Bush 1 the POTUS. Even now a bowl of hot steaming rice is a sacred reminder of how Asian Communism saved some Americans from a future of hand work and sobriety. All you Korean and Viet Nam ex-POWs know the benefits of brain cleansing, as does Marc and now mattd, the pleasures of auto-AP.