My Last Blip in Time

My Last Blip in Time

Edgar Alan Ongtengco

ISBN 979-8-89345-116-0 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89345-117-7 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Edgar Alan Ongtengco

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About the Author

Chapter 1

The two most important days are the day you were born and the day you find out why. (Mark Twain)

Dear world,

I was born in 1961. Soon I will turn sixty-two.

I'm sorry, Mr. Aziz. There's been a disturbance. (Spider-Man)

Yes, Peter, it had been looming. The disturbance is here. And yes, Mr. Twain, I am desperately trying to rediscover my why. I have lost it. What am I supposed to do next? Both my boys have basically flown the coop. They have emerged from the nest and found their wings. My oldest is married, status: post-honeymoon, the newest of physicians (a newbie), moving to North Carolina later this week to start his residency program at Duke by July. He has his destiny and a bright future for himself. But they are four-plus hours away.

The other is firmly ensconced out west (California dreaming) with his fitness guru girlfriend to do FOMO (fear of missing out) in between the occasional traveling nurse and wedding video gigs, which pay the bills and keep him above water. He lives minimally, with minimal possessions, content to meander here and there along the coastal archipelago while thriving in his custom-made full-size Ford van. He is a talented videographer and does much travel to exotic places because of his LLC partnership with his business partner, Anthony. No, I'm not making a plug for him. I just admire him. Where did he get this zeal?

We all recently got back, the seven of us, from vacationing in Europe. A wonderful but tiring two-week journey to the UK: London, Edinburgh, and the Isle of Skye. From the music of bagpipes, the bleating of sheep, the pomp and circumstance of the changing of the guards at the Royal Palace in London, driving (trying not to piss off the denizens) on the wrong side of the roads, hiking to the towering spires of Quiraing, climbing and touching the face of the Old Man of Storr, or sitting breathlessly atop Arthur's Seat.

My youngest son had an earlier flight. I gave him the longest hug and shed a few tears at the terminal, then waited with my eldest and daughter-in-law for our later flight together.

While over the pond on the way back home, I started experiencing this unsettled anxious pressure in my chest, in my thoughts, in my steps. No, it was not CAD (a heart condition). I know myself.

It was more like a morbid form of foreboding. My time was officially ticking. I was being chased. I was being hunted. I felt I lost my sense of purpose. My mojo. I had to invent a reason to keep going and find the impetus to keep moving and not just stay in the same place. Keep going. Move forward. Or I would lose my cushion and get caught. I had to keep running! Or see him in the rearview mirror. I am a blip on his radar.

In the heydays of handheld plastic games, I had this old electronic Yahtzee game in my bathroom that you think I'd go to for refuge, but sardonically I played the game to maximize a final score and buy time. Time? Yes, time to live. How absurd, you say? I agree. To think that a good score would somehow forecast and grant me more years of life!

If the score was less than 100, I would die quite soon. One hundred sixty or above, I earned a demerit and would be on borrowed time. I was safe at 200 or above, for now. Two hundred fifty and over was better. Score a 292, for example, and I would live to 92.

So it would get harder with each passing year. If I scored 312, I had 12 more years to live, plus 3 for good behavior; 301: one year plus 3; 375: I would be granted up to 75 years of age with 3 possible extra years if I took care of myself. Crazy stuff!

From the news and entertainment, I keep hearing my contemporaries dropping like flies or getting diseased—being hunted down one by one.

Jean-Luc Picard knows he can't keep going to the stars. Even Captain Kirk had his last go-around and said, It was fun.

Christina Applegate, the actress, I just read, has MS. She used to be young and sexy not too long ago. Now she is worn and wondering if she would ever act again.

The once-vivacious Michael J. Fox from Back To The Future has Parkinson's and is withering away. It's just a matter of time.

Someone else has Lou Gehrig's disease. That's even worse, where the neuron loss continues until the ability to eat, speak, move, and finally the ability to breathe is lost. That is just so tragically unfair.

My ole best friend from Livonia, Michigan, Mike Reid, just disappeared from the radar. I have since lost contact since I last visited him in Iowa, where he and his folks moved. He had been estranged from his liberal sister in a liberal state for political reasons. Nobody could provide any info or intel on his whereabouts or disposition. I am saddened. I suspect he has died. He hovered barely above the struggling well line and had not been the healthiest. I was taken aback when I met him. He was my junior, but he aged and became sickly-looking. I felt pity.

He and I were always deep in conversation about the state of the country, freedom, patriotism, how great this country still was, its enemies and haters, even hockey, his late parents, and his attempts at companionship. Yet he kept up a hopeful demeanor. I admired that.

I had a premonition that his time was near. I think he met his demise after I left.

I lost a dear friend. Poor Mike. I hope he was not alone in his last hour. Is he watching now from heaven as I write this? Or is it just something to say to prop up the veneer of hopefulness and sanity?

My friend's grandson died a horrible death with metastatic colon cancer at thirty! They were there at his bedside. How could a God be at ringside and watch this happen?

Abortions, beheadings, rapes, sodomy? Not just now but thousands, millions of years' worth of pain and suffering.

Surely, God could rush His preeminent and much-awaited Second Coming? Why not a third, a fourth, a twentieth coming, for that matter? Hell, let's go for a hundredth time? What's in a number? What's He waiting for? An invitation? A bus? Chariots? Armageddon? Has He lost His mojo? Is He busy in our galaxies? It's not our number yet? Why the mystery?

Enough suffering already! Let's not keep playing games with mortals, shall we? Here on earth and countless other worlds. Watch them pray and scurry in vain! They're all expendable. Ants, I am God. You must wait…

My dad died at sixty, one month before he was able to set eyes on Westley, my firstborn. He wasn't even able to reap the rewards of his labor. If anyone deserved it, he did. Unfair.

Oh, Dad, help me! My powerful dad. My great dad. I don't have the answers. My dad of great faith and humility. My uncomplaining and dutiful dad. He did not waver. He just did what was expected of him. And he had this inner peace. Or did he? It couldn't just have been a facade.

Just let it go, he would say in thought and you would see it in action. Turn the other cheek. He did his best to not let things bother him. But even he had his limits if pushed too hard. After all, we are all human, all dust. I was awed by his humanity and humble demeanor. I leaned on that.

Maybe I should just be a good soldier and shut the hell up. Be still. Be content. Be faithful. I have no right nor have the privilege to try and look up at the presumed giant eyeball from under the microscope of the Creator. You, Alan, are nothing. Ye of infinitesimal understanding. Nothing but a speck compared to the infinite mind of God.

From dust to dust. Even my great dad will be soon forgotten, his sarcophagus in Royal Oak, Michigan, will deteriorate, and all his mourners will be gone in the blink of an eye.

Like countless others, the graveyards will be meaningless to passersby. A resting place for future insignificant avian dinosaurs to poop on.

Birds instinctively know their time in the sun is now. I don't suppose they are much aware that they, too, are just prey, to be hunted, every day. Might as well leave my mark on this thing I am perching on, all the good it will do.

Armando Domingo Ongtengco who? My great dad. Someone still remembers. I still remember. For how much longer?

In the new enterprise series, Captain Pike is gifted a second command, but he becomes increasingly cognizant and experiences nightmares and daymares of his impending demise. It is foreshadowed that he has less than ten years till whatever happens, and we all know he will end up crippled and disfigured, only to be moved around in a life-sustaining mobile unit with someone's help.

The legendary Captain Pike, a once handsome, debonair woman-magnet, giving life-and-death orders, destined to be emasculated and stripped down to a helpless automaton capable of only answering with a yes or no via a signal. He will be a vegetable in this futuristic hellhole, trapped with an intact mind. He will be but a