It is 3am in our neighbourhood. Suddenly, the silence is shattered by crashing rock music punctuated by a thudding beat. Looking out of the window, I see the culprit drive by: a passenger tricycle decked with a stereo that could be classified as a weapon of mass destruction. It is a mystery where a vehicle that small could draw the power for its speakers and subwoofer.
We Filipinos love making noise, and do not care who hears it. By 'noise', I do not mean just a racket, I mean a din, ranging from the merely annoying - people inside a cinema who loudly use their mobile phones - to the sublimely maddening: last year, a contractor decided that midnight was a good time to repair the road near our house, and ordered 15 cement-mixing trucks to do the job. Walk into most office buildings or shopping centres and you will be assailed by the kind of music beloved of most Filipinos: loud, thumping and tuneless. Get in a taxi, on a bus or a jeepney and you will find the driver using a stereo system that would be the envy of an IMAX theatre, playing rock with the volume set on 'stun'.
Either we Filipinos do not worry about noise pollution, or many of us are born with eardrums of lead. How else can you explain apartments built right at the edge of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport's tarmac, unprotected by anything as trivial as sound-absorbing walls? When I recently visited a hospital, the attendant thoughtfully switched on a huge TV set, making sure that the volume was turned way up so (I suppose) all the patients in the entire building could listen.
It could be this immunity to noise that accounts for why Filipinos are ready to rend the air at any time - usually when everybody else is asleep. We have a neighbour who uses a karaoke machine to practice her singing abilities - and believe me, she needs the practice. She would have been a hit if she had been auditioning for a programme called Shoot Me Now Please and Make it Bloody. Her sessions, broadcast at night, have led to some of the most violent fantasies I have ever entertained.
I have always believed that we can exploit our national fondness for noise. We have had long-running territorial disputes over a few islands. My idea is to garrison these places with companies of karaoke troops - I volunteer my neighbour - equipped with massive speakers, amplifiers and subwoofers all drawing power from one or two tricycles. A system like that could project mind-shattering sound waves for several kilometres. I am thinking of that old movie Scanners where victims' heads would explode from the pain. Our neighbours would leave us strictly alone. So would the fish, I suspect.