Crabs Crossing

Me and peter had been doing jogging rounds at the local stadium since early this year, it was a good idea though because at least I've been doing something worthwhile healthy. But I did skip jogging for a month when my liver got really sick and I was so much in a mood to hit the tracks again the past few days. My liver doctor said something like I shouldn't put too much physical effort and crap like that in whatever I do but what the hell, its been a month that I've been in death camp without liquor cigarettes and doing nothing, and all liver doctors will agree its better I start breaking a sweat from jogging instead.

I felt that it has gone quite a bore lately running around in circles over and over at the local stadium, though I hadn't been there in a month but it was probably the same old goddam stadium with the same sight of the empty grandstands and frogs that cross all over the tracks, especially those rainy days when the frogs go swarming to the finish line, you'd have to manuever and dodge them from your lane along with those posers who just walk like the whole stadium was a sunday park, but it beats running on a treadmill like a stupid hamster though.

So a couple of days ago I decided to hit this new kilometer long riverside walkway, for a change. I ran at the place at six in the morning and the view is pretty nice, the road was built on some dike that separated the river from the left and this big marsh from the right and all those waters and leaves around already made you feel healthy just by being there at sunrise. The road started started with a towering sign that wouldn't let anything taller than two and a half meters pass through, I dont know what the hell was that for because the road is only open for pedestrians and it left me running the first few meters trying to figure out why somebody as tall as three meters can't get through, maybe I would find out soon if the walkway will go under a bridge or electric cables or anything that would bump into yao ming's head if he also ran there, in case.

None of the people running there were as taller than 2 meters though, but almost everybody running there looked old, you could tell from their grey hair and from the way they ran, old people move slow. And mother nature too had the animal kingdom over my jogging route again and this time there's crabs on the pavement instead of frogs, and they'd go crossing the road from the marsh to the river maybe to get breakfast, there'd be plenty of food there because its a city river and that's where all sewers lead to, and it wouldn't take a crab to know that people throw in a lot of leftovers down there for the ecosystem. I got my mobile phone camera and took a picture of this one.

The crab stopped on its tracks and the goddam thing must be smiling under those mandibles for the camera, it must be stopping for the faster lane to pass when crossing the street without turning itself into a roadkill.

I could have stomped the crab dead to crab heaven but I didn't, it was too early in the morning, besides some old guy was already fishing down the marsh and making a killing that he probably hooked up crabs by mistake and passed them judgement, he was just reeling in fishes smaller than a calling card, and I'm sure as hell it will take him the whole day to reel in a catch's worth with fishes those small, and I dont think he will get any bigger fishes there since the water only runs through his ankle, he had a fancy fishing stick though. That's what you get from roads that lead to riversides, people who find fun pulling marine life out of the water, one fish at a time.

I must have ran for almost a kilometer when I saw another old guy down in the marsh, he wasn't fishing but was taking a leak, and you could tell he had a hard time doing it because he had to go down the slope of the road dike with all those mud and crabs, and there aren't much bushes to hide in down there so he must probably be lowering his aim and trying not to make much ripples too, if there weren't other people jogging or fishing or crabs crossing, he'd probably try to find out how far his bladder jetstream can shoot or spell his name with it. I'd swear I'd spell my goddam name on the water if I was down there.

I didn't feel like taking a leak anyway and I was at the end of the road, but then hell I didn't find any overhead obstacle that first sign told me to watch out for eversince I started running there, they should have written crabs crossing instead or something useful like that.

Tales from the Decabiography

4 I collect coke cans

My recent acquisitions:

I got this coke can from turkey, istanbul no longer constantinople



And this one from egypt, land of tutankhamun and the pyramids

Yellow is for Cory

Cory, who is one of our most well known presidents, passed away more than a month ago. She was so popular with the whole country that the color yellow she used to campaign with twenty three years ago became so popular again right after her death, people wore yellow shirts and tied yellow ribbons anywhere and was close to wrapping the whole country in yellow. I remember it was discussed in our political science class ten years ago that the whole yellow thing came from this song "tie me a yellow ribbon on the old oak tree" by tony orlando, the guy who looks pretty much like ringo starr in the beatles let it be cover. I wasn't into the whole yellow fad a month ago, its not that I didn't admire her but I just didn't want to hop into the yellow bandwagon.

Then I got sick the first week of september and this was one of the worst fevers I ever had, I was wondering how I even got sick in the first place because I had anit-flu shots a month ago that was supposed to make me invincible to fever. It scared the hell out of me thinking it was the new pig-flu virus I got from someplace, I did get home from manila two days before I got sick but I didn't go anywhere where fever or pigs were particular, in fact I was just having two beers every night in my room after work over cable tv and I swear I was because, I could recall the movies I've seen the last five nights. There could have been pork in those chinaman take out foods I had with beer, but I suppose my fever came from fatigue after a couple hard day's work.

It was strange because my fever was reacting to the time of the day, like around eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon, my tempreature would be normal and I feel like going back to work for a while. By sunset I would start to burn all over again and come midnight I feel like hell is freezing over in bed, it was during the fourth night that my body tempreature went as high as 40 and I could hardly breathe, I felt like I was going to die, seriously. From what I was seeing, the edges from my field of sight was turning black and I was gasping for air, I was slouching on the floor with pain like I was doing those muslim ramadan pose where you have your ass higher than your head, it looked like I was already turning my life over to some god, just in case, but no one showed up to take me away though. Then I threw up a lot of water, I wanted to give my parents a call in manila if I should get myself to the goddam hospital before I pass out, so I got to the telephone but while sitting there and giving death some thought, I felt better from breathing the midnight air from the open windows, I ended up sleeping there instead with my blankets.

It took me another day struggling with that fever until I finally got better and went back to work, the fever pinned me down for five days and paperworks were stacking on my desk, I did feel better though I started having terrible heartburns just below where my esophagus ended, probably from loosing my apetite and not eating much when I was sick, I could feel it being twisted from the inside. It wasn't til the seventh day that I resolved what this goddam fever was, I was brainstorming over some employee's inventory report when he pointed at me

Sir, your eyes... look... all so yellow

I stared at the mirror and my eyes did look like werewolf jacko's in that thriller music video, hell my whole torso had turned yellow too and it dawned to me that there is something wrong with my liver.

Everybody told me that I've been drinking too much, it could have believed it too but I'm half the drunkard I was for two years already, nevertheless it was about time I see a doctor, finally. First they took a lot of blood from me in the laboratory that I think was enough to feed a leech for a week, by the time a third lab rat went over to my left elbow to suck more blood with those big goddam syringe, I told her to use my right elbow instead because they already made a lot of holes from the left. Anyway the doctor could probably tell a lot about my fever more from those blood results than me retelling him what I have been writing in these last few paragraphs.

The doctor was somewhere around his fifties and you could tell he had the knack for livers, he read through my blood tests which were full of numbers and integers, he ask how I felt and I told him I felt fine except for this heartburn over my chest, he pressed it and I yelled in pain to sound a yes, he told me that it was my liver and began writing some notes. I would have hated it if he was the kind of doctor who would read longer through my blood results and press around my body a lot and couldn't figure out what was wrong, because he probably don't know what the hell is wrong, and send me back to the goddam laboratory to leak out more blood from me and turn me into a hospital crash test dummy. Anyway this doctor said that its the hepatitis A virus and I probably got it from eating filthy food from wherever, he said that there's no need to worry about it and my liver will just return to normal, just eat about anything and get more sleep and drink some vitamin tablets.

The doctor's advice sounded pretty much like to wait until my shade of yellow goes away, I feel fine though so I just went back to work with these eyes, It ws pretty obvious because people keep on exclaiming about my eyes, they would go on asking me how I feel and all that crap and I could have told them I'm busy or I'd like to have a cup of black coffee, but I tell them stupid answers that I feel so yellow or from sseing too much yellow after cory's funeral because I don't want to go on explaining about hep A virus. In fact I have overheard yellow so much that I'm humming that goddam tune about the yellow ribbon in that old oak tree over and over.

Do you hate kris?

Undoubtedly the reason why I have not written back here in my blog is because of facebook, it always has something to keep everybody stuck with a facebook window open, like some stupid game or somebody's video or a fan site, until now.

There's this actress kris aquino who had been on the news more frequently because her mother, who was one of the most well known presidents of our country, passed away and the news would always show kris in great sadness on cable tv. But then after watching so much of her, I began to feel that she's overdoing her tearjerkiness. So I thought to read about her in facebook because they're sure to have something about her there, and there were quite some web pages, I joined the one that read out loud 'I hate kris' because topics are more interesting once there are people who speak on the negative.

This is when I started to have enough of facebook. That 'I hate kris' webpage appeared on my facebook account and just overnight people made comments on it why I hate her and all that crap, I had to reply to them that I only wanted to read some stuffs there and I don't give a galactic damn about her, but restated in a nice way. One comment didn't sound so good to me, it went like:

lib, hate somebody within your reach to make it more exciting

The jews hate hitler, the great jobless hate our president, our dog hates the neighbors cat, I hate a lot of things. Hate is limitless, absolute and unconditional, just like when you love something so badly, evebody has a right to hate something regardless of anything. I dont know but in a way I didnt like that goddam remark, it sounds like I envy the actress or to remind me that just I'm a nobody compared to her when in the first place all I wanted to do was read some articles. I could have asked a little privacy from facebook which made me realize that I miss my blog here.

I dont know a lot about kris either, all I know is that she was in this show come dinnertime where she yelled 'deal or no deal' in a manner that was annoying, and later became so popular that people would use it to harass in making decisions with the same annoying tone. And this one time in class years ago, we were discussing about marriage annulments and the professor asked me something like if I had a wife while having a secret affair with kris, can my wife annul our marriage if she finds out about it? I was kind of puzzled and the professor said:

Just like what happened to joey marquez

I eventually got away with a very smart backdoor answer saying I wouldn't fall for kris anyway, and back to my seat I was whispering to my seatmate asking what the hell was this kris joey thing? my seatmate told me that kris had an affair with this married man joey where she got sex diseases, like some afternoon soap opera gone mad. my seatmate told me its already like her third affair with married men and when I thought she got married to this late comedian guy rene requestas in the movies before.

kris aquino likes this

K

Almost every word in this country starts with the letter K, hell you can even make every word prefixically start with a K too, though it changes the mood of the grammatical sense in a way, but who cares, our country's language is as konfusing anyway.

And since most word can start with a k, its no wonder that a lot of streets do start with that letter, and this is about the k street where I had a couple of beers with imer last night. I had asked him out two weeks ago but we didn't get to, because I asked him already at eight the night before I was taking a flight back home the next morning, and it was all in a rush. Anyway I met him and some of my old classmates last night at this beer joint where a lot of office people were also having beers socially, you could tell because they were drinking beer a tablespoonfull at a time when it is supposed to be drank like water, I could tell because the waiter wasn't going in and out of the cellar with beer bottles a lot, or maybe it wasn't a beer joint in the first place at all.

Edward was also dropping by and he asked me where we were, I wasn't so familiar with the name of the beer joint so I decided to give him the street instead, which was one of those konfusing local words that started with k that I forgot too. All I know is that it has something to do with the struggle of democracy in this country like katipunan, kapayapan, kamuning, kalayaan or some goddam word like that, seriously if I were to use it in a sentence talking about the ideals of this country's democracy, I think they would all mean the same. Edward turned up more than an hour later hadn't I just said its the street outside school.

Take the ku klux klan which goes by the acronyms kkk for example, the people here during the colonial years also came up with an underground organization with the same acronyms like the klan and likewise opposed the status quo too. It was fairly easy for them to insert anything from the local dictionary to fit into the kkk to mean something about their organization, but hell it was hard for me to remember those goddam words everytime it appeared perennially in high school history exams.

Basically the group was underground because they were more of patriotic dissidents who didn't like how the spaniards ran the country and wanted to beat the crap out of them, with guns or very big knives, and maybe they thought of having k's to name their group is that because the k doesn't appear so much in the spanish vocabulary. I just thought about that this morning because on my ride in the rail transit, they had these spanish poems posted all over the train's ceiling, hell the ride was so boring that you couldn't help but read it. The que sounds like k though but es que, its another story.

Virtual Pet

I wasn't so particular about joining facebook eversince but I found a new way of wasting my time on it the past month, raising a goddam virtual pet, where I feed, dress, groom and buy the little bastard stuffs for his house. Although the whole game is based on social interaction where good money is paid from meeting other people's pet, but I tried my pet to be as reclusive though and got more money from gambling, hacking and betting instead, the kind of living you wouldn't get away rich in real life. I was hooked to the whole thing for more than a month.

Even when I'm away from home, the next thing I open right after my e-mail inbox is my virtual pet house ahead of my blog or e-bay, no wonder people are into facebook.

Lent

When people dressed in funny costume come up to your doorstep, its either they're gonna ask for some money or they're just plain crazy, and three men in tunic popped up at our secretary's desk last thursday, they looked liked caesar's tax collectors but it was the start of lent so I had to suppose they were the christian apostle worsely impersonated. They usually start coming out on lent going around the streets making money from praying, but by threes or fours than their whole holy dozen brigade so that maybe they could cover a bigger area on foot. They would have big name sashes so you could tell which particular apostle are they, because seriously, people can't name all of them, maybe one or two because you'd at least have one friend who got his namesake from the holy dozen. Like me, one of my friends is named after the leader of their group that was such a liar that even chickens can tell from afar.

I didn't have anything to do the next day, because it was good friday and everthing is closed and you got nowhere to go at all. The only invitation I got was from peter who was going to take his bike on the road about a hundred kilometers west to some little coastal town, he told me to ride a bus or something and meet him there because he knows I don't like the idea of taking a goddam bike on the highway, with all those trucks speeding by your side like they could sweep you off into a roadkill, and with all those dogs and chickens crossing over the road that you can no longer run over with something so fragile like a bike, especially the way I maneuver anything on speed like some x-wing pilot down the trench run. I'm sure there'd be a lot of apostles crossing the road too since its lent. I'd only be taking a bike if I had the whole highway to myself, I swear I would.

Anyway I didn't go with peter and I killed time instead with three of ariel's patrons from his internet cafe, two of them worked as telephone line operators which something silly as good friday was not able to shut down, and the other guy is from california who just wanted to see what the hell was going on for lent. They had a coffee shop over at where they worked since everbody working like answering machines for hours can use some coffee to wake them up, however when I got there, their goddam coffee making machine got busted and all they had was lemonade. I wasn't in the mood to drink lemonade because I wanted to light a stick and lemonade doesn't taste all that good with smoke and at two hours past midday, but what the hell, there wasn't anywhere else to go anyway.