Name Me

Today is Bonifacio Day, it is a local holiday in our country in honor of this renegade idealist turned hero Andres Bonifacio who lived during the days of the spaniards and later helped bring forth for his countrymen the burden of freedom. This hero was later immortalized in our currency under the 5 peso denomination, which now couldn’t even buy you a can of soda or was enough to pay the cheapest public fare around the same country he fought freedom for.

But regardless of his contribution to this country’s independence, me and my brothers named one of our computers at home “bonifacio”. The computer has nothing to do with the hero, it’s just that me and my brothers have this habit of giving things silly names, and our ingenuity has also left our other two computers at home with the names “good friday” and “independence”.

My cousin owns an internet café and he has like a dozen computers in his shop, but unlike our name-giving habit, my cousin is too busy to trouble himself in coming up names for his computers, though he named his own computer at his desk “usbrion”, heck I don’t know where he got that name but it does sound like the greek god of technology or whatever.

I had to come up with dozens of silly names too when we were raising these hamsters at home, these rodents bred like popcorns and we had to come up with names fast, and each name got sillier after the other. The worst one we did came up with for one hamster was ricoyan, I got hold of this black and white hamster on this same day this local actor by the name of rico yan passed away, he was still at the prime of his life and he had too much of a good time the night before in a beach resort that he passed away in his sleep without putting much of a struggle with death. And with the television as the backbone for every value in this country, they gave this actor a funeral fit for a king. I could say that it was fit for a king because this actor died in time with queen Elizabeth I of England, and the outburst of sorrow of my countrymen for this actor could match the royal sorrow of the Britons had for their former queen.

Anyway, ricoyan was a freak of nature (our hamster ricoyan is a female, the actor rico yan is a male. His profession is an actor anyway, he could portray the role of either gender on screen). Though our hamsters bred fast, their birth mortality rate was high, but for ricoyan, giving birth for her was already a mortality, she didn’t have problems with delivery, she had problems with cannibalism after delivery. She always eats all her litters and none of her descendants ever survived her hunger, she was a terrible excuse for a mother, perhaps living to the namesake we gave her. We thought ricoyan must have had an appetite that she could no longer tell dinner from her kids, so we made sure her den had hefty servings of fruits and vegetables everytime she gave birth, but hell this hamster had taste for blood, and I mean her own blood.

Ricoyan died without any descendants inheriting her insane cannibal traits, in fact she died a horrible death herself. My brother was feeding the hamsters, he dropped ricoyan’s rations in her cage and he was surprised to see ricoyan stare at her grub. It was unusual for a hamster with that appetite to resist food, so my brother observed the rodent for a while, it was standing on its hind legs, my brother gave her head a nudge with his finger and ricoyan fell flat on her head motionless to the ground like a dashboard icon. Damn hamster had dried up to a perfect taxidermy, I was thinking she must have been pregnant and her fetuses must have drank her blood dry to get even with all its brothers she ate in her lifetime, and I’m sure everyone of those little hamsters are also getting even with her in hamster hell.

Hungry Drunk Fighter

I was supposed to play badminton with my brother last night but the courts where we played were crowded. Hell everybody must have felt like playing that night too and they all got ahead of us going to the badminton courts. I hate waiting for my turn in these places, there are always these cro-magnon show offs playing around and when they see you sitting in the corner waiting, especially when you’re not talking with other good players around, they’d know that you’re not too good yourself, and they’d check if you’re carrying some cheap racquet and a water jug, which shows you’re not into buying fancy drinks at the concessions stand (I would rather buy beer later), then they’d ask you to join them and beat the crap out of you.

Getting some beers was the next thing on my mind, my brother had classes the next day so I just took him to the coffee shop some blocks away and bought him some coffee and sent him home. Then I called up ariel, he just got home from a seminar in cebu and I felt he was up to some beers himself. We heard live music in this little bar by the river, had some booze and got out of the place drunk around midnight.

We were walking about two blocks or so when ariel asked me if I wanted to go have another beer, I turned his offer down because I swear I was close to throwing up if I’d still go on drinking. We walked a couple more steps when ariel then told me he was such in the mood to go beat up somebody, he’d always say senseless things when he’s drunk but this remark wasn’t something to get amused with, this nut has been to a lot of street fights and when he says he wants to fight, he's up to any match anytime, drunk or not. I’d swear he could use street fighting as a living if only he gets paid for knocking down every fight club freak he beats up. Hell he even has a lot of false teeth in his palate as trophies from his fights. I told him it was the dead of the night and there was nobody up the road at this hour that he could pick a fight with, I was drunk myself and I knew I should have kept my mouth shut because I sounded like his agent or coach backing him up for a fight. Ariel paused, pulled out his palm top and feigned browsing the thing like he was surfing the net in the middle of both the night and that road. He told me he’s going to wait there til somebody holds him up for his gadget, then he’ll stun the crook with some flashy Jackie chan maneuver, beats the hell out of the guy and go home happy, sounds like a great idea to him though. I wasn’t going to join his martial arts script tonight but something told me he can’t pull this one out, I had to come up with something to stop him, I told him.

“Let’s go, I need to throw up”

“Throw up over there, nobody’s watching”

It wasn’t convincing him to leave, so I thought of something else.

“You still want to go get those beers?” (though I know I was going to throw up if I drank, but it was better than seeing him get beaten up)

“Right after I beat up somebody”

“You know, you could get flanked by a gang and they can outnumber you the least five is to one”

“I can take down five armed guys your size”

Now maybe that’s what makes those drunken kung fu stance in the movies so powerful, the more drunk you are, the more people you think you can take down. I finally told him.

“You want to go grab something to eat?”

“Good idea”

This one worked and I should have figured that grub was one thing that calmed him down, we walked to the next block where some street vendor was selling eggs. Ariel offered to buy me some, though I kept an eye on him if he would take out the vendor out with his fists. We ate, we went home and saved his fighting match for some other day.

If somebody picks on you for a fight, buy them dinner, it might just save your skin.