Being Lib ...or something like it

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Art Gallery

Some of my drunken watercolor paintings.

Liam gallagher of oasis. When I was in sophomore high I bought one oasis album what's the story? (morning glory), and there's a lot of pretty good songs there. People think this is a painting of sly stallone in his movie cobra less the sub machine gun.


This girl donita who graced the mtv screens some years back, I was drunk and I spilled watercolor into this painting that it took me more time to redo it, made a lot of effort in painting the hair.

That leslie comedian guy who starred in the naked gun movies, I had to leave brush strokes below because I felt the painting began to look more like a photograph, or was just too drunk to finish it.

One time I lost my yellow watercolor but I painted anyway and this is how it looked, pretty good though, the colors add up to the atmosphere making it more hannibal lecterish.

Another painting, I don't paint people's faces all the time.

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Monday, February 12, 2007

Anatomically Intact

I attended a friend’s wedding dinner yesterday, I missed the actual wedding though, our secretary was still absent from work and I had to pick my parents up at the airport but these aren’t excuses because I never been so eager attending church weddings.

The wedding dinner was supposed to start at seven in the evening, I arrived an hour later because I didn’t like to be seen coming on time all together with those other rich guests because the couple are kids of both rich families and their guests are all those rich phonies all dressed up like they were going to a cinderella ball. Peter was also at the wedding together with his wife and another high school classmate doc elbert, peter saved me a seat because he knew I always come in late though they were the only people sitting in their table, he smsed me that they were near the door going to the kitchen and Im friends with most of the guards and kitchen staff of this place so I didn’t have trouble passing through the kitchen going to their table, that’s how I wanted to get in anyway. And it was great having our table near the kitchen, I don’t know if peter chose that place on purpose but we’d always get food from the kitchen first. The food was great but if there was anything wrong with the food, it was the stupid idea of how it was presented, there was pork, crabs, shrimps, fish and pigeons but hell they were served anatomically intact, you could hardly pick out any meat from the small pigeon bones much less scrapping roe from crab shells. We also had one whole roasted little pig in our table and I mean the whole of the pig head to tail, you’d have to slice chunks of pork by yourself from the pig and it wasn’t easy slicing while sitting, the table had a second layer that spun and revolved so that the food on the table could go around to everybody, its the lazy susie table contraption but I don’t like to call tables that way, it sounds like there’s some girl procrastinating on your table. Anyway when you were slicing from the little pig, the whole goddam second layer spun alongside the force from the knife that everything in the table rocked and rattled and fell, this was one entry that you wished should have come in pieces, you can even make a head count of how may little pigs died in the wedding and how these poor little pigs probably wish they’d lease one more week with life, so they could live up to the lunar new year and see the glory of their swinehood come the chinese zodiac year of the pig.

Doc’s eyes were getting red and I thought he and peter already drank before I came, but he told me that he just passed on sleeping because he had been having graveyard shifts as the resident doctor of some government hospital. Peter asked him how much is he paid, doc replied “nothing, all I get is just food in the cafeteria.” And he was telling us that the cafeteria would close up on him sometimes because he had to be in the operating room or someplace and he wouldn’t even get his meal, he was laughing though, I’m sure he had more stories to tell from their hospital cafeteria. We decided to sit for a little while after the wedding dinner, I didn’t like to leave altogether with the crowd, it's full of hypocrisy, people would try to look for as much people they know on the way out and stop for a little chat that I feel it would be faster for them to go crawling out from the window than walking out of the main door. Then there was this old man who was passing by who stopped and stared at our table but none of us knew him, I thought he was looking for leftovers when I noticed he was staring at the flower decorations on our table and he was also holding some when I realized he is going after those on our table, I pulled the flowers from our table and asked peter’s wife if she wanted some too. Doc also noticed the old man staring and told me “Lib take the tulips! they’re expensive!”

Everybody was carrying tulips on the way out more than the wedding souvenirs itself.

Friday, February 09, 2007

你能活多久?

Our secretary had been absent for days because her father passed away and she is busy for their funeral and busy doing a lot of these rituals as if it were going to do their dead good in the afterlife aside from dignity, so I had been doing most of her work, one of which is receiving people.

Today I had rounds of my own paperwork while I sat at her seat when these two ladies showed up. I could tell from the way they looked that they were going to sell something and I could feel they were ready to persuade me even before they started talking, it was too obvious. They introduced themselves as whoever they were because I forgot and they asked for the management, I told them to talk to me and I said “shoot”, something that I wasn’t used to saying but I did out of panic anyway, they first asked if I were chinese and I said I am almost and they asked if I were conversant in mandarin. I was beginning to wonder if this were another offer for me to teach mandarin so I told them I dont know mandarin to give them second thoughts about continuing whatever campaign they had, but anyway still they said they were there to promote their chinese magazine and they handed me one and if I wanted to subscribe. The magazine was from last year and it had a baby’s head on the cover and on the bottom quoth “你能活多久?” and if Im not wrong it means “til how long can you live?” but I gave it back to them and said I couldn’t understand it, now I reckon they must be selling life expectancy pills or something in public because maybe they felt that death scared the hell out of everybody. The other lady said the magazine was free anyway and they had english copies if I wanted one and I replied in a fit of riddance that I’ll just take the chinese version, it will be just fine and there would still be pictures to see anyway.

Seeing that I finally took their magazine as a bait, the other lady pulled out an envelope and asked if I had anything to donate for their cause. For crying out loud, goddam gypsies were just asking for money all along and I’ll bet that they don’t even know anything inside these gook magazines they're carrying around in the first place, they just want to get away with your money.

I told them I didn’t have any money, I didn’t really, I only had coffee and garlic bread for a snack that afternoon, and even if I did have some I could have gone eating something better than give it to them, they left me the magazine anyway.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

One life to live

Our high school valedictorian nanci sent me a message some weeks ago, she was asking if she could have this wedding invitation I had, though she was also at this wedding but she was from manila and everybody knew she was coming here for the wedding yet everybody forgot to give her an invitation, and I feel nanci is so sentimental about the wedding and the invitation because her good friend the bride, is terminal with cancer and her fiancé wanted to make the most of her lifetime that is already running on a highway to heaven, by marrying her.

Death does make life valuable.

Nanci was also asking me if I could record her some blues music and send it along with the invitation, I was expecting her to use it for some background music like a stage play or something but I was surprised when she told me that she’s listening to the blues, I mean for somebody my age because the blues is one kind of music that’s hard to appreciate, even when you’re drunk. The music is so slow and depressing that I could feel the tone drag my thoughts and neurons to work with the music’s pace, and you’d get frustrated with time for moving so slow when its just the music messing up everything in your head. But still though.

I sent nanci songs from this artist lou rawls. Most of his songs are blues but he has some good jazz songs which I listen to quite often because I love listening to jazz and I feel you’d only need to place some faster beat to blues music so it would sound like jazz. Anyway this singer lou rawls has one hell of a voice, he has this low lumbering baritone voice that sounds like darth vader singing minus the force, and lou rawls does look a lot like james earl jones in a way too that it makes you wonder if their faces had anything to do with their diaphragms. And with a voice like that I feel lou can sweep girls off their feet from singing, or just by even talking and even if he has to talk nonsense like if you had him read the gettysburg address in front of a girl I swear he would still sound so goddam romantic.

I feel like I’m the only one listening to lou rawls, you could hardly find any record stores nowadays selling his cd, sometimes when I’d go inside a record store with my second brother, he’d tell me right on the doorstep “you wont find any lou rawls cd in this place” so I would go on telling him I’m looking for everette harp or john coltrane or anybody else instead, and my brother would say lou rawls like “rurals” like his whole name was some kind of tongue twister.

Lou rawls passed away just a year ago, january 6 2006

you've only got one life to live
so give it your all
give it a lot
give it your best shot

"one life to live"
lou rawls


Death does make life valuable