Funeral in April

It finally poured this morning, the weather has been like hell the past few days that you felt it has to rain somehow. I sort of missed the rain too, I took off from my desk thrice this morning to watch the rain on the streets, I stood under the shed like I was waiting for somebody but I was just smelling the rain, it has this scent that you could tell its raining even if you had your eyes shut. I wanted to get my depression running too, I wanted to write something since last wednesday night but I wasn’t in the mood and everything.

Anyway last wednesday night I visted a friend’s funeral who died of cancer just the sunday before, I was saving my visit on a thursday night because I had this funny feeling there won’t be much people on a thursday night, you don’t get too much thursday people around these days. Then my junior high seatmate called me up, he was at some coffee joint and he was asking if I had thoughts on visiting our friend that night with him, so I agreed because it was almost nine anyway.

There were some other friends including my editor in chief who hung out at the wake, our late friend left one of her closest friends a request before she died that she didn’t want her funeral to be gloomy, well everybody that night took it seriously and they were talking like it were just another high school reunion, yet everybody seemed calm about her passing away because perhaps they already felt this coming. It must be depressing to be terminal, you could feel death crawling all over you and you’d see all your friends around you getting sad about it, and at our age at 28 when you’re sure all of your friends are around to see you die. Its not like you are at 70 when you’re so goddam ready to die because you’re looking back at a long life full of regrets.

My junior high seatmate and I had coffee some blocks away around midnight before we went home, I could have asked him for beers but he couldn’t stand alcohol, one beer bottle can make hemoglobin cluster all over his face and he’ll look so funny on his way home.

Gnomes and Gremlins

Hell took over the weather last tuesday night, my room was so hot that I hadn’t found myself sweating so much at the dead of night for quite sometime already. I was going to have my rounds of alcohol at my desk to get me crawling to bed to sleep anyway but I swear I was still going to sweat that much when I sleep and my sweat will smell of alcohol, it happens and I can smell it sometimes.

I decided to turn on the air conditioner in my room to cool down the place a bit, the last time I remember turning it on was more than two years ago, because Im pretty much used to sleeping over a running electric fan. I was sort of scared to plug it at first because I felt it might short circuit and blow up or something for being idle for so long, it didn’t anyway. It made the same noises when I turned it on and I was expecting it to blow out from its vent tiny bones and the scent of decay since I felt little mice, lizards, gnomes and gremlins must have taken refuge inside it while it was dormant, but the only thing it blew out was a lot of dust, these pests must have found sanctuary someplace else in my room other than inside the air conditioner.

Hitler and the british air force believed that little wayward gremlins wrecked their planes when airborne during world war II causing air accidents, I think I too have gremlins and gnomes running around in my room alongside mice and lizards. When I get home, I usually empty my pockets from the trinkets I carry around like my headphones, car keys, thumb drives, pens, lighter and I always leave them on my desk, and the next day an item or two would always be missing and I would waste a lot of time looking for it only to find it under my bed or in another pant’s pocket or someplace else when I’m so goddam sure I left it in my desk the night before. I think they take my stuffs around when Im drinking in my room or I am just my own gremlin when Im drunk.

I had a good night’s sleep yet I was late for work the next day, I was busy cramming my paperworks in my desk when this operations manager of some big company across the block came up to me telling me that his boss wanted to see me, you see I had plans of developing some area that this big CEO owned, but most of the time I was just taking my plans with her operations manager that I wasn’t expecting that CEO wanted to talk about it with me in person. The OM was waiting to lead me to her office but I told him I’d catch up after finishing some papers but hell I was nervous, I was also lucky that I took a very decent shirt to wear to work that morning except that I was wearing slippers and jeans which I already wore yesterday.

I got to her inner sanctum and there were a lot of these expensive dashboard icons around the room, which I bet was plenty enough to go about for gnomes and gremlins in that place if there were any. The CEO looked pretty much simple for somebody owning a big business district though you could see some streaks of elegance in her. I took a seat in front of her and gave her my good morning grin, I never stood up from my seat thereon til I left, else let her see more what crap I wore from my waist below. We went down to the blueprints and I gave her my proposals, she was going to draw some of her suggestions over the paper, she was looking for pencils and she sunk her hand into this little jar in her desk, I could tell she got that little jar as gift from somebody, people buy you those stuffs when they can’t think of anything else. Anyway she shook her head while searching inside the jar saying

“Where did all my pencils go?”

I was replying to her in my mind that she must have pencil-gnomes hiding in her office. She did find an inch-long pencil on the bottom of the jar them pencil-gnomes missed though. She used it to draw some sketches and she would always apologize for not being so good at drawing, yet I think she very particular from the way she draws even when she’s already on top of her company’s food chain.

I left her office and I got out on the streets feeling so hungry, there is this hamburger stop right around the corner that I decided to grab a bite and because the place serves grilled burgers which you don’t get to eat often here. I was going to have the cheapest grilled burger but I felt like some goddam hot shot that noon that I though of having the most expensive grilled burger they had, which on the menu was grilled kimchi burger. I was hungry and all I could think of is how great it would taste, I had the menu on hand while watching the cable news which was showing the aftermath of a school shooting in virginia by a korean student that left 33 people dead, I swear this korean was nuts and then I had second thoughts of eating this burger with their kimchi that this krazy korean must have konsumed a lot, so I ended up ordering just the plain grilled burger.

Have a Nice Day Lou

Finally got lou rawls singing in this blog.

Tales from the Decabiography

7 I have poor literacy in my own national language

If you were good at something, you had to suck someplace else, and since I’m better off writing in english then I suck big time in writing in our own language. This isn’t much of a problem though, I don’t need to learn it anyway but it was one hell of a headache way back high school when I was forced to write it, and you wouldn’t probably want to see how my essays looked like. The worse was during junior and senior high when we had a subject in class that took up two of these novels that were written by our national hero, I had a hard time understanding the whole story because our language being used in the novels is supposed to be romanticized to a higher level the same way billy shakespeare would write his english, yet I don’t think it is a celebration of our language since the originals were written in spanish.

We had our high school reunion about a month ago, I didn’t have any plans of attending but I did anyway because my seatmates from junior and senior high were asking me to come, and I owe them big time because they helped me survive that subject about those two novels during high school, I kept bugging them in class asking what each goddam chapter meant, I swear that time I felt like reading gobbledygook, and my seatmates had to retell the whole thing to me in simplier words like some bedtime story to some kid. Anyway during this reunion I sat with them on the farthest end of the table less being seen by anybody yet something embarrassing had to happen, somebody from the microphone had to call my name and hell they got my last name wrong, they did get a lot of last names wrong that night too like my senior high seatmate but they were girls and because they were married anyway and they are having their hubbies’ last name and all. Thankfully somebody had to yell “just call him lib”.

Anyway it wasn’t til college when they taught about these two novels again and thankfully in english, basically joe rizal’s two magnum opus in general is a showcase of 19th century colonial oppression in this country and mainly focuses on this guy mr ibarra being stripped from his everything by pervert christian priests, and later this main character returning for vengeance in disguise. The theme is almost set like the one alexander dumas used in the count of monte cristo where you’d go on so eager reading how the antagonists got their share of his sweet vengeance, but joe’s version went on a tragedy, leaving his main character dead in the end without getting even or getting his life back, which for the reader that time realizing the same sense of colonial oppression upon him, takes this gut feeling of vengeance real time. This eventually led to joe’s execution for propagating reforms and revolutions by his pen.

We called this subject pi 100 in the state university, I had a good professor in this subject and he’s one hell of a historian, for my final grade he called me for discussion of a particular chapter in the novel, and with his intellect upon my dumbness, I was flunking every question he asked, correcting my every answer with what he felt was right. It took us too much time though and he dismissed me before we were even done telling me to finish the discussion next week. Came monday I was so goddam scared on flunking the subject but when we continued the discussion, the historian professor must have inhaled too much cobwebs in the national archives that he started the discussion all over again, asking me the same question from last week, and I replied with the better answers I already heard from him last week, I got a good grade for paying attention.

Anyway back to my literacy, if there is one language I’d love to have a good literacy in its latin. I mean every often when I write I could integrate a latin word into my english like the one I used earlier -magnum opus , and then its still sounds like common english, or even better english. And school mottos, army mottos, church mottos, courtroom remarks, everywhere they’re all in latin. It just sounds so powerful.

Funny I just remembered something latin about those two novels from joe rizal. The first novel had a latin title that meant touch me not which joe borrowed from somewhere in the bible (or should I say the vulgate), and the second novel too started out with the latin phrase sic itur ad astra.

Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. Quod revera linguam latinam vix cognovi, cum latine nescias, die dulce freure.

The Supporting Cast

Have a Nice Day
also starring
(friends who regularly appear in this blog)

PETER
Alcohol tolerance: &&&&
Current location: iloilo city

MAX
alcohol tolerance: (doesn't drink)
place of origin: california
current location: iloilo city
sleeps at nine

EDGAR
Alcohol tolerance: &&(because is prone to car accidents)
Place of origin: general santos city
Current location: cavite

ARIEL

Alcohol tolerance: &&&
Place of origin: lemery town
Current location: iloilo city
You only live twice
Car accident 2005
Car accident 2006



IMER
Alcohol tolerance: &&&&&
Current location: manila
stop whistling

EDWARD
Alcohol tolerance: &
Current location: manila
merry christmas lib

JASON
Alcohol tolerance: &&
Place of origin: manila
Current location: iloilo city
Eat at Mango Tree

April Fool

Ariel took this picture and that’s me and its high noon yesterday and I’m painting the wall of his internet café, I had to get myself drunk so I could paint good, in fact I hadn’t had anything since I woke up except for beers, I didn’t’ feel like eating anyway. My old man kept calling me too, he’s probably worried what I was up to because I had been dead drunk the night before that jason had to drive me home, I could have taken a crack at him and have ariel answer his calls and tell him I just blew up my brains to kingdom come and greet him an april fool’s afterwards, pretty nasty joke though, I told him Im busy painting the walls of ariel’s internet café.

My uncle got himself into the hospital last friday night because his lungs collapsed, he smoked a lot when he was about my age, my old man used to tell me that he had packs of cigarettes everywhere, he stuck them from almost every hole in his office that you could just pick up a stick anytime you wanted to smoke, and sometimes you just smoked for the sake of it because they’re everywhere, it was kind of good though that none of my cousins, his kids followed his career in smoking.

I was off to bed early yesterday because I had a pounding headache from the high noon heatwave and alcohol while at ariel’s café, yet I got up early again today at four in the morning and I’m writing this post and I’m eating pizza with beers before sunrise. I was as hungry last night but my goddam headache got over me, its been a while since I had that kind of headache, the one where you could feel your pulse pounding at either side of your temple that you just don’t want to move any muscle or have the slightest thought about anything so that the blood won’t go pumping up so fast in your veins, and funny I can fall asleep faster than being drunk and without doing any stupid things like sleeping under my desk.