The Sword of Damocles

I don’t know anything about psychology but now I know how getting sick with messianic complex would look like. Last week there was this rebel soldier turned senator having this disorder who was being tried in court for some crazy things he did in the past, his complex got in the way in the middle of his hearing and he got out of the courtroom while proclaiming salvation and deliverance and marched his way to this very expensive hotel where he and his brigade of armed apostles holed up for the rest of the day, it was amusing.

You could tell that he was fond of expensive hotels, I feel like every time he gets pissed off and his complex takes over, he goes to a hotel checks in for free and messes up the place. The first time he acted up in public I was in manila too, it was like four in the morning when these two girls roused me from sleep in my apartment room to watch the news that some crazy soldier took a hotel by arms, what scared them was that the hotel wasn’t far from our place. I don’t exactly remember what I did until noon that day, I probably went back to bed because I couldn’t have stayed awake so long a time on a sunday morning, I remember it was a sunday morning. What I can recall was that I started going hungry that sunday afternoon and I took a walk down makati avenue to look for someplace to eat but the whole avenue was empty and everything was closed like some ghost street, I did walk down straight to the hotel where they had all the army as sitting ducks to see the whole thing up close but the road was closed about two blocks to the place. Anyway I ended up eating in some goddam noodle shop which was very expensive, the only thing that made me feel better was that this expensive bakery I found on the way back was also closing early and they had everything half the price, so I had good loaves til the next morning.

Anyway, when this rebel soldier holed himself up in a hotel this time, he mustn't have noticed about the sword of damocles above him and the army this time sent a tank down to the hotel lobby to get rid of him, he did stop though. Though this soldier is named trillanes the 4th, which means there are three more persons in his ascendants with the same name, and hopefully they don't share the same disorder.

Forget Beowulf

My cousins went watching this beowulf movie last thursday night, I didn’t watch with them though, I wasn’t exactly too excited about the movie, I’ve probably heard this beowulf story before in some english literature class way back then that I forgot, I could have watchd it all over again if I were still in that class and save myself from reading a lot of words for homework.

Anyway my cousins went watching this movie with this guy who’s a very close friend of my older cousin, they both used to watch movies together but this older cousin of mine found himself some job in maryland and his friend would now go asking us instead. But his friend is very distracting when he’s watching a movie because he talks a lot about what he gets to feel about the story, and you could hear him laugh or get so soft and touchy with everything that’s happening in the movie even if he’s at two or three seats away, he gets on your nerves sometimes. I didn’t join them not because of him about him getting all too goddam emotional inside the theater, but I wasn’t exactly so crazy about the movie in the first place. He’s a very nice guy though, he’s always so terribly nice and soft to almost anybody that he can’t make much enemies that way.

Besides I had to save some of my dough so that I could buy peter this tie for his birthday yesterday, he invited me over for dinner with some of his friends at this classy italian restaurant but then I arrived late around past eight when everybody was almost done eating, I had to sit beside this big classmate of ours from high school because he was the only one still eating and he probably will be even after I will be done myself, everybody knows he eats a lot. The food was good but I didn’t eat much and I declined some beers from peter too, though he didn’t believe me. I just went outside for a stick of cigarette and it was from the outside that I saw the restaurant had a sushi bar, though funny it was italian, I knew sushi was going to be expensive so I just had to eat all over again, and the wasabi was so goddam hot that I ended up having some beers to cool down my nostrils, wasabi feels like it clears my nasal passage like alcohol without anything coming out of my nose. I had six and a half bottles for the night when I didn't even plan on drinking anything, the one and a half bottle came from the big classmate I was sitting with because he didn’t felt like drinking.

Blame the beer on the wasabi.

The Village Council

I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact

It was the holidays for the dead again and yesterday was the longest time I've spent sitting inside a cemetery over my grandfather's grave, they gave me this job for the holiday since nobody was up to it this year, I didn't much to do over my grandfather's grave though, I didn't have a book or anything and I all I had for the rest of the day was hamburgers since it was the only thing I could keep on buying inside the cemetery. The hamburger people were only there in the cemetery because there were a lot of the living coming around the place for the dead's holiday, you couldn't make business from hamburgers with dead people around you from the rest of the year though. And the weather that day went from sunny to raining to sunny again, and it almost drove me crazy from sitting there too much, like i began to have thoughts of starting my own telephone company, I knew it was crazy but I still thought of it anyway.

I got back home last night and decided to buy some chicken and chopped pork innards for dinner across the block from home, maybe after having too much hamburgers for the day. They didn't have much people inside the restaurant so I sat by the table facing the road, I didn't feel like sitting in the middle while the whole restaurant is empty and be the center of everything. From where I sat I could see some people setting off fireworks, it wasn't just because of the dead's holiday but we had these national elections some days ago and they were probably so goddam happy they won. This wasn't an election for president or governor or something but it was for these councilmen that run the little communities we call barangay that is scattered around the country a thousandfold, it is something like the village council that runs the smaller community affairs of the government, and because its with the government, they're probably using community taxes to put up those fireworks.

Anyway running for a village council or barangay is one pretty fierce race here because its not like some big scale elections like voting for a mayor were somebody runs against somebody living on the other end of the city and they got the whole population in between to convince to put them to mayorship. Village council elections are closed to a small neighborhood that council wannabes are up against with other wannabes just living across the street, and some want it so badly that it brings out the neighborhood clans fighting for power. Think of it as a pen where two alpha male silverbacks are stuck in for mating season with their hormones charging to overdrive.

And they've got a pretty small electorate that one goddam vote matters like hell to them, like from work I have to walk through three different village council jurisdictions but the ones I belong to at home even sent their propaganda papers as far to my work desk, they're probably are doing a good job back home but hell I didn't vote anyway.