have a nice day

Sons of the River

2011-05-23T22:39:00.004+08:00

My cousin decided to get married next week. if you know her, you'd say that she is one beautiful lady and so nice that she was probably pulled out from a girl monastery to drive a lot of men crazy, and now she is about to break all their hearts.

But the guy whom she gave her hand in marriage, which to everybody's surprise, is exactly the inverse incarnation of her values, thus the metaphor of marrying her is like winning a lottery, because like how a lottery goes, anybody can win it by chance and regardless of anything.

I'm also not quite happy about her choice, her fiance has a reputation for smoking too much, drinking too much and is magnificently prone to bar fights like everything is on defcon1 whenever he is drinking with other strangers. He has a ten year old son too but it isn't much of an excess baggage because the mother took the kid with her anyway. My cousin is pretty stuck to her decision even when I gave my thoughts about the whole thing, she is in love and people in love can't seem to think straight, they'd listen to your advice carefully then thank you for it but later do things otherwise. Its their life anyway, I've seen how it works on my end before.

Anyway this is all about some incident that the couple had last weekend, I was at home past midnight last friday night when my cousin sent me a sms message if I could accompany her to check on her fiance, she said he wasn't home yet from this strip club with his friends. It was a week before their wedding and everybody can say that her fiance must be on a farewell party to bachelor life, so I tried to convince my cousin not to gatecrash into the strip club because it is just a rite of passage of manhood which she should know. But my cousin insisted on going even if she had to go alone by herself, maybe because there wasn't anything much to say farewell to since her fiance has lived his bachelor life to the fullest anyway.

It was unlike my cousin to be insisting on something so badly, you couldn't tell if she was worried or anything because she kept giggling. I couldn't leave my cousin alone to go into a strip club to spy on her fiance too, so I had ariel tag along so that if we went there as a crowd of three, we all could look like that we're going to waste ourselves up.

My cousin drove us to the strip club since it was her idea anyway, her fiance greeted us at the door and he looked delighted like hell. He offered me and ariel a private room but we declined because it was all too embarrassing, all me and ariel did was sit at the corner and settled for beers while my cousin went about her goddam business about being in this goddam strip club. Her finace explained to us that they are just there to have a couple bottles of beer over this deep fried pork thighs with pork skin that taste so great because nobody in town cooks it the way the strip club does. We could have thought of the same great excuse ourselves, just because its a strip club its not all dancing girls but great food too, you just couldn't taste it that much because your senses are focused someplace else.

Its like saying that I'm smoking right now because I'm building a minature scale of the great wall using cigarette boxes.

I also found out that ariel already had a dozen beers when we picked him up, he looked tired and the waitress passed him a hot towel rolled on a plate. With all that talk about tasty deep fried pork thighs and pork skin, ariel almost ate the goddam towels because they looked like steaming chinese spring rolls in the dark.

My cousin soon left afterwards, me and ariel stayed behind hoping to get a glimpse of the girls over at the catwalk as a consolation for everything but hell even the shows were all over. And my cousin's fiance had to complete his program for the night by almost getting himself into a bar fight again. There was this room also full of drunk vikings right behind them whom he probably annoyed, his strip club catchphrase he kept yelling was "son of a river" and the river he referred to was polluted like an open sewer which could literally mean crap, and I suppose if he were yelling the whole line over and over, it can provoke other people, vikings or macho sapiens hearing they have dirty rivers for mothers. The alpha male of the other group approached and sat beside him introduced himself and bought him beer, it didn't look all too friendly. Their conversation seemed harmless if they weren't drunk strangers and you could feel their tone was poking into the other's temperament waiting who would break first.

While they drank they had their boys flanked right behind them in attack formation, me and ariel still sat in our corner which was now in the middle of both camps and had a great view of everything in case war breaks out. The alpha male of the other group noticed us and and said

Who are these two? your henchmen?

He didn't actually say henchmen, I just translated it from a local slang for loyal henchmen that guard and follow you for money or food, just like dogs. My cousin's fiance replied that we were with him and we're just new to the place. That just sent me on death row now that the other war party knows there is a stool pigeon on the other camp, ariel on the contrary will be happy fighting just about anybody. Then he replied.

Get these two beers, they aren't drinking anything there

I again declined but ariel nudged my knee and whispered to take it, because both of us are drinking everything tonight for free.

We didn't get to finish our last bottle though, my cousin's fiance gave us a hint that we needed to leave the place, it was a good idea because he had to keep himself in one piece until next week for the wedding. They all went home while me and ariel sat on the side of the road for a piece of smoke, we didn't ask for it but the god of war was five minutes late with his goddam miracle. In a snap, all of the electricy around went out including inside the strip club and everything was pitch black at 3 in the morning. Hell it should have came earlier when all of us were still at the strip club, everything could have gone flying and smashing and you'd find me under the couch when the lights came back.

Chaotic Facelift

2011-04-27T23:34:00.000+08:00

What kept me busy during the lent weekend

Gaddafi on the Finish Line

2011-03-28T21:52:00.003+08:00

When you're having jogging as your regular exercise, you'd probably been to these charitable events they call fun run where you get to jog with a lot of people and have an excuse to give money for a cause, like dog rabies, nuclear fallouts, save the artic, end of days... the list could go on because they can think about anything that highways are closed more often for people running for something. I could run for a cause or two, considering the creativity people come up with to run for, there'd be some cause that would be of my concern soon enough.

I have been jogging regularly for a couple of years now but I always want do it alone. Peter has been asking me to join a couple of fun runs with him before but I never did, he probably knows that I wouldn't want to be in the middle of a crowd where people in running shoes go socially phony with everybody else at the starting line. But last week I gave thought of this coming fun run he told me where the pot money would be donated to the fire department, peter works part time driving a fire truck and I used to work in the fire department office, and I know how badly the whole system needs a good funding the same way peter feels about his fire truck.

So I gave it a try.

I got at the starting point a little past five in the morning, peter was surprised to see me show up at the scene thinking I was wasted the night before after having some beers but I only had four bottles, I felt pretty much fine that morning anyway.

The fire marshal gave the opening speech since the whole fun run thing is about fire trucks and burning houses and I think he should work on his speech tone when he talked because he sounded like a total drag and nobody was listening. I knew nobody was listening because we were all caught by surprise when he just shot his blanks from his pistol to start running without even hearing him make the countdown, people just scampered and pushed me over to run. I have jogged for years and I know you had to accelerate slow to get yourself running for kilometers, but at this fun run everybody bursted into top speed all together on one hell of a stampede of their lives. Me and peter were supposed to run together but I lost him and I had to forget about momentum and sprinted shoulder to shoulder with everybody else.

About half a kilometer later, somebody behind me yelled

Hah... this is actually exhausting!

I was relieved that they started bailing out that early, the others who couldn't fake running anymore gave up when the route went up on a flyover. I never jogged on an uphill slope before but it reminded me of how hard gravity works.

The road to the finish line became less swarming with running people thereon, I could spread my arms and spin and wouldn't hit anybody anymore, but I wouldn't do that, I'd look very stupid because I was on the middle of the road and a lot of cars stuck on the other side are watching me. Even running on the middle of the road was stupid enough, I'd end up in other people's stories how I got them late to work that morning by screwing traffic.

I ran peacefully to the finish line where peter was already waiting , he was pumping his fist trying to say hurry up or something like that. I shrugged my shoulders because nobody was catching up or cutting on my lane. You see if you were on the first 150 people who got to the finish line, they'd give you a shirt for all the trouble and sweat you made that morning. I knew I made it to the list so I didn't hurry, I wasn't making a headcount but it was some kind of an intuition I had.

I was the 123rd runner to finish but I was surprised that they wouldn't give me my prize of a shirt.

I just made it to the first 150!

They said that they'd only give 120 pieces to men and the other 30 to women.

Nobody said that the other 30 didn't need any pair of testicles to finish!

In fact none of their goddam promotions weeks before ever said anything about that at all. It must have been a disclaimer clause the size of ants at the bottom.

The ladies shirt can fit me, I wear small sizes!

But they wouldn't budge like barnacles on a rock and I gave up arguing because I was running out of air after running all those goddam kilometers for nothing. All they gave me was some paper for a trophy I could show off that I finished the whole route. Hell it didn't even have my name on it, so I just wrote muammar gaddafi and maybe to cheer this libyan megalomaniac up after his whole government is starting to go down the drain.

Peter later told me that his whole laptime is at 23 minutes, mine at 26 minutes and his wife at 44 minutes, he was pretty much after beating the clock. The couple asked me if I wanted to go grab something to eat for breakfast, but gaddafi wasn't so hungry after missing out on the goddam shirt.

Biblical Bloopers

2011-02-03T22:02:00.008+08:00

I have finally finished this book good omens I got last october, it's a good novel actually, and its pretty funny. Its about a devil and an angel who were sent to earth during the bible's version of the creation of the universe in order to tempt or guide mankind according to which side these beings were on.

The devil and the angel eventually became friends after 6000 years on the job because they got used to seeing each other for that long. And both of them also developed a fondness for earthly pleasures, the devil had a thing for a good ride, music and wine while the angel liked a lot of books and tea. Then judgement day is coming and both of them now doesn't want to part with their great life on earth and they try everything to stop the four horsemen, the armies of heaven and earth and the end of days.

There was this one part in the novel about the angel loving all sorts of books, hence he kept a small bookshop for himself. He'd love to collect bible misprints too which were enumerated in the novel's footnotes, because for an angel it was like poking fun on your superiors. I had a good laugh about the idea of a bible gone wrong but it wasn't until I finished reading the novel when I read through some internet article that those bible misprints in the novel does exists! And they are picking up quite a fortune at ebay, probably because people would want to have hard copies of god making mistakes, and no amount of miracle can save him from these books.

Say what? Some of the more famous bible misprints include:

The Wicked Bible (1631): In exodus 20:14 the word "not" was omitted making the seventh commandment read "Thou shall commit adultery". Though never mentioned, the printers were probably burned at stake. A copy now sells at $89,500.

Unrighteous Bible (1653): In corinthians 6:9 the word "not" was omitted before the word "inherit" thus read "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of god?"

Sin On Bible (1716): John 8:11 reads "Go and sin on more" rather than "Go and sin no more".

The Fool's God (1763): In Psalm 14:1 the word "no" was omitted before "god" making the line read as "the fool hath said in his heart there is a god".

Judas Bible (1611): In mathew 26:36 judas tells jesus after the last supper "Sit ye here while I go yonder and pray" which should have been jesus' line to judas.

The Standing Fishes (1806): In ezekiel 47:10 "fishers" was replaced by "fishes" making the line read as "And it shall come to pass, that the fishes shall stand upon it from engedi even unto eneglaim".

Denial Bible (1792): In luke 22:34, philip instead of peter is the apostle who would deny jesus.

Vinegar Bible (1717): The chapter heading for Luke 20 reads "The parable of the vinegar" instead of "The parable of the vineyard". A copy now sells at $5,000

Affinity Bible (1927): Contains a table of family affinities that includes the line "A man may not marry his grandmother's wife".

Printers Bible (1612): In Psalm 119:161 "printers" replaces "princes" to read "Printers have persecuted me without a cause" (the bible got this one right)

Arachnophilia

2011-01-28T21:20:00.012+08:00

I've kept my black widow spider for a month now, and the other worse thing that could happen besides from getting bitten is the goddam thing now laying eggs inside the jar ready to multiply. It must have been pregnant and ate its husband for breakfast when I caught it a month ago, and I feel like playing god when I got the natural order of things and a thousands of lives right on the top of my hand if these eggs hatch and escape and these spiders mess up our local ecosystem because of me.

Then neurotoxin would become a new household name here and backwater towns will have invented a new name for a spider demon god for their silly superstition after all those spider bite deaths, and maybe some unlucky indigenous species will get extinct to kingdom come with the black widow spiders now on the food chain.

It reminds me about this crazy scientist who bred european bees with african bees perhaps on some kind of experiment on honey, but instead he got himself these killer bees that go berzerk on people for even just staring at their hive funny. His experiment got loose and the goddam insects are swarming up and killing people to the north american continent, like a biblical plague moses came up with that caught ramses with his pants down a thousand years earlier.

I really think you should get rid of it, seriously

My brother kept asking me to do the spider and our family a favor the past few days, he's worried like hell and I couldn't blame him, he's the most likely collateral damage to any accident I end up with at the house. Take that goddam hepatitis virus that thrashed my system more than a year ago, he was the first person who caught it from me afterwards and he'd probably be the first spider fatality if I don't get bit by my spider first.

My spider has laid about four egg sacs so far though I only make it keep just one egg sac at a time, usually the most recent it laid so that I can have more time to think about breeding it before it hatches.

The goddam truth is, I just have this silly penchant to keep all things nonsense and unusual, like coke cans and these stupid thoughts I've written all these years, and what makes my black widow so unusual that death is just a spider bite away.

Kids, do not try this at home.

Jar of Death

2011-01-01T01:32:00.009+08:00

If there is a god, he/she probably wants me dead on my birthday, because it sent me a black widow spider crawling up my shelf to get the job done, and nothing can say death more discreetly than a black widow's venom, which is more so powerful like scotch whiskey that a rattlesnake's venom would only taste like cheap beer.

Everybody was in doubt about the spider being a black widow because they are only endemic to north america and its unlikely this one is here for a christmas vacation or for my birthday. But if you were listening to your biology class, black widow spiders are best described as jet black spiders with a red hour glass mark on their underside.

And here's a very clear shot of my birthday visitor.

Unless you are color blind and your idea of an hour glass looks like a hammer and a sickle, it can be just one of those obscure spiders messing the corners with cobwebs. I did consider it to be those occasional freaks of nature accidentally born with an hour glass birthmark and for the other spiders to make fun of, that was how I thought it was when a second black widow came out from the other corner to say hi.

How they got here was the bigger whodunit, but since I guess this was the work of some gods to get rid of me, they could have sent them through some portal from hell because those gods can open up one from anywhere. They could have sent a pair of poison dart frogs, stinging wasps or box jellyfishes to do the job, but it would take less than five minutes for the frogs to hold back croaking, or buzzing and get caught, much less have the jellyfishes fit into my drinking glass.

I already got the message once, they didn't have to repeat it, so I just pressed flat the other black widow and sent it back to hell. I kept the other one inside a jar and it freaked my old man with me carrying that thing around. Though he still had his own reservations, he said the spider could be one of those cheap con artists of their kind, impersonating a deadly specie so that the other spiders wont go pushing it around if they knew what the red hourglass meant. If it is just a phony black widow then it already did a great job because it got me into the trouble of catching bugs for it while it sits on the bottom of the jar in peace, but at least I had evolution happening under my shelves shorter than a thousand years.

One way to conclude that if the goddam thing is a black widow is have it bite somebody and see what happens. I could take a shot at it, for all I know maybe I'd turn into spiderman overnight at the first bite with all those spider powers and everything. I'd bet I'd get to have the black widow powers too, that I get the chance to eat up every girl I screw with.

Every Damn Day

2010-12-10T22:22:00.005+08:00

There's this really good bakeshop at the airport that serves very cheap japanese noodle soup, I don't know if it tastes the least japanese because it doesn't even have anything japanese to call it like hiroshima pokemon or yakuza but I don't give a crap, it does taste good at five in the morning when I take the first flight out of town when my jaw and throat are too sleepy to be working on solid food at that time before daybreak.

I was about to get my soup at the airport yesterday morning but I bumped to this girl at the airport and funny, it was exactly two years ago when we were on the same flight.

(2008)

It reminded me that it was her birthday too, hell I have this strange knack for remembering dates. I forgot all about the goddam soup and ended with a conversation with her, I swear I was interested in her two years ago: she's pretty, she's nice and she could carry a great conversation, she's those girls who'd ask questions and listen, not like some girls who'd ask you about something for the heck of the conversation and pretend to listen and end up asking the same stupid question 15 minutes later, that almost killed me. Anyway that was two years ago, now she's married with a little daughter and that sucks, father time does rips reality to pieces with his scythe as he treads along.

I only brought one bag when I left home this time, and its those bags with wheels and a long handle to drag it with that makes you look like an all expensive stupid traveler all together. Hell I didn't want me looking like that, I only took this bag with wheels because I knew it was the christmas season and I feel traffic will be screwed like a clogged drainpipe that I might end up walking with it if I get stuck up anywhere on the road.

Traffic was pretty smooth to my hotel anyway, at least according to my directions to the taxi because the driver wasn't so familiar with the roads. He wasn't faking it though, earlier I heard him call some lady over his mobile phone, his wife probably and they were talking in some kind of remote dialect that sounded like it came very very far from here, I couldn't even make out their conversation no matter how I listened to it. I only heard 'christmas' and '19th' and it must be some big fat lie that goes like 'I'll be home for christmas on the 19th' that you'd tell your wife while working away from home when you wont even make it on christmas eve.

I gave the taxi an extra 20 buck for the ride, he didn't ask for it but I could be paying maybe another 50 bucks more on the taxi meter if I left him to figure out the roads by himself.

I had a lot of things to finish at work but I was able to pull everything off on schedule, and I had more than enough time to kill for the rest of the day, what I thought I'd do was get myself something new to wear for christmas, there's enough christmas sale to go around anyway.

There was one shirt I saw two weeks ago that I wanted to buy now, it had bold letters up front that said

EVERY DAMN DAY

Which said everything I felt in general, and almost in whatever order you'd say those three words. I didn't buy it two weeks ago before I flew back home because I felt fine and happy in a strange way, but now I'm back to being depressed and miserable that I had to have that shirt.

I got another shirt which I bought 5 minutes after I saw it, it had a silhouette of a stormtrooper up front and I have yet to have a star wars shirt for myself. It only had the stormtrooper up front and it didn't have any words or anything, and people would get the point that you like star wars with that shirt on and nothing more, unless you bought that shirt by mistake, or you're actually wearing the whole stormtrooper armor and everything and they'd call you a star wars retard.

He Almost Hit Me

2010-10-26T23:31:00.005+08:00

One of the joys of having a facebook account is the chance to proclaim to the whole on-line cyber public on your page about what the hell you are doing and thinking at that instance to everyone interested or not about your miserable life, like what you just ate, what stupid thing you just saw or how you hate the goddam world that it would just blow up right about now.

I never joined facebook so that I could openly publish to the world my thoughts whatsoever, and for so long I was those unsociable solitary facebooker who never said anything on their homepage, until I finally wrote this thought three weeks ago:

He almost hit me.

Then came these comments from everybody else

Who did?

Some foreign guy, but he didn't do it on purpose, he probably forgot all about it too.

Did you see his face?

Yeah, but I can't remember, his face was a mess.

Some foreigners can be so rude, they'd love to make a scene.

But this guy wasn't so hard-headed at all.

What?? How did it happen? I hope you are okay now.

He was in a hurry to go down the ground floor, probably running from someone. A lady even yelled at him, but I guess he didn't hear it. its ok he didn't bump into anybody. A security guard caught up with him after, but it was nice of him not to resist, in fact he barely moved a muscle.

PUAHAHAHA!!!!!! WOW..

He barely moved?

Yeah, like I said, he wasn't so hard-headed.

Haha I wish I saw him too.

Amo rah mining it quote moh!? (is this what your quote was supposed to mean?)

The french proverb? "a leap of faith and an open mind will astound everybody else"

dunno, can you apply it?

Maybe, in a way.

This happened in a mall by the way. The foreigner also spilled something on the floor, it looked like dressed chicken. he left a great mess on the floor.

Did he steal those?

No I dont think so, the groceries were at the ground floor, he came from the 3rd floor. And I was pretty sure those were his.

Drum tana baH! sa bawbaw sya halin pero daw dalum gd sa ubos... (this is so complicated! he was from above but it all ended up in the ground floor (?) )

Drn na intrigue ako, so anung nangyari? (Darn, I am intrigued by this, so what happened)

You could make out a little picture about what happened from all the conversation, but the truth is, I was just playing rhetorically with words and see what everybody thinks about the little picture the whole conversation made. The bleeding truth goes like this, and I mean bleeding.

I was going to watch a movie again at ermita at manila like what I always do every month, I was looking at this big TV screen in this mall where they had the movie schedules shown, it took me a while to stare because I couldn't make up my mind what the hell to watch. Then suddenly I heard a lady scream, when I looked into that direction I saw this man falling from above and landed headfirst somewhere on my left, I'd say about 5 meters more or less, with this terrible bone crunching sound . His head was smashed and he spilled his brains all over the floor. I felt hell froze me all over, I started to take a few steps back thinking another body might drop next, then I waited if there were gunshots or explosions but then nothing followed and people were already running and making a stampede at the exit. I pulled my myself up and started to come closer, I swear I could feel ice inside my shoes. He was a big guy I'd say around 40, he was in an orange shirt and shorts but some said it was red, I was already getting disoriented like marijuana. They said he was a foreigner but his face was scrambled, I could see his goddam brain like a salad, they were pink and once piece was so near me that I looked at it closely, it was like a small piece of pink dressed chicken all moist and sticky. I pulled out my mobile phone to take a shot of him but my hands were trembling, then that was when the security whistled at me to go beat it, show's over or something, he was carrying the sale banner from the marks and spencer store to cover the poor schlep in pieces. With my mobile phone still on my hand I called up my old man.

You wouldn't believe what I saw

Now let us go back to my facebook thought, scroll the window back up and read it all over again, this time knowing what the hell is going on.

The french proverb was actually shortened from my version of 'A leap of faith from the third floor will leave you with an open mind once you hit the ground headfirst, and it will shock and astound everybody else around'

And by the way, it is not french, that foreigner was.

Slippers

2010-09-21T22:37:00.009+08:00

My slippers broke down after serving my feet for so long and making footsteps with me for the last hundred miles. It broke at that part where the Y shaped strap held the whole thing through the gap in your big toe, I couldn't fix it, I've tried tying the whole thing with a cloth rope but I looked like a walking screwball with a big knot tied on one of my feet.

I wasn't in the mood to buy a new one yet, I had a lot of old slippers though, widowed slippers that also had their other working half broken or lost. I just took one slipper and paired it with another abandonned pair so that I just could have something to wear on the road even if their colors didn't match at all. What I was wearing on one feet was green and the other was black, the green slipper was overused too, I could feel the rubber under my left heel getting all too paper thin, like the ground was a breath close to my sole. I could feel my left foot and right foot from just each step I made, it made directions all too easier to remember.

I looked less of a screwball wearing two different slippers on the road than having one askew with a fancy knot, you could tell from the people looking down on your feet. It was maybe because the last couple of years ago expensive slippers started pouring into the fashion market and people treated them as goddam luxuries, even when they came in silly bright colors and different from its own other copy for the other foot, hell it made you look so metrosexually gay.

I wore slippers a lot since high school since that was what I could afford those days and I evolutionally got used to it. My mother complains a lot that I look hell sloppy with those things on, maybe it has something to do with seeing a persons feet with all the dirt he's gathered from where he had been going around for the day, and to think that they're cheap and wearing them in public makes you look poor all together. But with the expensive versions out with the fashion trash, it makes it all worse because people will look even more into your goddam dirty feet for whatever kind of slippers you're wearing.

It was funny because earlier this year my mother called me up from brazil asking if there was anything I wanted her to get me from there, aside from the usual coke in can. I asked if she could get me a pair of those fancy expensive slippers since they're all made in brazil and my mother is there anyway, they couldn't be so expensive anymore once you buy them at their doorstep, just like zebra skins from kenya or radioactive stones from hiroshima. So I ended up with a pair myself, but I had gotten used to the cheap slippers for almost like a lifetime and I was planning to have these brazillian pairs hung over my wall like a souvenir from my parents.

But I did try using them once though, because for all their goddam worth, they're just slippers anyway, its not like some dead lion whose head looks great on your wall and make stories that how it almost got your own head instead. My friends saw me with those slippers on and they said that they'd look authentic expensive brazilian slippers. I told them that my mother just got them from sidewalk vendors, which she actually did in brazil because they were sold almost in every alleyhole and gutterhole, I didn't say the sidewalks in brazil though, just to make them look cheap, in my sloppy kind of way.

Baronausea

2010-08-09T22:13:00.011+08:00

My sinus feels like exploding from the inside and giving me one hell of a headache.

I figured out that this must be because I swam for the longest time at boracay after five years and my sinus had not been used to being underwater, then I had myself flown up into the atmosphere when I took the plane back to manila a couple days ago, the sudden drop of pressure must have put my sinus into a goddam squeeze. It must be something like those bleeding nose syndromes those divers get after going back up to the sea level so fast. The weather hadn't been fine lately too, with all those rains and still the hot temperature and a lot of people getting sick about it, I was tired myself and I felt like getting sick too especially after I watched this very complicated movie 'inception' over the weekend which gave me a brain squeeze all together with my sinus. But all I got was just a runny nose, it was still a lot of trouble anyway because it was leaking like a broken faucet. I even figured it out while riding in the rail transit why phlegm in your nose is sticky, so that it wont drip down so easily, and give you enough time to pull out your goddam hankerchief. And at the rate that it leaked, I was carrying the hotel's toilet paper with me when I go out. The hotel didn't complain that the toilet paper rolls go missing every morning in my room anyway.

______________________________

I was betting on spain to win the football world cup last month, I don't watch football that much but I could tell that they had a pretty good line up for the world cup, they still had that torres guy who beat the crap out of all the other teams in the euro cup two years ago. I don't wager good money in sports games but if only I did, I shall be thanking the hell out of the spanish team because they did win the world cup. I was still happy they won, but the whole spanish people was going bonkers overnight, like they were betting with their lives on the game than just money, it was all over the news right after the games. The next day I was still watching the spanish channel over dinner because I wanted to see more of the spaniards going crazy over their world cup glory, or anything about the recent bull run festival which was as crazy anyway, but all they were showing was just some stupid cooking show where I could barely make out the spanish recipes. After a while I found out that all the three chefs were actually wearing the spanish football uniforms under their aprons, and that was when it hit me, I want one of those spanish football shirts too.

I found some of those football uniforms when I got here in manila, and I swear I could have bought a piece if not for my conscience giving me a whole lot of inceptions not to buy the goddam thing.

It is very expensive

It is very lightweight, the wind can slap my back cold anytime

I don't play football

I am not spanish

Puedo hablar apenas espanyol

Mere novelty

I must have made so much trouble with the store clerk asking for the sizes and spend so much time in the mirror thinking about buying it and not buy it in the end at all, she didn't look so annoyed though, I guess she got used to it after facing all sorts of customers everyday, I couldn't be the most annoying if I think about it that way. I could have bought it for our reunion in boracay weeks ago though, because it does look like those colorful beach costumes.

My Quantum of Solace

2010-07-28T22:59:00.008+08:00

A few months ago, my high school class decided to have a reunion at borcay which is some island up north and full of everything of what a beach should be, though I havent been there exactly 11 years next month but I could tell from every travel magazine that it is now the grand beach where you can find everything to do and everything spend your money with; below, above or near seawater.

I had some second thoughts about going because I will probably be busy with work, and I was never the sociable person worse being seen in a reunion, but anyway its been five years since I last swam in a beach and I wanted to go to one badly for a vacation too, so I decided last week that I'll drop by the place just for a night for our reunion. One night wouldn't seem so bad, its like semi-attending and being seen in less than half of the pictures later.

I got to this little town of caticlan by myself last friday which is nothing more than the town with the jump off point to boracay. They had a big ferry terminal which I swear wasn't there when I went through these roads I long forgot, and the terminal was really big that it left me staring inside the whole place so much, then one lady from the help desk came up to me and gave me a boracay for dummies book with a map and everything because I did look definitely lost. She handed the book without saying anything, she wasn't probably sure where I was from and I didn't say anything in return, to keep her guessing like hell at the back of her head. I did smile though, just not to be rude and all.

The book was half useful and half making me look like a tourist while I read it on the ferry and on my boracay cab ride onwards. The book listed every resort accordingly to the beachfront, but it was only half as useful because the passenger cabs I was taking are all running in this road further inland and you couldn't them beach resorts from there, I'd have to watch out for every goddam resort road sign and match it with the book before I cross the whole island coast to coast.

I got down from the cab when three different people got down themselves, the most passengers going down from my ride eversince I took it, so I reckon this must lead to a busy part of the beach and according to the boracay book, I was close enough to where my classmates where staying, I wanted a little walk anyway. I made it to the beachfront and hell it sure was busy, with all these peddlers selling all sorts of junk up close to my face, like disposable watches, plastic jewelries and little magnet trinkets to stick to your refridgerator to remind you've been to boracay. I ended up buying this gelato ice cream tin told me about, because it was just right there when I got on the beachfront too, I didn't get it why they call it gelato because as far as my taste buds tells me, it tastes like ice cream, maybe its how frenchmen call their ice cream or beach ice cream that melts so fast, or maybe 'got a leg' spelled backwards

I'll bet you a scoop that you tried spelling it in reverse and found gelatog instead.

Anyway my high school classmates had the third floor of the resort to themselves, I stayed with peter and his wife and he pulled off a bottle of tequila to start off with, because it was our high school reunion and that's what he does best those days. I didn't feel like drinking, I just took a shot and headed out to the beach half naked, in fact I was the only one who was going to hit the beach, everybody turned up in our room for tequila.

I felt awkward walking to the beach half naked, its been a while I did it in public, I could have ran like crazy but I could have made a scene with my classmates looking and all, and if we were still in high school I'd swear I'd run, because they'd throw me out into the water during high school whenever we'd go to the beach, with my clothes and all, but I guess they're all too old for it now. But when I got myself to the water, it was just so goddam amazing, I mean from where I stood in the water, I could see the whole island at 5 in the afternoon and it was goddam pretty, cristine reyes kind of pretty. I didn't know I missed beach for so long that I was smiling by myself even underwater and even how salty it was, good thing all my classmates had tequila back in my room else they'd see what a nuthead I turned up in seawater.

I came back to my room after an hour and a half and everybody there was on their third tequila bottle and I joined them, after that we had a dinner but all everybody had each was a piece of chicken and a lot of beers, we went singing in a karaoke bar and had more beers, then went to a club to dance and had rhum coke for a change, and that's when I woke up at 6:30 in the morning my bed. I was in my sleepwear yet I still had my watch on and my whole stuff in a mess while peter and his wife were sleeping on the other bed.

I had pizza beside our hotel before going all the way back home, I had a whole plate because I feel it will be another long trip. The pizza was terribly good for a very fancy restaurant, they arranged a little plate, fork, knife and all but the pizza crust was so thin like taco it breaks whenever you sliced it, and when you hold it by the end it also breaks because the toppings are too heavy, I looked like a mess while I ate but I was alone anyway, I didn't join the reunion breakfast my classmates had someplace else. The pizza was too damn much and I couldn't finish it even how goddam good it was so I had it packed and left it over to peter, then left the island.

I wish I could go on vacations like these more often.

3D-K9

2010-05-22T21:39:00.007+08:00

I got four of these chinaman's breed of chickens from my grand aunt a couple of months ago, it was a good start for me to raise them because I had been clinically depressed with animal companionship that I was stuck with raising a stupid virtual pet at facebook for the longest time. I was able to grow a whole flock of chickens at our backyard though, and it was more entertaining than those stimulated internet pets because they laid a lot of eggs for so many breakfasts and are one hell of a nuisance, especially the alpha rooster that crows like a broken engine from the morning onwards, maybe to remind me of the unpredictability of live animals, that you can't tell them what to do or when to turn them off and when to shut up.

I also kept a hawk chick which I caught at the cemetery a month ago and hopefully is a reincarnation of somebody nearby and bound for a terrible afterlife at my house. I started gaining interest in the hawk chick than the chickens with thoughts that it will grow into a bird of prey scaring the hell out of our dogs and maybe some of the house mice and maybe shut the chickens up too. It died after a month though, carnivorous son of a hawk died after eating spoiled meat, the hawk was about the size of a large retarded potato and I had to chip off raw meat from the freezer a bit at a time for its meals, and I goddam left my meat block out of the freezer overnight that it got ruined. I didn't smell the spoiled meat because I was hand feeding the hawk chick beside the turtle pen, which also smelled like an outhouse.

______________________

I flew back to manila yesterday, I brought along this pygmy book I got last month, its about some kid who works as a government spy and goes undercover to the US as some exchange student. The whole idea for the story could have been great, being in the eyes of an ignorant communist but the soviet kid in the book narrates it in broken russian english that is more of a headache getting to understand what the hell he is talking about. It could have been fun hearing him talk like that in thick russian accent than read it on paper, like liam neeson and harrison ford in that submariner movie 'K-9 widowmaker' greeting each other with komrad all the time like crazy when they're supposed to be having english accents even in galaxies far far away like what they did in their star wars roles. Goddam K-9 movie is boring if you've seen it, they had submarines set in the cold war and hell they didnt get to blow up anything in the movie.

Since I already stopped drinking, I had been watching movies every month here in manila, last night I decided to watch these futuristic 3D movies for the first time, I went to see shrek and when I bought my tickets the clerk asked what seat in the theater I'd like to take, I could still hear neeson and ford at the back of my head yakking all those rusky accent together with the book that I yelled at the clerk

K-9!

It was hell expensive but it came with free popcorns and a soda, I didn't know it did so I already had a bag of my own to go with 3D and I was asking the popcorn man at the counter if I could have water instead of the soda but the popcorn man gave me the soda still, hell it made my hands full with twice as much junkfood, making people think that I was out to go have a grand picnic while on 3D.

Them 3D movies are cool though, I never thought that I'd get to see 3D movies outside disneyland before but now they come in the neighborhood theaters every week. The whole movie felt like those shrek cartoons were jumping to bump my nose all the time, and it made me cry too, I mean the goddam glasses were a pain to my eyeballs together with the small light coming from this girl's mobile phone in front of me, she kept looking at it all thoughout the movie and it always disturbed by field of view. With her glasses on, maybe her mobile phone was also 3D.

Nerdsville

2009-10-12T23:23:00.005+08:00

My liver doctor still has the red light on me drinking liquor for more than a month already, even when Im here in manila and liver doctor couldn't see me from far away. There's not much to do after work here now that I have to hold myself back from drinking, it feels like denying an goddam itch from an ant bite for so long, and all I could do without beers in my hotel room is watch cable TV and hope that not all channels are showing trash. Luckily my parents also arrived in manila yesterday from some other country and I just joined them for dinner, because they're sure to buy me dinner in some fancy restaurant than me alone in my room eating fastfood in boxes.

Anyway I met my parents up at some mall and they were busy talking about all the crap they went through during their trip but I wasn't listening that much, my mind was thinking about this toy convention I saw over at the lobby of the mall. I was interested to see it because I still keep a couple of hobbies myself like star wars and gundam model kits but then there will be nerds who will live by these pop cultures like a cult, and as far as conventions go, nothing breaks the nerdscale than these toy and comic book freakfest conventions.

I checked out the lobby after dinner, the place was a bazaar of everything for a nerd's amusement, there were small booths around and a race track in the middle where nerds take their toy cars and recreate their own formula one experience at the size of their palms, there were a lot of people buying little things around but there'd always be somebody in some kind of halloween costume who'd pass by to keep the convention strange enough. I found one booth that sold gundam model kits and I saw this kit that I was thinking of buying but not anytime sooner yet. I asked the booth keeper who was dressed like spiderman for the price and I found out that it was four hundred bucks cheaper that what I saw at ebay, but spiderman told me that they'd be closing in about five minutes so I just went around to see more nerds in costume before everything closes. But I was thinking what the hell, I will buy the model kit soon anyway. I went back to spiderman's booth and he was there talking to some kids dressed like the fellowship of the rings out for nuisance, he excused himself and went to me instead because his spider sense probably told him that I was more serious in buying something. He had packed up though so I asked him if could still get the model kit at convention price tomorrow because I just flew here from iloilo this morning, he then gave me the address to his shop which was just a couple of blocks away.

I went to my parents hotel this morning, sent them off to the airport and headed to the place. It was on the second floor of some dull building with no signs or anything, even the stairs were hidden at the back of this long garage, it looked like your friend's apartment when you knocked at the place for the first time. But when I got in, it was a goddam sport equipment shop where they'd sell tennis balls and ping pong paddles, I didn't want to ask the clerk for model kits because all the athlete balls around made it look like the wrong place, but I did ask him anyway.

It turns out that they do sell model kits and I told the clerk I was there for something from yesterdays convention, he asked me who I was looking for so I said

I don't know, he looked like spiderman

he stood up and yelled to this other guy working at the back

Hey, did marvin dress like spiderman to the convention yesterday?

The other guy yelled back that he did, and none of them were so surprised with it though, it must be the things you'd get to see often when running a hobby shop.

I bought the model kit and thanks to spiderman I was able to save four hundred bucks, but I still cant spend it on beers so I just decided to watch a movie a while ago, its been a while since I watched here in manila. Anyway this 'surrogates' movie was about some alternate future where people become so clinically depressed that they use personal robots to run their daily lives while in bed. It sounded like the whole scenario evolved from your habit of making a virtual life in those facebook games. It was a good movie anyway, because most of the theaters were showing bleeding movies about love, not the kind nerds would probably understand.

Crabs Crossing

2009-09-28T22:36:00.008+08:00

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.

I could have stomped the crab dead to a roadkill 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 to crab heaven, 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.

There were so many new sights to see here, 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

2009-09-12T01:20:00.005+08:00

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

2009-09-09T21:50:00.012+08:00

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. The doctor could now tell a lot about my fever more from those blood results than me figuring out things by myself the past few days.

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 just full of numbers and integers but to him it seemed like an encoded distress call from my liver, 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 take longer to read through my blood results and press around my body a lot and couldn't figure out what the hell was 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 contaminated food from wherever, he said that there's no need to worry about it and my liver will just return to normal, just eat more of anything and get more sleep and drink some vitamin tablets.

The doctor's advice sounded pretty much like to wait until I shed my yellow skin, I feel fine though so I just went back to work with these yellow eyes, It was pretty obvious because people keep on yelling about my eyes, they would go on asking me how I feel and all that crap and I tell them I'm busy or I feel like having a cup of black coffee, but I tell them stupid answers that its from seeing 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?

2009-08-06T22:48:00.010+08:00

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

2009-06-25T10:36:00.014+08:00

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

2009-05-29T21:47:00.002+08:00

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

2009-04-11T21:52:00.008+08:00

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.

Facebook

2009-03-31T22:32:00.002+08:00

Micoy emailed me last january 2008 about joing this site facebook, I didn't know what the hell it was so I checked it out thinking that maybe I could listen to music there or buy garbage at an auction but I only found out that it was just another goddam social playground in cyberspace. I abandoned my facebook account for a year like some cruel mother if not for one of my high school classmate who found out about it and invited me to his own account. I don't know how the facebook system works but right after I responded, a couple dozen more people found out about my account. I hate crowds even if they come in cyberspace but what the hell, people might thnk that I am a goddam snob if I go on avoiding people even if they're just colorful pixels on the screen.

I noticed in facebook that there a lot of these personality survey tests that people love taking a lot, like which dead celebrity does your vanity suits well or what animal do you act like if you greet people by sniffing out their anuses, and people would love to brag about their results. I am hitch hiking on the bandwagon anyway so I took up some of the tests myself and here's what facebook has to say about me.

What kind of gun are you?
Explosive

What kind of explosive are you?
Nuclear bomb

How dangerous are you?
You were born to kill

What kind of killer are you?
Crazy serial psychopath

How evil are you?
You're so damn evil

How likely are you going to hell?
100%

Is your life worth living?
You life sucks

What swear word are you?
FUCK

And there's one more survey asked in the language of saddam hussein which I took anyway

هاتكون انسان ناجح و وهتلاقي شغل و لا لا
انت انسان ناجح

I don't know what the hell it meant but it showed a picture of a wasted man who looks drunk and I think I'm only natural in answering these surveys. Facebook might send me to some screwball institute at this rate that I'm answering, but boy it was real funny, I was laughing at bed last night thinking how I turned up at facebook and I was still laughing the first thing I got up this morning, I thought I was just dreaming when I heard my father and brothers were panicking like hell about some bomb blowing up and thinking I was still answering some psychotic questions at facebook, but some bomb did blow up just a block away from home and my mother was just on the adjacent building for her morning workout. The blast came from this police office where some bomb cop was trying to disassemble this grenade strapped to a can of combustive fuel but set the goddam thing off and killing him first thing in the morning. My mother is fine though, she didn't talk much about the explosion, except for her gay instructor who still went on jumping and swaying in the gym like nothing happened, he/she probably likes his/her work so much that with that blast, he/she would love to be caught dead at what he/she is doing best.

This Diode

2009-03-09T21:09:00.004+08:00

I got to manila today using this ticket I bought online, I never thought it would work but now I feel I can buy almost anything from just sitting over at my goddam computer without going anywhere. It seems the internet wants to take over with everything humans do, even read my miserable life through this blog, and after what it has learned from us it'll become self-aware and come 2029 it will be sending a terminator back in time to kill sarah connor.

I had breakfast with my parents here in manila because they just got back from china, they were flying back home this afternoon and they left me this diode which got busted from their TV back home and they told me to get a new one, I don't know crap about electronics and I don't know what the hell diodes anodes and cathodes do, only that they look like broken earings with small serial numbers around it the size of ants. I went to this raon street which is basically an electronic junkyard market and it looks like what would happen if the internet took over the planet and humans were reduced to a dystopia selling scraps, just like that movie terminator which had been coming up to my head eversince I saw its new movie poster here in manila. It was harder to look for my diode earring because it had to have the same serial numbers with the one I had and most numbered diodes I found there didn't match or come close. Everytime I show it to a electric merchant, it would take them time to read the serial numbers and more time to figure out if they do have anything like it, they all hell look the same though, but getting a different diode will probably blow up my parents television set.

I went back to my hotel room with out the diode, it was past noon and the goddam heat was making me lazy, I didn't want to work for a while so I just sat in my room with three bottles of beer while watching the midday scene from my open window and worry about aging. I don't feel like myself the whole afternoon too. After this I'm going to get a couple more beers at seven eleven and head back to my hotel and drink alone again tonight. I really don't feel like myself, must have been the radiation from the diode, I think it is radioactive.

New Brush And No Bush

2009-02-27T20:21:00.010+08:00

I decided to get myeslf a new paintbrush because the old one I had for eight years looks pretty much busted, the brush tip has stiffened and it had turned sideways and it now works better off scratching your ear canal.

I got the old one for about 35 bucks, or something around that price because I don't spend much dough on my pursuit of art. The bookstore didn't have that same brush anymore or even anything about that size or price so I had to go to this other small art shop I've seen before because I swear they should have everything you can use to brush with from their display window, probably even those brushes drag queens use to swipe their faces with, because the art shop is surrounded by parlors run by drag queens and they could have gone inside the art shop asking for one, out of curiosity of course. Anyway the closest they had to the one I was looking for was around 80 bucks and I was having second thoughts about the price when the owner came in and saw me holding it, he started asking me if I paint and I told him I guess so and he continued smiling and asking me questions like where I go to school at. I didn't know what the hell he wanted to talk about and I wasn't in a mood to go talking especially about me and the arts because I am no artastic person who sees irrational meaning in the silliest of drawings, so I just paid for the paintbrush and left. He was no businessman selling brushes either, he could have helped me out by telling me what a great goddam brush it was at 80 bucks but he was an art-man, he wanted to know if I painted and maybe he's going to convince me to join their society of art-men who would talk about paintings over colored coffee. I am no art person, there is no traces of self expression in my paintings except that I was drunk and I only paint because I want to.

Anyway I wanted to try painting over the week to try out the new brush, I had some leftover acrylic paints I had from painting my gundam models and I decided to use them instead of watercolor, it took me four nights and a lot of liquor to get me to paint this.

You could probably see the person I had in mind, anyway it was a good brush to paint with and my drunken fist technique hasn't failed me yet, but I wasn't used to acylic paint, they dry fast especially over an airconditioned room, I have to make a new color palete every half an hour and it explains the different shades of color around his face, but its him alright, new brush and no bush.

Dimes and Nickels

2009-02-12T23:18:00.001+08:00

I wantched this movie underworld a while ago, its a third movie in a trilogy and it had a lot of vampires and werewolves where a lot of them were getting killed in a slaughter fest that Im sure made it a hell lot better than twilight.

This isn't about the movie though, when I was buying movie tickets, the pricetag for a ticket is at 90 bucks and a half cents which is very troublesome paying because you always have to have loose coins to pay for the goddam extra penny than just pay them an outright 90 bucks. The clerk said its for charity that sometimes I wouldn't mind paying because I feel like saving the world, in a way.

But anyway the idea here is the value of the half penny itself that I had in my pockets on the way out of the theater. In this country we only have 6 coins in circulation, the first three coins are the smaller values of our currency in denominations of ones, fives and tens, each complete with a dead hero immortalized on its underside, which you might find useful in buying a stick of cigarette or for paying for public transport to get you around town. The lesser three coins are made up of the smaller denominations of the penny which are the quarter, the dime and the nickel, and unlike the other three you'll never find any dead person's mug on either side or find these coins of any use by themsleves, particularly the dime and the nickel because you can't buy anything with them, you could still save a couple of quarters and get yourself a spearmint before anybody notices you breathe of alcohol at work.

The dime and the nickel are about the same size and they have this sort of light metallic red shade, you could guess its a bronze alloy with plastic or something useless to make up for its also useless value, the nickel though has a hole in the middle because they both look all the same and nobody bothers to check the value on these coins if not for the hole, much less pick them up on the streets, you could see a piece or two on the sidewalks say about every 20 meters and nobody picks them up, they'd figure out they're wasting their time even before they could make a penny out of it. Its not even worth buying a piggybank, once you've filled it with dimes and nickels and break the porcelain, everything inside would just be enough to buy you a new goddam piggybank and start collecting all over again.

Anyway, I could still use the 5 dimes in my pocket to pay for the 50 cent in the ticket pricetag the next time I would watch a movie, the trouble with these coins is that they're so easy to lose, and if I just lose one of those 5 dimes, I can't use them to pay for the charity part of the movie ticket, but then I can just walk around a couple of meters and maybe I could just spot one on the floor.

2009

2009-01-15T22:21:00.011+08:00

I still have this feeling the year right now is just 2005 or 2006 but then suddenly I find out that its already 2009, these years always fly so fast, and its almost ten years after that doomsday nonsense about the earth blowing up because computers can't tell how old you are, just like those liquor store clerks that wont let me buy beer because I look like a minor.

I had a lot of things to do in manila at the start of the year so I flew back again last thursday morning, what I didn't know that they had the feast of the black nazarene that day again (what the hell is a black nazarene?) and what made it worse was that they had the statue parading all over the major streets in downtown manila together with a great wave of humanity on barefoot. Before they only had it running inside one district but maybe because obama became the most powerful yankee yet being black so they probably wanted to show that their black statue is as powerful that it could wreck traffic for one goddam morning.

I finished everything I had to do in manila sunday afternoon, I was planning on getting beers with imer sunday night and he decided that we should go drink with our friend froi at taguig because he was really down, his father's working as the chief state prosecutor of the country and he knew that the next day the president is going to give his father the axe because he got himself in hot waters the past few weeks. You see there's these bunch of rich kids who got caught selling dope a couple of months back and because money is the lubricant of all things in this country, these kid's parents tried to buy them out of jail, and froi's father sort of got involved in the mess. He's so down about what happened because he always looks up to his father that we even started to call him 'chief' in class. I quoted jack nicholson in this movie a few good men for his father because I think people just don't appreciate what his old man does, and maybe to make him feel better.

you people sleep under the very blanket of the freedom that I provide, and yet questions the manner in which I provide it

but then I realized it was just wrong because nicholson was the ground breaking bad guy in the movie, but at least it got froi in a lighter mood after we started talking about movies and stuff.

His father did a lot for this country though, like putting behind bars perverts like this sanchez mayor in laguna who did and killed a college girl and these gang who were high and did this girl and killed her whole vizconde family, sometimes people just cannot remember what he did because the local folks made two very terrible movies about it that you wish you'd forget the whole crap after you've seen it.

28 Years Later

2008-12-27T21:56:00.003+08:00

John Lennon

october 1940 - december 1980

It's Your Birthday

2008-12-16T21:10:00.013+08:00

I had to go back to manila for a couple of days because I had a lot of things to finish there before chirstmas comes.

I flew back home on a sunday, I was taking the evening flight but I left at two in the afternoon because the people and traffic from where my hotel was were building up like ants on sugar, although it was a sunday but it was minus ten days to christmas and everybody was out on the streets buying about anything in a hurry for the sake of the holidays. The lines at the airport were terribly long too, I stood there for half an hour til I got to the counter. There was this nurse behind me who started up a conversation with this yankee next to him the whole time I was on line, I overheard him loudly say that he's working in seattle but I didn't care where he came from or if he was bored but his english is terrible, it gives me nausea to listen to english being ripped apart that I could have thrown up from listening to him if I stayed longer there than half an hour, I was wondering how the hell he even got to work in seattle speaking crap like that, I just pulled my journal and wrote some things over the push cart to get myself not to listen, he's those kinds of johnny come latelys who want to be overheard when talking about something, maybe for getting all the way home for the holidays. Nobody tried to stop him though, the other passengers were probably bored too and they must have enjoyed the show the nurse put up from his side of the line, like a monkey dancing over a music box.

I was wearing my rubber shoes so I had trouble taking the laces off and back in getting through the xray machine, after that I bumped to this girl who was from my high school days, we weren't from the same class, I was a year senior to her but I knew her because she was those tall and pretty girls me and peter would talk about those days. I never got to talk with her before but I was caught off guard and said hi you're here or hey were on the same flight, which ever came first, she smiled and said hi too and out of nowhere from my memory, I blurted to her a belated happy birthday which was just the day before. We started talking down the hallway like what was she doing here in manila, I told her I've got a few things to settle before chirstmas and she told me about how she visited her father after some surgery earlier that week. She is so nice. I was hungry too and I was eyeing this airport coffee shop up the hallway that served great cinnamon where I thought I'd ask her to grab some, but I just passed by the coffee shop because she was just so nice to talk with.

I usually get pissed off when the flights get delayed for more than an hour but this was one time I was very much hoping that it did and that I could stay longer there with her, I should have asked her out for dinner at the airport.

malexodontia

2008-12-09T22:33:00.007+08:00

I chipped off a part of my tooth after chewing a goddam pebble that was in my food a couple of days ago. The broken part wasn't so big though, the tooth fairy would leave me peanuts for it but it left a crack right down deep the center of my tooth that I was becoming sensitive to anything cold I would stuck on my mouth.

I went to see my dentist today, she saw this old amalgam filling which I also broke from chewing the pebble and she said she had to drill and fix it too. I knew my nerves were going to take a beating from the drill and I couldn't stand it so I asked for some anesthetic, she injected some to my gum and played this religious music on her player, like something bad is about to happen. Then after a while she started working on my tooth but the goddam drill still rang on my nerves so I asked for more anesthetic, I knew it was already working because my jaw felt like a slab of dead pig skin but my neurons were revolting because my tooth still felt the drill coming, I wanted to ask for another shot but it still probably won't work, just like those worries that won't go away no matter how drunk you get. Bore the goddam thing for fifteen minutes.

what I like about my dentist is that she's not the kind who'd love to pull teeth off for a living, take the other dentist I had before her, she'd always find a tooth to pull out everytime I visit her, she probably knows they don't grow back like fungus so I'll be paying her big bucks to put some fake teeth to my mouth after she takes them all out, like this molar she had her eye on once, it has eroded from behind which I didn't see from the back of my throat because I dont have those long teaspoon mirrors dentist have to check on it often. She said the tooth was a goner but I decided to see my present dentist now and she got it fixed and its still stuck good up there. I could have lost a still good tooth if I had stayed with my old dentist but I learned to brush to that far part of my teeth though, I feel like throwing up whenever I overdo it because its like sticking your toothbrush into the tip of your throat. Just like ariel when he forces himself to throw up, he presses that emergency button on the edge of his throat with his finger, like this one time we drank and he made himself throw up in the lavatory but one of his fake tooth bumped to his hand in his mouth when he burped and it fell off and down to the sink. He came back to me covering his mouth and explaining what happened while making funny whistling sounds, those accidents happen if you have a dentist who loves to pull out your teeth.

Getting Twilight

2008-11-29T23:11:00.009+08:00

I finally got to fly to manila through the new airport, it looked really really good that it didn't look like I was still in my country when I landed. Even right after I got out of the airport at eight in the morning, I felt sort of orderly at the new place like the shirts in my goddam luggage were all folded in place, it's not like the other airports here in manila that when you get out, everything is like cramped and crowded like glastonbury, now I could sit there and catch the morning breeze in a great big pavement without people pushing you around.

I don't know about cabs here yet and I don't know my way out of the place but somebody was driving me out of the airport, so I just walked around hoping to see this bust of this guy ninoy they said was around the place. Anything that has to do with airports here in manila are likely to have ninoy's name on it because he was shot dead a hero while getting out of a plane decades ago. I was trying to find his smiling bust because its probably a sign to everybody to be glad for coming out of the airport alive unlike him who got killed even before he got to his luggage from the terminal.

Anyway, my sister was asking for these books that were made into this movie twilight that's hitting the theaters right now, I think its about vampires and one of them falls for a human girl which every other vampire thinks is too good a food to waste, probably something like that. And I don't understand why a lot of girls are into this thing, I've heard some are crazy about the vampire who stars in the movie, they said he's so romantic and all that crap but I think these girls hadn't heard enough pick-up lines in their lives yet. Vampires sure do have a way with words to get to their food, if this actor were a real vampire, he should be very fat by now.

I didn't have much money so I just got her one book after work and I'm sure its not part of her homework in high school and she couldn't finish all those twilight books over the weekend. The books were easy to find at the bookstore though, there weren't in the shelves but I found them piled on the floor because nothing says bestseller for a book better than it being piled like an aztec temple in a bookstore. I got one and went to pay for it at the counter, the clerk was wrapping it so goddam slow that I found this box of twilight book markers she hid under the counter, I could tell because you can see the vampire's bad hair day sticking out from the tip, I asked for one because I wanted as much collateral freebies after buying this twilight book and my sister would probably like it too.

I later found out that it was a slip for some free haagen das ice cream, its said you can get twilight flavors from it which maybe would make your blood sugar all to high and vampires were out to get you. I wanted to eat the haagan ice cream because I knew they were expensive notwithstanding it was made for a movie which I don't give a crap, but then they might tear or take this whole bookmarker for my sister after I get my ice cream so I just had to let that haagan thought pass, its still just ice cream anyway.

(picture was taken by my sister in her room, so don't mind the flowery sheets behind)

'Thud'

2008-11-19T22:19:00.003+08:00

The last time I was in a car accident was around five years ago and I just had a new one last week. Actually I'm not fond of driving but I had to drive my father to the airport saturday, then drive my mother too on monday and pick up my brother tuesday and I was tired of running around the same road for days and maybe that's when it finally got me again.

The guy whom I crashed with was some old guy in his fifties and he was driving some old pick-up truck, that time I couldn't think straight anymore and I was smoking like hell, he kept telling me to take it easy and all. He was a very nice guy I swear, he took care of everything with his insurance and talked things over with the cop and all I ever did was stand at the corner and smoke.

A week later I had to get all these police reports from that cop so I could get the insurance company to fix my goddam car bumper. I had my accident around five in the afternoon and it was the night shift cop who handled my papers so I had to go to the police station at night. I didn't feel like holding on to the wheel for days now so I just took a ride and traffice was like hell at rush hour. I've never been to this police station on this side of the city, I got there way past seven and the police station looked like it was just the tip of the empire state building sprouting from the ground, there was no lights or anything around the place, it was dark but you wont feel bothered anyway, it was a police station for god's sake. There was no lobby when I got inside but the whole goddam ground floor was a jailhouse and the prison bars were right in front from where you came in, with all those inmates piled over like sick dogs in a pound.

There was a clerk at the side who had a statue of a saint giving out a peace sign and wearing this police cap on the table, maybe for the inmates to pray repentance and freedom from accross the bars. The clerk told me that the rest of the offices were upstairs, I went up and the second floor looked like your grandparents museum with all those gothic rails and rusting typewriters and steel cabinets that probably had doris day records inside them. The tables were pretty much rundown like the ones we had in high school and from where I sat there was a chalk board that wrote

This is not an ashtray

and an arrow pointing to where the chalks were placed at the edge. They could have just placed one goddam ashtray if everybody was looking for one.

I don't feel like writing about my whole car accident anymore, it bothers me so much at night that whenever I get to think of it, the goddam 'thud' rings in my head that I can't even get myself to sleep, hell I don't even feel like posting this one.

八八八 Part 2

2008-10-29T22:04:00.008+08:00

They have this big new airport in manila right now, its not actually that new because I remember as far as five years ago it was already sitting there empty but then the people who built it messed up the terms of payment with the government I think , that they had to settle the whole mess for a long time in court. I knew I had an idea what the whole mess was because it was even an essay on our final examination way back when I was in school then, and I got a good grade for my answer though I really forgot all about it now.

Anyway they now got one airline docking on the new airport the last two months ago, I had a couple of things to do in manila so I decided to take a flight on this airline so I could get to see the new airport for myself too. This airline cebu pacific had some promotional tickets for sale which you could get cheap by calling up their manila telephone number 702-8888 and I wanted get a ticket on a budget too. I was surprised though when I called the number up and the guy on the phone said:

Chowking delivery!

I paused and awkwardly replied

I think I’m not hungry, I need a plane ticket

I thought I misdialed the whole thing off but the same fastfood still answered after that, I later found out that the airline number is actually 702-0-888. That’s the problem with rhythmic telephone numbers, you’d sometimes get the order of the numbers wrong, especially this one when all I could think of is that it ends with a lot of eights. It took so long for the airline operator to pick up my line when I called, I even finished a cup of coffee while waiting on the headset and listening to the airline jingle which I swear still keeps ringing in my head right now, and it was a waste of time listening to that jingle for so long because the operator soon told me that there weren’t any cheap seats left for manila that week.

So I flew to manila still through the old airport last tuesday though some other airline, I didn’t get much sleep in the plane because the toddler behind me kept banging the food tray at the back of my seat, it was so goddam annoying that I’d wish the kid would just play with his seatbelt instead or find the plane crash menu card and stare at the pretty pictures and learn to get out of the plane if it crashes. If I were only a growth fairy, I’d take a centimeter off from his height before puberty for each bang he made on my seat.

It was raining hard in manila but I worked the afternoon through, I got back to my hotel past 9 in the evening, I passed by the seven eleven beside it and got a hotdog, a bag of chips and a can of beer to go with cable TV, ridiculous but I can now drink just a can of beer for the night, their hotdogs were all frozen though, they must have started steaming them just five minutes earlier and the only hotdog which was hot was about the size of my finger, I was hungry anyway.

What they were showing on the local news in TV last night was about some government minister who’s flying back to the country, he's in trouble because he took a couple of million bucks from the government to spend on fertilizers years ago, it was pretty obvious that those fertilizers were so goddam expensive like they were made up of royal dung taken from the augean stables by hercules. So everybody started asking fertilizer bob why the hades were they so expensive (hades: hell/greek -that's how hercules probably swore when he cleaned the stables), fertilizer bob flew to america to come up with a spectacular explanation and he’s flying back here probably to show us now that his fertilizers can grow beanstalks up to the sky to some giant castle where we would find some money making fowl and harp that can repay the millions he took.

Got Milk?

2008-10-05T20:02:00.011+08:00

For the past few days the local news at night wouldn’t be complete without them anchormen showing footage of grocery stores being hoarded for milk by cops with a lot of guns, and it almost seemed like milk has become as illegal as dope. Because just recently they found out that milk from china has some sort of secret ingredient they call melamine, I flunk in chemistry and I don’t know what the hell a melamine is but at the rate of their milky panic, melamine must taste like cyannide.

A lot of kids in china got sick with their milk, and the rest of the world are pulling out these milks from their store shelves before it gets their kids sick too. Nobody from my country has died over these milks yet but the government people and cops are overdoing the recall so much that you’d wish they could just figure out the math that more people die from rabies and they rather go catch themselves some stray dogs on the street instead. I’m sort of a lactose intolerant, which is I give out gas if I drink a lot of milk so I drink soymilk instead, but hell they even took out the china soymilk at the grocery stores probably because it has the words milk and china on the box. The people here just want to be part of the great milk recall.

These sick kids in china will probably blame their chinaman action hero jackie chan from drinking milk because he used to appear with the ‘got milk?” advertisements in magazines, he’s not advertising any milk brands but milk itself and there he looks like he drank a gallon of milk with stains still running up to his nostrils without even time to wipe it before jumping out of a helicopter, melamine probably gets you all hyperactive. What a phony, he got famous in his old hong kong movies where he drinks a lot of liquor and fights great when drunk, now he tells us to drink milk.

Steve Tyrell

2008-09-29T13:58:00.010+08:00

Artist currently on my playlist

Colorful Metaphors

2008-09-28T21:31:00.012+08:00

Star trek never had this same appeal to me like star wars did, though both film franchise are hollywood science fiction space movies with aliens, spaceships, warp drives and big cult followings in real life, but I think its because I watched star trek IV first and it was a very bad start if you were to introduce yourself to the star trek universe.

The story goes something like this:

Humpback whales were hunted to extinction during the 20th century but unknown to humans, whale songs humpbacks whine while underwater was actually some sort of an alien language they use to communicate with some aliens a couple of million light years away. After all the humpbacks went extinct, the aliens were wondering why they haven’t heard from their whale friends so they sent some spaceship to earth to check on them, since they were millions of light years away, it took them til the 23rd century to get to the future earth. They weren’t the creative kind of aliens because their ship just looked like a lead cylinder with a little light on the tip, but the problem was it gave off some kind of electromagnetic pulse that disrupts anything mechanical thus leaving the space ships around earth like flying scraps and it went on thrashing the earth’s ocean looking for its whales.

This is where the star trek heroes come in, their plan was to go back in time to the 1980s and get some humpback whales and bring them to the future to make those aliens happy. Their iconic saucer-looking uss enterprise was blown to bits at the start that they had to use a klingon warbird ship to get back in time, since it was my first star trek movie, I thought that the warbird was their star trek flagship, and I didn't even know spock was an alien, I thought he had that beatle hairstyle because it was probably back in fashion in the 23rd century. Most of the movie was focused on the star trek crew running and figuring things around in our time period, it was the typical case of future people going back in time and getting lost in the culture but seriously the script was great, I liked the humor but then it seemed more of a comedy movie rather than science fiction to me because I found myself laughing most of the time.

I was just reminded of some lines in the movie because I was writing a month ago about the word hell being in my vocabulary all the time, and I think kirk has a good explanation to it.

(kirk and spock are the two lead star trek characters)
Spock: Admiral, your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with, shall I say, more colorful metaphors "double dumb-ass on you" and so forth.
Kirk: You mean the profanity?
Spock: Yes.
Kirk: That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the period.

(kirk and spock learning to talk with colorful metaphors)
Dr. gillian taylor: You're not one of those guys from the military trying to teach whales to retrieve torpedoes, or some deep shit like that?
Kirk: No ma'am, no deep shit.

Spock: They like you very much, but they're not the hell your whales.
Dr. gillian taylor: I suppose they told you that?
Spock: The hell they did.

(kirk looks at spock)
Spock: Are you sure it isn't time for a colorful metaphor?

(kirk and spock on their way out of the 20th century with whales and full of colorful metaphors)
Kirk: Spock, where the hell is that power you promised me?
Spock: One damn minute admiral!

60

2008-09-15T20:56:00.002+08:00

It was my old man’s birthday last saturday and it was supposed to be grand because its his 60th birthday and its something like a milestone for most people still being alive, but my old man didn’t like the idea, he just wanted a simple dinner with our extended family.

I picked up my parents at the airport friday and they chewed out on me at the airport because I screwed up their flight back to manila sunday, my old man was indecisive on what flight to take yesterday that he had me book a lot of seats on different sunday planes and the one he decided to take was of all the ones that I forgot to book. They went home for his birthday dinner though I had this feeling they wanted to stay in manila for this petula clark concert, they didn’t say a word about it but even when I was still a kid, they’d always sing her song you and I from that old movie goodbye mr chips.

Anyway when I got to the restaurant for his dinner that night, it was full because there was also some sort of convention there for whatever brotherhood it was, they had their guests coming in white tuxes and bow ties that if the restaurant wasn’t chinese, you could mistake them as waiters. There was one guy there who I think didn’t have a lot of friends, because he had a band of bodyguards following him with a lot of guns sticking out from their pants so that no one would probably start a fight with him. One of them was even sporting this ammunition belt of bullets from his shoulders, I’m not quite familiar with guns but I think those bullets on his shoulder were too big for any of the guns he carried, they looked like they should be used in M60s in helicopters, it’ll probably scare you to know that he maybe fires them through his teeth, it’s like chewbacca who always carries this bandolier by his shoulder but you never saw him reload bullets from there, it must be his clothes or something since he’s not wearing anything at all. Nobody tried to kill whoever that guy was anyway, you’d get lost in finding him because they all look the same in their white tuxes.

The waiters also forgot to fix the walls where our tables were at, there was this banner from a forum earlier that says b.o.m.b which meant something like budget operations and management in barangays or something like that, though b.o.m.b. made no sense to what their topic was, its just other people’s habit of making stupid a.c.r.o.n.y.m.s. to phrases and titles, though bomb came in handy, I just had to tell my cousins to look for the bomb in the restaurant before they get lost in a sea of men in white tuxedoes.

We had shark’s fin soup for starters but they were probably grated chicken cartilage, and I felt better eating it that way for the love of greenpeace and the thought of how angry a shark can get in that jaws movie. The rest of the food was great though and the best one was this steel keg of beck’s beer under my seat.

4 Years Later

2008-09-02T22:34:00.004+08:00

I still remember asking myself ‘how long will this –diary writing- last?’ last year this well. Its been one full year and I’m still keeping this and evaluating the benefits I’ve gain, they’re simply valuable. I know I would regret very much now if I did not keep this, I’ve learn many things, but the most important of them all is that, there’s so much I don’t know, so much I haven’t experience, so many things I don’t understand yet, I don’t even feel like celebrating it even to myself, I didn’t buy me sweets. Also I realize how many things I don’t dare do, inhibited from doing, things that are really plain and nothing but I unconsciously considered morbid. I’ve been living in a closed world, a prison cell and isolation from people and relationship with girls.

weatherman1
september 14, 1970

I might have said the same thing like my old man after a year of keeping a journal for myself, and its been four years this september since I got my journal over this blog and I have to admit, there’s still a hell lot of things to learn for myself.

Overnight Leaders

2008-08-30T19:10:00.004+08:00

Bakeshops are always expecting suckers to be buying bread all the time because they’d always sell old bread from yesterday and get them suckers to buy one or two a day later, especially the cheaper breads where they could just stack and hide the old ones alongside the fresh ones, probably under the same idea that there’s always one bad egg in every ten that a chicken would lay, or there’s at least one crazy professor you’d get for every semester you'd enroll in college.

I bought some bread to go with my afternoon coffee yesterday and like what I said, the goddam bakery was so kind enough to sell me some old prehistoric bread that I didn’t find out sooner when I was already back at my desk, no where in hell I was going to eat them so I just used them as bait for these mouse traps because I had been hoping to get rid of these mice that had been running on my floor even during daytime when I worked, like it was their own mousetropolis and they’d be chewing to almost anything I have around the place. I did catch a couple of the mice though, and one of them even bit me at the hinge of my thumb probably for giving him a prehistoric bread for its last supper.

Then later that night my cousin was calling me up to join this personality development seminar today, I said I didn’t want to because I will be busy with other things today but she was so relentless in asking me to join because she said it’ll make a good leader out of me and all that crap, that I felt this seminar can turn me into another mao where I will be able to lead peasants to a cultural revolution in the mountains and denounce all things stupid in this country. I didn’t answer her calls the whole night though, I just busied myself with my brother’s school project where he asked me to help him carve just about anything for his class, I sculpted mike tyson’s mug in a potato and gave it to him, took me about an hour and I left my palm with cuts and smelling like raw potato.

It was a bad day start for today knowing I couldn’t hold on to a pen at work with wounds and a bitemark on my hand but what made it worse was my cousin still calling me up even while I was sleeping before daybreak and asking me to join that seminar she kept talking about since yesterday. The goddam truth is that I am not a very sociable person in a crowd if you know me, and moreover this seminar is about behavior development and I think most people joining here all believe they could change themselves overnight which will be just another grand buffet of phoniness. Really if she just didn’t bug me that much I couldn’t have been one hell of a sarcastic for the rest of the day.

八八八

2008-08-09T23:18:00.005+08:00

The olympic games opened in beijing yesterday at eight minutes past eight in the evening, august 8, 2008 with the number eight recurring five times, it does sound like some pizza telephone hotline where they are all trying to make their telephone numbers recur rhythmically so that you could recall it along with the pulse of your stomach when hungry. But I think them chinamen did it on purpose because they are superstitious even in phonetics because saying eight in mandarin almost sounds like 發 (fa) which literally means prosper, and having signs of 8s in succession is almost like chanting for luck to make all things to prosper exponentially, especially bank accounts. The same way chinamen also avoid the number four because it sounds like 死 or death, hence you can’t find any fourth floors on chinaman elevators because maybe it’ll open a door to hell or something.

I was hoping to see the fireworks at the start of the olympic games because I’m pretty sure they’re going to put up a great show with it especially when its from the same people who created fireworks two thousand years ago, but I didn’t get to see it on tv though, I had to attend to a friend’s wedding that same night. A lot of people were getting married or having babies or doing just about anything stupid probably because they hope to get lucky for something in the next few days or somewhere along their lifetime, and if they did they would say it was of what they did yesterday.

Anyway right after the wedding, me peter and some high school friends went to this bar for some beers, I had around five and everybody was on a conversation but I didn’t feel like joining, I was just staring at the tv from the ceiling watching whatever was left from the opening of the olympics, all that they were showing then were athletes marching around the field for an hour, it was boring, it was like waiting for some funny looking athlete to pass by, but on the other news channel they were showing some heavy war that was going on the russian frontier while the rest of the world was celebrating humanity in the olympics, it was kind of strange though, but that’s what they probably got from the three 8 date, and them russians over there weren’t so lucky

See You When I Get There

2008-07-29T09:48:00.007+08:00

Madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push

the joker
the dark knight

My head had been blank the past few weeks and I couldn’t get myself to write anything until I got to watch this new batman movie the dark knight last night, and all it took was this movie to push the madness that is me writing back on its feet.

The movie is great and like what everybody said, they made the most disturbing joker character, it’ll take more than a lot of good acting to come up with a psychologically messed up character like that because it left the actor dead after doing a great joker role, but the batman though croaks like a toad on steroids every time he talks with his mask on that the hard leather must be tight somewhere around his throat, that if not for his temperament somebody around him could have already asked him if he wanted a glass of water.

There was this part in the movie in hong kong where morgan freeman passes some spying mobile phone to bruce wayne while he was taking pictures of the place, it was funny because I was at that exact same spot a month ago and it reminded me of something. That place is some sort of a platform that connects these elevators that take commuters up and down the mid level district because the whole area is on a slope and gravity will not be on your side and it will indeed take that little push to get you down. Anyway I was also stopping at that same spot because the view there is certainly pretty, you could see this house that has a romantic little garden balcony and a little street below lined with lamp posts with chinamen in push carts full of vegetables or bread running about their miserable lives. Even if you were in a hurry, you’d still want to stop there and just catch your breath or something, it was a pretty sight really.

While I was watching the scene, there were two ladies there who excused themselves, they weren’t morgan freeman though, they gave me this calling card they saw me drop, it was from my high school classmate duhong because he works at central district down the slope, but I didn’t visit him, I just pulled it out of my wallet earlier just in case I wanted to. Anyway I felt sort of thankful and I smiled back, I was surprised though when I overheard them talking behind my back in my goddam language back home, probably thinking I was some chinaman or from some other stupid race.

Why did you give it back to him?

And the other lady said

It wasn’t money anyway

I kept recalling this incident after watching that batman movie because weeks ago I was trying to figure out something to write but I couldn’t get anything running up my freaking head, I just got over at the bookstore across the block from home and maybe I could get a few ideas of something. I saw this book by zafra the 5 people you’ll meet in hell, the title sounded interesting but I didn’t buy or scan the book and after that I began to count people that I would probably meet in hell and maybe I could write my own list of five too, but the funny thing was every night I could already get to put like two or three people to my hell list and after some weeks I found out that I do hate a lot of people, and the batman movie just reminded me of two more of my hell bounds I bumped into hong kong last month. If I instead did drop money at that platform, those ladies would probably return in to me when we meet in hell, I don't think there's anything up for sale down there anyway.

And if there is one overused word in this blog, I must have said hell a hundred times over already, I’m just using it as a figure of speech as an emphasis on discontent or maybe just plain cursing, like why the hell did she do that for? And using the word a hundredfold over also seems that I do hate a lot of things. I never thought about the concept of the demographic hell though I’m already hoping to meet a lot of people there. I did think about how hell would look once, when I was in sophomore high we had this exam in english where the last part of the paper the teacher asked us to make a poem about just anything, and it only took me ten minutes to write a poem about hell, I don’t know why of all things but hell that came to my mind, maybe because hell was likely to come at the rate I was answering all those papers at examination week. I can’t remember what I wrote back then but my idea of a poem is getting the end words to rhyme, so I was pretty sure I used the phrases land of judgment and souls in torment.

After that examination week, the teacher said that he wasn’t expecting us to be writing something a grand poem like edgar allan poe’s in the exam but he’d give us all full points for trying anyway. He started to read some poems his class wrote that he liked and like all fourteen year olds, every poem he read was about falling in love and all that horse crap, but then soon he found my piece and then had to go reading what I wrote, then some of my classmates were already looking at my direction knowing if there was anybody that could come up with something so strange, that would be me, sure beats the hell out of dante aligheri in infernal ingenuity.

A Rather Blustery Day

2008-06-25T21:47:00.009+08:00

Frank the typhoon in the pacific was looking for a good place for a landfall for the weekend and with a little help from the monsoons, they gave him directions to pay my hometown a stormy visit, and frank was very angry when he did. He messed up my hometown that he was close to sinking everything over the weekend.

My hometown is a wreck because of the typhoon, and a lot of people here need help very badly, and I wont be surprised if some chinaman from sichuan would donate one chinese penny for our disasater, in return for one of our own penny I donated for their sichuan earthquake two weeks ago to make it even.

Frank was all over the news too, he took last week’s top airtime spot from this news anchor in the news who got kidnapped by some rebels and was later released after his fellow news anchor turned senator claimed to have helped her out to grab airtime scenes for herself too before she runs for president two years later, it was already getting dull. If frank came here for a reason, he must have lost his sense of direction because these rebels' hideout he needs to flush out is lying further down south from here, but the rebels must have enough ransom money to refortify it anyway.

There wasn’t much to do at work over the stormy weekend, the streets were flooded with mud water that nobody was walking to anywhere at all, I decided to go see some movie to help me kill time, I didn't mind wading through mud water though, you don't get the streets here looking like rivers often. I watched this second narnia movie which I wasn’t too keen to because I hadn’t seen the first one, there wasn’t anything else good to see anyway but it was kind of fine. They had mythological and fairytale freaks in the movie who were up against medieval troops that had thick spanish accent complete with conquistadoric armors, you could tell that they were spanish from the start, they were supposed to be pirates invading the freak kingdom and they could have definitely been from magellan’s fleet because you’d always wonder what happened to his other three ships that never made it back to spain, and they weren’t pushovers too wherever they landed.

And the mythological and fairytale freaks in the movie were called narnians that sounded close to narranians, which was what my high school section was collectively known, probably after what an odd, hardy and uprising bunch we were. But what was hilarious about the title was that narnia for me almost sounded like hernia, and that what’s exactly came to my mind after seeing how the satyrs walked around in the movie like they had one.

Rocking Sichuan

2008-06-14T22:52:00.011+08:00

If you want to know one pathetic truth about me, its that I’m a really big sucker for flowers, I like picking and buying the good looking ones and getting them altogether on a goddam bouquet, its not that I like flowers for myself but during past unfortunate events that I fell in love with a girl, I have this intuition of sending her flowers because I’m just one hell of a hopeless romantic that I’m stuck with this idea that girls like getting flowers.

I was flying back to manila from hong kong and I always made it a habit to go see their flower market before I leave the place, I am not seeing anybody but its one of the places where I think they had the best flowers.

There’s this bundle of roses I found there which were very pretty, it was pink and it turned dark purple into its petal edges, I wanted to buy it though I didn’t have anybody to give it to, perhaps to that cute girl who frequents ariel’s internet café but what the hell. I was staring at that bundle long enough that I almost pulled it out and the florist even asked me in mandarin if I wanted it.

I left the place and took the subway back, and the past few days that I was taking the subway I could notice that there are a lot of these donation boxes scattered around the place for the earthquake disaster in sichuan a month ago, they almost had one in every mcdonalds and every corner you could just turn to. Because a month ago there was this one hell of a earthquake that rocked sichuan province in china back to the ming dynasty, the news reported that the earthquake blew up the richter scale but maybe because of the suppression of the press in red china I didn’t get to see much pictures of the earthquake devastation in the news back home, all they gave you were numbers like millions worth of property lost and ten thousands of chinamen getting killed in the earthshake, and seeing numbers didn’t struck your sentiments rather than seeing real pictures of a crushed townscape along with its humanity. But in hong kong there were always pictures at their late night news and their morning papers and posters everywhere that the disaster surprised me too soon already.

I even tried giving a donation two days ago, I was walking and I passed by this shrine where some chinamen were praying to their oriental side of heaven, there was a big steel sichuan donation box beside the shrine that caught my attention, I had one penny from my country’s currency and decided to drop it inside, they couldn’t buy anything worthwhile with it anyway but I was making some sort of a wishful thought with my penny to them like how losers drop coins to wells and fountains. I struck a pose during the moment when I was about to drop my coin and took a picture of it with my mobile phone.

When I dropped my coin, it hit the bottom of the steel donation box with a loud resounding ‘TONGGG’ and I found out that the goddam donation box was empty, and the sound of my coin was awfully loud because of the silence in the shrine that everybody who was praying turned to me and saw me with legs apart holding my mobile phone and making that glorious dropping-coin pose, all those chinamen could have done was clap for me, they didn't but nonetheless it was embarrassing, I smiled back anyway. I should have dropped my coin someplace else like in the noisy subways.

I did get the flowers, but hell I will just have to let them rot at my desk.

Just Like Manny

2008-06-08T23:25:00.003+08:00

I was only home for three weekends but I had to take this flight to hong kong on saturday so I had to fly back to manila again last friday, my flight to manila was around seven in the morning and I was already up around four yet the seat I got in the plane was at the farthest rows at the back, and when they started handing out newspapers up front, everybody ahead of me was so eager to read then that none of the papers ever made it to my seat. I felt like sleeping anyway, it was contagious from both the sleeping passengers beside me and I think I only had three hours of sleep myself the night before too.

I was going to stay for a night in manila because I had some things to do. First I had to do some laundry at my hotel because the jacket I brought along was filthy dirty, I was watching the weather at the news back home before I left and it said it was raining hard in hong kong and I just grabbed one of my jackets in a hurry without seeing that it looked like somebody used it to wipe his car clean. Then next I had to get some eye drops because when I get to hong kong my eyes turns blood red after a day or so, it always happens and it will give you the creeps, and its like the same way I get mouth sores whenever I get to bangkok. Sometimes I feel it’s the bird flu trying to get to my system through my eyes.

One of the persons I would like to meet over at hong kong now is this guy chris I got to know at the start of the year. He’s from hong kong, he works there and sells gundam model kits as a part time job, and eversince I revived my old hobby of gundam models last december, he’s been responsible for the armada of gundam models crawling up my desk. I don’t know how he looks though, we do business only in emails but what is particularly great about him is that he doesn’t charge much for shipping a package to me, unlike other internet merchants that would charge a lot, and when I tried complaining about it they would tell me that their shipment costs is not just the price on the stamps I see in the package. Chris would always end up his emails to me by saying cheers lib like he’s holding up to toast a mug of beer to me or something across the screen, my brother told me that it’s a british remark. I wonder if chris does like to get beers after work but in a fit of rush I left the copy of his address back home.

On my way to hong kong saturday I had breakfast up at the plane and slept all the way over the red china sea until touchdown, the weather was spectacularly bad from my window and they even called it a black rainstorm at the airport, it sounded like it was raining more than just cats and dogs and it made you feel the weather just had your day on a bad start. I made my way out from the tube of the plane when I saw this guy who used to be the president of my country whom everybody back home got used to call by his initials FVR, he ran for office years ago when I was still 12 but yet he still looked pretty fit for somebody who’s almost 80. He was chewing on his unlit cigar because they probably cant have anybody smoking around the airport, the same way I would have chewed on my plastic cup because they don't serve beer at the plane at eight in the morning, I came up to him and tried to say something and when he saw me he looked stern and said something like ‘get your chest out and stomach in son’ he then gave me a thumbs up sign and a smile and continued saying ‘that’s it, just like manny pacqxxxx’.

I hate this presumption that everybody from my third world country has this arrogant pugilist for a hero.

The King of Israel

2008-05-23T01:11:00.011+08:00

I was stuck reading from this book the king of israel over at my desk last night, its about some college guy who went up to see his jewish uncle in new york who was a wrestler that went by the name of the king of israel, and when you thought the namesake of the title was of biblical significance. The story is really good and I could have gone reading it for the rest of the night but hell its just a short story from a compilation I got from a book sale last tuesday, makes me wish the author could have spent a couple more brain cells writing on it to make it a little longer.

It took me about thirty minutes to finish the whole thing off but I could have gone faster if not for these ants that were crawling across my desk, I didn’t have anything sweet up my desk but these ants were making their way to my table lamp, they kept going inside for something through this hole where the cord to the plug goes in the lamp. They were quite a nuisance because when I was reading, the lamp was at my left and the ants were coming from my right and their goddam trail just distorts the direction from where I was reading because I read from left to right and then some ant would crawl from my right to left to the lamp and my eyes would end up following the stupid ant instead of the words, especially when they’re carrying something and they would catch my attention more, I would end up pressing them flat with my fingers to stop them from disturbing me, I had to shake the lamp once in a while too to drive them away because they might ruin it by stuffing scraps inside and its hard to get a good working lamp these days.

Anyway I was to see some tailor this afternoon because Im having this suit done and the tailor needed to get some measurements from me. When I got out of the office around three in the afternoon. the freak weather was depressingly gloomy unlike this morning when it was burning like hell, the sky was full of rainclouds that afternoon that you could feel it was going to pour any minute.

Anyway the tailor I met for my suit was those kinds of men who think they’re women on the inside, because people believe that these kinds of men that are into making fancy clothing are always good at it, must have something to do with their state of confusion. The tailor did a good job with his house though, it reminds me of what a mess my home is. When I got inside his personal haberdashery, the tailor was taking measurements from a group of kids with their parents, it took him about five minutes to finish with one kid but it took him another fifteen minutes to sweet talk to that kid’s parents about how fabulous life is. He talked too much, he talked just about anything he could think of, including about this miscarriage one of the kids mother had before, because I think that’s something he’ll never have in this lifetime no matter how much woman he think he is.

There was another fat boy inside the room whom the tailor adored from everything from hair to the flashy gadgets around his belt, except for the length of his belt though. He said that he love the fat boy’s hair and he asked who did it, and fat boy over there then said something like stello and the tailor said “oh stello” like he was pretending to know the guy to keep him at the helm of the conversation. Hell they then turned to me probably hoping to know who does my hair too, and really I don’t know the guy around the block at home who shaves my hair for thirty bucks so I got ahead of them and said that I usually have my hair almost bald, the tailor then told me not to do so because I would look like some convict on parole.

Show me a human being who doesn’t pretend and I’ll show you a dead human being. Everybody pretends

the king of israel

Reading Mood

2008-05-13T17:27:00.005+08:00

Me and imer planned to go get some beers last friday night and he told me that I should check out this new place he discovered in makati avenue that he now frequents, he could have just said he found a new place to hang out but instead he said discovered and from how he used the word, he must have found something unusually great there. We were to meet at seattle’s best at nine because another friend gb was also joining us on beers, gb didn’t drink much before when I first met him in school but now I swear his drinking habit is catching up with mine and imer’s.

The place both of them were talking about isn’t far from where we met but we took a cab, both of them seem to know the direction to the place better by talking to the cab driver than just walking and it felt it was going to rain anyway if we walked. I forgot the name of the place but I remember it was two words paired up to mean something, the place is small say that it could hold like 50 guests inside but it was great, they had a band inside and beer is only at thirty buck something and you couldn’t get beers at that price especially around makati avenue.

I felt we were like high school students at the place drinking beer if you heard us because for the rest of the night all that we talked about was comic book superheroes, this was because the movie all three of us last saw was the iron man movie, gb in particular and he even told us he had to line up on the first day it came out in the theaters and he’s upset too that he missed the hidden nick fury scene after the credits, he’s still even reading the comic books right now. Gb asked us what were we reading ourselves and imer pulled out this book alastor he got from a sale, I told them I was reading this book jason lent me the tipping point by malcom somebody, I had to remind gb of jason because he met him once when he went to iloilo but anyway imer asked if my book was any good because he heard about it too, I told him it felt like you were listening to college professor lecture in class.

Actually I gave this one some thought because I didn’t know how to answer anybody if a book was any good, save catcher in the rye. I have not been myself the past few months and maybe if one book was any good, it didn’t felt good for me right now maybe because I am depressed or I couldn’t even feel like reading at all. Jason’s book was with me for almost a month already and I haven’t even reached the hundredth page though I could remember some parts of the book were interesting.

I continued reading it again when I took my flight back home last sunday, I was on my way to the airport even before seven in the morning and hell the airport was crowded because there is always a first morning flight to every part of the country from manila. It wasn’t the line to the check in counter that pissed me off but it was the line to the airport donut shop because I hadn’t had breakfast yet and I ended up lining in the other expensive french bakeshop instead where one goddam vegetarian french bread and coffee costed me two hundred bucks. Anyway I read the book at the airport and then it was beginning to sound interesting again, but I only lasted for about thirty minutes on it because my flight is up soon and I couldn’t focus my eyes on the book anymore because I had to check out the lines if one of those were to my flight, only to find out that my goddam flight kept on delaying til midday.

I had a hell lot of time more to spare at the airport but then I just lost my reading mood.

Maximum Engagement

2008-04-25T17:02:00.009+08:00

Max proposed to his girlfriend about getting married and last sunday they held their engagement party, max’s girlfriend sarah called me up that I should attend their affair at nine last sunday, I asked her what time would dinner follow and she said maybe after an hour or so, around ten I suppose but then it sounded quite late already so I decided to eat a little bit before going there.

I’m quite infamous for coming to weddings late, this was just an engagement party but I was already on my way to max’s fiancée’s place even before nine in the evening, for some reason I wanted to be there early. Then I called max up and I told him I was arriving on time but hell he took me by surprise when he said his goddam engagement was already over at nine that morning. I thought he was just trying to pull a good one on me but I realized it must indeed be over because from the way I knew max for 16 years, he always sleeps at nine in the evening and he couldn’t probably stand an engagement party that would start at his bedtime hour.

I decided to drop by ariel’s internet café and he was there busy playing video games himself that sunday night, so I took charge of the counter and used their telephone to call up sarah and apologize for missing their engagement, when sarah was on the line talking she sounded quite pissed off that I missed it and because I was max’s only friend who was supposed to be there, I swear I thought it was at nine in the evening because I mentioned dinner to her and she didn’t gainsaid anything, but sarah didn’t believe me, she said I knew it was at nine in the morning but I was just trying to act that I thought it was nine in the evening so that I could just go out and use it as a reason to get beers later on. Well there was this very pretty girl who was logging out from the café and I was rather busy staring at her than listening to sarah, and since I wasn’t going out to any engagement anymore I was indeed having thoughts of getting a beer or two anyway but i never planned it on purpose, I was thinking of asking sarah if she wanted to join but it might just piss her off more.

The next day I drove my parents to the airport and my old man was asking about how traditional max’s engagement was last night, he asked about the dowries and jewelries I saw and I had to fake it out that sure there was a hell lot of them in the engagement, then my old man had to continue asking what food did I bring home because he said in traditional engagement parties the groom always hands out food giveaways, at that moment I didn’t have much time to call up max and ask him what in hell was he giving away yesterday and much less even grab my mobile phone to call him up because I was driving, my old man continued that they usually hand out bean roll cakes and I just took that goddam chance and yelled

Oh those bean cakes, I didn’t take some because they didn’t look so good

My old man stopped asking thereon and I saved my throat on the way back home. A couple of days later max called again and this time he said he wanted me to be part of his wedding entourage this july, he said he’s only asking two friends to be in his entourage, me and this girl who was the president of our high school student council, he said I was to be the candle-man and he'd better be sure I wont be doing much in front of the crowd in his wedding except light one little candle. He said he’d help me out in getting something to wear on his big day and save july the 26th for him, and lastly he told me just not to be late.

L is for Lib

2008-04-10T21:51:00.008+08:00

Use the first letter of your name to answer the questions, cannot use your own name as an answer, nothing made up.

famous singer:
Lou rawls
Liam gallagher

four letter word:
Lost
Life

street:
Ledesma (perpendicular to our street)

color:
Light grey (the color of somebody who gets cremated)

gifts, present:
Liquor

vehicle:
L300 (what I’m good at driving)

things in a souvenir shop:
Liquor

boy’s name:
Luke skywalker

girl’s name:
Leia organa

movie title:
Letters from iwo jima
Leaving las vegas
Laurence of arabia
LA confidential

drink:
Liquor

occupation:
Lawyer

celebrity:
Laurence olivier
Leslie nielsen
Lisa simpson

magazine:
Loaded

sports:
Lawn tennis

fruit:
Liquorice

reasons for being late to work:
Last night's liquor
Lethargic
Larm clock did not go off
Loose bowel movement
Long line at mcdonalds
Looked at headlines at newstand
Longganisa took so long to cook
Left mobile phone at home while midway on the road
Late, just simply late

something you throw away:
Love

something you shout:
Lapulos (good for nothing)

Fool's License

2008-04-04T22:30:00.008+08:00

I was on my way to pick up my parents at the airport last monday and when I was about to take the car on the road, I plugged in this song star guitar by the chemical brothers and the heavy music made me drive like mad, you should try listening to it when you’re miserable, you’d feel like you’re going to explode in anger. I am not feeling myself for the past few months and I felt I didn’t care if I crashed into anything, like I was driving on a collision course.

I did calm down when I got to the airport in one piece though, it was high noon when I got there and it was so hot that I could feel the heat coming from down the airport parking lot floor already, the goddam heat was almost killing me. I’d feel better once in a while when some breeze would blow up to me against the heat while being in that big countryside of the airport, and it made me drive slower on the way back home too, else my mother would have fainted dead if she was at the back riding while me driving on the road home like it were a race track. I also remembered that my driver’s license had expired for more than three months already, and the cops will probably say that it was my fault driving on an expired license if I crashed with something on the road, if I came out of it alive though.

The next day I decided to get my driver’s license renewed, there was this new place where you could get it done that was only a couple of blocks away from home, my brother told me to go there at an hour past noon because there’s not much people there yet, they’re probably still having lunch. Anyway I didn’t have much trouble going through the process of getting a new license, except for that part again where they were taking your urine samples to check if you doped. I got to their small laboratory and the lab rat handed me my canister where I should put some of my urine into, I left the door open to the lavatory because I knew before that the lab rats there wanted to see you fill the canister with the jet stream from your bladder and that it wasn’t coming out of your ears or nose or someplace else. But it was harder to get myself to take a leak with the door open because I knew the lab rat from behind me was watching and I could not concentrate, I knew he was watching because I was trying to figure out where to pose the canister on the floor so I could fill it up easily when then the lab rat said that I should just hold the canister up close with my other hand, he was probably worried that I would make a mess that way filling it up at a distance on the floor like I were showering a lawn. It wasn’t as easy like last month when I had my blood samples taken when all I had to do was sit.

After that whole trouble I was sent to some in-house doctor to check on me, I didn’t know what he was supposed to check on me because he didn’t check anything at all. He asked for my blood pressure, I told him it was normal and he just bought it, and I didn’t I know if it was really normal, although I knew my liver was but you don’t expect my liver to be stepping on the gas or brakes when I’m driving anyway. He was the kind of doctor who wants to get his work done right away, like there’s a big headband in his head saying lets get the hell over with this. Though I did try checking my weight for real on the scales because I hadn’t been myself lately, I lost eight pounds.

I did get my driver’s license that afternoon, I was looking at my picture because I could see that patch of grey hair growing at my forehead, and below my picture was the date it was released and I just realized it was the first day of april and I’ve got the date of april fool’s right below on my license.

Liver Confessional

2008-03-18T14:59:00.006+08:00

I knew my liver is a wreck, if you knew at the rate that I am taking in alcohol you could tell that my liver must have taken quite a beating that it is garbage even from the outside. I do worry about my liver sometimes but what made me do something about it was because last sunday afternoon something came up that my thoughts were so depressed that I wasn’t in the mood to do anything at all, i was in a mess and I wanted to drink hard very badly, so I just went over to ariel’s net cafe and had rounds of beer. It was kind of creepy because when I was sitting there drinking, some blue love bird flew to my hand and I caught it, the other guy at the table said something like let the bird go like its supposed to be a sign or something. I did anyway, the goddam thing is sure to drop some shit into my palm if I held on to it any longer. Anyway I drank hard up to midnight that ariel began to notice my depression, he closed his net café and we headed out for more beers and I even lost count of how many I drank but ariel paid for it. I got home with ariel walking me to my front door worrying why I drank like a madman, my close friends can always notice it.

I got back to work the next day with me only being late for about thirty minutes, but the sick thing there was that I hadn’t eaten anything for a day already. I was thinking about the way I drank last night that I finally decided to go get my liver checked that day, a lot of people had told me to do it years ago but I was sort of reluctant about it. Now it was a very good time to get blood samples from me because I hadn’t eaten anything except beers and coffee, and I was so depressed too that I felt I could take in any bad news about my liver or even if they told me I’m going to die or something.

I have this old friend in manila charlene who’s a doctor right now, I find her really pretty way back high school because she looked a lot like this actress mikee conjuanco that has a killer smile, Anyway she once sent me some medical phrases a year ago which were supposed to be what I needed to check from my blood about my liver. I got to some hospital about a couple blocks from home and lined up for the laboratory to have some of my blood taken, I saw that there was some lady ahead of me whom they were also taking blood samples, they took around two drops of blood from her but hell when it was my turn the blood taking nurse instead pulled out one goddam syringe about the size of a candle for me. She had it stuck in my vein on the hinge of my elbow and pulled out a lot of blood and it even started to feel numb there. I should have also asked to check for my blood alcohol but I don't think I don't have too much blood alcohol yet, else I would have gone up in fire everytime I smoked.

I took the results a couple of hours later and sent them to charlene and though I said I was ready for anything bad, some part of me was scared about it like if I’m going to die so painfully slow, and while I sat and waited for my results, the laboratory was now full of people sitting that I had to sit in some other seat that was facing everybody, and I could see all their face looking at me and like they’re saying prayers for my results. But what the funny thing there was that doc charlene told me that my liver is pretty much ok and its very normal, charlene is the top student of her medicine class in UST but I had to ask her all over again if she’s sure because I really thought my goddam liver was already garbage.

Fota ka, kala ko may cancer ka
-edward

Lol 2loy ang inuman!
-imer

I was sort of happy about it too for a short time, I figured it out that in my goddam depression right now, I am just happy that I know I can still go on drinking alcohol to make me feel better.

I bought a whole bottle of hard liquor for last night over at some grocery to feed off my depression again, I bumped into a high school classmate there who was also a doctor and I took the chance and pulled out my lab results and gave it to doc elbert and asked him how was my liver doing, he said it was pretty alright too and he laughed if that’s why I’m carrying some liquor right now. Then he hugged his wife and told me that they’re going to have their baby this july and they were both so happy about it, doc elbert then asked me if I alreay had someone and in my depression I just told him that I can manage through life being alone, he laughed maybe because he thought I wasn’t so serious about what I said but what the hell. I walked back home and I didn’t notice that doc elbert followed me from behind from his car and he passed by and honked and they yelled something like take care which I didn’t hear, I waved back anyway.

I drank at my desk again last night when I was surprised that charlene sent me a message to my mobile phone telling me to go easy on the alcohol, and she said something for my liver like its not going to be as healthy someday.

Gundam Kits

2008-03-10T10:17:00.006+08:00

5 things I'm currently into

-building gundam models

What the hell is a gundam model?

Gundam is a popular japanese anime fiction series that features giant robots or mobile suits and gundam is basically how they call these robots. Gundams are easily distinguishable through their heads because they always have a V shaped antenna on their foreheads, a protruding block on their chins and exhaust vents around their faces, more often on the sides of their faces, moreover they are long-limbed robots and they seem to have plated armors around their bodies, shoulders and knees in particular. The Gundam series has been around for almost thirty years and their franchise has gone from japanese manga to different tv series, model kits, video games and anything a cultish object.

amuro ray’s RX-78-2 from mobile suit gundam, the grandaddy of all the gundams.

I knew very little about the gundam universe, I haven’t even seen any gundam episode in one sitting, I only have one gundam manga and I haven’t even read it, I’m only into the model kits. I always fancy looking at gundam models before when I was a teenager, partly because maybe I was into fiction and maybe they just look so goddam cool, some of them cost a lot though. It wasn’t til 2000 when I first tried making one, it was a V2 gundam and though it was the only one I had, I enjoyed the whole trouble of building the kit and staring at it over at my desk. Before I didn’t make much gundam models, say one model in six months or even in a year. It wasn’t til last december when I decided to go back to building these kits again and I'm building fast, I was trying to find a hobby or something to get my head distracted with because I just feel lonely everynight.

In a nutshell, gundam models are divided into scales which are:

SG (speed grade)
or HCM-Pro (high complete model progressive)
these models come in one piece and they need no more assembly, for people who are into gundam models but do not want to go through the trouble of building them, suitable for little kids

SD (super deformed)
As what their name implies, these gundam models look very goofy having very small bodies yet very big heads like they were cartoon gundam figures

1/144 FG (first grade)
I haven’t had one so I don’t know how to describe them much except that these gundam models are small and will take a lot of skill, paint and patience to build, but these models cannot do much movement with their limbs.

1/144 HG (high grade)
These kits usually stand around 4 inches tall, unlike 1/144 scales these models can do more movements, almost every gundam model is available in this scale.

1/144 HGUC (high grade universal century)
These kits are slightly bigger than the 1/144 HG, say about 5 inches. Universal century represents a certain timeline in the gundam universe so I think only certain gundam models that are in this timeline are included in this scale, I think.

1/100 HG
More bigger, around 7 to 7.5 inches tall, better mobility, better details.

1/100 MG (master grade)
Is just around the same size as a 1/100 HG but it is hell more articulate with its limbs becasue they have an internal skeleton system, you could even open their cockpit hatches to see the pilot seats.

1/60 PG (perfect grade)
Very expensive, freakingly detailed, only very few gundam models were given the honor of appearing in a 1/60 scale. I can’t afford one.

conversion/resin kit
these are the hardest kits to build because the kits come in pale resin color and you have to paint everything from scratch

This is sven cal bayan’s strike noir gundam (1/100 MG) from the ce 73 stargazer movie posing hopelessly in front of my old painting of marilyn monroe. I found this painting stacked at the bottom of my closet, I had to find something to cover my desk because it is a mess, I remember I did this painting around seven years ago and I was about to throw it away because I feel there is something wrong with it, her missing mole is one thing but came this girl who saw it and was begging for it so I decided to keep it anyway. It’s like some things you have that you don’t pay much attention to but you start to hold on to it when somebody wants to take them away.

Leap

2008-02-29T20:39:00.006+08:00

Today is the one day that only comes once every four years and since the last time it happened I still wasn’t writing my thoughts on this webpage yet, I should have at least something to write today.

I also decided to open up this business I’ve been working on the past few months today, this one is not about the leap date but I had been thinking of opening this up on a february though some of the walls and ceiling aren’t finished, even the air conditioner wasn't working yet, but I’m thinking at least I only get to celebrate its anniversary once every four years. Anyway they woke me up this morning that before the business would start running, some christian priest had to say some prayers inside perhaps in wishful thinking that the business will rake in good fortune. I swear it was easier for the priest to tell everybody here to work harder because that’s how you rake in fortune for real. Anyway my head was spinning from waking up too early and I fixed myself a bit and brought my morning coffee to the place unlikewise everybody who were holding candles, so I just had to leave my coffee at the corner and get myself a stupid candle too. The priest was some very old guy where his hands trembled when he held on to his little black book of prayers and his voice trembled too and you couldn’t hear him talk because some of the other workers were pounding on wood and aluminum bars to my leap day deadline.

I thought his prayers were going to be some long ritual that will take so much time but it only took him about ten minutes to finish his call to heaven and then he started sprinkling holy water all over the place. He was good at this though, from the way his hands trembled, the holy water droplets got all over the place including into my cup of coffee over at the corner.

My cousin told me that this priest is very sick from some kind of disease which I forgot because my head was still sleepy, which probably explains him hardly holding on to his little black book. I felt sorry for him though, I mean his old and alone and sick, so I placed one thousand bucks in an envelope and slipped it to his little black book of prayers, it wasn’t for his prayers or anything he did for the leap day, I just have this big problem with sympathy towards humanity, it eats me from the inside.

The Triumvate

2008-02-12T23:02:00.006+08:00

I spent the lunar new year alone in manila again, I stayed in a hotel in the middle of chinatown so that I could get the feel of the holidays but it wasn’t much fun though, the streets were crowded with people because some tv network brought in show biz people up in some parade around chinatown and everybody around was dying to get to see them. Its not like that they could even touch them or anything but they just went plain mad watching, and its not like they’re part of the new year at all and I’ll bet these people on the parade don’t even know that it’s the lunar new year if not for their agents telling them to dress in red and join the parade at chinatown and leave the crowd going bonkers.

Anyway I had some beers over at my room watching the mayhem from my window with some chinese dumplings for take out, I couldn’t eat at any restaurant downstairs because they were full of chinese families in red eating together so I just had to buy anything that was already up for grabs and I ended up with dumplings, they were so easy to buy because you could just point at anything that looks good and save yourself from reading any menu, they all tasted great though.

Keloyd’s old man bit the dust on the lunar new year and he was also in manila over the weekend, he was going to have some beers in makati with his friends and I was planning to drop by him to see him if he’s feeling fine or something because he’s probably down. Imer was also in makati avenue playing ball and we were going to have some beers ourselves later too. I was riding the jeep on taft avenue when another old friend jom smsed me up asking how was I doing, I told him I was about to meet imer at makati avenue and if he wanted to join us for beers, but he found the place too far because he’s in sampaloc and what chance it was because sampaloc was only a few blocks away from my hotel. So just I got down from my ride and called him that I was there and maybe we could just let imer come over. I felt imer will come over because the funny thing was me, imer and jom used to be the triumvate of drunkards in our class and it has been a very long while since we met the three of us altogether again, on occasion only two guys could meet, it was like some reunion we’ve been waiting to happen. But the problem was I had a plane to catch at five in the morning, much less I should have seen keloyd after what happened to his old man.

I think the thought of having a plane to catch at five in the morning made me hold on to my senses the whole night even after I had ten bottles of beer, I swear I was crazy to drink that much. All I could remember was I left them at three in the morning, had coffee in my hotel and slept at the taxi to the airport. I woke up and my head was still spinning so I had to hold on to the airport luggage cart with my stuffs while walking to the check in counter and then slept at the airport again, I woke up the second time and went up the plane and slept at my seat again. The third time I woke up it was daybreak and I was already at the airport back home, my brother fetched me up at the airport and I told him I’ll drive because I knew my brother is not fond of driving at all but he said

“you look wasted, I’ll drive”

Then I slept again, by the time I woke up it was way past seven and I was staring at my desk at my room and thinking about what to do at work later when I began to goddam realize… how the hell did I manage to travel 300 miles back home like that?

Sister's Birthday

2008-02-04T23:21:00.004+08:00

Eight months was long enough, I can hold myself longer but I need to take in alcohol more often again, I’m expanding my father’s business twice fold even thrice fold that I can no longer handle the pressure. I just want to drink and unnerve and get the hell out of reality for a while.

It was my sister’s birthday last saturday, I didn’t greet her or anything, I never did to anyone in our family, maybe because that I don’t even give a crap about my own birthday. I could have left for manila that morning but my father decided that we should go out in some buffet for dinner. The problem with buffet dinner at those restaurants where you could eat all you could for just a certain price tag, is that you’d always feel so hungry when you’re thinking about eating all you could, but hunger is so persuasive that by the time you get there, you couldn’t even eat half as what you felt you could in the first place.

When we got into the restaurant, they had this picture of the chef who did the food at the buffet outside, it was big and it had all his credentials for cooking and the picture was just so goddam big that you could count the strands of hair from his goatee mustache. He was sporting some goatee on his chin to look hip or something and it made you worry if some of it fell while he was cooking.

The food was great though, half of what I ate was japanese sushi and the other half was what was laid on the rest of the table. They tried to make the whole menu so classy by giving silly names to the food and you wouldn’t know what the hell it was. Like this one they called mahemahe del veranda when its just plain fish with cheese, and they should call it fish with cheese because it might confuse somebody who doesn’t like such and they’ll end up taking a platefull and later get billed for leftovers. I even thought mahemahe is some kind of big shrimp.

What was more ridiculous was that the waiter told me that they don’t serve beer, I doubted it has something to do with their religion and too bad they’re missing the finer things in life. But I was thinking I should have said cerbeza de beber or something because maybe they might also have some other name for beer on their menu just like their food.

Anyway I took our bill after dinner and left for ariel’s internet cafe for my share of beer for the night with some of his patrons, some of them bought beer from another bar and I took half a liter in a big plastic cup and I didn’t know the plastic cup would be so soft that I ended up crushing it and spilling my first beer bottle for my sister’s birthday down on the floor.

Mecahnical Rodents

2008-01-27T22:33:00.000+08:00

5 things found in my room
-car side mirror
-a box of dead mice
-old tennis racquet
-bruce lee poster
-three cases of beer

Lonely

2008-01-24T23:15:00.004+08:00

Its that weekend in january when they’re going to have mardi gras parade out on the streets again, and it may not be the weekend yet but the people joining the mardi gras are already getting on my nerves, its almost midnight and they’re drumming on the streets for practice caring less that sleep doesn’t come my way at night.

My head hurts too because I’m worrying about of things from work, I am going through a hell lot of papers from contracts, quotations and government permits that they are almost driving me nuts, and the very precious time I have to lie in bed at night and think hakuna matata then some eager paraders have to practice out loud on the streets. Last tuesday night my head hurt a lot that I had to go out of the house at midnight for some beers, I couldn’t stand being at home anyway. I went to this bar, it was a tuesday night and there weren’t much people around so I sat at the bar ledge by my lonesome. All I could see there was a wall full of liquor bottles and some porcelain figure of a chinese mythological war god with his paintbrush beard and a pole arm spear. I was thinking how funny why he ended up in the middle of a wall full of liquor bottles, perhaps guarding them or something, like if I were going to have my own wall of liquors, I’m going to get my gundam models lined up in front to guard them.

It was depressing sitting and drinking there by myself. I felt I wanted a conversation, sometimes my lonesome and this goddam pressure from work gets into me that I wish I had a girl whom I could talk about this miserable life and she would be smiling at me, that’s one thing I miss big time.

Then some guy who was sitting beside who I think was gay, threw a pick up line to me hoping for some conversation himself, he told me how he saw me often but I wasn’t up to talking to him so I just didn't mind him and then he just left, he could have been some melancholic like myself though I felt I shouldn’t have been so rude. Soon the bartender came up to me after my third bottle and asked why the long face “is it about a girl sir?” I told him I have a lot of things to worry at work, I didn't want to go talking about how depressing my night is or why I am here in the first place because of the racket on the streets at home. We ended up in a conversation though, and I think it was better to have a conversation with the bartender than with somebody who just came up to you who looks gay.

I got home around three in the morning and I did get good sleep after that but still my head hurts today and that lonely feeling is just getting worse.

5 things found in my bag

2007-12-28T23:07:00.005+08:00

-can opener
-plastic bags
-box of chocolates
-white shirt
-powdered cream sachets

Actually its five things I just found in my traveling bag since I just got home from manila two weeks ago and i don't bring any bag unless i'm away from home.

The can opener is when I go drinking beers I buy in seven eleven to my hotel room because sometimes you’d find it expensive to keep on buying beers at the hotel.

The plastic bags are for sorting my laundry and all manners of trash on going back home, everything is always a mess when you’re packing things up.

I was planning to give the boxes of chocolates to somebody but its past christmas already and they’re still inside my bag.

The white shirt is the only shirt I hadn’t worn when I was in manila two weeks ago.

I got the sachets of powdered cream from the hotel and airport when I was having coffee, I had a flight going back home at five in the morning and I had three cups and I saved all the cream sachets because I didn’t like cream anyway.

I had one hell of a trip back home from manila two weeks ago, I was supposed to fly back home on the night of december the 10th, I almost got to the airport late because of the december traffic. I also had trouble packing my things back to my bag before I left because I was carrying a lot of things back home that I had to get a used rice sack where I placed all of those other stuffs and tied the sack to a knot, hell it looked like a sack of trash if you saw it.

I did look silly going to the airport dragging a yellow rice sack but it wasn’t as heavy, and when I was checking in the sack at the airport, the clerk said that my goddam flight was cancelled til next morning and it didn’t hit me all at once because I was still staring at the scale and how my rice sack weighted but when I began to realize that I’ll be staying for another night in manila and how much money I have to be spending, I started complaining like mad about the whole mess that they are getting me into. I swear I hadn't complained to somebody like that before.

Anyway they got me a hotel room for the night plus paid everything in between, they led me to their shuttle bus outside with passengers from different screwed up flights, I lit a cigarette before going up the shuttle because maybe I wanted to calm my nerves a bit and it made me look more upset to the airline people while I smoked there. The shuttle had a friendly bunch of people except for this guy who was talking a lot about his christian faith, he told us about how these miserable lives we have now are just trials for our afterlives and all that crap like Im sure his flight to the afterlife will not be delayed anymore, He was close to preaching but at least he calmed down this girl in the shuttle who was sobbing like hell because the airline people also screwed her connecting flight abroad. The driver had to drop her first at the international airport fast and I could have told preacher man there to pray to jesus to give the driver stiffs while stepping on the gears. The preacher man did stop talking when we got to the international airport though, I almost forgot that it was in time for the hajj and the international airport had muslim pilgrims lining up for a flight to saudi, and preacher man had his faith outnumbered there.

They later brought us to this hotel that’s in the middle of nowhere, everybody started coming out of the bus and into the hotel restaurant for dinner and the goddam food at the place was terrible, everything was dry and coarse and they should have at least served it with a soup of some sort, luckily my father called on my mobile phone to ask me where the hell I was so I got the chance to stand up and answer my call and leave the restaurant first.

They had me staying in a big room with three other passengers and hell I almost lost my yellow rice sack I was carrying back home because the bellboys at this hotel thought it was trash from the bus and they almost threw it away, I swear it doesn’t look like a luggage when you look at it. From the three other passengers at my room, two were fathers who were coming home for christmas and the other guy was some deaf ship crew who was also having his christmas vacation, the two married guys talked a lot about family life while in bed and the shipmate was watching tv but it was hard getting to talk to him anyway, he can hardly hear you. Besides I sort of felt uneasy sleeping with three strangers so I just headed to the hotel bar at the rooftop and drank some beers and came back after everybody was sleeping.

I barely slept, only for maybe an hour or so and by the time everybody else was up at 2:30 having breakfast, all I had were just coffee from the coffee shop, they kept serving it with cream though, that's how I got to save all those sachets in my bag.

Facts in Five

2007-12-27T01:17:00.000+08:00

5 things found in my room
-car side mirror
-a box of dead mice
-old tennis racquet
-bruce lee poster
-three cases of beer

5 things found in my wallet
-driver’s license
-credit cards
-band aids
-unknown numbers written on all sorts of small papers
-pocket calendars of years past but have good looking women on the other side

5 things found in my bag
-can opener
-plastic bags
-box of chocolates
-white shirt
-powdered cream sachets

5 things I want to do
-go on a vacation, to a beach in particular
-to buy a new office chair
-to hire a programmer
-buy a pressured coffee maker (the one that goes pphffft!)
-get rich

5 things I’m currently into
-building gundam models
-alcohol rehabilitation
-work
-hell that’s enough to keep me busy

Artful Dodger

2007-12-06T23:08:00.005+08:00

My watch stopped 10:30 in the morning of november the 16th and time hasn't moved for more than two weeks according to my watch, but even without the track of time I would still arrive very late like I always do in a couple friends wedding I attended about a week ago. The wedding reception started at six in the evening and I arrived almost eight though my watch said 10:30 and this time it got me into trouble. I got inside the hall where everybody was eating but they were all done anyway, I saw peter and his wife and I decided to join them at their table when he started standing and pointing to my direction, I found out that jason was also hosting the wedding and he was calling me on the microphone to come up front. Everybody in the crowd faced me and they had to clap like hell and I found out I got inside the hall right in time for that goddam part where the groom throws his bride's stocking to single men, and I caught the garter on the third throw. Jason then stuck his microphone up my mouth if I wanted to say anything to the crowd and I swear I could have gone nuts, I pulled the microphone away and told him I just got here, so much for being late.

They say you're supposed to get married next if the garter falls to your favor, hell I don't think so.

I also got a call from my high school classmate who was the valedictorian of our chinese class last month, he is also getting married next year and he had to because his hair is receding like the low tide. He called me up because he wanted me to do this part in his wedding where I tie a rope noose around him and his wife's neck, maybe to mean something like in marriage we'll have the other's neck everytime the other screws something up. I kept on refusing and I swore everytime I did because I just don't want to go up front in weddings, he tried to changing my mind telling me that he got no other close friends left, though I did appreciate him counting my reclusiveness a close friend.

I promised him that I'll be there for his wedding in manila if I can make it, he just need not put me into the people that's part of the wedding scene for the crowd to make fun at. My high school friend was hoping for more conversation with me because he kept popping out things to talk about, like he was asking if he could help me get married, he mentioned this chinese art of traditional pimping where somebody plays the matchmaker and gets all the aging losers to get married among themselves to preserve their gene pool or some chromosome that they don't want to keep from getting diluted with other races, else create more freaks like me that can blow up the world with depression. Anyway I kept on swearing and refusing to him, I just don't have thoughts of being up in front of a crowd in my own wedding or even the thought of getting married at all, I just didn't feel like telling him about it.

The Sword of Damocles

2007-11-30T22:17:00.002+08:00

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

2007-11-15T21:57:00.000+08:00

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

2007-11-02T23:33:00.001+08:00

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 loyalties of the neighborhood clans fighting to certain heights. 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.

Trinoma

2007-10-20T21:11:00.001+08:00

I went to this mall up in north avenue my brother told me about earlier this month, I only wanted to check out the place and see how they whipped it up to shape because it was new and I used to remember it some years back to be some wide empty lot with construction machines scattered all over the place, I got to remember it so clearly because I used to wait there to catch a ride at midnight after class going to visayas avenue. I had to wait for these jeepneys that yelled something like project 6, though I didn't know where the hell it was and all I had to remember was to go down at this seven eleven which was the only place having lights on after midnight.

Anyway they did a pretty good job with this mall and it was like some grand weekend park with all the people walking around, but I didn't have nothing to shop though, I only wanted to go to this fine bookstore because I was trying to find this woody allen book without feathers, they didn't have the book though they said I could order a copy and pay them half the cost thereon and come back three weeks later for the book. It was too much trouble except if you were really so crazy about the book and besides I remember my old man having getting even back home stacked at his shelves. I'm not such a big fan about woody allen anyway but I think he has a good sense of humor in him.

It was a great bookstore nonetheless because I still got out of the place buying one book, maybe it has something to do with the carpet all over the place, it makes you feel you'd want to walk all over and over and check out more books, I would want to get out fast though if they had already started to bomb malls in manila to kingdom come about two weeks later, it was all over the headlines days ago that a bomb took out this mall glorietta and it could have scared the hell out of me then being inside a mall but anyway this mall probably was too new for these bombermen to blow up, they'd probably get lost themselves on their getaway run after getting their bombs in place because the hallways are very confusing, and it even messes my own sense of direction inside.

Anyway I bought one japanese manga book, its like a thick comic book told over black and white drawings and I bought it because some friend introduced me to this girl over coffee some months back who was working on a thesis about graphic novels, maybe I wanted to go reading another graphic novel or something after talking to her. But the funny thing is that I haven't opened the goddam book because I found out that there were three more volumes after it and maybe I'd find myself hooked to the story and buying the rest soon, though I think I could still sell this book around.

September Deluge

2007-09-29T21:14:00.000+08:00

It had been raining nonstop for the past two weeks like hell that you'd begin to feel that the old testament god is up with his temperament over humanity that maybe he's out to flood us again for something, fortunately we have a good working sewer system in this millenium now that is saving us from another deluge, unlike before when all somebody could only think of was to make a boat.

The weather too is getting on my nerves, I can get the least two garments soaked everytime i get out of the house from the heavy rain and I can't hang them dry fast enough without sunlight for days, I was running out of shirts to wear that hell I was even forced to sew back these holes on some of my old shirts some goddam mouse gnawed on some weeks back. I'll bet that guy stuck on his boat for forty days under the rain from the old testament had trouble drying his clothes too, and with the whole animal kingdom on board his ship, his clothes probably had holes too from all sorts of rodents trying to find something to chew on.

I needed more things to wear because I was also leaving for manila that I had to pack a weeks set of wardrobe with me, most of what I brought were shirts that I had already worn once but they were dark colored anyway and they don't catch dirt that fast, nobody could tell. The weather was as bad in manila and it still brought my depression to overdrive since I was now alone, and I couldn't get any work done being depressed, I needed some time alone to unwind anyway. I decided to go to some mall facing manila bay to kill time, I took a cab to save myself from getting soaked and i was expecting the driver to chisel me over my fare, they will just pick about anybody to chisel when its raining but my driver didn't pull one out on me, he didn't even talk or anything, I suppose he was depressed too by the rain.

I wanted to get some coffee in the mall and watch the rain take on the bayfront but I had pizza instead, I was hungry anyway. What I didn't know before I got to the mall was that they brought the shroud of turin there for a show.

The shroud of turin is a 500 year old white blanket laid with an image of a man made by red stains with facial features of a renaissance inspired look of jesus christ complete with emphasis on his stigmatas. Despite conspicous proofs, christian believe that this is the cloth that covered jesus christ after his death a thousand years and a half earlier.

The exhibit was up for 250 bucks to see the blanket up close, I wanted to see it at first too for all the fuss it made the last 500 years but I then thought it was too expensive and somehow I didn't want to join the bandwagon of believers buying this 500 year old prank. The truth is, I think this is one great prank somebody thought of that lived off for a long time, the guys who made it didn't knew about the science of DNA coming out in this century and if they knew they should have the least placed their blood over the blanket and expect them to be cloned as gods 500 years later, but a still lot of people buy their story anyway and their dead bodies six feet under are probably laughing at us right now.

I'm no iconoclast but I think people should draw a line between symbolism and blind fanaticism, and if I were the old testament god, this might be reason enough to flood this part of the country where the blanket is right now and wash it clean.

Blood Moon Freak

2007-08-30T14:52:00.000+08:00

August is always dull, there is always nothing much to write about. I remember I even tried starting this blog on an august three years ago but it was probably always the same dull august that I just had to wait til september. At least something had to happen last tuesday night, there was this lunar eclipse where the moon was supposed turn red just after sunset, but it wasn’t a spectacular sight to miss anyway because the moon turns red quite often.

There are still people who are amused by a lunar eclipse, especially the primordial folks of this country because they love entertaining themselves with their own stories of the blood moon, and with some of their imaginary friends turning up the red light on the moon, everything unusual is happening around. I knew there were ridiculous stories out there so tried to go and ask some people for fun and perhaps what folks agreed so much with was that the blood moon can make mutations to babies if their mothers stared at the blood moon during their pregnancy. It didn’t make sense but they still bought that crap because they knew at least somebody pregnant who saw a blood moon and later had a freak for a kid, like this boy they kept telling me they knew that was born with just one ear because of the blood moon.

Anyway, it was raining hard monday night and tuesday it did stop raining but still there were a lot of clouds after sunset that you just had to forget about the blood moon thing, though you knew in your head that the moon is red behind those clouds. And last bloody moon tuesday night I was stopping by some grocery for peanuts on the way home after work and I couldn’t help staring up at the sky again and again if the clouds have cleared, the only thing red I could have seen was from bumping my head from not looking straight. I don’t know why I even tried buying peanuts in the first place, maybe I made that one up so I could walk home longer and keep an eye at the moon while pretending to be walking. It was cloudy anyway but at least the birthrate of freaks will probably drop.

Gang Aft Aglay

2007-08-06T23:27:00.000+08:00

I thought it would take some goddam miracle to get me to stop from drinking too much, but it must have been something less of a miracle because I have been cutting short my drinking habit for quite a while already, and I’m pretty much happy about it.

Anyway I had to take a flight back home this morning from manila and I had to be up somewhere before six today, it was going to be rather early so I went back to my hotel around nine last night, I passed by seven eleven to get some chips or anything to eat because I was going to hole myself in my room for the rest of the night and it was a sunday and there was probably something good on cable TV over the weekend. I was thinking of passing without beers in seven eleven anymore, but I still ended up buying three bottles because they had this coor’s light beer which I only used to see in those american magazines like popular mechanics when I was a kid. I wanted to try it anyway and besides it would always taste good over some good movie, and hell something good was showing on cable TV back at my room that I got to finish all three bottles before the movie was done that I just had to go buy another bottle from the hotel bar to finish the movie off.

I did get to wake up before six today and I made it to the airport quite early, I had my bag half empty and there was not much cars on the road because the weather was not so good in manila, but I did have my jacket and pocket umbrella with me though. I didn’t use my umbrella that much, it was quite small and the ribs folded a lot that it was too much of a trouble trying to open and close it for the rain, besides I had my jacket and I could even sleep on it the airport because of staying up late over cable TV last night. I also met my parents at the airport, they were just going to drop by manila for the morning and head for hong kong later, they didn’t have an umbrella or anything for the heavy rain so I just gave them my pocket umbrella because I wasn’t using it anyway.

The weather was a lot better here back home but I blew up the roof when I got to my room though, I was going to pick some new shirt to wear for the rest of the day from my closet and some goddam mouse had been gnawing on my clothes over the weekend when I was not around, probably to make himself a home or something, and most of those it gnawed with are my most expensive clothes I left here at home. Just because there’s this animated movie in the big screens right now about some ambitious mouse who had his big break at cooking doesn’t mean these mice can trash around my clothes anytime they want and later put on a show that they’re good in cooking, let them french eat their mouse cuisine like in the movies because they’re stupid anyway.

I had this shirt which costed some grands that I bought some years back, it was quite expensive and that goddam mouse made one hole on the shirt right where my liver should be, the shirt was old anyway. I used to think something expensive can make somebody look good but hell buy an idiot some expensive suit or some doctor’s robe and they’re still an idiot underneath it.

Tales from the Decabiography

2007-08-01T13:39:00.000+08:00

9 I have a lot of caps

I couldn’t help but notice ariel’s receding hairline and I couldn’t help too but ask him about how it happens, he would pass out the subject by telling me its all because he liked wearing this cap I gave to him for his birthday. It scared the hell out of me because I used to have a lot of caps and I had this habit of wearing caps a lot and I didn’t know wearing caps for so long can get you bald.

I wore caps a lot before because I have a very stubborn set of hair that always looks like a mess and everyday is a bad hair day and only caps can hold them down in place, I tried using hair paste before but it doesn’t work and its goddam annoying like your head feels heavier and hair paste doesn’t last long on my head too, it melts down to my face getting my forehead all shinning and sticky like I had some slug hiding up there. It does make me wonder how other people can use hair paste on their hair and shape it like mohawks, don kings or into sharp thorns that I swear it could get lizards killed if they fall unto these kinds of hairstyles from the ceiling, they're probably hiding their horns under these hairstyles too.

I quit wearing caps for quite a while already even before this urban myth of caps and baldness because I had my hair mowed down to some short stumps, its much easier this way though, I can save myself time from fixing it after getting out of bed or from the rain or just anywhere. Im much worried sometimes on the mirror that I overdid wearing caps and that my own hairline is receding, maybe that’s why them turban wearing people have long beards because their hairs had to grow on the other end of their heads because of being covered from above.

Anyway what people tell me that what I should worry about my hair is that Im growing a lot of grey hair, and most of these grey hairs cluster in a small patch right above my forehead, yet it doesn't make me look older, it looks like I dyed it on purpose. You can’t get to see it these days because my hair is extremely short but when it starts to grow longer, people notice it a lot and they say its kind of strange too that it only grows above my forehead, though you could spot some vagrant grey hairs across my head. I think maybe because that spot on my head is right where that part of the brain that stores depression, and maybe because of the depression glands below it that hair on that part of my head turns white.

Popeye's Girlfriend

2007-07-22T23:35:00.003+08:00

Max’s girlfriend, sarah called me up friday night around 9, she had this korean guest over at their house whom her mother wants her to take around the city, since max sleeps exactly at 9pm, sarah wanted me to join her for the night. I did anyway because she told me that our korean loves drinking alcohol too.

I picked them up at their house and our korean friend looked lost on what to wear, he had a cloth cap that looked like a sock rolled over his head and he wore shorts and sneakers and a belt bag where he had his stuffs, and his mouth was always slightly hanging open where he looked like he was always staring and you could see both his incisors sticking out too, I told sarah that she should have at least told our korean to wear pants. Anyway we took him to the bar joints in the city and sarah said we should try taking him to a korean bar and maybe he could spot his cousins there and we could just leave him, we took him to this watergate2 place which had many korean words outside. The place was dark and hell it was full of koreans and kimchi and a big screen tv which was showing some korean movie that me and sarah felt we just took a door leading to korea. Me and sarah sat by the wall facing our korean and we started talking, he asked me what was my full name and sarah told him

oliver

he paused and tried saying my name with his korean accent

oo-leev-voirl

then he paused again and he looked puzzled and said

popeye’s girlfriend?

And hell he kept calling me popeye’s girlfriend the whole night, I began asking him how did he find this country and the weather and all that crap and he said it is pretty hot here, he began talking about how they have snow in korea and he thinks its dung (he hasn’t learned to say shit yet) because they’re always told to clean snow when he was in military training. I asked him what he did during his military training days, he replied with two words

drive tank

I told him during my military training days we only had wood rifles to carry around the field and he look pretty surprised, I told him you could still whack your enemy with it anyway.

Me and sarah left watergate2 to get more beers someplace else, it was a friday night and there was many people walking around, I was pretty much uneasy and sarah kept on telling me not to mind them. Sarah is very pretty, cute and white if you’ve seen her, and she was a head turner when we were looking for a new bar that I had to walk in front of her so that people wont look in my direction, I was looking down when I walked so that I could just forget that there were many people and when I tried looking forward, hell froze over because carelle was standing about 2 meters from me. We held hands and I tried to smile and I just asked her how she was doing, my words were seconds apart because I didn’t feel like talking, I even forgot all about sarah who was already staring at us because she haven’t met carelle, but she knows pretty well what’s going on between me and her. Elle was with her family and this old man from france, she said she wanted to introduce me to this old french guy she's been hanging around with, I wasn’t looking at her direction and I wasn’t saying anything though elle could read nevermind from my face. She continued telling me it’s alright that it’s not what I think it is, and she pressed her hand harder and said

He’s just my friend ok?

Though everybody had already said otherwise some months back that its her boyfriend, I wouldn't give a crap about it anyway and she introduced me, I didn't say anything too. The french guy had a big stomach and wrinkles on his face that he could be old enough to be your father and all he did was sit and stare back and forth and up to the ceiling. Me and sarah then sat in the next table beside them, elle told me her aunt met my friend peter earlier. I said

I know

I knew because peter told me about her aunt when I was at his house earlier and he invited me for dinner, I just told elle I know because I didn’t feel like talking anything to her. And for crying out loud our korean came to the bar, he saw me on my sixth beer bottle that night and said.

whoa slow down popeye’s girlfriend slow down

He sat in front of us and I pulled and gave him a cigarette so he would talk twice as less while smoking, I didn’t bring my lighter and hell our korean walked around to look for one and bowed down to this guy like some nutcracker soldier when he lit his stick and it left everybody laughing, it was goddam embarrassing. When our korean came back to our table sarah asked him what he thinks about the frenchman in the next table, he paused again maybe trying to come up with his amazing words and said

He looks like grandpa

Saving Private Palma

2007-07-19T23:32:00.001+08:00

Our secretary’s neighbor died last week, his death was the talk of their neighborhood and perhaps the rest of the country because he is a marine private who died in the line of duty in a small island down south in a campaign against enemy rebels last week.

This private just took one bullet during their gun battle, but it got him right on his forehead right above his eyebrow and it was enough to get somebody killed. But it was pretty much a decent death when you try to think about it because the other dead soldiers from his platoon came back home in pieces, and mostly without their heads on. From what the other marines told the private’s family, some of the dead soldiers had their arms, legs, eyeballs and reproductive extremities missing and the enemy rebels couldn’t have just shot them off, they were like animals that they had to dismember them off and leave these dead bodies in pieces outisde their territory as co-specie warnings not to come close, since probably their urine and feces didn’t smell strong enough to mark their frontier.

Animals tend to be territorial over nesting grounds or a food source, about a week ago these rebels caught an italian priest whom they are keeping in their hideout and whom these marines are looking for in the first place, and this italian is a very good food source for them and they're not giving him away so easily, not that they had him cooking italian spaghetti or pasta but this italian can rake in a good amount of money once his country starts looking for him.

Some say this private was the first one who got shot at the heat of their gun battle because he carried their radio equipments and the enemy had to take him out first before he could call for help. Our secretary also thought that way too because she remembered their neighbor to be a very placid boy and he would probably run like forrest gump if caught in a heavy gunfight. Our secretary took the day off yesterday because her daughter caught fever after staying up late watching soldiers at their neighbor's. It was the private’s birthday too yesterday and their town priest held mass for him because the private used to be an acolyte for that priest when he was a boy, anyway the priest couldn’t think of anything to say during the mass, the private’s mother had been crying like mad the past few days so he just sang a happy birthday song over the dead body and the mother fainted down to the ground.

Pennywise

2007-07-02T22:01:00.000+08:00

I was invited to the first birthday of a high school classmate’s daughter yesterday, I came to the lunch party 2 hours after it started because lib always comes to parties late, the place was at some fourth floor lobby of some really expensive hotel and when I got there, I found max already taking deserts in the lunch table, and hell the food was strikingly good being the menu of some really expensive hotel but I wasn’t so eager to eat anyway. I was even wearing sloppy going to the place, it was raining hard that day and I had the bottom of my jeans folded twice over dirty sandals that I looked like I waded in the rain going there, I was driving though.

Peter and his wife were also at the table where I sat and I only ate a handful of grub, max then asked me to check out this crep bar in the restaurant, its spelled crepe but I’d rather spell it crep which is spelled closer to crap. I don’t remember eating crep because they always come in expensive, though in menu pictures they’re just some thin pancake neatly folded over some fruit with fancy swirls of syrup and cream which I bet folding and decorating the whole fancy foodstuff is making it expensive, should it come in a mess it will probably be threefold less cheaper. This probably explains why I had to go through the trouble of decorating my own crep at this party's restaurant, so that they could go easy on creativity costs.

I am quite fond of apple pies and my crep looked something like a bloated apple pie and peter’s wife had to ask where did I get such desert. Anyway the party was starting while I ate and the guests around me had their kids playing with this clown who was hosting the party, the clown could tell he was surrounded by rich kids, he started this game where he asks something from the kids and these kids go scamper here and there to get it for him for a prize. The clown was asking for these things everybody knew only rich kids can get from their parents, like car keys and credit cards, and hell he even asked for the most expensive mobile phone, and you could just forget about joining if your parents didn’t have a car or they got some crappy old mobile phone. I swear the clown could have also gone asking which car keys he asked for opens the most expensive car or which of those credit cards can loan the biggest, goddam clown was teaching kids the value of money too soon.

We left the party before it was over, we were to old to join the other kids with the clown anyway. Max asked me to check out his shih tzu puppies at his place, peter said those dogs are for girls and he asked to check out his rottweiler puppies over beer instead, since I was driving I just went back to work for the afternoon.

Playing God

2007-06-21T21:42:00.000+08:00

I flew back to my country last sunday afternoon. I already had my trash packed into my luggage the night before yet I was up early that sunday morning, I usually wake up late sunday mornings.

I only had some oatmeal, bread and cups of coffee for breakfast last sunday, I had been having the hotel’s omelet for breakfast for almost a week that I feel I’d go sick if I had the same morning hors de oeuvre for another week, yet breakfast was the only meal in bangkok where my food wasn’t spicy. I didn't have much to do that sunday anymore so I read the morning news in my room and sunday newspapers are usually better because they’d always put some better story about the lighter side of life than more people getting killed on the front page. There was this article about cloud seeding that was sort of interesting, the article wrote about thailand’s rainmaking project where farmers on the countryside who can’t grow crops because of drought can send a wish list to the government for rain and wait for cloud seeding planes to come and give them rain clouds. It’s more effective than offering dead animals to the skies to some lazy rain god for rain, and weathermen could loose their jobs faster when predicting sunny weather can easily be undone by rainmakers, it was the first time I heard man playing god with the weather.

Anyway I took the plane back to my country around three in the afternoon, I ate and drank some beers up in the plane and slept, I woke up almost at touchdown and as a trademark gesture from the plane crew, stewardess hand out corsages to ladies with their country’s national flower. There was this family across the aisle from where I sat, the husband asked for a corsage for himself from the stewardess, he was trying to strike up a joke up there that he told the stewardess that he needed that corsage for his mother in law, and he was the only person laughing at his line even with his wife and kids around him, it killed me, its those mother in law jokes that you’re supposed to find it funny when you’re doing something thoughtful for your wife’s mother. I could have asked for a corsage myself and the least shut up about it.

I stayed for a day in manila, imer dropped by my hotel the night before I flew back home and he was laughing at how I rated him the highest for alcohol tolerance in this blog a few months back, though we only had a few beers that night. I was also looking forward to going home because they closed down the old airport back home when I was in thailand and I’ll be flying back home in a new airport a couple of kilometers north of our city. I got back home around 8:30 and there wasn’t much to see from the new airport at dark and though I wanted to see how the airport looked like, I wasn’t expecting much since two days ago I was at thailand’s new 6-month old airport too and theirs was like some big hindu space installation that you could get lost in. But anyway the new airport back home is now far better from the old one where I flew from almost two weeks ago, our old airport before seemed like some sweaty bus terminal in the middle of nowhere that right after you got down from the plane, porters gatecrash the terminal and crowd on passengers to let them carry your luggage for robbery prices, and they’d get so disorderly pushing around passengers like they own the airport. And when you get out of the airport, taxi drivers then take turns pestering you to take their cabs, you’d feel like you’re a week-old slab of meat with legs walking out of the airport where these taxi drivers are like flies buzzing all over you.

The new airport just made it felt better to be back home, except that it now takes twice as long to get there from home.

Tales from the Decabiography

2007-06-13T21:37:00.000+08:00

8 I love everything spicy

I grew a very big mouth sore on my lower lip last friday and the goddam thing just had to come out when I am taking a flight to bangkok yesterday morning, and if there is something I am looking forward to here in bangkok its eating their great spicy food. I think I have a very good resistance in the scoville scale but hell I just had to have this goddam sensitive mouth sore since last weekend to stop me from getting anything explosive tasting into my mouth. It always happens when I get here, as if the mouth sores are popping out of excitement for spicy cuisine.

I had some things to do in bangkok this week but when I was already about to leave manila, the office back home called that there will be this meeting with this stupid lawyer manager which I had been hoping to come up soon, and hell when it did I was not going to be around. I was going to miss the goddam meeting that it kept messing up in my head up to the time I was already on my seat on the plane. What the heck I tried to make peace with the situation and drank two beers after the plane took off and I went on reading this book I pulled out of a sale back home last sunday, I didn’t know what the book was about really, I went on reading for about 50 pages and I realized that the book’s author is gay and hell he openly wrote about their gay perversions every so often in the story, I tried reading it anyway than bug myself about the meeting back home I was about to miss, though I was wary about the other passengers beside me if they knew the book and think I’m gay and Im flying to bangkok to get transplants or something or be in gay company, there are a lot of their kind around in this place.

When I landed and had my turn at the immigration counter, the officer asked for my boarding pass which I don’t remember being asked from me often in the past. Funny I used my boarding pass to bookmark the pages I was done reading in the book and I just pulled it out and gave it to the officer that I lost track from where I was reading, but I didn’t mind anyway, I wasn’t going back to the book soon or probably even finish it.

I got out from my hotel around six already and there wasn’t much to do at that hour anyway so I just went to some fastfood and eat spicy as how I wanted to write about in the first place. The foodcourt I ate in looked so classy and stylish because it were at some business district and you had all these young urban people eating around in their ties, but the food is pretty cheap though, its those people with their ties that only make it look expensive. There was a sign on the seasoning table that almost sounded like a welcome sign to my taste buds.

I took the note as: everything goes.

The first siamese word I learned years ago is nam which meant water, I learned that word the hard way because I wasn’t acquainted yet with how fiery the food here can get and I just took a mouthful of spices that it left me taste buds burning and asking for anything to rinse it with, I called to the waiter for water and hell he didn’t understand a simple english word like water and the more I couldn’t repeat saying water any longer from my mouth because it was goddam burning. So I had to motion my hand like I was holding some glass and that I’m gulping heavily, and to my relief the waiter exclaimed “oh, nam” and rushed to get me a glassful.

Sea Wolves

2007-06-04T02:47:00.000+08:00

They told stories in the news that the third pirates of the carribean movie raked in some grand sum of money only after the couple of days it hit the big screen, so me and my cousins figured out that this must be something great to watch altogether at the break of the week.

Me and my cousins had gone watching some other movie the week before and one of my newly-wed cousin took her husband to join us for the movies, but the problem with this new in-law is that he is taiwanese and every english word doesn’t make any sense to him except hello and paul which is the western name he adopted. So when we went watching a movie with him the week before, all he did inside the theater was eat popcorn and probably wonder what the hell was going on the movie. We did ask him to join us again this week for another movie but he declined saying that the movies here didn’t have any chinese subtitles, like how english movies are probably shown in his country for them gooks to understand. Somebody could have told him why we don’t have chinese subtitles in this country is because there aren’t much monolingual gooks coming to theaters here.

Yet still he joined us again since it was probably more entertaining for him to watch a movie in gibberish and help him learn an english line or two than stay put at his in-laws home that night. I came to him and I wanted to tell him that we were going to see a movie about pirates but I didn’t know how to say pirates in mandarin. Piracy could have been easier because that is what happens when DVDs come in very cheap in the black market that will always have chinese subtitles in it. Anyway I only know 水手 in mandarin which meant sailor, so I told paul that “we’re going to watch a movie about bad sailors who steals from other sailors”, it was chinese rhetoric at its best. My brother then gave me a hint to try saying sea wolves in mandarin to paul hoping it would ring a bell to him but the only thing that made his head rang was the movie poster outside the ticket booth, paul told he has seen the other two earlier movies, yet he's going to watch this one without understanding any goddam thing from the big screen.

The movie went on for about three long hours and most of those three hours were spent on long dialogues, and it wasn’t just the long progressing dialogues that you had to keep up with the story, there was so much twists in the dialogue that screwed up the the whole plot every so often that you couldn’t help but ask what the hell is going on, I could even feel those same barnacles growing at the side of my ears from listening too much. I glanced at paul across the seats and I can see himself more at peace from the whole confusion because there is no chinese subtitles.

The only scene me, paul and every body else found funny in the movie that needed not translation or neither was toilet humor was during this sequence when they had pirates from all around the world to have a get together for the sake of their existence in one table. One pirate who was obviously from the indian ocean because of his sikh fashioned beard held back his speech until keith richards of the rolling stones came out also dressed in a pirate suit when the indian pirate talked and screeched in his funny voice that sounded like a frog was caught in his throat. That was the only goddam thing funny in the movie and a good break from the long dull dialogues next to keith richard in a costume.

Tales from the Decabiography

2007-05-25T23:22:00.000+08:00

10 I am a star wars fan

A long time ago
In a galaxy far far away...

It wasn't so long actually, just 30 years ago exactly on this date when the first star wars movie was shown in the big screen and george lucas introduced us to that galaxy far far away.

My age falls a couple years short to being 30, so I was not around when the first star wars movie came out but I was able to see the third film on the big screen when I was a kid. In fact it was the first movie I saw inside a theater, I don't get to see much movies those days because they were quite expensive for my parents, yet I fell asleep halfway from watching my first movie though, I wasn't a late night guy yet at that age.

Anyway for the sake of the 30th year anniversary of star wars, I got a package 2 days ago from surfing for on-line garbage and it was sealed packs of star wars cards released by decipher way back 1995, the whole stuff costed for only about two dollars and you could tell the seller was trying to get rid of it, he sold it for two dollars to somebody halfway accross the globe with all the handling and shipping he had to do and I swear if his friends could have begged for it in the first place, he could have gave them away easily. The cards were also from the first movie too and I was expecting I could get a darth vader card or luke or obi wan but hell most of what I got were the alien regulars and drunkard patrons of the mos eisley cantina.

If you don't remember what the cantina was, its that gloomy and rugged bar joint in tatooine full of strange aliens having their alien liquor and cutting deals with each other in their alien language. I think the cantina is a breakout scene from the first movie because the sequence itself alone has so much star wars essence in it, that anybody having seen star wars once can identify and relate the place to the movie. Even in popular culture, the star wars cantina has become a metaphor for watering holes full of inter-culture and inter-racial low lives in an unfriendly atmosphere.

There might be bars out there that could have this same unfriendly atmosphere, take the places where there are entry points for large cargoes from other places like frontiers and waterfronts like the cantina is adjacent to anchorhead, and bars around that place are probably hived with smugglers and outsider seafarers at night, and places like these are mostly run by mob lords and you have to think of them as the hutts in human form. Its one place I wouldn't want to drink in unless its the real cantina, even if I had to be a droid.

The cantina has also been the source of star wars idioms like doing the kessel run in twelve parsecs and galactic controversies if greedo did shoot first. It takes a devoted fan to understand these terms anyway, I dont even know where the kessel run is and I bet lucas would have wanted greedo alive by now for the fame he brought by his stupid marksmanship.

Suffraging

2007-05-13T23:06:00.000+08:00

I dropped by ariel’s internet café right after work yesterday to unwind for a while. I had two beers and went on playing some world war 2 video game where you relive the war as soldiers on either fronts of the war running in a village in france or someplace and shooting the hell out of the other players around. Shooting people did make me feel better after work though, things you wished you could have done while at work.

Right after I was done playing, ariel was outside his internet cafe with some of his officemates and a bottle of scotch, not only that I can’t stand whiskey it was only a bit past nine and I hadn’t had dinner too so I had to refuse like hell when he passed me a shot to take, I had to go home anyway. He himself already had around three beers before that and he was such in a hurry that night because the national elections is coming up on monday, and sale of alcohol is banned across the country come election day and the day before it, three hours before midnight might be closer than he thought so ariel was beating the clock for alcohol.

Sale of alcohol is banned perhaps for reasons that liquor might aggravate and induce violence at the height of the elections, or perhaps voting sober this monday is better than voting drunk yet people in this country had voted worse than being drunk, you could tell from the kind of dumb people being voted into office in this country the past few years. I get this sort of relief though hearing that some brilliant people now have better chances of winning this monday to even off the dumb people already in office.

This afternoon I went back to ariel’s café because I left some stuffs on his fridge the night before, he wasn’t around and he’s probably sleeping after last night's spree. I found a note posted on the door and it said:

We don’t serve LIQOUR for the meantime

The clerk said somebody drinking with ariel must have posted it last night, and maybe this is another reason why people are banned from drinking, else spell the candidates names wrong.

Tales from the Decabiography

2007-05-07T09:18:00.001+08:00

3 The novel catcher in the rye had a profound influence in me

It was way back senior high when we were told to make this book report in our english class, you're supposed to read some book and write something about it. I had just finished reading the iliad novel then but I couldn’t use it for my book report because the same teacher already discussed it in class earlier during the semester and she would probably say I heard the story from her, though the novel I read was the full version from homer.

Before reading the iliad, I was also busy writing my own novel, I even forgot about that for a long time already, only when I started recalling these events before the catcher in the rye that it came back to my head. It was about some kid during ancient macedonia who tamed alexander’s horse before he did and something crazy like that and it killed me. I gave it to my history teacher and she never acknowledged it or anything soon thereafter, it was probably a terrible novel anyway, if some of my friends did get to read it.

Anyway I decided to go get a new book to read, I usually dig out old books from my old man’s bin in the stock room, he had a lot of books when he was about my age, and by chance of fate I opened one plastic bag which had around eight old books or so. I picked out the book doctor zhivago because the weird name for a doctor like that felt like he was a mad psychopath or something. But doctor zhivago was quite thick and I felt it will probably eat much of my goddam time reading it, so I turned to the smaller red book beside it and pulled it out.

The title didn’t make any sense, I first thought that it were about some baseball player in a rye field who’s always playing for the outfield. Nobody told me about it and I tried asking my old man if he remembers anything about it and he just said it’s about some kid who got kicked out of school, so I read the book and I got hooked yet I didn’t know how. I gave my report to my english teacher which was practically bland like water and all, telling her the same thing that it was about some kid who got kicked out of school.

I was done with my book report but I went on reading the book over and over again because I sort of liked it, imer once said it’s the book’s form of english. I realized I liked it because it can deliver to the reader a sense of depression and cynicism in its simple slang english, and in a very conscious state of a first person perspective, and I learned to put into words the same depression, cynicism, non-conformist and pragmatism in my goddam brain before it eats me inside out.

My father got it when he was nineteen, I took it from him when I was fifteen and the book just turned forty this year, I don’t think it could survive another generation. I got elle a copy about two years ago, I bought the book and later met up with edward at a convenience store at ortigas around midnight to get some beers. edward saw the book inside the transparent plastic bag, I told him I was going to give it to elle, he said why the hell was I giving to a girl because it’s supposed to be a guy’s book, and he paused and said.

“that ’s just so gay”

Bar Flies

2007-05-01T20:03:00.000+08:00

A schoolmate of mine from manila came to my hometown saturday morning, she told me was going to spend a night here and since it was a saturday, I was free that night so we decided to see each other and get coffee or something. I got out of the house around nine but hell I couldn't find her, I gave her a lot of calls to her mobile phone but she wasn’t answering or anything for more than hour, she probably had something important coming up that she couldn’t make it, she’s working for some law firm and the other day I saw her boss on the early evening talk show news and it probably had something to do with that.

When I said coffee or something to her, the alternative something was supposed to be beer, and since it was saturday and she wasn't around anyway, I wanted to go have some beers. Instead I met up with the little miss traveler that night, she hung out in this bar on this night strip joint where there was a lot of people going around. I joined her on her seat on the bar ledge and we had a few laughs, I had myself facing the bartender and a wall shelved with liquor bottles that I didn’t have to bother myself with the social crowd behind me, though I did lean backwards a couple of times. I always get so uncomfortable in social places but it was a great place to sit nonetheless.

There were a lot of bar flies in the ledge that night. There were two girls sitting beside me, they dressed hell glamorously but they didn’t have dates or anything and they weren’t even talking to each other. They kept opening their purses for nothing too, if should they pulled a lighter out, I could have asked for it since I left mine back home. And they weren’t even sipping on their drinks or anything, you could see it from the back of your head, by the time I have finished my second beer bottle their drinks hadn’t gone down an inch.

They were probably waiting for their dates to fall down from the sky, and while they did they were staring at the cable tv over the liquor shelf, it was showing some football game rerun and I felt funny about them because they were not the kind I’d expect to watch football games, they were faking it out alright, I didn’t even bother watching that game, I only remember it was liverpool against some team I wasn’t familiar with. Football games can get too dragging, I swear the last time I watched a full football game on a full sitting was last year’s fifa semifinals between germany and italy.

Little miss traveler had her share of amusement from her side of the table, some old caucasoid geezer sat beside her and dropped a line to her, I didn’t hear him but he talked together with his hands that you could tell he was talking, these people are losers.

And by the way thanks moiee for that melon vodka you got me.

Funeral in April

2007-04-27T12:59:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-20T14:06:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-12T12:48:00.000+08:00

Finally got lou rawls singing in this blog.

Tales from the Decabiography

2007-04-11T22:44:00.001+08:00

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

2007-04-04T23:41:00.003+08:00

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

2007-04-02T04:49:00.000+08:00

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.

Litsooner

2007-03-26T13:57:00.000+08:00

I had a really bad stomach at six in the morning yesterday that I had to get out of bed and get the crap in my intestines out in the toilet. It must have been something I ate from saturday night, I had my usual dinner at home but peter called me up later to join him for some beers because he was with two clients from bacolod city who were getting him to sell their cars, his wife couldn’t join him though because she’s having chicken pox which she got from peter who was sick the week there before. I was first planning to have some beers with ariel but he still hadn’t recovered from his sprained knee he got from kuala lumpur, besides I’d like to see what chicken pox did to peter’s face too.

Anyway the only thing I ate that saturday night with peter was this dish he ordered to go with our beers, I forgot what the hell they call it, it wasn’t sisig but I remember peter telling me it was made from a pig’s mask, a more convenient way of telling you that you’re eating the ears, snout, eyes, lips and everything in between them in a pig, its like the staked carcass totem in the lord of the flies being chopped to bits and served on a plate, and yet they tell you its pork. The whole thing though was served in thick mayonnaise, I don’t enjoy mayonnaise but it also came with bits of chopped pepper that I just ate it and forgot about mayonnaise.

I’m not sure if it was the pig’s mask dish that gave me a bad stomach yesterday morning because I didn’t ask peter if he had a bad stomach too. My stomach ache left me awake and thinking about pork dishes for almost an hour in bed. You’d probably be wondering why here we eat those parts of a pig in the first place, because in pursuit of an identity in this country the people claim that roasted pig is their culinary expertise, I don’t see anything distinctive or a third world touch in it since anybody around the globe can impale a pig and roast and they’d all taste the same. But what is distinctive here is how they make the roasted pig, no part of the pig gets wasted, everything in flesh from entrails, liver, heart to the drops of blood all end up in the dinner table, including the whole stretch of skin on a pig’s face which I still doubt did make me start this post.

By the way a roasted pig in this country is called a litson, traditional celebrations in this country always calls upon a whole liston on the household table as a symbol for the magnitude of the celebration, notwithstanding that their closest neighbors in this country are muslims whom their religion forbade them pork consumption. Litson itself too has become a gerund in the local vocabulary which also means to roast, in particular to roast a human being by accident, because on my way to work in the morning I’d always stop by new stands to glance at the headlines and I always see the local tabloids quoting folks being litsooned in freakfire accidents, less being eaten anyway.

I should have wrote this post a litsooner than a month ago in time for the turnover of the chinese zodiac year of the pig.

Decabiography

2007-03-18T22:59:00.000+08:00

The author of this post starts off with ten weird things or habits or little known facts about himself. People who get tagged must write in a blog of their own ten weird things or habits or little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you must choose six people to be tagged and list their names

1 I was tagged twice

2 I am an alcoholic the words drinking drunk and beer appears very often in this blog if you hadn’t noticed.

3 The novel catcher in the rye had a profound influence in me this is one book that I never got tired of reading, I found myself as the same depressed and sarcastic young man who opposes everything for the sake of opposition. My cynical writing is almost patterned after the novel's modern slang english.

4 I collect coke cans I have a big collection of coke cans from around the world, from japan korea vietnam india nepal lebanon italy france to as far as the islands of maldives.

5 I only drink black coffee I drink at least two cups of black coffee everyday. I don’t put cream or milk to my coffee, it doesn’t tastes like coffee anymore but like mocha and it is for women. I only use a small dash of sugar on my coffee or sometimes none at all. I love arabica and columbian roasts.

6 The words in my sms messages are always or more often spelled with the letters complete I dnt ncrypt my words n my sms msgs by omitng letrs and speling dem dfrently lyk wat m doin ryt nw. though I do cut short the word you to u, in to n, for to 4 and to to 2. This form of english was developed in this country because people here enjoy abbreviating words in their sms messages, using only key letters of a certain word that can convey it phonetically.

7 I have poor literacy in my own national language not only that I am not fond of using my country’s national language as expression of my thoughts, I also have trouble with its grammar and vocabulary, I once even thought bughaw was clouds and talumpati was a kind of bird.

8 I love everything spicy I can stand a lot of strong hot spices: peppers, jalapenos, chili, curry, wasabi. Ariel and jason were once surprised to see me crush five small peppers in my marrow soup when they are sweating to just one piece. That’s why I love eating at street vendors in bangkok.

9 I have a lot of caps because if there was one thing that can hold my hair down it’s by wearing a cap, so I had been buying a lot of ball caps way back when I still sported hair in my head. The last ball cap I bought had dr seuss’ cat in the hat printed up front, but I never got to use that one.

10 I am a star wars fan inasmuch that I am well versed with star wars nomenclature I am also fascinated on the movie’s insane popularity, numerous references and being a phenomenal pop culture.

The Balls of a Brass Monkey

2007-03-04T22:52:00.000+08:00

My parents arrived in manila last friday, I was in manila too and I was supposed to pick them up at the airport around eight in the morning but I overslept and I woke up almost eight already, my old man called me up that they were already on their way to my hotel and we should meet someplace near for breakfast instead. I blew that morning up but my old man wasn’t so mad because he knew I could hardly wake up at that hour and I had been dead tired the past few days, I got to the bathroom to fix myself up, I stared at the mirror and I think the only thing I needed was a good shave, my mother always complains about it and she probably will again over breakfast but I could go tell her I forgot my shaving kit at home, I don’t bring them with me when Im traveling to manila because I always pack them inside my backpack in a hurry and those overrated security agents at the airport always takes them away like hell they think I could hijack a whole plane with my goddam shave. Anyway I first spat on the sink before splashing water to my face to wake me up, there was some little red streaks on my spit, it could have been something else but I just woke up and I hadn’t had coffee or anything yet so I had to look closer and it was blood, I spat a second and third time and there was still blood and I was like interested in seeing more come out, after that my spit went clear again and forgot about it. I wasn’t coughing or feeling anything funny and it wasn’t because of my drinking either, I only had four beers from nine to midnight the night before and I had been in worse shape than that.

My old man gave a ring on my mobile phone asking me what wanted for breakfast because they were arriving ahead on the restaurant, I only told them that to have my egg sunny side up, I didn’t have to tell him to get coffee because I know my old man will eat breakfast at a place that serves great brewed coffee, and like me my old man loves coffee in the morning and he loves drinking it alone rather than places like starbucks where you have to be seen drinking coffee in the open. My mother was only having thick soup for breakfast, they were taking a flight going out of the country around noon so I think my mother is trying to fix her hunger with the jetlag by taking in a light meal. I took them back to the airport after that then I went back to my hotel to pack my things up too because I was also catching a flight going back home that night.

There was this poster I saw while walking back to my hotel, its about this concert later this month from this hong kong singer emil chou (周華健), the poster was up at the supermarket window and I don’t usually read them because they usually post crap there like grocery raffles and stuff like that but emil chou’s poster caught my attention because it had his portrait up close on it and you could tell it was him from the side of your eye and even if you weren’t going to read it anyway. I was sort of surprised that he was going to throw a concert in my country and hell the prices of the tickets were even skyrocketing from 3500 to 5000, Emil chou must have made dozens of records during the turn of the 90’s, I have five of his songs in mp3’s back home and if I were to watch this concert I would only end up in the theater waiting for him to sing any of those five songs I know all night long, and if he does sing all of five of them, its like me paying one grand a song so that I could listen to it up real alongside local gooks.

The last time I heard an emil chou song outside from my room was about a year ago, I was sitting in my hotel lobby in beijing around 11pm having some beers and a cigarette, I wanted to try swimming at the pool but the goddam weather was cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey, and the gym was closed too and all they had were a dozen of these immobile bicycles inside the gym room with nothing but cable tv to watch while you peddled, and it wasn’t as distracting too because it was showing some hollywood film dubbed in chinese like the ones we have back home where they dub japanese movies to talk in english that the actor’s mouths kept on moving even after they stopped talking. Anyway I bought my beers from the convenience store outside because I was sure the beers at the lobby are highway robbery, I did tell the concierge I bought beers outside and they didn’t mind me even I looked like a slop with my shorts and sandals down in the lobby where every other guest coming in looked grand with their suits. There was a girl playing the piano in the lobby, she looked like she’s still in school and she’s like just doing a part time night job playing the piano for the hotel. Anyway she played emil chou’s 花心 song and I liked the way she did it, I went up to her with my cigarette trying to look like I wasn’t a slop wearing my shorts and sandals and asked her to play it again, well she did but on the way back to my seat hell she just stopped midway from the song and played something else, sometimes people feel doing something you want them to do if you’d pay more attention when they do it.

Cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey, I’ve always wanted to use that phrase.

Art Gallery

2007-02-17T20:40:00.000+08:00

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.

Anatomically Intact

2007-02-12T22:49:00.000+08:00

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.

你能活多久?

2007-02-09T22:07:00.001+08:00

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.

One life to live

2007-02-04T22:34:00.000+08:00

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

Meet the Fockers

2007-01-15T09:44:00.000+08:00

Its hard to come up with christmas gift suggestions, especially when its from one company to the other, and because of the december rush last most, most christmas gifts coming for our business wont come in til the first week of january. I was in manila the first working week of the year, and it all started with this guy johnny who now ran their company after his brother got shot at gunpoint last month (he survived though). It was the first time I met this johnny guy and he was as hell friendly and he had a better set of teeth from his brother whom had his eroded from smoking too much nicotine. For a starter, johnny gave me a box of canned porridge with mixed tubers for christmas, I didn't know where he came up with that gift though I never tried them anyway. His gift was heavy and I carried the goddam thing around as I met other associates and hell it gave everybody the idea that I liked cold canned porridge, and days after that back home I started receiving from our cargo crates of assorted canned beverage from those associates who that day were all thinking I was like the father bear from goldilocks who loved his porridge cold, everything was canned but they weren’t all porridge though. Remind me next year january I’ll be carrying a beer six pack around when meeting those people again.

I was planning to go back home thursday but I changed it to a friday because my parents are coming to manila on thursday, and I thought of taking them to dinner with this girl I had my eyes on for a year. That night I was to meet up my parents at rockwell center while I picked carelle up, it was the only place that came to my mind that was close to both her place and my parent’s hotel. Elle came home from work almost 8:30, I was telling her the night before to wear for dinner this green blouse I got for her some months back that had this little green rose on her right chest, she looked pretty on it but she told me she had already worn it, that night she was still wearing green anyway. I was kind of stiff when I introduced her, and hell I was still stiff into dinner, elle was doing most of the talking and my parents were asking us lousy one-liners like how did we both meet and they would just stop the conversation right there after they got the answers. One of the more stupid remarks I made over dinner was that the chicken on my plate tasted like fish, I was only having potatoes, corn and diced carrots before that because they were easier to swallow whole, my mother had some of my chicken and said it did taste like it got frozen after it was cooked, elle then just had to share me her chicken and she had to whisper almost in laughter

“you just couldn’t think of anything better to say”

My parents went back to their hotel after dinner, they were heading to cebu in the next few days to see this summit of pacific nations thing, me and elle walked for a while then caught a cab and I took her home. I checked out from my hotel earlier because I was going to sleep over at my parent’s hotel tonight which was almost four grand a night, I was going to sleep at the floor anyway yet the floor will feel expensive too. I got there at almost 11:30, my old man was still up watching the fashion channel, I took off my shirt and went straight to the bathroom to wash my face and placed on a new plain shirt and told my father I was going down to the lobby for a while, then he said

“NO, no more beers for tonight”

Smoked Statue

2007-01-09T15:37:00.000+08:00

I flew back to manila yesterday morning, I just planned to go back just the day before at 3 in the afternoon. The early monday flight was full but my old man booked me a seat for that flight and I got the first seat in the plane -1A, and it made me feel so goddam important, like if the plane crashed and they made a body count of the dead passengers, my name would come out first. And I was facing the seats of the stewardess too, there was this stewardess who was sort of pretty but I don’t feel like staring at somebody pretty head on, I had to lean my head sideways and stare into the window as if the stupid clouds outside were more interesting to watch, and sometimes I browsed the inflight magazine over and over when watching too much cumulus became too blinding. It was the first monday of the year and I could smell panic from the passengers at the airport when I landed, the line to the taxi stand was hell long and it took me almost half an hour to wait for my turn to grab a cab and I ended up with a driver who was new in driving around manila, I had to give him directions to m hotel and keep an eye on the road else we’d be driving in circles. I was tired though, hadn’t had much sleep the past three nights, slept from 2pm thereon.

I had some people to meet for work today but I took the time off high noon to see this religious tour de force up close which was going on some two districts away from my hotel. This celebration is called the feast of the black nazarene and is in honor of this wooden statue of christ struggling his way on the road to calvary, legend has it that this statue a long time ago survived a fire that burned the church upon where it was kept, the church was left in ruins by the fire but the statue was still in one piece, except that it was smoked to a darker complexion, kind of like somebody having fifth degree sunburns, or perhaps christ having empathy to the skin tone of the indigenous people in this country. Anyway the black nazarene celebration falls in this day in january, and incidentally too it lived to see its holiday for the 400th time, it was far from being the hajj but the wave of pilgrims flocking to the black nazarene was another demonstration of the power of religion, pilgrims by the thousands, notwithstanding the crowd, sweat, old age and certain stampede, were surging to the church to make contact with the statue, perhaps with hopes of achieving the same fireproof-ness should they go to hell soon. One of the unusual traditions from the black nazarene statue is pilgrims taking home a piece of its divinity, pilgrims throw away white towels unto the sentries guarding the statue and they wipe these towel about the statue’s face and throw it back to the pilgrims with this myth that these towels are now of miraculous value.

I got to the place and I just stood a good distance from the crowd since I was only there to see the force of faith from as close as I can get anyway. I got there on foot with a maroon shirt and pants, plus my scarf and 200 bucks in my pocket should I go hungry, I left my mobile phones, watch, wallet and anything else expensive in me, though I knew I was going to religious event I have to doubt the morality and values of these people around the place. There was a replica of the smoked statue being carried around which I chanced upon a few blocks away from the church, it had less pilgrims crowdind upon its feet since it was just a replica, though they too threw away their towels to be wiped on the statue's face since they think it will probably do their towels miracle anyway, and since it was just on my path, I threw away my blue grey scarf into the statue and the sentry wiped it to the statue's face and threw it back to me.

Place this scarf on my head the morning after and it will probably take the hangover away.

2007

2007-01-02T22:57:00.000+08:00

Before it was just gardens

now guess what's hanging at babylon?

The iraqi fate hangs in balance

Christmas Messages

2006-12-26T21:12:00.000+08:00

"Merry christmas lib. saddest christmas is not an apt term but most numb. you are the only person I greeted. congratulations on your misery."

edward

"Dude pare tol tsong! iisahin ko na ang bati para mas matipid. hehe. belated happy birthday and advance merry xmas! easy on the beer this season. magtira ka for the rest of us."

imer

Mr Jones and Mr Smith

2006-12-20T22:11:00.000+08:00

This is the duo who starred in the two men in black movies

Its a painting I made some 4 years ago

Using just 5 watercolors, red blue yellow black and white, over a big piece of white cardboard

And a brainload of depression sunk in hard liquor

It was those days when there was this hard liquor in the market that was bubble gum flavored and the liquor was light blue in tint, the alcohol was so strong that I had to mix it with coke to make it easier to drink and that was what I drank when I painted this portrait. I was using watercolor then so I also had a glass of water beside me where I washed my brush every so often and washing red blue yellow white and black colors in this glass turned the water into a dark muddy color, which looked no different from the glass of light blue liquor with coke that I drank from. And since the hard liquor was also kicking in my senses, every so often I forgot from which glass to take a shot from.

Never underestimate a depressed drunkard

Gook Mainlanders

2006-12-07T23:44:00.000+08:00

I don't have a chronicle for december of last year, what was I thinking then?

Last saturday night I drank over at ariel’s place and the weather wasn't so good that night. When I got there ariel had a bottle of rum, two bottles of lime soda and two bottles of beer and without any sense of recipe we poured everything into a jug and took turns in taking shots from the cocktail of our ingenuity. Ariel also has this drinking courtesy of asking anybody from his neighborhood to have a shot with him if they pass by his place, but nobody passed by to chance the cocktail because it was raining cats and dogs and rabbits, and they'd probably choke and yell what the hell it was made of. We drank at his doorstep and both of us were staring at the rain taking on the road in front of us and I’m sure the rain did get ariel depressed too, we just drank and we barely talked about anything, the rain crashing down was noise enough for us to hear each other talking anyway. Ariel was also cleaning up trash messages on his mobile phone too, its those messages people send you that always have the word god, telling you how he gives a crap about you and stuff, like its no different from saying good morning or have a nice day or something, but I do appreciate other people’s thought of sending me those messages anyway. And every once in a while he smoked and then he tossed his cigarette butt out into the middle of the pavement under the rain in one place, as if there was this spot on the pavement with a illusionary perimeter from his head where he felt he was getting points for every cigarette butt he tossed inside that spot.

Tuesday night my parents had me attend to this social dinner event because they were in manila and because the couple who threw the dinner were some business associates of ours. They’re a rather amusing couple, they’re chinese mainlanders and they’ve been here in my country for around five years and like most gooks from the mainland, their names are always made up of three or two syllable words that would sound like some onomatopeia or sounds made by two brass objects hitting each other, all put together in conjunction to be their name. So to put a more western touch to it, gook mainlanders adopt a western name by themselves for people to call them joe rather than ding dong chow or something. I remembered when my grandfather’s brother, my granduncle was the first to decide on a western name, he chose winston because it was post ww2 and churchill was the man that time, and luckily he didn’t convince his other three brothers to be roosevelt, stalin and hitler.

Anyway, this gook couple who threw the grand dinner, the wife whom I was acquainted doing business with for quite some time went by the name letty which she thought of herself, but when I read through her invitation, I was surprised to see the name marie as the host, letty then told me she just got tired of being called letty and decided to be marie thereon. sometimes i doubt how many names he had before this one.

I attended the dinner tuesday night, there was about twenty full tables and hell yes I didn’t like the social crowd around me, I sat with some local gooks and I couldn’t eat anything with them, I felt full by just staring at the food and hear them talk, and it was mutual phoniness at its best, they would talk about some baby across the table in the room and talk how cute she is and say that she got her grandmother’s looks, and I think she does look like her grandmother alright. And they would also talk about another couple in the room and say how adorable they both looked together, though I think they looked more like little miss muffet with a six foot frankenstein.

Max owned the place where the dinner was held and on my way out I saw him sitting on one of the tables checking out the waiters or something. We had a little chat and I told him about this sistilio professor from california I met weeks ago who was after fidel castro shirts (last post –lib). He then told me “sistilio testa” and that he also met the guy in their hotel and what he was wearing was worse than having latin american rebels, he was wearing a shirt with the letters NPA in it, which those three letters being arranged in that order is the name of a communist rebelion front in this country hiding in the mountains. For a minute I thought he had ideals, now I think he's just plain nuts.

Bay of Pigs Invasion

2006-11-27T23:26:00.000+08:00

I flew to manila yesterday morning, this would probably be my last trip for the year, that is if nothing comes up before december ends. I did a flight count and when I fly back home on Wednesday, it’ll be my 22nd plane flight this year and still I hadn’t rode one that ended up on a plane crash or had some terrorist on board, better luck next year.

I arrived in manila around 7:30 in the morning and it was a very fine daybreak.

I took a cab to my hotel and the cab’s FM station was tuned to 105.1 which played great jazz songs, I didn’t know if the driver was into the same music that I am but I ‘d rather save him that question else it’ll probably end us both in some dumb conversation which would ruin that fine sunday morning.

I got to my hotel around eight, I felt like if I were at home I would still be dozing off at this hour on a sunday morning. Blame it on the mood brought by that fine morning and the jazz station from the taxi cab but I just got four bottles of beer and thought about drinking til the next hour or when the sun rises a little higher. I had a long way to commute after that so I felt I’d probably loose the alcohol in my head while on the road and after I grab breakfast, I didn’t get to finish the last bottle though, I saved it for lunch.

Edward and imer were both busy on a sunday night so I ended up having beers with keloyd and I sure did get wasted. Keloyd was wearing this white shirt with a red silhouette of this local boxer who’s on fire at the moment, his shirt grabbed my attention because earlier I was working on samples that had the same red silhouette. I didn’t like this boxer a lot but nonetheless I gave his ugly mug a shot by just placing small orders of those shirts to see if anybody did give a crap about him, though I decided the red silhouette on black shirts. Keloyd told me that he’s fond of wearing shirts with icon personalities on them.

Over lunch today I was still pondering about the market of people who would wear shirts with icon personalities when it reminded me about this guy I met at work about two weeks ago who wanted to place orders for fidel castro shirts. This guy is american and he goes by the name sistilio and he’s some spanish professor in ucla or berkeley or those bigger universities in california, he was wearing a white shirt with his country’s president in some wanted sign like you see in the old west. Sistilio was also busy picking out che guevarra shirts whose mug was a more popular fashion statement here, and while he was at it, he started talking with thin air in spanish which mine was already dog crap but I think it was some grand speech from che. It also dawned to me sistilio is so mad about latin american revolutionaries, he did look like a veteran of the bay of pigs invasion himself and I could have asked him about it but I felt like he was going to give one goddam discussion about revolutionary idealism being the professor that he is. And I was also wondering why he is shopping for castro and guevarra shirts here when latin america is more closer to california and I continued to think what even the hell he is doing here in the first place. One guess I have is because my country is a great example of spanish heritage gone wrong, since sistilio is teaching spanish anyway.

I knew some shirt factory abroad whom I know printed castro shirts, I phoned the place to find out that they were no longer printing castro’s mug. I apologized to sistilio, he didn’t mind though and I had to go ask him.

“you’re buying fidel castro shirt’s because he’s going to die soon?”

Last time I saw castro on tv, he looked a lot more older and feeble in a hospital bed.

“everybody dies, that’s one truth”

I was going say the same thing about taxes but I didn’t anyway, I never wanted to ask him in the first place but I guess I was just looking for some goddam intelligent conversation.

疲勞

2006-11-12T20:25:00.000+08:00

They had to wake me up at 8 in the morning yesterday, I wanted to sleep more because I had an appointment with some sales agent later around 10 but my parents were arriving from cebu at 8:30 so I had to drive and pick them up at the airport and it was one of those terrible mornings that I wanted to go on sleeping and wished that my parents could have just hired some driver or they could have taken the taxi home. Anyway I drove to the airport with one of our housekeepers to help my parents with their luggage whom I wished could have learned how to drive himself, I sure did get to the airport before 8:30 and hell for crying out loud my father then called that their flight got delayed and they won’t be arriving till 9. Half an hour was so much of time yet all I can do is sit in the airport carpark field and drink this cup of coffee I brought which I didn’t have time to drink at home.

I got to work right in time to meet this sales agent at 10 in the morning, he’s working for around four of our bigger suppliers and I knew was going to have a very long matter to attend to for the rest of the day with him, and hell it took me up to 6 in the afternoon to wrap everything up.

This sales agent is in his mid forties though a lot of his hair had turned white and he sounds like pretty much like a nice guy though he was making good lies in a straight face, like there was this time he asked to be excused because he wanted to take a leak and instead he came back to the office smelling like cigarettes and I was sure he smoked, he stood beside me while I wrote and he hummed this happy and silly tune that filled the air around me with traces of nicotine from his breath, and the goddam tune annoyed me that I had to change tables to work in peace, and hell he just had to follow me and hum some more. I had to start some stupid conversation with him to get his mouth to stop humming and talk about something else which I wouldn’t be listening anyway. I told him that there was this president of some company he used to work in who visited me some 2 days ago, it did stop him from humming though and he muttered the president’s guy name and he looked like he was happy he got fired from that company or something.

This guy’s former employer did come to see me some 2 days ago, he was some tall thin guy whom everybody would want to pull out a handshake with him because he’s the president of some company they probably never knew anyway, I just gave a short talk with el presidente here to amuse him for about ten minutes but the bleeding truth is, his company is doing slow in the market, and there was this one year that his company didn’t even send samples or anything that I thought this company has gone down the drain. Before he left he gave me his calling card, half of what were written were his contact numbers and on the other half was this coat of arms that he probably want people to know that he’s from the order of suchlike knighthood or whatever secret society other than him being el presidente, not much of a phony but lost his card though.

I was dead tired after what I had to work through yesterday, it was a saturday night though but I wanted to get sleep early. Raymund smsed me on my mobile phone a little before nine asking me if I could accompany him to this bar at 11 later because there was this dj who’s going to play that night whom he was mad about, he didn’t have anybody to ask around, his girl wasn’t around too so he was bugging me to go. A couple of beers would be great to end the day but what I was so keen about is because he wanted to meet at 11 which I felt was quite late. I wanted to do raymund his favor anyway and I stayed with him til around 1 in the morning while he listened to this dj play, which for me his music sounded pretty much like the music I hear on any other saturday night, as if the dj was only there for looks and for drunk bar flies to yell and cheer at.

The 5th of November

2006-11-06T00:15:00.000+08:00

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot

This was from some ode they made up for this british revolutionary guy fawkes which I've heard from this movie v for vendetta that I saw earlier this year (guy fawkes, yes we all do), the protagonist in the movie wore a smiling guy fawkes mask and was his role model because he wanted to blow something up on november the 5th which fawkes wanted to do, nothing blew up today in this part of the globe though. One thing that drew me to watch this vendetta movie is because it is an adaptation of an alan moore comic book, and most alan moore comic books that made it to the big screen were great, like john constantine and the concept of the league of extraordinary gentlemen, but vendetta wasn’t as good, it was like some brainwash movie for potential rebels to come out to mutiny.

I’m not a big fan of moore’s work but I do have the violator set of comic books he wrote, I got them when I was in high school and took me most of my dough for those stuff, but it was pretty good though, I don’t get bored reading those comic books over again every so often.

My classmates from manila were also here in my hometown for the weekend and I got everybody wasted last night over beer at jason’s restaurant, it was fun, they loved the place because the ambience was peaceful and they said the music sounds like starbucks, well you don’t get drunk over at starbucks often.

On Dust

2006-11-01T21:54:00.000+08:00

"on dust" is just a homonym from which the slang for the day of the dead in my country sounds like, which is today. It might ring a bell to some though rather than my previous post's title which was a lot confusing and I felt anybody could have hardly made that one out. Anyway the day of the dead is one of the few days I don’t get to work and since I was going to get a day off, I decided to buy a couple of beers during lunch break yesterday should I wish to enjoy the rest of today. I got to some mall grocery about three blocks from the office and shopped for my supply of alcohol.

The day of the dead in our country is pretty much a one day retreat of the living to the graveyards, so the groceries were kind of full because people were buying foodstuff they will be eating above graveyards while worms are also eating their dead relatives six feet below the ground. Anyway I got my grocery basket, loaded it with beers and lined my way out of the place. There was lady in front of me unloading her cart of grocery items to the counter, she had her little girl sitting and facing me from behind her shopping cart, she was a cute little girl I’d say around three or two and she held this coke in a plastic bottle by both hands, she stared at me and she looked like she was sorry for something. She stared at me then stared at my basket of beer bottles for a while then stared at her coke bottle, she went staring at me again and this time she looked confused and held her coke tighter. If she could have been older a bit she could have gone asking me what the hell those in my basket are. I could have told her it was beer to make her stop looking so goddam sorry maybe about my liver or something.

My father and brothers were in manila so I went to the graveyards alone around noon today, I thought it was a good time to visit because I felt the great mass of the living couldn’t stand the heat at this time of the day and most of them must have fled. I first visited my grandfather and my great grandmother’s grave and then dropped by this friend’s grave who shot himself in the head some three months ago, nobody was around so I stood there for a while staring at the date on this tombstone reading: died august 14 2006 and when I thought I was alone I saw his mother sitting by the shade, I went up to her and said hi and it almost made her son alive for a moment seeing me there, I went back home soon after because the high noon heat could have dried my brains out and drove me nuts.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and woke up at five, I slept like a log because I don’t spend that much time in slumberland that much on regular days, anyway this late afternoon I visited another graveyard, this place is pretty much old and not much of the living do frequent the place, like the last dead person who got buried here was already 20 years ago and probably the last person who could remember them is also dead in some other graveyard. I brought along four candles only to remember that I have five dead relatives buried in this place, I lost count because I haven’t met most of my dead in this graveyard in my lifetime. Almost all the tombstones in this graveyard are broken, and most of them had weeds and molds growing over the edges and had a candle or two around it like somebody left them burning in a hurry. Hell there was even a lost graveyard goat grazing in this place, it was walking around sniffing some grass that grew in the cracks in the pavement and Im sure it could have also gone away with some of the flowers placed for the dead. The goat could just have had a kin buried in this place too, or it could have been somebody who got reincarnated inside the poor animal that it was checking out on its own tombstone for candles.

It made you feel hell creepy walking around this place at sunset.

"I hope to hell when I do die somebody has enough sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery."

Holden Caulfield

Baker's Dozen Parasceve in Oktoberfest

2006-10-13T22:25:00.001+08:00

I’ve been waiting for a friday the 13th to fall on an october and what makes this day certain interesting is that one thousand years ago the remaining templars of the crusades were burned at stake on october 13th a friday after inquisitors and priests accused them of worshipping the baphomet, the idol bipod of human torso and a goat’s head.

Anyway I had my dose of crap early on a friday the 13th morning. My grandaunt from my chinese lineage is having problems with her blood pressure and yet with popular western medicine, she is still pretty much convinced of remedies prescribed by our ancient ancestors: traditional chinese medicine, which is taking random botany and an occasional dried critter as medicine. I was in manila so she asked me to buy her medicine her shaman told her to take, she faxed me the formula for her medicine to my hotel and it sure did look like the theory of relativity written in chinese. My grandaunt also told me it’ll take a day whole for them to finish cooking up her medicine, so I had to go to a herb bazaar first thing this morning.

I found one shop and there was a herbcrafter, a small old lady I think somewhere past her eighties, standing by her little counter surrounded by her collection of strange dried oddments which made her little depot smell like strong twisted mint. She wasn’t saying much and I approached her and gave her the formula, she glanced at the note and suddenly she snapped and blew herself to a furious scolding frenzy, hell she did surprise me, as if what were written on that paper were instructions from heaven for her to get mad at me. She called me with remarks at her age and she pulled her telephone and yelled at me to call whoever sent me the formula and ask what the hell it was. I could have told her it was the theory of relativity and gone away with it, I looked at the phone because I know I will be making an expensive long distance phone call to my grandaunt back home if she insisted on me calling, my awkward silence triggered the mad herbcrafter’s wrath to greater heights and yelled at me if I know how to use the phone or not.

A piece of history, ancient chinese medicine was evolved from another ancient wild goose chase, the chinese alchemy which attempted to come up with the elixir of life. You know what? I doubt these herbcrafters do have the recipe to the elixir of life, else not have a herbcrafter this old in front of me yet blows the roof like a person twice less her age.

I controlled my own temperament and went out of her shop instead and called my father on my mobile phone, I saw her telephone number from outside her shop and told my father that he should go talk to the old herbcrafter himself because I think she is having menopausal cramps or something. I took some deep breath outside to calm myself and watched ordinary people scuffle about their miserable lives that early morning before facing the mad herbcrafter again. I got inside and I reckon she was already talking to my father on her telephone, I stood by her depository of oddities and I swear I could have found dried testicles of a tiger in one of the jars there. She called to me in a now better tone and passed the telephone to me, it was my father and he told me she just misunderstood the formula and he thinks the herbcrafter went haywire because I didn’t look chinese to her, like some other race is trying to pull out the secrets of their alchemy, racism her tiger testicles I run a bigger business empire than her subterranean voodoo lounge.

The herbcrafter told me that she’ll have the medicine ready by around four in the afternoon, I thanked her anyway, its just going to be a bunch of placebo drug though.

Going back to the templars being burned at stake a thousand years ago, if kramer and sprenger were still around, she’d get top honors for witchcraft and be roasted at stake on a same friday the 13th in october.

Neverwhere

2006-10-11T15:45:00.000+08:00

I can’t find anything amusing to write about for two weeks now, nothing like last month there was this wayward planet’s quest for earth recognition, the pope reviving quotes from constantinople, 2,000 leaks under the sea and one sting ray’s success over the reptile kingdom proving that one sting can do the trick than fifty sharp teeth combined. It must have been the weather or something, it had been raining like hell and it brought my depression to overdrive again.

Anyway I took the flight to manila this morning because I was getting too bored back home, my brother wanted to tag along to my trip but I was too keen on taking him with me, I wanted to be alone for a while.

I got myself another book by neil gaiman earlier this week and I wasn’t reading it that much because I was saving it for my flight today and perhaps any occasion thereon that will require patience in waiting which I am not fond of. Funny I wasn’t reading gaiman’s masterpiece “the sandman” but I fell asleep after reading for only about fifty pages up in the plane. The book is good but I was just too sleepy because I had to pack my things in a rush last night yet still found time for beer past midnight, must have slept for only around 3 hours this morning at bed.

I was planning on finishing some business affairs first thing when I got to manila this morning, but from the time I got a cab from the airport it was only a couple of minutes after eight, and its way too early. So I decided to get myself a room first and hit the sack for maybe an hour and work later, the taxi driver didn’t complain much when I told him to change our route midway from where he was driving to, there wasn’t much traffic on the road anyway. There was some really really big storm that hit manila a week ago and I think it blew every away motorist on the road that traffic today was so open. That storm didn’t like trees too and I saw it did a good job uprooting a lot of trees in open parks, though most of the downed trees are now tilting stumps while the rest of its bark already chopped to pieces, it was like firewood is being sold all over the streets. It figures, the driver told me that the storm screwed electricity all over the city for a couple of days, the storm took down a lot of electric post too, probably mistook them as trees.

I found my turn in cursing this storm when I got to my hotel, I found out that this storm got the hotel’s elevator to stop working. Either the storm was clever enough to screw an elevator from inside out of a building or it was a good excuse to boost tips to room service as they carry your luggage up from the stairs. I’ve stayed in this hotel a couple of times and the reception knows I never asked help from room service, I always carry my own trash to my room, well this time it was damn hard using the stairs.

Halfway to the second floor I crossed the stairs with some old geezer who was slowly making his way down clamping beside the banister, I was looking at how feeble he took each step by step and suddenly adrenaline rushed into me going up the stairs while I heard his thoughts saying:

damn this storm for screwing the elevator, my days are already numbered and it’s eating too much of my little time left going down these stairs