Tales from the Decabiography

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

Tales from the Decabiography

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.

Tales from the Decabiography

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.

Tales from the Decabiography

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.

Tales from the Decabiography

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”

Tales from the Decabiography

7 I have poor literacy in my own national language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decabiography

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.