Dear Joe,
craze sometime around 1996. And with just a little under ten years of
experience in composing cute little messages off to total strangers thanks to
the wonders of mIRC, you’d think I would’ve
known better. Several years back though, I ended up in an eyeball with a really dainty young lass who lived in Valenzuela.
She loved the webpage I made about a Brit-rock band called Bush, I admired her
sense of humor and writing style and we really hit it off. I’ve never felt like
this before and it excited me. A few email messages a day turned into more than
twenty a day, and over the course of three months, we came to know each other
rather well. We spent hours talking on the phone, we exchanged pictures, and
sometimes even gifts; the whole enchilada.
continued on to Christmas season. You know how it is; Christmas season has this
tendency to make you do crazy things; your mind is brimming with thoughts of warmth
and fornication to the point that even your pubic hair began to hurt. Well,
apparently my pubic hair didn’t hurt badly enough as I was able to convince
myself to drive all the way up to Valenzuela one beautiful December afternoon.
inside the local mall. She picked a table in a far corner and she looks exactly
like she did in the pictures she sent me. Images of a romantic weekend getaway
rushed into my mind as I smiled my way through the tables towards her. But as I
took a seat across her, I realize how utterly naïve I was; and naïve is just a
cuter way of saying stupid. Yes Joe, I was so stupid.
Journal? Which is it? ‘Journal’ makes you sound sophisticated and hip while ‘diary’
makes you sound like some girl fudging together lengthy descriptions of her
first period in a flower-patterned
notebook with a cruddy golden lock.
Of course some girls don’t even remember their first period,
right Shelly?
had my inhibitions with regards to keeping a journal, or even a blog for that
matter. For one, even if you don’t immediately post an entry on the internet,
you know that someone will read it eventually. With regards to a diary, you can turn the key
on that little heart shaped lock, hide it in a chest, or hide it between the
mattress and take comfort in knowing that despite all your efforts to safeguard
your secrets, someone will eventually get their sooty little mitts on it and
read it. Your journal is a secret until you leave town for a vacation and your
mom, dad, brothers or sisters sit down and laugh themselves dead reading it.
thing might not happen immediately, but when you die, several years down the
road someone is going to find it. It’ll tumble out from underneath your now
antiquated mattress as your next of kin pillage and loot the prized possessions
you left behind. And after they laugh themselves dead reading it, they’ll take
it to a publisher and it’ll sweep the world like wildfire. Before you know it,
you’re bigger than Anne fucking Frank.
editorial review would read: “His
exquisitely detailed, heart warming personal entries gives the reader an account of over twenty years of battling
halitosis, excessive masturbation, and an improperly intimate relationship with
a hairy truck driver named Sergio who somehow, finds Michael’s eloquent
profanity sexy. Hands down, the best book of the century!”
Nisha to get back from ordering breakfast from the counter.I’m a poor judge of age but I find it
interesting that the people you come across with on Sundays are oddly old.
McDonald’s Katipunan is no exception. I caught myself trying to stereotype most
of the people in the fast food joint as a bunch of rich, old Chinese folk;
taking their time, nonchalantly reading the morning paper over a cup of black
coffee. There’s also a group of guys I take as college varsity basketball
players and a bunch of very chic teenage girls who look like they’re here to
sober up from all the partying and hard drugs they had on last night’s gimik.
the restaurant trying to figure out where I was. She spots me ducking under a
table near the door trying to hide. She puts her hands on her waist and pouts
in an oh-so-cute way.
that she never takes dating decorum seriously. Of course, she finds it charming
that I open doors and pull up chairs for her occasionally; but most of the time
she insists on doing things herself. Things like falling in line and ordering
in fast food joints like this one, carrying her bag, driving and basically
doing all the stuff that requires more than 20 kilojoules of effort. Chivalry
is dead my friends.
exhibiting now by doing her best impression of a baby learning to walk while
carrying a tray full or breakfast treats. She spills half of my coffee on the
tray before finally arriving on the table.
Mcmuffin from the tray.
know, I almost died the last time I had soda this early.”
into my cup and taking a sip of what’s left of my coffee. I warily glance
around and sure enough, at least four old bats were darting strange looks over
at our table. ‘Look at the cute young
couple over at that table darling, remember when we used to be as sweet as
them?’
without a doubt, augmented by my current state of sleep deficiency. ‘Why yes, we’re Mickey and Mallory Knox. We’re
cute young lovers with foul mouths and a penchant for random violence. If you
watched enough Tarantino movies, you know it’ll serve you best to go back
eating your sausage and omelets before you irk THIS young couple and make us
decide to draw our semi automatics on you and pump lead into your collective
asses.’
mooooorning! She knew that her life had passed her by; and she called out a
waaaarning (warning!) she knew that her life had passed her byyyyyyy…”
last word but his voice sort of trips in a raspy, phlegmy way.
will make millions writing books on the wayyyyy it should’ve beeennnn..” He’s
lost it, he’s rocking out, belting out his guts at this point while tapping the
drum parts on the steering wheel. He also has a smear of hot sauce on his
otherwise clean, white shirt but I’ll let him figure that out himself.
tonight. Didn’t she say she was coming?” Jay said turning down the volume of
the car stereo as we speed down
make it. Something came up I guess.” I said playing with my seatbelt in a dopey,
drunken sort of way.
girl up? I mean, I remember you saying how you’d love to go out with a college girl
several months ago. Less than a week later, bam! You’re dating one. I wonder what’s
next Mike; are you going to have a fairy tale wedding in this fantasy too? I’m
sure all of your other imaginary celebrity friends will be there.” He laughs.
A drunk beggar ambles towards us from an alleyway to the left.
“Bossing, can you two spare an old timer like me two pesos and fifty cents?”
beggar
dialectics, I gather, must’ve been influenced heavily by some obscure
Confucian philosophy nobody has ever heard of. I mean there must be an
old adage that says ‘he who asks for two pesos and fifty cents is bound to get three pesos’
What other way can you explain the two pesos and fifty cents thing?
Maybe he has five pesos and the jeepney fare to his home costs seven
pesos and fifty cents. But beggars like this one don’t have homes. Fuck, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.
“My carburetor is hot.” I said. The drunk just stands there with a flabbergasted look on his face.
Very much like women,
when you’re being bothered by a beggar, especially a drunk one, always
say something totally unrelated to what they’re asking from you. Like
when they ask for food, you respond with something along the lines of
‘Dioxyribonucleic Acid is sour or I’m straight and I have syphilis.”
This will seriously throw them off balance and by the time they get
their bearings you’ve already entered the door or half a block away.
I
walk behind Jay through the door; the sound of Rage Against the Machine
suffused with the convulsive conversation of people well on their way
to the wonderful world of intoxication grew louder as we make our way
to the middle of the joint to an empty table.
Roland’s
is a local bar we frequent. We even played sets here during my rock
star glory days. It deviates from the typical bar layout though and
more like some criminal gang’s hideout. The place is a hole in the wall
with a makeshift bar that serves beer and hard liquor on one side. But
what’s up with the people watching television on one corner? The
goth-looking couple making out? The stray cat loitering around looking
for morsels of food?
They
have a Quezon City business permit and a liquor license. They also have one
of those San Miguel Beer sponsored neon signs but that’s as far as any
resemblance to a real bar would go.
It’s
going to be interesting to finally introduce Nisha to Jay whom I
consider in more ways than one to be my best friend. Jay may be an
alcoholic and acts like a total douche bag half of the time but if you
really want to know, it’s all a big image thing. Anybody who really
knows Jay would testify to the guy’s sharpness. He’s a very talented
musician too. I wonder what he’d think of Nixie.
I
didn’t tell Jay that Nixie is my girlfriend; because she’s not. But
Nixie doesn’t need to throw herself all over me for Jay to smell that
something is going on. His sensors will immediately pick up subtle
gestures and he’d skip to drawing up his own conclusions. He has been
very outspoken in the past when it comes to my girlfriends and if I
discount the fact that Jay’s the most promiscuous guy I know, I’d
probably say he’s gay.
He’s
right most of the time though. He hated my last two girlfriends with
intensity and I never could get him to say why. My last girlfriend for
instance, pressured to say what he didn’t like about her, he’d simply
say ‘I don’t know man, there’s just something wrong with her.’ And as
it turns out, he was absolutely correct. Of course it took me a while
to figure that out and the entire relationship turned out to be a big
clusterfuck.
Mike "Fucking" Villar
"a Manila-based blogger made famous by his Atrocities of Friendster series, a regular feature he publishes on his blog where he mercilessly criticizes and mocks pictures of ugly people he stumbles upon on popular social networking site, Friendster. Although a lot of people are offended by what he writes, long-time readers of his blog regard him as a brilliant satire writer."
-Taken from my WikiBios page
