Joe D’ Mango, Salonpas and Internet Love

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Dear Joe,

I hopped into the internet
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.

Our euphoric correspondence
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.

We met at a cramped Chinese restaurant
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.

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