Subic Sucks

Friday, June 16, 2006

Last weekend I randomly decided to pack my bags and go with my family and another family (whose kids are my best friends) on vacation to Subic. The thing is this trip means that I need to ditch the company outing we were supposed to have, coincidentally, on that same weekend. My boss says that this might send a wrong message and that in a lot of companies, Marketing people and engineers rarely see eye to eye and that my absence might lead them to think that Marketing people are nothing but a bunch of highbrow, overpaid primadonnas. Now this would’ve been fine if at least one of the people in my department are going but each of them have their own vacations planned out for the long weekend.

Now for the record, I want to say that my absence was neither a choice nor a statement. My presence on the trip was nothing short of being mandatory given that I’m the only person in my family who:

• Knows how to get to subic (well my dad knows how but he didn’t go with us and I was supposed to give my brother, who was driving, directions)
• knows where all the cool places are in subic
• has genital warts

Besides, engineers, don’t we see each other everyday? Don’t I pester you for every small bug that comes up? Don’t I verbally abuse you when you couldn’t get the job done in time? Don’t I cry and run back to the safety of my cubicle (seeking the relative comfort my blog offers. More often than not while crying) whenever you retaliate and throw inappropriate remarks about my incompetence and my weight? So pardon me for seeing vacations as times when, for a couple of days, I could escape the monotony of my everyday life, relax and try to pick up fragments of myself which I, over the last few stressful months, got lost drudging through the routine that is work. How can I do that if I’m with you nerds even on vacation? How can I do that when every time I see you, I get reminded of work, JavaScript (or some other nerd programming language) and that burnt wire/onion/turpentine-like scent you reek badly of?

Anyway, if it’s any consolation to you guys, I didn’t really enjoy my vacation much. In fact, I didn’t enjoy my vacation at all and I’m going to tell you why:

My paralyzing bouts of panic attacks and road trips don’t mix

Long time readers of this blog know how I’ve been suffering from paralyzing bouts of panic attacks and that how I recently broke off my relationship with my shrink. I can say that this move has done me a lot of good but that’d be similar to me saying that "Mike Villar can walk up three flights of stairs without panting like a motherfucker" or "Mike Villar has had consensual sex with a non-deceased person over the last two months." Truth of the matter is, my condition has only gotten much worse. My shrink told me that benzodiazepines (which is a maintenance drug I used to take regularly) are very addictive and abrupt withdrawal from them could cause my condition to come up from behind and kick me in the ‘nads when I least expect it. True enough; the withdrawal symptoms I’ve been experiencing are about ten times more intense than my original condition.

The good news is that I’ve learned how to control and deal with my episodes. And by “control and deal with my episodes” I meant I got some junkie girl I used to date to write me fake prescriptions so I could score large doses of Xanax and pop them liberally at the onset of an attack.

The problem is that on a long road trip where you ride shotgun and all your eyes are exposed to are hours and hours worth of open road and depressing country scenery, you can’t avoid thinking about death. For those of you who don’t know, the thought of death is what primarily triggers my panic attacks. Being the anxious fat guy that I am, you could only imagine how torturous the entire trip was for me; shifting uncomfortably on my seat, secretly popping pills while my brother plays terrible rap music on the CD player.

At one point of the trip, I have enough benzodiazepines coursing my bloodstream that I was having really weird hallucinations of me riding an obese unicorn, wearing only a bath robe and bunny slippers, yelling “We built this city!” or something really stupid like that.

Also the car’s AC was acting up and it was fucking hot. Terrible.

There’s something terribly wrong with my bird

I don’t know if it’s from holding in eight cups of coffee I drank prior to going on the trip or if I contracted some sort of venereal disease or something from having sex with my "girlfriend" over at the massage parlor but there’s something terribly wrong with my bird. I learned about this on one of our many stop overs at one of the gas stations on NLEX. I rushed to the restroom and grabbed my bird and whipped it out. To my surprise, my bird shot two streams of urine. It was uncontrollable; the other stream was wetting the wall to my left and the other one shot down at a weird angle and was wreaking havoc on my right leg. It’s not that I haven’t experienced this before, but what troubles me is that I feel a tingle of pain after I’m done with my business.

I’m sure some of your are doctors or something, help a brother out here! Does this mean that I have some sort of STD? (Again ladies, for untamed, animalistic fun, my email address is god [at] man-blog [dot] com) 

My bestfriend JL is a total douche

For those of you who don’t know, before Subic was pumped in with billions of dollars worth of investment and before it was turned into a freeport, subic was home to the US 7th fleet. So you could imagine how many products of some sucky sucky 2 dollar loving came forth from all years and years of American sailors spending their passes on Brothels surrounding the base.

So yeah, there are a lot of caucasian-looking mongrels walking subic and for someone like me who’s not so used to being around white bois, my instinct was to talk to them in English. This would’ve been fine hadn’t my bestfriend been totally drunk most of the time and much to my chagrin, been making a total ass of himself. Check this conversation out:

Me: [buying a pack of cigarettes at a local sari-sari store with a caucasian guy behind the counter] Um, sir, I need three packs of Winston Reds

Whiteboi: Teka tignan ko lang kung meron…    

Me: [Surprised] So you speak tagalog pala

Whiteboi: Oo naman…

JL: [Emerges from the van after taking a leak on the wheel] Hey Joe!!!! Sopi man!

Whiteboi: [kinda irritated] 60 pesos po lahat [handing me over the cigarettes]

JL: [Doing the Dgeneration X crotch chop] Suck it meyn! Sopi Joe! Sopi!

Me: [paying, walking back towards the van. Holding back tears]

 

Subic just plain sucks

This might make me sound like a snotty sonofabitch but if there’s one thing I learned about this entire blogging thing is that an effective way to drive traffic and readership is that it’s okay to alienate a demographic if doing so entertains a larger demographic.

Me believing staunchly in this maxim is the reason why gay people and people with down syndrome hate me so much. But hey, I’m famous! So you know, suck it!

Anyway, at the risk of alienating readers from Subic, I’m gonna go ahead and say that Subic sucks hairy balls through a straw. It’s a quaint little city where there’s nothing much to do but shop for surplus American clothes and chocolates. The beaches aren’t all that as well; the sand is rough and coarse plus the water reeks badly of oil for some reason.

Also the resort we stayed in was this swanky mediterranean-inspired club and nobody was really there but me and my party.

I mean at first I thought that having an entire beach/club to yourself is awesome but it gets boring after a while. Kinda like a movie about talking dogs, at first you think a movie with talking dogs in it would kick ass but they always end up horribly wrong.

So yeah, at first I thought "Hey cool! I’ll have an entire beach to myself! I could lie around under the sun all day without having to get distracted by people laughing at all the cellulite on my legs or people looking at me with unsophisticated wonderment because I’m playing with my uncircumcized bird while singing Spandau Ballet songs" But my entire stay in subic was about as entertaining as watching paint dry.

So yeah, enjoy your weekend fuxx0rs!