This week has been one big BALL OF MADNESS I’m surprised I haven’t flung myself yet onto the rusty LRT tracks to invite death by tetanus (rather than train grindage).
Here’s the review of related lit.
Some three weeks ago Tita Rose cutely decides to rent out the house (the HOUSE!) to this Japanese dude with a preggy Pinay wife. Hai. Watashi wa Jepang.
So before we knew it, Karen, Steph, JF, Letty and Coco and Bailey and I found ourselves evicted and all house articles however termite-chomped hauled out into the garage to await prospective buyers.
None came, but a few people down the street snapped up five peso kubiertos and came back the next day asking for a refund. And, the guard waltzed by wanting to buy my bike. I refused so he attempted to buy one speaker instead, which Letty refused to sell because it still worked.
The next couple of days were a fuzz of strange men trooping in and out of the house, hammering on things and turning the walls white. I spent nights disoriented, bumping into tables and cardboard boxes. Bailey, just as confused, usually got high on the fumes and therefore turned more maniacal than usual, forcing his snout into our space whenever she could. I walked Coco almost every night, urging her to start appreciating each inch of asphalt.
Saturday came and I had to scrape off the blotches of paint I had slapped on my wall over a year ago, in a fit of crazed mental imbalance, and thinner it off and then repaint the whole thing white (which was fun). I had to scavenge through my mountains of books, doodles and letters and declarations of insanity from now vanished people, dating back to the stoned ages, e.g. college, which I just can’t, for the life of me, throw away. I finally convinced myself to go minimalist and was just about to fling everything into the wastebasket when at the last second I madly gathered everything back into my arms, hushing them crackly yellowed papers and apologizing for my rashness.
Next came the clothes. And man, for somebody who likes wearing only two shirts I surprisingly have a lot. I filled up a whole sack and half a box with holey shirts I really ought to have burned and garments that’ve been faithful compatriots too long I just couldn’t.
In all, I filled up an entire box with letters and journal entries that more or less begin with statements like:
If Pepe Smith’s a pessimist specimen of peppermints, then pessimist pepe smiths are specimens of peppermints…
or..
A czekoslovakian chiken n chips wil tingaling d buchikik. Den jakichan wil brk his nik lintik na intsik hu kismi sa chik
And normally end with such profound conclusions as:
Pakner’s nose has shut down.
In addition, there’s another box filled with riff raff like square saucers I looted from the kitchen, one sack of clothes, one bag of things I will never use and one garbage bag of apparel I excavated from my dead grandparents’ chest.
For somebody who never buys stuff I surprisingly have a lot.
Soon it was our last night in the house we all grew up in, and in the middle of pious observance of earth hour, JF and Jason decide they want to buy rum and coke. Karen magically produces a big bag of alcoholic drinks, like one serious party pack bursting with all possible variants and in ten seconds we’d lit katols and formed a huddle underneath the coconut trees, opening bags of peanuts and merrily pouring alcohol into powdered juice mixes.
By 2am we were denouncing the evils of imperialism and I was drunk texting Ernest (and must have said something seriously stupid cause have not heard from him since).
By 5am we had consumed a whole bottle of vodka, premium gin and Gran Matador.
By 7am Tita Rose was yodelling for us to get the hell up, the movers were here and we had to move our asses.
it was both hysterically funny and miserable for all of us.
So now I’m displaced and drifting like driftwood, parasiting off my parents one day and squatting at my ex’s on another. I’ve looked at condos, rooms, apartments and have been frightened off by rotund landladies, horrific rent, babbling grandmothers and units that for some creepy reason have childish scribbles on the ceiling. I’ve walked the entire length of Taft ave and Malate and have seen everything from coffin spaces to creek-colored pools, have gotten lost a hundred and five times and had had to fend off overeager brokers, one of them an old pervert who liked to say the word “panties.”
My sacks of junk are scattered all over the city, some deported to Jopet’s, others hunkering down at Steph’s. Coco is going hungry in BF and I have absolutely NO idea where my school I.D. and underwear are.
So in less than three weeks have lost those articles stated above, our house, and as it’s starting to seem more and more like, my boyfriend.
No, this summer is not off to such a dandy start.
