Menthol-Guy

It won’t really hurt NFA anyway.

Summady on the crowd said that my blog needs major overhauling, that my fiction stories suck and that it doesn’t entertain anyone, that my posts are as boring as my life and that - he said - I really really need to get laid with some hotshot girl on the campus (no way?!). Or I need some alter ego to brighten my days (the way Chuck Palahniuk wrote about it on Fight Club? I’ll change my mind).

“Your blog is too personal, kiddo. We’ve got too much of your father-and-son rants, that’s why most of us are skipping on your blog while blog-hopping with the fear that your latest post might be another huge problem we need to bother.”

“You dickhead wearing this menthol stick on your lips like some fat-ass Supahhh milk-flavored straw user!”

“Sweatballed Kevin, die with all your emotional rants and be buried side by side with Holden Caulfield! Or J.D Salinger! Or *gasps* somewhere in Harry Potter!”

Meh. I rarely check my blog statistics. Though my blog has reached its ten-thousand pageview mark just yesterday (I think spams are included on the counting, LOL), most of my readers have either hibernated or have had puking sessions while viewing my page. To tell you the truth, I myself half-puke when I read my own blog since I would always think of it as this overemotional blog teeming with teenage rants, a solemn example of overkilling some emo shit rants or something. But what can I do - I’m a teenager, and I’m not yet working so don’t expect too much for me to rant about “hey I hollered someone and invited her for coffee” or something far more interesting like “I hafta go to Palm Jumeirah and buy some kickass house”. And maybe I’m just pretty sentimental about stuff, but the way I see myself I’m no overkiller.

Maybe nothing’s really interesting with college. I can’t even blog about it - it’d bore anyone. Probably not if I take pictures of my professors (especially that newbie professor who knew nothing about teaching a college class: heck she even have a seat plan) and criticize them and piss them off the Punk’d way, but I might be expulsed from the university.

Maybe hmm, nothing’s really interesting with a guy who has got no love stories to tell. I BEG TO DISAGREE. I am far more interesting when I got no love stories to tell!

Maybe it’s because I haven’t had much alcohol (compared to last year where I used to drunk-blog for chrissake) in my system. And maybe some friend ditched an inuman session that was supposed to be yiztarday just because he/she caught some Saturday-scheduled flu, whatever. I even cancelled that Coke Event at MOA for chrissake, and then you’ll end up DITCHING the whole High School class just for some *URGH* flu! Whatever. :(

Now for the boring daily diary-like details:

• So it was raining for about two hours and I cooked three packets of instant champorado. A nice sweet spoonful of champorado + evaporated milk could simply warm the senses on a cold, cold day. :)



Yummy swirl!

• I played DoTA a while ago here on my laptop after two weeks of not playing, and boy, I hate Rikimaru for killing my Kardel.



I quit now. :(

• My Dad asked for some pictures of my dormitory (just to see how it looked like) and I was surprised since the slideshow popped out my desk and a pack of Marlboro Menthol. It was REALLY freaky, and before my Dad could caught me off-guard, I told him it was owned by one of my orgmates (I have to lie on this one). He was convinced enough, or not really convinced. I know and I can feel that he knows and everyone in the family knows that I’m smoking: I just hate the fact that they still needed my confrontation and my public speech about the vice. Lesson learned: rarely take pictures of any Marlboro paraphernalia or smoking paraphernalia or any other thing - it might betray you.



That’s not mine, that’s.. err. One of my orgmates owned it. It’s his. They happened to visit me at my dorm when I took that shot, err.. yeah.

• My Dad and I purchased seven books at Booksale today (all 700-pesos worth of them: I told my Dad I’ll pay for half of it but since he rarely treats me a book and since he would always borrow my books, I agreed on him paying the whole bill). This was so far the biggest bulk I’ve ever bought from Booksale! Yey!

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre

Friction by E.R Frank

Naked (short story collections) by Susan Zakin

Ned Kelly by Robert Drewe

The Forsaken by Stephen Arterburn and Mike Moscoe (this would be my first book to read with TWO authors, and I was quite wondering on how they agreed about the story and who wrote which part)

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

The Shopping Cart Soldiers by John Mulligan

• My Dad meanwhile bought this ‘phony’ magazine, The Gear Guide. The title itself is a huge antithesis of him: I mean, he can’t even climb MOUNDS for chrissake or row a canoe or something - he just really loves buying hiking magazines and watching the scenic views and the pricey Safari hats (he once bought one at REI in Mountain View and the next thing I know my Dad belonged somewhere in Jumanji) and all the tents and hiking boots (he purchased this Blundstone - whatever the spelling is - and he uses it once a year, when Pag-Asa lifts a signal number 5 here in Bulacan). Gahd.
• We ate at Pizza Hut and well, well, well - I’m one die-hard Shakey’s fan when it comes to their thin-crusted crispy pizza and their mojos.

Now I need room to think about telling my Dad that I’m smoking. He seems pretty cool about it anyway.

I should have posted this on Deviantart, but I decided to put another fiction here just to give a damn about it.

-

I made myself a coffee the way I usually do after my part-time job as a cashier at some 24-hour convenience store. Coffee sinks within my system and calms my nerves. I ‘overdose’ myself with coffee, if there’s such a case. It’s the only luxury I can have while working, aside from smoking, of course. But I don’t smoke nowadays; I rarely feel like smoking, but when I do, I could be chain smoking the way your regular chain smoker can do in days. I started to restrain myself from smoking after watching this documentary at some news channel about how tobacco above other things can blacken the lungs, can make people sick. Results can vary from emphysema to lung cancer. I can tell I’m having regular intervals of breath shortness: once it happened while a customer was waiting for a receipt for her hot coffee and brownies, I suddenly gasped hard for air and she was staring at me in horror. I quickly give her the receipt and told my co-worker Joshua that I have to go to the comfort room - and that I blurted out incoherently.

My cellphone suddenly distorted the silence with its message alert tone.

I could smell a meager but strong hint of alcohol somewhere out there, but I replied to Joshua’s text message first. He’s a die-hard DVD fanatic and he wants to borrow that movie I told him was good, The Stepford Wives. He juggles DVD-watching and his associate degree on Nursing and his part-time job, and as far as I could tell he’s doing a brilliant job - except that he usually flunks on his anatomy classes - an obvious sign that his nursing career is a clear misfit. He really wants to be this director kind of a guy: he wants to direct indie films, he reads a lot of E-book scripts of movies and everything about movies, but in as much as he would like to extricate himself from destitution, he can’t. He gave up his dream and started to study his two-year associate degree, of course with the forced support of his parents.

I tried to recall where I left that particular DVD, so I stood up and went to my room and searched the shelves. It was alphabetically arranged and compiled in rows - I did that for the sake of killing boredom yesterday, since my delinquent thesis professor failed to show up and all of us were pretty used with it.

There, Stepford Wives besides Step Up 2. I haven’t watched Step Up 2 - most of my DVD collection are either stolen or a gift of a gift of a gift until it unfortunately reached my lousy filing cabinet. I replied to Josh and sat back to the dining table with my coffee.

I then traced the faint smell of rotten alcohol and it lead me to the bathroom. There I saw this huge pool of vomit waiting to be cleaned. It looked awful at first glance (and it would look so much awful when you stare so long at it) that my stomach churned so bad I almost felt myself throwing up, but I looked away. I was still looking away from it when I went to the opposite direction and walked a good five meters away from the bathroom. It wasn’t normal in this house; whoever did that was just really sick that he can’t even wash it away with the drums of water besides it.

I started conducting an analysis about the vomit: my brother’s silver-meshed liver would not allow him to puke that much. He’s doing fine with his girlfriend, as far as I know and as far as I’m concerned, so there would be this slim chance that he would intoxicate himself except for a much deeper problem. My younger sister was twelve, my youngest brother was eight. My mother - my mother works on a hotel at Kuwait City, so it was virtually impossible for her to take a plane ticket home and puke at the bathroom and go back to Kuwait for her job. Dad, dad, dad. Dad?

——-

After gulping another mouthful of warm coffee I saw - right after my mug made this almost-silent thud on the dining table - this red leather bag. It was this shiny patent-leather bag with some plastic varnish coating it: an imitation of snake-skin or crocodile skin or whatsoever, and it was just so lady-ish and so feminine Madonna could have owned it. It wasn’t from my ex-girlfriend - my ex-girlfriend happened to visit here in the house without any permission, as if she owns the house, and plays with my younger siblings, makes warm coffee for my Dad and all. I met her after my brother told me to have this double-date with this certain girl as his college; she has this sister and he told me she’s a nice, hot girl that means serious business in bed. I finally agreed after he had shown me her picture.

I slowly opened the bag, and while opening its zipper I knelt within the shadows with the fear that its owner would see me robbing something on her bag. I adjusted my eyeglasses and peered a good look on what it contained: lipstick-red tablets, a little coin purse florid for its dainty-looking design, rolled tissues, hand sanitizers, and all those paraphernalia most women would give a damn - make-ups and lipsticks and all.

My cellphone surprisingly beeped again and I literally jumped with horror. I closed the bag and went back to my coffee and emptied the mug. Between the investigation of who owned the bag up to the moment that I emptied my warm cup of coffee I was thinking, thinking, thinking about the possibilities that it might be some prostitute or some lady connected with my Dad.

Right after that I felt dizzy. I felt really dizzy, probably because I was awake for the entire day working and researching for my thesis.

————

I found myself in front of my Dad’s bedroom door and I can hear the loud whirring of his electric fan and the horizontal blinds moving back and forth. I opened the door slowly the way a thief does and cautiously made a good look of his bed - and there lies a feminine figure. It was no mistake that she was the owner of that bloody red bag - the dark red on her seemingly crumpled lips is a perfect match, and even if the room was terribly saturated with the moonlight casting shadows of the horizontal blinds that covered the windows, I could still see the reddish pigment of her lips.

She didn’t have any bra or whatsoever, probably she tossed it after..

I knew my Dad as this monogamist who would avert his eyes off pretty women. If they had sex, then he’s no monogamist anymore. They must have had sex, judging by my father’s bare chest and the blankets covering both their body parts the way movies could see it (and I remember Joshua getting mad after this certain movie of Jennifer Garner where the film used not blankets but mere darkness to hide what needs to be hidden; “it shouldn’t be! it wouldn’t look natural!”).

You sonuvabitch, I suddenly shouted. It was madness. I suddenly could imagine my Mom in her hotel clothes waiting tables on some hotel or poised behind her porcelain counter with this flat-screen monitor and all those pens standing on some rack, and she was standing, smiling at the back of her mind thinking that the five of us have been doing so well on our studies, that her husband spends all those dinars for the household expenses, for books and for the bills, and then I blurted sonuvabitch.

And then I shouted, shouted, shouted and retreated from that sinful spot of my Dad’s bedroom.

Dad was still snoring when I went out of his room.

My brother was probably awake even before I went inside the room - I saw him slouched on the dining chair, the one besides the chair I sat when I was drinking coffee. When he asked what’s wrong, I cried. This was probably the first time my elder brother could see me crying - I rarely cry after break-ups, and I never would want to cry after failing a subject or after miscutting my toenails.

“Dad’s cheating on us, that sonuvabitch slept with someone else three days after he filed his resignation! Can’t you just think of it - he’s such a monogamist back then but..”
“Just shut up”, my brother cut the crap after his sharpest delivery. “Crying won’t do anything good, so just..”
“Can’t you just imagine Mom working at Kuwait..”
“Now please, I’m through with it. I’m twenty-one and I know what’s happening.”
“You don’t know what’s happening!!!”
“I know - I saw them come home late at night, an hour before you finished your night-shift, and Dad explained a few things at me and then puked in front of my shoes and that lady puking at the bathroom.”
“What explanation are you talking about? Nobody needs explanation!”
“That he was drunk!” My brother raised his tone now.
“So - what the fuck - you don’t even think he’s committing adultery on that one.” it was sarcastic. “Haven’t you thought about Mom working her ass up at Kuwait, waiting tables and smiling and entertaining those veiled Arabs with coffee or tea or dates or shawarma or whatever!”
My brother stared at me point-blank, his face swiftly shifted sideways from Dad’s room to my face, flustered.

I terribly missed that part.

I terribly missed that part that my Mom died after catching asthma. It wasn’t normal asthma, it was worse, like some grave respiratory disease similar but not equally fatal with that of lung cancer. She had to absent herself from her job for weeks. It was an inopportune disease, very much untimely for public-related works like my Mom’s. She must have been coughing all the way while entertaining visitors and all, and maybe her boss hated the fact that she had to excuse herself during conversations just to cough with her handkerchief on her mouth.

She was dead a little less than a year ago. A year ago, I suddenly thought. Why would I even think of her as if she was alive? Is there such thing as oblivion over death, wherein the griever would suddenly forget about that loved one’s death and think about her welfare, assume that she is alive? Or is this not the case of oblivion, but of this prevailing hope of reviving someone that’s dead?

My brother, that stern-faced brother of mine with tears gushing from his eyes, asked what made me think that she’s still living, working in Qatar?

I dunno, I told him with a hopeless sigh. I thought that time should have healed scars and wounds by now, but most of the time it fails its job. Most of the time it only conceal wounds and hide it in plain sight.

Weekends are boring, boring, boring without free WiFi so I resorted to cooking Tonkatsu (breaded porkchops) and stir-fried mungbean sprouts with shredded carrots. Also, I prepared Polaroid photos as props for my next post. I couldn’t call this productive since it didn’t even helped me on something than to kill boredom; it’s basically out of the context. But at least it helped me to cross those long sleepy hours.

And hey, at least I tried to find some WiFi signal earlier this morning (I posted a new deviation at my DeviantArt account and I plurked a while ago) but the signal lasted only for thirty minutes. :(

Anyway, I made this untitled layout (not a theme since it doesn’t have any code) for Wordpress, inspired from grid-based themes like those made of Derek Punsalan and that Gridblog theme I found somewhere on the net.

It’s just really simple with some pictures and stuff and the use of orange (probably I got hooked with it ever since I used this theme) and gridlines as basis for the layout. But nothing’s really a stand-out or something about this pseudo-theme I made just to kill boredom.

*click for larger version*

That’s just it. I’m really open for comments and suggestions (if there’s any).

Four days a week (Tuesday to Friday) I go to school. Two of them only have three classes a day (relatively short - it only occupies four hours), and the remaining two days got this disastrous eight-to-twelve and one-to-four combo, which is why I hate Wednesdays and Fridays: it’s a coma-inducing hectic schedule with all the running and waiting for jeepney rides at yellow-painted curbsides.

But the academic routine ends there. Every Friday I go home to Bulacan, three hours away from my beloved university, and I take two bus rides and it takes me three hours to reach the house and untie my shoes and entertain my attention-seeking laptop with the free Wi-Fi.

And every weekend I would sleep and go online all day long. Or do reports, read books, cook our lunch meals, shop for books, or if my friends are kind enough to share their repressed feelings with a case of beer I’d be cancelling all those shits just to have a night of booze.

In short, I’m satisfied with the way everything’s running these days.

-

And then my sister would be buying me a FlickrPRO account real soon (first week of July, she said)! Maybe it was because of my much-prepared persuasive approach I sort of used on the e-mail I sent her, including the line I highlighted with green (I almost chose orange but whatever) which says:

“but please, I’d love to know you’re taking your time thinking about it (buying a FlickrPRO account)”

Well, I have read this column on some magazine I got from Dad’s pile of magazines and it says that when communicating through e-mail or even phone and you are about to request something to someone, the use of “love” would be an excellent word to persuade or provoke that someone (only for your opposite sex) to really consider what you are saying, without them knowing that you have this ulterior motive in using it.

And maybe I also used the “appeal to pity”, which I once tried on my position paper way back when I was enjoying my Creative Writing class. LOL.

I don’t really know if the trick worked, but the e-mail sure did something miraculous.

-

I’m currently reading two books. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath so far envelops me into something very philosophical: one chapter clearly personified the bank as some “master” of those bulldozers and those workers wearing gas masks destroying farms during the Depression (this book, I think, is set first on Oklahoma - though I haven’t finished it yet but I have this feeling the Joad Family would be migrating to California for a new life). Uhh, I just can’t explain it right now but I’ll try to make a book review about it.

I’m also reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I’m digging every literary piece of this world-class Japanese author these days (since I almost finished Salinger’s, except one book with Seymour on the title). What I really love with this book is it’s modern setting - which I can totally relate - and its explicit exposition on sex (the part where the protagonist has his wet dream after some steamy blowjob he got from his dream with some girl! I have not heard of any book that would really narrate something like that even in fiction - yet he still narrated it without a tinge of vulgarity, and I like it very much) and death and every topic worth digging.

I’d really love people who would donate second-hand books may it be from Murakami or from any other kickass author. But since a personal meet-up would be quite difficult (I study in Laguna, I reside in Bulacan), you can just send me some e-book at utakgago@yahoo.com okay? :) Thanks!