I felt as empty as a haunted house the past two days. I can hear the echoes of my thoughts running through my percieved great halls. To blunt the silence I’ve decided to ransack the fridge and disabuse it of its alcoholic contents.
I was drinking beer at 10 AM, feeling the buzz at around 11:48 and decided to walk it off a couple of minutes later. Unlike other places in Manila, there’s nowhere to go to when you’re in Sta. Mesa, this place that has become some sort of a prison for me. I stepped out and joined the solitary walks of the great unwashed. I was unwashed myself, not having taken a bath since Thursday. What for? I never got around to leaving my antiseptic room anyway, except to go down and shovel food down my throat.
What I saw outside was painful, kids pushing carts to sell bottles and newspapers, the closed cabarets futuristically reborn as KTV’s. They’re as dingy as they can get. Perhaps Claire Danes was housed in one of those joints when she berated Manila as smelling of roaches and mice. I took a deep breath and felt a cocktail of carbon monoxide and methane (from a decaying rodent, or was it a cat?) rush through my lungs like adrenaline. I suddenly remembered why I do not go out of my house in the first place. It’s all this decay and deprivation and scarcity. Some folks would rather close their eyes than witness these things. I prefer to lock myself up in my room.
***
Saturday saw me pacing my room wondering which mall to go to aside from Centerpoint. That place has been like a kitchen to me, I already know where the vermins hide and where they place their dirty rags. I cannot overdose on Chef de Angelo’s beer sausage spaghetti again. For one the pasta was too stiff, even the sausage was stiff, causing me to imagine that, that must have been what it’s like to eat dick.
I decided to go to the Shangri-la Mall. It’s close, it’s not too crowded, and it’s got theatres. In short it’s perfect. As I had a lot of time to kill, I went steak hunting. It’s easier these days when you have your meat cravings, before you have to shoot your own buffalo to have meat, now you can order it over the counter.
I’ve made up my mind that it was beef day. I got a T-Bone from Steak whatever and congratulated myself for buying something that’s not too pricey, for a steak. I should have stabbed my eye with the fork. The only big thing about that steak was the bone. It wasn’t a steal, it was a robbery, and I was the one being robbed.
I gnawed at whatever meat it had, and hauled my ass off to Wendy’s. At least there I’ve never been burned. The spicy chicken breast (miss, spicy chicken breast please; with matching hand signals to my chest, I had no idea why I was doing that) still looks great and the fries seem ready to spice up my cholesterol count.
In a burst of inspiration I had my meal to go, then half run to the cinema. I wanted to watch Stardust after seeing Michelle Pfeiffer oohing at her butt in a trailer. Unfortunately the nazis at the cinema won’t allow foreign food to be brought inside their theater, you have to buy those things that they sell. All together now, what the fuck! Good thing I still had time, I went to the parking to my car, set the aircon to full and had Aerosmith blasting from the speakers. I always have a book stashed somewhere in the car so while consuming my very fulfilling chicken and fries, I was chuckling to some really fun short story.
* **
Stardust is a good date movie. After all this years, I still haven’t gotten over my childhood crush on Claire Danes. I thought she was heavenly as Angela in My So-called Life. I couldn’t get over that cleft in her chin. Down boy.
It’s scary to watch Michelle though, her prosthetics were like a sign of things to come. She was yanking my chain all afternoon. She had me believing her when she cried over her sisters’ deaths. That witch.
I can’t spill any more info here cause I’m like that, you know, good. Right.
If you’ve got money to spare, go see it, and bring a date. Shit I almost kissed the person sitting next to me in one scene. And the person was a man. With a mustache.