Four days and I'm running out of metaphors

It's raining again. I just came home after spending the morning running errands.

The transactions at the banks I went to went faster than was possible, given that I usually spend half an hour minimum waiting for my pending number to be called. Today, however, by the time my pending ticket came out of the dispenser, I was served before I can even sit down. This might be because the usual clerk manning one counter wasn't there, the one who might as well serve customers once every five hours for all the dallying he does. His sweater, last time I saw him, said "Word." I will let his choice of wardrobe represent all the adjectives lining up in my mouth.

After the refreshing absence of that clerk, I went to a restaurant where three grown men were sitting one table away from mine, talking about religion. Their conversation was suffused with the enthusiasm normally seen among men talking about their fighting cocks or the sorry state of the country and what should be done. They looked to be neither cockfighters, barbers, taxi drivers, nor businessmen, just three men who sat at that particular restaurant, ordered coffee, and subjected the items in today's newspaper to what might be considered theology for the masses. When I sat down they were trying to remember what man does not just live by, and after a minute one of them, whose windbreaker has slipped from the back of his chair onto the floor, recalled it was bread. When I finished my meal they were agreeing among themselves that scientific evidence supported Genesis.

After eating I went to look for clothes in the building housing all the thrift shops in this particular city road, hoping to find a parka the kind worn by men in anime, particularly The Red King, Mikoto Shuo. I saw one like it last year at a boutique in Manila, which I didn't buy right then and there because I am an idiot. I didn't find any that looked good enough, though I did find some pants that could be made to resemble the signature cut of the Bulgarian clothing line Demobaza, the clothes in which are upwards PhP80,000, so this very sentence doesn't even need to be finished. I also found a thick, gray kimono that's masterfully done. At least to me - this is the first kimono I have ever seen up close.

At the grocery store I didn't find some items I was looking for, like Japanese mayonnaise and a hot compress bag for my old age. I did get greens and some fruit, bread, some other things that will make decent meals for the next several days. The lady in front of me in the queue to the cashier bought what looks like the entire grocery stock of 15 bottles McCormick crushed white pepper and nothing else. The first thing that I thought of was how inefficient killing a person would be if you had to induce pepper allergies this way.

Three bags later, I asked the cab driver to pass by a detour and went home to resume what passes for my life. It stopped raining enough to rain again.

The day that followed that might as well hog all the metaphors in my lifetime quota. The driver of the jeepney I rode on was wearing plaid fluffy pajamas and fake crocs, and the only other passenger for a good mile chose to sit beside me, shotgun, for all the emptiness of the jeep cabin. Her knuckles were raw from wounds that appear to have been punches to rough concrete. Even our route was weird - instead of turning right, the driver did a left and took us to a part of this barangay I've never seen before, which doesn't look like it's from this town at all. In the city center I saw what my madness might look like if you gave it legs: a lady dressed enough (qualitatively, at least) not to be mistaken for a hobo, but without enough of whatever garments she did have on not to be mistaken for anything except drunk and high. She was wearing fishnet stockings, absolutely tattered boots, shorts that might as well be a belt, and an oversized camouflage jacket that hides the part of the ass that curves from the legs.  She had on her face a pink and black half mask further folded in half enough to cover just her nose, tied around her head of clumped, mangy hair. She had piercings on her face, the remains of black crumbs of mascara and eyeliner all over her eyes, and she carried a bag more apt for vegetables or dirty clothes. She looks and sounds insane and one inch of skin crud away from homelessness.

Two days after that I was restless at home, since I read Žižek, Sedaris, and Murakami one after the other cover to cover, and got whooped in the ass again with eight episodes of Kimi no Todoke. Why I did that in that order in that combination, I cannot tell you. So I went to this specialty brewery but drank only one stein of light beer, since two tables in the place were magnificently roaring with a surplus of Northlander testosterone. I ended up in another bar and went home with no idea what to do with my life while being ridiculously and wastefully smack dab in the middle of it.

Yesterday before going to where I go to be punched and kicked the hell out of, I sat at that restaurant again, had runny waffles that were nonetheless inexplicably burnt, and listened to a sales clerk convince six women of the health benefits to be had in "the only nutritional supplement in the world with no clinical therapeutic claims approved." It will definitely make your child smarter, because, as a matter of fact, he is slow in school due to being by default malnourished. In the gym I tore through my thigh muscles being told to kick what felt like 47,920.75 times at both imaginary midgets and a punching bag. The slap of shin against leather is always satisfying, and I brought home bruises, the only things that tell me I still have blood somewhere.

I went home, and burned through four beers and two glasses of wine in two hours, and slept at 5:00 AM for all the adrenaline and misplaced, impotent aggression at the universe's groin. It did not rain. As I am writing this there's a young lady outside my window shouting "I love you!" to someone I can't see. Or maybe at trees, I can't tell.

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