gorging on life...

Another Monday night… I wonder how long this week would feel like.

It’s unusually quiet here in the office as I once again pretend to be occupied with some extremely important life and death matter in the office. I should’ve just stayed home to sleep but I was thinking of not missing the opportunity for overtime. We didn’t really have work today since we are drastically affected by SONA being along Commonwealth Ave. I slept through the entire hoopla happening around as (it seemed) the whole family stuck to the TV for the president’s speech. It’s better to get the details and manuscript online not to mention different opinions and commentaries ready for devouring of the idle minds at 3 am supposedly busy with an important life and death matter at the office.

I’ll get around to it later. I don’t want to ruin my worthless (but paid!) lack of sleep.

Anyway, out of the spirit of living life to the fullest, we went swimming last Saturday, again. This one was just a barkada outing to celebrate someone’s birthday. And apparently they’ve got nothing better to do. We went to Gubat sa Syudad, somewhere in Caloocan. They said it was just a stone’s throw away…yeah right! If you were Samson, Hercules or Goliath, it could’ve been. So armed, I mean, packed with a lot of food, alcohol that is way too much for 6 persons, and pure guts and thirst for ‘happenings’ (I’m merely there for the adventure); we cramped ourselves and everything else to a taxi.

The ride there was spooky, really spooky; take my word. It was called Gubat sa Syudad: Forest in the City… it didn’t look anything like a forest. The way there: long, winding, dark, deeply rutted unasphalted, unlighted roads lined out or seemingly carved out of tall grass; seem perfect for a crime scene or a horror movie. If you stare out the window long enough, you can’t, I mean I can’t… I feel as if my imagination would jump ahead of me and see things I’m not supposed to be able to. I just leaned back and closed my eyes. Later, according to Mela, our birthday girl friend who has a working third eye (huh?), my fears were justified, there were some things around. It seems like a perfect place to die or scream yourself to death. To make matters worse, we got lost.

We eventually made it out. It was probably the first time I felt relieved to see lights and hear Totoy Bibo playing in a stupid videoke machine. We went in realizing we weren’t the only ones stupid and insane enough to go night swimming in the middle of the rainy season right after a whole afternoon of thunderstorms. it was better to have people around anyhow, they were looking for company and the place is too big to have to ourselves.

The place was almost as creepy as getting there. It was a big place but I think there were only two working pools, 3 of you count the kiddie pool just beside the main one. The rest of the pools had black water that seems to house either alligators or a forgotten breed of dinosaurs that would justify the reputation of it being a ‘gubat’. Some didn’t have water at all but didn’t have signs saying anything so you have to squint to check or probably not be so stupid to swim where there are no lights and people around. We discovered a slide and raced up the rusty winding staircase to the top. It seemed to be the stairway to all the slides on the entire place. We almost slid through one that leads to an empty pool; I dare not imagine the outcome of that one.

There were about 5 groups that went there. We got to talking to one group since they had this 2 or 3 year old kid that we were playing with and we needed help finishing the third and last bottle of Emperador. Again, I spent almost the entire night on the water not caring if my body aches to high heaven for another week. I was evading my turns at alcohol. I vowed not to get drunk again or anywhere near it. We got a lot of food for 6 people who aren’t that hungry and we were stupid in guarding it much to the delight of roaming cats and dogs who probably took and ate almost half of the fish we were supposed to cook there. Oh well! On the bright side, our friends for the night gave us some more food: raw fish. We basically just took it home to eat for breakfast.

Well to make the long story considerably shorter than it already is, we had fun, waited until 6 am to raise ourselves from the pool and attempt to clean the cottage we occupied. Our trustworthy taxi driver, the same one that drove us there that promised to pick us back up in the morning, was there waiting for us. We discovered he slept there, how he found the guts to or why he did such a stupid thing for 200 pesos is beyond my imagination. We stayed awhile at Hyland’s place, fried the free fishes, had breakfast and (all of us) crashed on his/her bed for a few hours before realizing we had homes and lives.

I was asleep the whole off Sunday waking up late at night just to watch TV and sleep again. Next Saturday is another birthday, another drinking session, another adventure… sheesh!

Carpe diem!?... hahaha