I wake up at 5:30 AM with the adverse effects of alcohol—instead of the hangover, I get neurotic as if I just guzzled a liter of black coffee, my thought bubbles scattered all over my apartment. I riffle through my documents and find my medical appointment slip. “Bring stool.” Shit. I need to shit right now. In a vial. I rummage through the condiments and find a plastic bottle of Crispy Adobo Peanuts. I empty the leftovers and haul myself to the sink, where I find my execrable vomit splattered on the unwashed dishes. Holy fucking god. The toilet is five steps away. One of the mugs is brimming with vomit like rotten oatmeal. I wash the plastic bottle and try to peel the label off with my fingernails. It wouldn’t rub off, because I have ripped off all my fingernails with my teeth.

I take a filter cigarette from a packet of Marlboro Lights, light it up with my green cricket, and take a drag while scanning the words on the minuscule banner on Marlboro’s logo: VENI, VIDI, VICI. Why is that? I came, I saw, I conquered. Incipient rage shoots up my brain. Why does the horse on the left have a crown and the other doesn’t? I place the packet on the green table and step into the bathroom. Defecate, I command my asshole. Defecate, please defecate, but my asshole isn’t at all responding. I piss and take another drag of my cigarette. My anal sphincter twitches and I hover the plastic bottle underneath my buttcrack. Ordure oozes out and half-fills the container. For some inexplicable reason I raise the plastic jar to my nose and sniff it. My shit smells excellent I swear to god. It looks like peanut butter and I marvel about sticking a peanut butter label over the Crispy Adobo Peanuts label and putting it back in the food cabinet. Yum. I mummify my shit with newspaper and three layers of plastic bag. The last time I took my stool my bag smelled like the dungeons of my asshole.

…

I toss my documents and a random book, Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works of Existentialism, into my bag and step out of the house with the gray cotton candy clouds threatening to ruin my day. My ambivalence is torn between grabbing an umbrella or getting saturated in the rain. I prefer to get wet and looking wild with sticky wet hair. Rain is good. It starts to drizzle on my way to the nearest jeepney stop. Droplets of rainwater dart on my face, on my skin. Raindrops are marvelous. I inhale heavily the semi-smoke filled atmosphere and smell dogshit and the putrid contents of the canal to my left. The wonders of smelling, I feel like I’ve been drugged.

I ride two jeepneys and miss both my stops. My thought clouds have occupied all the space in the megapolis and I couldn’t see anything but clouds upon clouds of thoughts. Being an introvert is a mother. Upon reaching the clinic, a space monkey sitting on the passenger seat of a ten-wheeler truck motions a blowjob at me. I smile and give him the finger and cross the street.

I reach the ramshackle clinic and this evil-looking faggot in a faded dark cyan uniform accosts me. “How can I help you?” he says. I say I need a medical examination for The Stupid Company that just hired me. I fill out a record and queue parking my butt on a monoblock on the hallway. The clinic is filled with the gloomiest assfaces in the world. I cross my legs and fidget my foot forward and back while sucking all the meaning of the askew shit-colored acrylic painting hanging on the wall. Cortez, the artist, portrays a peeling vignette of a brown narrow street in the Old Manila. There are brown Spanish buildings made of wood, vintage vehicles running on the road, and tiny brown people wearing farmhats and frocks and kamisetas. The clouds are an inkspill of brown and I can’t determine if it’s morning, afternoon, or evening. Maybe that’s the point: this painting is timeless.

I glance to my left and discover a dude staring at my rocking foot, and I look at my foot then at him, he at me then at my foot again, us having a telepathic conversation that I’m horny, that I want him to know that I’m horny, that my horniness is attracting his special field of animalistic interest. I mentally command my foot to stop and I throw my head around the clinic and count twelve paintings crookedly hanging on the walls. The air-conditioned clinic is floored with shoe-scrubbed vinyl tiles; the walls are filthy white, the ceiling green, the desks green, the chairs green, giving me the impression that I am in a forest filled with hyperactive space monkeys brachiating from branch to branch. My flat is similarly forest-like green. Everything I own is green: green table, green fan, green bed, green bucket, green pail, green LA Gear, green Adidas sneakers, green flipflops, green curtains, green toothbrush, green notebooks, green tumblers; all stuff green are mine, all purple IC’s, my crazy flatmate. Green grants me the illusion of being surrounded by oxygen-generating trees. To breathe air is to compensate for the lost oxygen I have missed from smoking packets of cigarettes. I have breathing fetish. The green-shaded aquarium to my right houses the silver dragonfish arowana the size of a bazooka. Arowanas are said to be the ambrosia of the gods. I suddenly have the impulse to snatch the fish and grill it on my veranda. Beside the aquarium is a horrifying display of eleven icons of Jesus Christ and the Santo Niño.

I shut my eyes from all the visual stimulation but my ears are subject to torment: knocking on doors, doorknobs clicking, doors creaking open and shut, sneakers and clogs and slippers shuffling on the floor, feet tapping, nails tapping, pens tapping, papers ruffling, cellphone keypads clicking, typewriter firing like gunshots, nails scratching on dry skin, dumbass Westlife crooning faintly on the radio, women chattering, the air filled with words like “laboratory”, “medical”, “putang inang karayom yan”, “ang laki ng nidel”.

The main door chimes open and there is silence. I flutter my eyes open and this goddess the epitome of my lesbian fantasies has walked in. She has milk skin, an angular face, and a hippie getup of worn sneakers, faded black sweater, faded black bag, and bitten black fingernails. Up close her cheeks are potholes of acne scars; she has scratched stretch marks on her back and her asscrack is peeking out her rugged pants.

“Tobias daw, Tobias!” the lesbian security guard echoes the cry of the faggot nurse. The security guard is chimplike, short, and fat, with a humongous flaring nose, a humongous jaw, humongous flappy ears, and humongous black clobber shoes ideal for kicking my brother’s girlfriend with.

I strut into a whitewashed room reeking with antiseptic and this corpulent giantess with upside-down checkmark eyebrows and cup J breasts smiles at me and asks me to sit down. She grabs my left middle finger, swabs it with a wet cottonball, and pricks it with a sterilized needle. I shriek the word “Fuck” and she wipes a drop of my blood on a tiny glass plate. She covers my pricked finger with cotton and hands me a test tube for my urinalysis. “Don’t you need my stool?” I squawk. And she replies, “No.” “Would you like to have a jar of peanut butter?” I say, but she is flummoxed and I leave it at that. Then again I’d rather give it away to some random passerby.

I sashay to the restroom and switch the light on. Good. Exhaust fan. I fish out a cigarette from my bag and smoke while I unbuckle my pants and try to piss. With the cigarette on my right hand, the test tube on my left, I grope my genitalia for my pisshole and piss but miss, my hand all soaked with piss. Someone knocks at the door. “May tao.” I piss some more. Another knock. “May tao.” Finally I fill the test tube with my piddle the color of dark yellow, wash my hands and clog the drain with my half-smoked cigarette. The idiot knocks again, and I bang the door open just to find nobody on the hallway.

I hand Giantess my piss as she instructs me to enter the next room, where an old woman with a forgettable unremarkable face orders me to unstrap my bra, unbutton my pants, and lie on the sickbed. She pulls up my magenta shirt, and interrogates me about my tattoo and the ragged terrain of my ominously purplish burn scars. I confabulate that my house was bombed and that I am fortunate to be alive. Previous answers were being burnt by a candle while sleeping, car accident that exploded, kitchen accident, a gas tank that exploded, Glorietta bombing, someone tried to kill me, and others that escape me at the moment.

She massages my breasts and nipples, groping for a lump that could render me unemployable. “You have fibrocystic lumps,” she informs me. “What the heck is that?” I retort. “Normal breasts are smooth and gelatin-like; yours is grumous or semisolid, lumpy.” It’s the end of the world, but please do not stop caressing my breasts. “Is it something serious?” I say. “Uh,” she racks her brain for the answer, “No.”

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