Monday, December 16, 2024

KUNINGAN, OUR 27th YEAR, AND CHRISTMAS IN LUMANG BAYAN

Kuningan is a soft rain accompaniment of the Merokok Man's ballad about how a Lucky Cat licked foams of Bintang and Prost from the food stalls at Plaza Festival where residents of the Menteng Pulo Public Cemery confer with financial managers while rifling through the 8th ASEAN Energy Outlook for 6 shots of  Teacher's Highland Cream and a power map as the ladies in Luang Prabang  disrupted an MCP review learning trajectory with a computer handover that is the public narrative of two Padang dinners, a dessert of sate kambing, and an Indonesian carnivore set. 

Sleep is a teen-faced Eurasian (most probably Spanish with Filipino ethnicity) whose ancient wrinkled hands slithered from JS Luwansa's Room 910 to race with a Bluebird to CGK, a red eye flight to Manila, and a morning bus trip to Tuguegarao.




27 is "100 years of Solitude", not in Macondo but in Bakal 2 where the Ciencias not the Buendias scrambled to rescue a failing structural engineer through Oplan GSIS by deploying a barrage of emails from the turrets of a team collaboration app that fired 100 sandwiches and juice packs to appease 100 recruited liberal conservatives, not from Macondo but those gathered in Hogwarts where happy hocruxes were relived 27 years after Fr. Apolo not Fr. Nicanor served potent undiluted mompo, to Baby Liza not Ursula, 27 years before the nights of patatim and inihaw na bangus in Bakal 2. 

There  might have been incidents with a horny capidua but not with Pilar and Amarantha, and there will be "tapoebak" rides but not being restrained under a chestnut tree.



Lumang Bayan is almost Macondo and pogaca can pass as Pancit Cabagan, not the steamed rice for the adobo and pinakbet-flavored ice cream that were manually cranked in Bakal 2, hollowed concrete blocks of waknatoy for the Christmas lunch, snack, and dinner of aging once upon a time dreamers of Hogwarts whose ultimate thrill is concocting kalderetang kambing from a magically real potion of soju, pinot noir, and merlot.

It's almost like the chikin melting with the sun as gifts were traded for bluetoothed music that ignited the holiday lights in Munoz and stories of love found and lost...

 

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