The people who know me know that I am spectacularly unlucky. Like “fall down the stairs, have a bird poop on your head, get stabbed at H&M” unlucky.
In his book 11/22/63, Stephen King describes a character as someone who “… wasn’t clumsy, she was accident-prone. It was amusing until you realized what it really was: a kind of haunting.”
That’s pretty much how it’s like to be me.
It’s a good thing that I was blessed with a decent sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurd. Otherwise, I’d have already gone crazy from all the weird, horrible, terribad things that have happened to me over the years.
Since I’m bored in quarantine, here’s the story of how I cried on a jeepney because of an old man’s respiratory problems.
It was early morning and I was on a jeep, on my way home from a night of drinking. I was exhausted, drunk, disheveled.
Since it was so early, the only other persons on the jeep were the driver and an old man. The latter was seated a few feet away from me, close to the driver. I was seated near the exit, on the same left bench. All of these details are important, trust me.
We’re whizzing along, wind in our hair, when the old man started to cough. It went on for a minute or so and then I heard the unmistakable sound of an old man hacking a loogie. He spat it out the window, right into the slipstream.
Seconds later, something wet splooged on my left cheek. I slowly raised my hand, touched the wet thing on my cheek, then started to cry.
a visual
It was the old man’s loogie, following the laws of (bodily) fluid resistance to crash-land on my face. Let me tell you that nothing in life prepares you for another person’s phlegm on your skin (unless maybe if you’re a doctor).
Still crying, I yelled “PARA HO!” at Philcoa, sprinted into Mercury Drug, purchased rubbing alcohol and washed my face with it. Four. Times.
If there is any lesson to be gained from this, is if you hear an old man coughing up a wad of phlegm on a jeep beside you, MOVE TO THE OTHER BENCH.
Anarchy in the Ukay 