In honor of Swan’s 40th birthday and Father’s Day, we gifted each other a “we” day. Basically, doing what we usually enjoy but devoting the time to being together.
At Saturday’s birthday party, Steve, the owner of Kokomo’s, mentioned a Father’s Day gathering at his resort. Surprisingly, I remembered that. So, we headed out to Baloy Beach for some of that afternoon’s “we” time. Except when we arrived, no one was there except the staff and some heavy-drinking Filipinos, one of whom was a bakla. No big deal, I figured we’d have a drink or two, then move on. Swan said she was enjoying the music and the bay view, so it was all good.
Steve and his wife, Liza, showed up within an hour of our arrival. Some pork was thrown on the grill, and they had nachos delivered from Treasure Island. The party was on!
Swan was hungry for a meal, so we said our goodbyes and thank you (Steve picked up the tab for all our drinks), then moved on to Treasure Island.
After our meal, we went back home and spent the night together. That’s the way “we” roll.
Here are some photos from our Sunday morning candy walk. We hit our regular stops and when the kids spotted us, they came running.
Here’s a memory from 1959:
Today’s YouTube video discusses some aspects of Filipino culture from an expat’s perspective. He narrates a video of a street walk (Cebu City, I think) that reminds me of why I head for the hills when I can.
Some more attempts at humor:
Alrighty, then. It’s Hash Monday, and I’ve got to prepare myself to be Leeched. I’ll be taking the shorter trail, but there is a climb in my near future. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. If I’m still breathing.
Food looks good!
Another regular stop
That house looks more solid than what you usually see out in the boonies. Do you know the story of the place?
We were a working-class family, so our vacations were always camping trips.
I bet it was real camping and not the nonsense the idle rich engage in.
My first big camping trip that involved “roughing it” was with my best buddy Mike back when we were in high school. In Shenandoah National Park, you had to tell the ranger office what your camping/hiking route was. Mike and I decided to forgo the tent and just use a tarp and nylon cord for shelter. A ranger came by the following morning, checking up on us, and he declared we’d done a bang-up job of setting up camp: tarp hung correctly, proper distance from the creek, etc. I’ll always remember that trip with fondness. In my mind, the trail we hiked was several miles long, but in reality, it was a loop that probably wasn’t that long. Still—an experience.
I hope the Hash went well for both you and your lungs.
Swan looks absolutely livid in that second pic, John, an expression I find myself often encountering on my ex’s face. Did you perhaps ash in her drink when you thought she wasn’t looking? That usually does the trick for me, although with my ex’s brains being bonkers I don’t have to do much of anything before she is deeply embedded in Cuckooland.
Take yesterday for example. No mention was made about the bruise on her eye (although to be fair ever since I accidentally burned her forehead with a lit cig she doesn’t look in the mirror much, and my bathroom mirror is broken anyway from the time she threw my paintball gun at it).
Anyway, it wasn’t long before we had lift off yesterday. We got into a spat about her gaslighting me. It’s been constant since she’s been back. She accuses me of saying or doing something mean to her the night before and assures that of course I don’t remember it because I was in a blackout. I get blackouts are an occupational hazard for those of us who like a few drinks for breakfast, but when I blackout it’s usually on the way to bed. I rarely lose hours or nights, but the way the ex tells it it’s a nightly thing for me. I don’t buy for it a second, it’s gaslighting 101, a textbook narcissistic manipulation tactic designed to get the victim to question their own memory (and eventually sanity). I distinctly know she’s full of shit because she alleges I drank half a bottle of cough medicine the night before. I know I didn’t because she was the one necking the bottle, and when she offered me some I declined and reminded her it’s not smart to mix booze and acetaminophen. Besides, I know I hit up the Listerine bottle before bed as my shits smell extra minty this morning.
I tell her I know she’s trying to gaslight me and I don’t appreciate it. She’s immediately apologetic, claiming that wasn’t her intention, she’s not doing that at all etc. I don’t want to fight so go out to have a cigarette so I can cool down and I don’t have to be in the same room as her.
She follows me out not long after. We smoke in silence for a while before she strikes up a “can we pretend that didn’t happen?” conversation, with a meek tone. I’m always quick to make peace so join the act. But something changes in her tone after a few more drinks.
I should have picked up on it sooner but I’ve noticed that before she has one of her psycho episodes, her tone changes. She goes from being expressive, changing pitch and tone appropriately, to speaking in this low, mumbling, monotone. The calm before the storm.
I’m inside, watching a Uriah Heep concert, when she slumps in, eyes lidded. “You could have apologized at any time,” she mumbles. “The whole neighborhood heard you call me a whore and you never apologized. You’ve got 30 minutes to apologize, or I will be going and I never want to see you again.” She slams the door shut behind her as she goes out on to the porch to drink and smoke more. I can hear her playing music aloud on her phone (another herald of an impending episode) and mumbling to herself. Here we go. Incident time.
I expect us to have yet another scream fight, but to my surprise she just abruptly, gets up and leaves in a Lyft. I track her on Maps and she goes back to Bernhard (a supposed “friend” of hers she just occasionally fucks), as expected. Maybe that buys me a night to sort my clipped Uriah Heep articles, maybe get some gaming in, some quality fap time perhaps.
But no.
She calls not two hours later saying she wants to come back so we can “reconcile”. She uses oddly stilted and formal language at times, I’m not sure why; maybe to play up the appearance of being ‘eccentric’ or appearing smarter than she is.
She’s mumbling about “some black guys in furry suits” trying to rob Bernhard’s neighbor, and the military heard her through her phone and sent some fighter jets to scare them away (I wish I was making that up). I have to switch off to preserve my sanity and ask about her getting back here. Turns out – and I know this was the real reason for her wanting to ‘reconcile’ – she left her debit card here. She wants us to go to the liquor store and then we’ll watch a movie or something.
She rolls up to collect me in a Lyft and as I hop in she carries on with the conversation she was having with the driver. “…and there were these four black guys, and they were wearing furry suits – can you believe that!? – and they were trying to break into the next door neighbor’s. He’s a Korean War vet. And I shouted ‘Leave that man alone!’ and the air force must have been monitoring me through my phone because they sent a flyover. Yup. 5 minutes later. Two fighter jets and an attack helicopter. I’ve talked shit about the air force before but I never will again. I need help I’m not calling the police, I’ll just say ‘corpsman down!’ and they’ll be listening and send help. Man, that Korean War vet must be someone if the military is tracking us like that!”
I see, in the rearview mirror, the driver’s brows furrow in confusion. “A flyover? As in…the military?” “Yes sir!” the ex chirps. “And…you’re talking about a video game you were playing?” “No sir, this was real life. I am not delusional.” We spend the rest of the ride in silence.
We get home and the ex repeats the same story again: she was having a cigarette in the yard when she saw these “furry men” try to break into the neighbor’s. The military is monitoring her phone so they sent two fighter jets and an attack helicopter to assist her. The furry men ran away.
I don’t even give her story an ounce of credibility. We’re talking about the woman who thought the owner of the shelter we met at had been kidnapped by the neighbors, or that I tried to kill her in her sleep with my “death magic”. I have suspected, at times, she must been a heavy meth user before we met, as I’ve only encountered this level of delusion in homeless tweekers.
I don’t engage, at all. She’s deep in one of her episodes, where my participation in a conversation (and even my presence) isn’t required and she’s really just talking with herself.
I silently finish my cigarette and go inside to take a shit, hoping to buy some time and that she’ll maybe drink herself into slumber out there. I’m on the throne when I hear her burst in. “Did you hear me, honey? DID YOU HEAR ME!? One of the furry men is here! I saw him and he ran into the backyard! They must have been tracking me! The police only caught two of them, they don’t know where the others are! We’re not safe here. We are not safe!” She wails. I can do nothing but bury my face in my hands.
But she’s not done. Oh no.
I vacate the bathroom and head straight towards the bedroom, telling her I’m tired and I’m going to bed. I don’t wait for a response.
I can hear her on the porch, again repeating the same fucking story about furry men and fighter jets and how she’s so VIP the military is tracking her. I swig from my bedside drink, hoping unconsciousness claims me sooner rather than later.
She comes in a while later and climbs into bed. The light’s off and my back is turned to her but I go stiff (no, not like that) hoping she’ll think I’m asleep and have some consideration for that. Not so. She continues to mumble to herself about furry men, fighter jets, and government tracking. It’s eerie because it’s like she has a sixth sense for when I’m about to drop off. She will be silent for 5, 10, 15 minutes and as soon as my eyelids start to droop she begins to mumble again.
I notice a change in her tone as she becomes more animated. “But the military already knows who I am, why are they following me? Wait…what if they’re not following me, but they’re following you!?” I feel and hear her turn sharply in bed and she begins shaking my arm “Honey, why is the air force tracking you!? HONEY WHY IS THE AIR FORCE TRACKING YOU!?”
I’ve had enough. I’ve tried my best to be patient with her but this is beyond ridiculous.
“The air force isn’t tracking me! No one is tracking me. No one is tracking you! You need to stop smoking meth with Fear and come back to reality. You’re starting to sound like Meadows!”
‘Meadows’ was the owner of the shelter the ex and I met at. I met him a couple of years before I lived there, when I ran my own homeless veterans camp. I thought he was a sound guy, and we had some fun times when I first moved to his shelter, but he gradually unraveled mentally, culminating in him dancing on the roof of one of the shelter structures, with a loaded rifle, filming himself on Facebook Live. The sheriffs took his happy ass away. Meadows believed the government was sending spy planes over his property every day to monitor us. We won’t talk about the fact Meadow’s shelter was just down the road from an airfield.
The ex absolutely loathed Meadows, so the comparison strikes a nerve. She pushes me in bed. “You think I’m lying? What, that I just made that all up?” I so am not in the mood for this right now. “No, I think you need to just calm down and go to sleep.” She gets out of bed. I don’t turn to look but I can hear her pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. “How dare you compare me to Meadows. You think I’m a liar? You think I’m crazy like him?” She slaps my feet. “You want to step outside, cunt?” The bedroom light flashes on and she slaps my feet again. “Huh? You want to step outside, cocksucker? Do you want to step outside, chicken shit?”
I roll over in bed to retort and I’m struck by one of the most incongruous sights I’ve ever seen and I know I’ll be taking it to the grave with me. The ex is stood at the foot of the bed, arms wide in a come at me, bro stance. She’s wearing a Deadpool shirt she got me for Christmas and…nothing else. She’s literally butt-naked and challenging me to a fist fight.
I have to laugh at that. “No, small tits, I’m not going to fight you, you crazy bitch.” Without warning, she screams and launches herself at me; she clambers up my body and starts trying to punch and slap my face. I’m still laughing at the sight of her when she tries to reposition and put her knee on my throat. Instant reflex: I throw her off me and pin her arms to the bed, telling her to stop attacking me. She starts shrieking as if she’s being tortured, “don’t you lay hands on me! How dare you attack me like that!” I tell her I was defending myself from her, that I’m going to let her up, but if she comes at me again like that I’ll respond appropriately.
I let her up and she darts into the kitchen. I can hear her rifling through the utensil drawer. She’s going for a knife. 50/50 she comes back into the room and things get uglier, or she rants to herself from the kitchen. Luckily, it’s the latter. In an eerie callback to her warped version of attacking me with the stone, she maintains I launched an unprovoked attack on her and she’s not afraid to ‘defend’ herself. I have to get up to use the bathroom at one point, which involves passing by the kitchen. The ex holds out a carving knife in front of her like she’s a duelist or something. I barely glance at her as I go into the bathroom to pee. She’s still rabbiting on about how I just assaulted her and I’m lucky she’s not going to call the police.
She never mentions fighter jets, furry men, or government tracking after that. Instead we opened a bottle of rum I am sure she stole and drink it straight from the bottle because no one had the wisdom and foresight to purchase Coke to mix it with. Next up: some cold beers to wash the furry men away, cheers!
That’s quite a story, Thompson. Glad you lived to tell about it. You seem to be a glutton for punishment, or maybe your girlfriend satisfies a masochistic craving. Just to be safe, I recommend you check under the bed for any furries!
“Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.”
Hunter S. Thompson
Kev, regarding that “regular stop” photo, hollow block construction is pretty much the standard here, one step up from the less expensive bamboo walls you commonly see in the boonies. I’m not familiar with any stories about the house—it’s in a neighborhood of similar structures. The baby mama who lives there with her candy-lovin’ kids is a cutie, though.
Oh yeah, our family campouts were old school…we all shared one tent. Went fishing in the river, then cooked the catch over an open fire for dinner. Kernville was several hours from home, and us boys rode in the back of the Jeep pickup to get there. We had a family reunion there several years before my parents passed, but we stayed in a motel.
Your camping memory reminded me of the time my older brother and I went on a backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park. The ranger warned us to be on the lookout for bears. Sure enough, that first afternoon, when we were setting up camp, a big brown bear walked by. During the night, we heard screams from the campsite next to ours: “There’s a bear in the tent!” The next morning, we decided we’d seen enough and hiked back out.
I couldn’t bear camping like that and barely escaping.
I hope you support the right to bear arms, Drain…
I do. And more importantly, the right to bear bare skin before a roaring fire on bear skin.