Woke up at 6 pm with a crushing headache, the sort where you imagine a vise clamped on your head and you just hope that someone would very well make it quick and do the deed already. And in my phone, 8 messages. I was supposed to meet with a few friends for dinner. I already had my general rants organized in my head, as there are very specific rants you can only rant to very specific friends. One of the messages, of course, read that the thing was cancelled as the people involved are scattered all over. I drifted back to sleep and woke up a few minutes later feeling better.

I put a crumpled polo on, looked at myself in the mirror, only to see the reflection of a cockroach surreptitiously crawling its way to a half-open bag of potato chips on the floor, among other neglected and spoiling food–a plastic bag of moldy bread, two rotting mangoes, chopped crispy pata in a tupperware sitting there for weeks on end. I turned around to step on it, and as soon as I did it was gone. Of course it was gone.

I went out for token dinner by myself in the nearby barbecue joint. I ordered two hotdogs, a bottle of Coke, a cup of rice. Very few people were there–the usual customers probably in some high class restaurant for their Christmas get togethers or such. I ate the hotdogs and a few spoonfuls of rice. Keane started singing “Try Again” from the album Under The Iron Sea in my iPod. Followed by “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. Followed by “Some Unholy War” by Amy Winehouse–three songs I never really bothered to understand the lyrics of but always sounded depressing as fuck anyway. My iPod has always been some kind of empath, knowing which song to play in my ongoing state of my mind, but sometimes I wish it would play the opposite– like Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohen just to cheer me up. The song Walking in Memphis was played in one of my favorite X-Files episodes of all time, The Post-Modern Prometheus. As that song was playing Mulder and Scully were dancing with each other in a rustic pub. Come to think of it that episode was quite depressing in itself.

Thankfully “Some Unholy War” was followed by “Turn Your Lights Down Low” by Lauryn Hill. I love that song, and for once that night, something that wouldn’t make you want to drink spiked Kool-Aid.

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