June 2, 2008
It's easy enough to hatch ideas in Turtle's Nest; succumb to the temptation of a couple more hours after work in the book café near the street corner where I take my second jeepney home. Buy a beer, a couple of smokes, musta bai? And before you know it, you've downed five bottles of beer with five other people at 11 pm, and while you wait for another set of beers, you're talking about God, who's putting up the next exhibit in the small gallery of the café, or some random story for the day. Here at Turtle's Nest, everybody knows everybody who has become a pilgrim of the place, enough to also leave each other alone on silent weeknights, each to his own table and his own cup (or bottle) of thoughts.
Unlike the first few nights when my nightly pilgrimage began, I no longer struggle with a decision between a bottle of beer and home as I release myself from the confines of the office. I step outside in a sigh of relief. The air is cold on my skin. Perhaps it's the AC, perhaps the air simply is cold on this October night, perhaps my skin itself is cold. So I cross the street, hop on a jeepney, and head straight for Turtle's Nest where I can smile a non-perfunctory smile, and then keep to myself if I wish.
Kurt Cobain is humming through the speakers from the afterlife when I arrive willing me to come as I am, and oh boy do I let myself in, ragged and eybagged despite the clothes that scream "Yes, I belong to the middle working class now." Pulis acknowledges my arrival with a knowing smile; it's time to bring out the one light beer and two sticks of Marlboro Gold. All waiters and waitresses here are Pulis to the frequenters, the history for which we owe to a former security guard who eventually took on the duties of waiting on the customers every time the place was brimming with people, and so everyone was pulis then on. I take a seat, claim my share of the whole place like the older men around, and I begin to look like an old man but not as wise, and begin to devise a rough design of a map.