So Suasoria For A Sunday

It's showing guilt, as a device, in rhetorical scriptwriting fashion.
But this very technical term amused me to the highest heavens
just by the way it's said.

It's the Lao Code word I learned for the day.

Feeling sorry is rhetorically, "suasoria."

Guilt should strike whoever thought of this source of business.
What the hell are stalactites and stalagmites doing
in Metrowalk, and are available for sale?

Why should a structure carved through hundreds of years by nature,
in the deepest recesses of untouched caves, be sold?

They're too big to be placed in an SUV, you need a truck
to bring them home.

They're too tacky to be found in your nouveau riche grotto rock garden.
And you need a big lawn to have them in the first place.

Same day, earlier, as if buying an expensive Rolex
in a nation under a state of calamity,
won't make you go into the mode of suasoria,
the same expensive watch store was robbed,
in a most unexpected place where it can happen,
at Greenbelt 5.

I won't mind if I was there and eating crispy fried ears
and heavenly noodles and fried banana dessert at Solihiya,
and I am not allowed to go out because robbery is in progress.

If I was caught inside Adora, I will try to fit those
pricey shirts, and see if I am worthy of such wasteful
spending, and if my 2-year gym-trained buddy without
losing the belly will flatter Christian Dior with his
12,000-peso creation on me.

Lucky are those who were not allowed to go out
but were in Fully Booked. Perhaps this temporary
imprisonment is enough to complete two books
without buying them.

But shouldn't I be suasorially disturbed now
posting a blog about a scary, criminal phenomenon?

I should be more guilty not fulfilling my Sunday
obligation to go to Mass because of attending
a workshop as if it can instantly fulfill a full-length
celluloid dream.

There's something less involving if a Rolex shop is robbed.
The heartland in me feels, yeah, such blatant display
of unnecessary luxury will whet the thieves' desire
for acquisition.

But I wouldn't want to be in the security guard's shoes,
whose undisturbed, air-conditioned boring job, faces
its ultimate test, when confronted with armalites
on the laziest, most family day of the week.

And to have cops from Taguig, in a pricey store,
having the chance to display their bravery by engaging
the thieves in a gunfight makes me wonder. Wow,
being a cop may be lucrative enough these days,
to walk through Patek Philippe and IWC row as a Sunday habit.

But thanks to their attempted heroism,
bravery is still a virtue. We miss action flicks.
And we still need a hero, we're holding out for a hero till the morning light.

Reeling from more mind-boggling terms
from the Code of Lao, we decided to be decadently
savoring the drinks of Decades.

I didn't know that old bar down Makati Cinema Square
exists in casino and DVD bootleg land called Metrowalk.

The old waiter who approached me seem to know me.
Oh my, he's still the same waiter from Decades Makati!

Again, I went into suasoria mode.
As I am excited about my new job,
here he was, choosing waiting tables
as a lifelong vocation, in the same bar
of my early 90's working life.

This crazy sorry Sunday made me drink once more.
I had to give a bigger tip for nostalgia's sake.
While I dripped myself in San Miguel Beer fashion,
I can see those stalactites from my peripheral vision.

There's too much guilt in this society waiting to be unleashed.
And it didn't help to know that Metrowalk is actually under
one traditional politician's ownership, Chavit Singson. Eww.

I need to get back to my bed. This is so suasorially surreal.
I stood by my window, for one long sigh, to say, what a day.
And what I see is a big cemetery, the South Cemetery
enveloped in dead darkness.

It made me ask, before dying, what the mission of this man
will be in his most productive years. Way before gout strikes,
or who knows, any other age-related debilitating disease,
as long as it didn't come from rats.

There must be a good reason to wake up, and do something,
before ending up buried under those tombs I see from my room,
or be fossilized and be found besides stalactites and
stalagmites, when Makati will be Pompeii in the next
civilization.

What they might recover are my Gossip Girl DVD Box Sets.
That won't make me a good fossil find and a relic of decadence
past should a future archaeologist discover this corner.
I hope I won't be sold as a mummy down Metrowalk.
By then, they might have renamed Decades as Centuries.

Forgive me for this unusual post-Sunday post.
It doesn't make sense. It attempts to be rhetorical.
But the tokens reportable in a day are too strange
to ignore.

Suasorially yours,
Lilit