Chuck Tailor’s Notebook: Chuck’s Autobiography

I have carried Chucks with me in my mini-kingdom. He is with socks now, resting under my bed. Tonight they are sleeping underneath my bed. I have rewarded them for being such loyal companions on my tiresome Araw ng Davao journey or should I say a day of massacre.

Massacre? That’s an exaggeration. Well it isn’t. Both my delicately-skinned legs have long waited for their turn in the operating room. I feel like both of them together with chucks and socks are going to faint anytime soon and get amputated.

Thank God I’m finally in my room and sprawling freely on my bed. There’s no place like home. And there’s no place like hell than the dark drenched and crooked San Pedro alleys.

But before I entered my own private legroom in this house, lo, and behold my intruder black sheep brother was sleeping like a devil on my bed.

I was like, what the fuck. Don’t you guys have enough space outside my sweet sacred space? It’s like you’ve got a much outsized room than mine but why snooze here you little horror?

I never contemplated about hesitating to ask him to rise from the bed, wake up and get a damn life. Though it’s evident he’s been sleepless and have not been home yesterday night, I wanted my bed for me alone badly.

Salve Regina! And I can smell his tangy ascetic acid green fume stench floating around my bed.

It’s healthier to have Chucks and Socks alongside me on bed when I go into the recesses of my deep slumber. Than to close my eyes and sleep with a reeking and pungent obnoxious someone. Not to mention the bed-dislocating motions that someone does on anything he sleeps onto.

He’s one hell of a neighbor. And I don’t even think I can think of him as a sibling. “Blood is thicker than canal water”? Better not tell me that. It’s nothing but a damn fraudulent lie. ‘Coz I can smell the canals in my own home.

Now, I consider my chucks and socks brother and sister, respectively. They are worthy to be beside me more than anyone else. Not even that obnoxious brother [?]. They don’t reek like the latter anyway.

My chucks remind me of my mother.

It was supposed to be asked for by that obnoxious brother. But don’t know what garbage-methane or carbon monoxide penetrated his cerebrum and told mom to buy something else and just gave me the Chucks that I know and have so loved.

I guess it was really the hands of fate that sketched the route for us to meet. It was never in my wildest imagination to have a Chucks. I didn’t even know there was such a brand for some funky footwear. All I knew was my black school shoes and rubber shoes.

Fate is really an irony.

How can I have received a beloved pair of shoes that has been with me through thick and thin since third year high school? From none other than, logically speaking, a brother I have no plans of understanding the superlative obnoxiousness natural structure he possesses.

A brother who for decades have become a thorn in the throat not just to me but for the whole family on the larger scope of things.

How mysterious was that? Two things are, for the fact, sure though.

I and Chucks are going to tame the tides with our camaraderie and companionship. I will never let him rot like other shoes that come into contact with my feel-like-a-millionaire brother.

Philosophically speaking, I have saved Chucks from hell. My brother treats shoes for décor purposes and changes them through the weeks. Throws them like any other play thing like the toys in Toy Story and lends it to just anyone that passes by our doors.

The other fact being this.

When I look Chucks in the eye, I see a glimpse of my mother’s warm soul of motherly love. I find my paradise in everything that reminisce my mother’s love for me.

Chucks is a pair of shoe any other can’t replace eternally. It may be put aside in the future, but it will always sit on the deepest depths of my heart.