Adam, Adam, Adam — I’ve not been good to you.
Last weekend, I sold my guitar. That was an ordeal if I ever saw one. Since I am going to be unemployed soon, I am feeling the pinch of a tight budget. Okay maybe it’s not a tight budget because I planned my finances down to the worst case scenario centavo, but I feel the pretend pinch anyway. Apparently, poverty at its best is always going to be romantic to me.
The time had come to part ways with Adam. I have decided to let him make music with someone else. I thought of throwing in my old amp as well, since I won’t be needing it and besides it’s a practice amp at best so good luck trying to sell that on its own. So I listed the items as a package deal on ebay.ph and knock-off sites like sulit.com.ph and auction.ph, which seem to be doing rather well, I might add.
I don’t know if it’s my target buyers or what, and it was my first time to sell anything online but I do think that I had the dumbest “bidders” ever. I put that in quotation marks because, yes I had buyers but they weren’t doing no bidding. My starting price was 5k (we’re talking pesos here kiddos). 5k for a kick-ass guitar and an amp, albeit a crap one. That’s a finger lickin’ good deal. I mean look at Adam — he’s clearly what any given 17 year old spotty rockstar panks-nat-ded wannabe’s wet dream. Mouthful. Rawr. Rock n’ roll!
Finally I had a serious inquiry, someone who didn’t haggle and actually placed a bid. Some teenage boy — in Cebu. I told him I could ship it to him but he’d have to shoulder the costs. Needless to say, I didn’t expect to sell to him so I continued to tolerate messages like “Pre kunin ko na to, pwede bang 4k nalang” and “Sir kunin ko yung gitara lang, 3,500 payag po kayo?”
So on and on it went. By the end of the week, most of the messages had me fuming invectives out of my ears. Fortunately it wasn’t long till I had a breakthrough. It turns out that Teenage Boy really had a hard on for my lovely Adam. So he convinced some poor relative who was going to be in Manila to transact for him.
What a nightmare it was. Poor Relative was in fact, according to his own definition, poor. What does this have anything to do with me and my guitar? Absolutely nothing. The man and I had a ball playing hide and seek at our meeting place. That was so much fun. Ugh. He didn’t read text instructions (I never use textspeak, nose up in the air) very well and I believe he was hard of hearing, he couldn’t hear me at all when I rang him. But then he was a man who communicated with a loud voice so perhaps over the years, he made himself quite deaf from shouting at everything and everyone. Anyway his defense was that he was poor and he was using public transport since he wasn’t from Manila.
First of all, WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ME?? You’re the buyer, meet me at my convenience ya dick! Not actually the buyer?? Then WHY DID YOU AGREE TO DO IT FOR YOUR ACNE-RIDDEN NEPHEW?? You owe his dad a lot of money? Pure conjecture on my part but…well, that explains everything. Pwned!
It was aggravated with the fact that Teenage Boy didn’t give me any details about his uncle, the bastard. I thought the uncle lived here. I don’t even know if he is an uncle! Geez. And another thing, I imagined he’d have a car, it’s a guitar and an amp, after all. Trying not to be mean here, but this is a business transaction, not a freakin’ sob story. It’s his fault for agreeing to do it and not mine for “inconveniencing” him. Whingy bitch.
But it’s done. Yay! Yay! Yay!
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Back to Adam. I bought him years ago, at the height of my guitar obsession. I was pretty much what you’d call a slacker at university. And I was convinced I was going to become a rock star. Blind obsession does that to you. It does. One image that comes to mind is that scene from the third (?) installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The one that took place in the insane asylum and the character Joey, I believe his name was, falls asleep accidentally and finds himself on the rooftop. Mr Krueger is pulling the veins out of his arms and tugging him to the edge, where he plunges to his death, to the horror of his onlooking friends. Okay. Not exactly the most appropriate analogy, but I did say it’s the image conjured up by my mind.
And with that I would like to end with this message…
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