Shot Down in May

It is the twenty-fourth of May and I am writing an almanac at the desk — which is either maturity or cowardice, and the tarot refuses to say which. April stayed dry on purpose; May arrived wearing too many holidays and Frank Sinatra’s weather report: riding high in April, shot down in May, back on top in June. I am clinging to the June clause.

May Day, doubled

First of May, 2026, arrives wearing two hats. Labour Day — the world’s polite riot about work and rest — and, for Theravada calendars I grew up inside, Buddha’s Day: not Vesak with its diplomatic umbrella and its different full-moon maths in different countries, but the Myanmar-flavoured insistence that this particular May first is the Buddha’s, full stop, incense and monastery queues and merit counted in buckets of water. Do not confuse the two publics. Vesak is the region’s shared postcard; Buddha’s Day is the auntie’s certainty. I respect both; I only argue with one at a time.

Labour and enlightenment on the same square of the calendar — say what? — as if the universe wants you to rest and reflect before the month shoots you down. I heard Sinatra in a taxi years ago and thought it was melodrama. In 2026 it is forecast.

Wizardry season

The new season does not smell like monsoon. It smells like prompts. Old canvases I painted when movement was the only magic got AI-polished — same composition, new light, as if a patient apprentice had learned patience overnight. Re-drawing a painting by describing it to a machine is ridiculous and addictive: you whisper brushstroke, it returns a cathedral; you ask for rain on tiles, it gives you nostalgia without the humidity.

Wizardry and AI look alike from the cheap seats — incantation, latency, result you did not fully deserve. Melodies with Suno; images with Gemini; late-night drafts with whatever ChatGPT is calling image generation this week (the new one is better, which is the oldest sentence in tech). I am not a luddite. I am a man who once felt foreign on a ferry and now feels foreign in latent space with too many tabs open. The garuda on my chest was ink; the garuda in the cloud is a thumbnail. Both can fly. Neither feeds the cat.

Fifth of May: Recuérdeme

On the fifth, Cinco de Mayo — say what? — which is not Mexican independence no matter what the bar specials claim, but still a fine excuse for colour and lime. I hear Recuérdeme and I am back in Manila remembered, not because Mexico owns the melody but because memory owns it: remember me, though I have to say goodbye. May only replays the chorus while I stay at the desk.

Ribbons, robots, and homecomings

Elsewhere in May’s mixtape: a hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree — hope as folk song, kitsch as lifeline. Jimmy O. Yang finally home in Hong Kong, which matters if you grew up watching Asian faces earn punchlines abroad and wanted, quietly, for one of them to land where the harbour lights look like belonging. And Mr. Robot’s outro still walks into the room when the credits roll — piano, debt, the city exhaling — Hello, Elliot! as if dissociation had a theme song and you were allowed to survive it.

That’s life, as another voice put it — that’s what all the people say — and you’re riding high in April, shot down in May, but you’ll be back on top in June. I am clinging to the June clause like a visa extension.

Heroes and 520

Then a hero comes along — you know the one — with the strength to carry on, and you cast your fear aside, and you know you can survive. Pop music is embarrassing until the month you need it. On the same calendar, by a different tradition’s sleight of hand, Wu Er Ling — 5·20, wǔ èr líng, Chinese unofficial Valentine’s, “I love you” smuggled through homophones — says what?! to anyone who thought February owned romance. Love as number pun; the region as group chat of holidays nobody fully agrees on.

And then sport did what sport does: Joshua Van defended his belt — yay — and Burmese pride stopped being abstract for one night. Diaspora chests tighten the same way; you don’t have to be in the arena to flinch when the decision lands.

Two years, one harbour

May also reunites me with Kevin Khant — a sailor friend I had not seen in two years. Damnn, another Kevin. He is a real sailor; I call myself a pirate. Only one of us earned the word at the pier.

When I say pirate I do not mean crime. I mean Krabi — April 2025 in the travel archive, Songkran week out of JB, long-tail spray on the face, islands swapped like cards, Andaman wind in the teeth. I was not a real pirate. I was a remote worker playing one between standups — dry bag at the hotel, laptop safe ashore, the ridiculous joy of choosing which limestone tooth to raid next. But the feeling was real: posture on the bow, Moken voices at the pier that made me ashamed of my resort key, the ghost of Thingyan behind Songkran water. I’m a pirate was never cosplay; it was what the province did to a Burmese engineer who needed the sea to forgive him for keyboards.

Kevin Khant is a real sailor — chip off the old block, keeps the tradition his father carried: berths, manifests, the language of work on water that does not need metaphor. I inherited the same maritime blood and spent it on Krabi posture and dry bags. After two years ashore we drink kopi and compare voyages: Khant’s patches are rust and duty; mine are sand still in a mental pocket and a desk joke that reads Captain Kevin Myat, Lord of the Seven Seas (LOSS) — software captain, routing packets where charts once were. No uniform except headphones. No crew except tabs. He laughs, not unkindly. The joke ships anyway; his ships actually do.

Every Kevin has a father problem

The Boys agrees, annoyingly. The Deep is also Kevin — man of the water, man of shame — and the finale ended as badly as everyone predicted, pffft. Soldier Boy with his sudden heart — tell me about being a father, eh? Ryan does not like his father either; some plotlines are regional constants.

Homelander dies weird, as tyrants should. Kimiko, pinned while the others struggle to restrain him, gets a vision of Frenchie — essentially: love triumphs over hate. A funny sermon for such a cynical show, but it does the job: radiation wakes, she blasts the room, the supers depower. The best beat is Homelander realising his gifts have evaporated — just a guy in spandex who never learned to fight because he never had to. Butcher always brawled; Homelander never put in real effort. Fear finally wins; he pleads on the livestream, offering sexual favours and humiliation rituals like currency. I wish the finale held that ordinary terror longer. It did not.

Meanwhile I miss my black hairy son boarded in JB. Apa kabar, sayang? Jie Mao does not watch finales. He occupies a chair and forgives return.

Gentlemen, Nguyen, and weekends

Philosophy corner, uninvited: Kevin Myat is a gentleman — Myanmar passport, Johor rhythm, cat at home, desk instead of drama. Kevin Nguyen is not — because he drinks boba with extra salted cheese and hollas at some ABGs and calls it personality. (Any resemblance to persons living or fictional is, regrettably, the point of the joke.) I drink kopi when I remember who I am.

Weekends are the best — although the tarot said Death, which sounds catastrophic until your ChatGPT reading insists it is good: dying of a bad season, rebirth into a good one. I will take the algorithm’s optimism and the deck’s drama and the weekend’s mercy in one bundle. April was high; May is the middle act; June is the promise Sinatra left on the vinyl.

Shot down, not out

If you reached the end confused — fair. This is not a travel post. It is a May mood board: how a month feels when you are not crossing borders, only calendars, news, finales, and your own head.

The spine is simple. Last month I wrote about refusing Songkran water on purpose — April high in its own quiet way. May is Frank Sinatra’s middle verse: shot down, not destroyed. June is the clause I am still banking on. Everything else in this essay is that slump translated into things I could touch — holidays, tools, songs, TV, sport, friends.

Kevin Khant is the human keystone. Real sailor, father’s tradition kept. Kevin Myat is the one who felt like a pirate in Krabi but lives as Captain LOSS at a desk. Same maritime blood, different craft — his manifests, my metaphor. Jie Mao in JB is the son who does not care about Homelander or finales; he cares if you come home. The Boys is the loud version of the same question: what do fathers owe children when power was never real?

AI wizardry, Recuérdeme, Joshua Van, tarot Death — they are not random detours. They are how a tired person says renewal without writing a self-help paragraph: let the bad season die, polish what you already made, borrow courage from pop culture until your own returns. Even Michael Jackson got his own movie in May — another king shot down and re-staged, smooth criminal on the timeline, rebirth sold as biopic the way the tarot sells endings as doorways.

So this is May on the twenty-fourth — an almanac, not a map. Labour and Buddha on the first; wizardry in the middle; memory on the fifth; Khant at the harbour; cat in the chair; June waiting like a patient landlord.

Paint with words if the brush is tired. Let the machines polish what you already made. Tie a ribbon if you must. And if you hear That’s life in a mall — or Smooth Criminal leaking from someone’s phone — ride it through May: fall, moonwalk, rise.

You were shot down… but anyways… Annie, are you okay? :D