Bobby Eusebio! You Naughty, Naughty Boy!

Getting a community tax certificate at the Pasig City Hall, though not entirely an experience comparable to a brief detention in fifth level of Hell (or Auschwitz), is something strikingly similar to masochism that you emerge from it more sympathetic to Holy Week flagellants. Having no patience compounds the lovely experience, especially when you are handed a waiting number 585 and the counter is still serving number 23. There is no scientific/statistical evidence yet but you suspect the act of getting cedula is a prime recruitment tool for rebel and separatist groups. After fifteen minutes of shifting your weight in those welded airport chairs you begin nursing violent thoughts. Amplifying your growing homicidal tendencies will be the ceiling-mounted televisions bookending opposite ends of the hall, showing the painful, unwatchable noontime duel of equally-brainless dreck popularly known as Eat Bulaga and Wowowee. Twenty minutes of these lunchtime genius and you'll catch yourself plotting to wipe out Camp Crame, The Congress, The Senate and the entire local chapter of Lady Gaga Fans Club.

Ages later you're nothing but a quivering heap of mutated protoplasm. You regroup your scattered sanity and get the hell out.

On the way home you spot the City slogan emblazoned boldly on the tacky pedestrian overpass. It yells:

SIGE PA...PASIG! SIGE PA!*

You suddenly feel dirty.





* More, Pasig! More! (This is the decent/Rated GP translation)

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Summer Flyer Designed During An Eclipse

Ignore the ugly design. Join the pretty fun it promises.( I am NOT responsible for this acid trip design. A Blog friend requested I post this and threatens to self-destruct if I don't. So, there).

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Dialogue Straight Out Of A Gosengfiao Script

Seated next to me in a cybercafé is an ultra-aggressive salesman from a Pyramid/Networking company involved in indeterminate products slash foreign exchange. He was explaining how the schemes work to a posse of loud women who seemed to be new recruits, or as I fondly call them, suckers.

I tried to zone out their networking twaddle but it was hard to ignore one of the women’s three-hued garish eye shadow/s, in shades that would make the pantone swatch book/the rainbow bright characters/the teletubbies/Elton John/Bob Mackie/Liberace’s closet look neutral.

“Ikaw, SIR!” he suddenly turned to me (which made me jump a little) with the mad enthusiasm not seen outside Oprah/Wheel Of Fortune/Televised Evanglism. “Baka gusto ninyo sumideline!” (How about you, sir?! Would you be interested to make a quick buck?”)

Even a frozen Rice-A-Roni would have a better judgment not to ever attempt declining a networking salesman’s behest. They thrive on rejection. As a sales mantra would have it: “Selling begins when the client says no!”

Or the way I would decode it: “If they decline, the fools, bring out the Holy Book and begin quoting from the Book of Revelations until they are wracked with guilt and terror that their brains melt into a gooey muck and start oozing out of their nostrils!”

Idiot that I am, in my scatterbrained state, politely but foolishly uttered a tepid “No, thank you.”

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Sensing a golden chance to dazzle his lady friends of his convincing genius, and, the potential of an economic reward of converting me into a slavering cash cow/downline he latched on my disinterest/rejection like fungal infection that refuses to go away.

“Ayaw mo yumaman?!” (Don’t you want to be rich?!) he exclaimed in a mix of shock, awe and disbelief.

Look, I may be a bonafide zit online but in real life I try to be polite and respectful of people trying to have a crack at a living. So I half-smiled and shook my head.

Naturally this incensed the resolve of the salesman, who by now is fully enraptured in an evangelical mission to convert my disbelieving refusal and embrace the untold wealth awaiting me in the grand altar of pyramid scams, errr schemes.

“Bakit?!” (Why?!)

Now I was struggling to phrase a difficult decision to refuse an equally-pesky client request and the salesman's hell-bent in not giving me a slice of quiet or a semblance of personal space.

“I am very busy, I have no time.” I said without tearing away my focus on my typing.

“Ayaw mo kumita ng MORE THAN TWENTY THOUSAND a month?!” (Are you refusing potential 20K earning in a month?” His eyes flashed like the Mephistopheles in Faustus.

Wickedness crept into my warped mind.

I stopped typing, faced him, stared, smiled with the menacing glee of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and hissed:

“I earn more than that per hour!”

A lie, obviously. But peace was restored between us.

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So It’s No Longer A Dirty Word?

Bisexuals are regarded as odd subspecies in the self-loathing gay-o-sphere. Not only erroneously misunderstood but the mere mention of the B word divides even equal rights-seeking gaylandia into two fierce camps: The first camp dismisses bisexuality as one stoplight away from full blown fruitcakehood ergo the one who claims to be occupying that gray zone is in the state of deep denial, pretentious, hypocritical.

The second camp reflexively frowns on the bi word with a mix of skepticism, trivializing/mild hostility, snide suspicion and open disdain.

The poor Bis of the world! Overtly vilified for daring to enjoy both worlds!

(Personally I don't give a toss about how snarky folks view the B word. Think whatever you want about the B word, brand me whatever convenient adjective your narrow mind can come up with, but nothing will change the fact that coitus with the feminine breed can be equally enjoyable as an occasional bromance. Just don’t sum me up with your insular way of thinking because I do not meddle with who or what you fuck either.)

Not that the B kind needs validation but the species is teetering into becoming a
trend. The Daily Beast argues the coolness of having it both ways and as a sort-of-expected consequence the smarty-snarks at Gawker reacted with automatic wisecracks and jovial lampoon.

Does this mean the B word is officially laundered? Or should we revisit that orientation-bending gray zone David Bowie glamorized as pansexuality and declare it the new black?

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Oral Pleasure Awaits A Zac Efron Clone!

Scatterbrain infection is still upon me, rendering me incompetent in the blogging department. So as not to fling this feeble blog into the permanent depths of passing black holes I’d feed it a steady supply of random things. This policy is of course the blogging equivalent of eating LuckyMe instant noodles: filling yet empty. Or staring at the shirtless Zac Efron: compelling yet intangible.

So!

For this edition of LoudCloud I’ll share recent stuff I hoarded to gather dust by my bedside.

01. Philip Roth – The Great American Novel
02. Richard Russo – Straight Man
03. Martin Amis – Success
04. Richard Dooling – Bet Your Life
05. Douglas Coupland – The Gum Thief
06. Armistead Maupin – Michael Tolliver Lives
07. Don Dellilo - Falling Man

In case words fail to arouse you here are a few tracks to subsist on:










The Evil Panda offers an incentive: he'll enthusiastically extend oral pleasure to those who can guess all the titles and artists and the albums these stuff were pilfered from.*

Start googling. Meanwhile Evil Panda is being busy paralyzing his gag reflex.





(* subject to Vatican approval, of course. Only applicable to those who look like the aforementioned shirtless Efron)

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Yet Another Dispatch From The Limbo

Crawling out of the limbo is what I have been struggling on for a while. No, wait, that's a tad melodramatic. It's beyond cheesy I caught myself rolling my own eyeballs while typing that first sentence. Someone should kick me in the face. The impact might jolt my dormant snark back into circulation.

Sad to report that I have nothing much to report here. Hold on, that's not entirely true. I have lots of things to whine about, so much it would guarantee your instant migraine. In this regard you might want to thank your lucky stars that I cannot seem to commit my bent thoughts into a proper, coherent entry. This forfeits you the calamity of enduring any of it.

So what to do in times like this?

Distracting pesky voyeurs (like that evil panda) would be a very good trick. Here are a few choice digressions.

• 01. Marlon Brando, he, of lust worthy genetic configuration and prodigious talent, has a photograph fellating a friend that resurfaced online. It was chronicled in Brando Unzipped and he didn't deny it, dismissing it as something not to be taken seriously because it was taken as a joke in a party. Regardless, that blasted photo didn't erode my respect for his talent one bit.

• 02. After Fabien Baron's sudden departure from Interview Magazine (after spinning the magazine from stagnancy with this very bold cover), graphic wunderkinds MM Paris took reigns. I have been avidly following the Baron/MM musical chair game that spanned across collaborations from Calvin Klein Jeans, Arena Homme+, Vogue Paris and now, Interview. Twinky video poster boy Zac Efron is MM's launching cover.

• 03. Speaking of Wunderkinds, the indie dynamos, Altajeros + Bonife tandem is threatening local movielandia with another collaboration. (I reviewed one of their works here.) I haven't been in the movie theater lately but I'll line up for this one when it hits the screens. If my hunches are to be believed, this collaboration will hopefully pump much needed combustion in the comatose pinoy movies considering the steady plague of dumb and dumbest flicks yawning onscreen.

• 04. Meanwhile, meet your new daily cretin. Errr, Kitten.

A scab-ridden, crabby kitten.

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Strangely Sterile Thoughts At Jesus’ Funeral

Concentration was such a struggle. The heat was merciless at lunchtime when the readings (and insightful reflections) on the Seven Last Words commenced and having skipped breakfast and lunch entirely made the three hour ritual challenging.

As the priests reflect on the Savior’s dying words my consciousness kept on detaching itself from the church proceedings like an aimless juvenile delinquent and hopscotched freely toward less sacred (but not evil/profane either) cubicles cluttering my scattered mind.

The same thing happened when I joined the Good Friday procession which bisected a nearby posh, gated village, interrupting the steady flow of traffic in the busy intersection of the central city district where I live. I attempted to join the public recitation of the Holy Rosary but kept getting distracted by abrupt modification in pacing of the three teenagers of varying degrees of devastating cuteness in front of me. I theorized that they were siblings and cousins and like me, their attention span must be somewhere else, which I assumed to be dwelling on abstained games of DotA or World Of Warcraft. They don’t seem to be concentrating either, and they carry off the air of casualness that made the whole religious rite seem like a requisite college thesis that needs to be done without due respect to enraptured interest or depth and commitment for the exercise. Had this been a day outside the Holy Triduum, my contaminated mind would be nursing thoughts that would lewdly float towards the sets of twinky videos, but strangely, no, my usually-hyperactive imagination favorably chose an antiseptic hide.

I wasn’t thinking corrupt thoughts or anything lewd, which, now that I am typing this, seems like a major improvement.

Which gives you, Evil Panda, something to remark on.

:: :: ::

P.S. On a more virtuous note, Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday in the entire Christian calendar. Do make an effort to attend church rites in recognition of God’s mercy and kindness (or an act of gratitude) for having Jesus redeem us all, aberrant humans.

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Neglect

Hello, Blog.

Evidently we share the same quality these days: dismalness. A discouraging state of affairs that can be a tad disappointing for both of us and—If I may pander to our mutual delusion—for a couple of random voyeurs who wander in here, sift through your dormant pages, find nothing recent to remark on, blink at your shabbily updated self before clicking away with a fleeting wonder whether you will be as active as you once were. I cannot blame them if in the invariable displeasure of not finding something worth their trouble they’d abandon us both for good. It would be even sadder if that happens.

You see I am the one at fault. I cannot coerce my nerves to find any incentive and bundle up my arbitrary thought patterns into one coherent entry. Inspiration isn’t even a problem before; remember those days when not a single thread of inspiration can be traced in any of the drivels in here? Lack of inspiration didn’t stop us from unleashing ourselves into the blogosphere with abandon and insane disregard for virtues and discipline of good writing!

Yeah, I miss those irresponsible, fun days, too. I know you do miss it twice as much as I do, which makes me even sadder, knowing I have dragged you into the blog update limbo. How unfair is that? How very selfish of me!

Most of my days lately are spent craning my neck towards the horizon.

Waiting.

Waiting for what is to come. What blind faith tells me is coming.

Waiting for a dream to untangle itself from the shadows.

Waiting for a certain fondness that seems to have been doing perilous detours, hence the overdue arrival.

Waiting, swimming in sugared sadness, getting cheerless by the minute, floundering in growing despair, trying to get steady in the face of a frightening certainty that nothing so encouraging is stirring on the horizon.

I’d customarily retreat to you, to music, to movies, to books for comfort and indulgence of few moments where my mind could wander off from burdens and obligations and breathe freely. I am troubled to report that even those trusty distractions prove inadequate.

Meanwhile the shorelines between you and me seem to have been subjugated by indifferent gulfs that divide us into distant blurs. I wave anxiously at you, and in my mind you are waving back in the same fervor, but you seem to be fading farther to hear my words.

One of these days I’d stumble upon a raft, befriend the wind, and paddle back into where you are.

We would laugh crisply throughout the summers, our voices piercing their way beyond the clouds.

Till then I remain,
LC

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