Sick Puppy That Barks Really Mean at the Table

Contrary to Augusten Burroughs’ personal belief, old man Burroughs isn’t such a terrible man. He’s just not the type of father you’d want to hug after coming home from school. He’s also not the type  you’d give an affectionate, spontaneous son to father kiss on any given day. But daddy Buroughs is not completely deserving of the supposedly symbolic Wolf in Augusten’s A Wolf at the Door. To be honest, Augusten’s father simply wasn’t much of a father figure and that is it. But for little Augusten maybe that’s enough to earn him the title Worst Father of America. But he’s not my father so it’s probably best not to judge.

The people in Augusten’s life, his family and those very close to him, do they perhaps daydream about murdering him? If his allegedly psychotic mother were alive and read his memoirs, would she disown him? And his father, if it were physically possible, would he roll in his grave and maybe choke Augusten to death or scare him to insanity? To be fair, Augusten doesn’t quite paint a very ugly picture of his mother as much as he did in previous books where she was described as crazy, aggressive and unstable while his father was mostly a mere apparition. In here, her mother grows a heart and his father takes center stage. If you’ve read any of his previous books, you’d wonder just how he could get away with all the things he said about them and manage to make it appear like he truly cares about them more than his vain, writery self who maybe needs to fulfill contractual publishing obligations. The difference probably lies in the fact that Augusten Burroughs is a New York Times Bestselling author, a distinction that the average father/family disser would want to achieve first before he gets away with saying shit about anyone. And also, that Mr Burroughs is probably telling  truth.

To up the creepy father ante, Augusten shows only brief flashes of wit and focuses instead on the minute details of daddy’s meanness such as willing the household pet to bark at him and his mom and drive said mom insane and him to a strange psychotherapist’s house which he would later on write about and get rich off of. If you think about it, he actually ought to write his father a check for all the books he’s sold (Running With Scissors) because he made his life equal parts interesting/school-free and independent/unbearably loony. I would never understand how it feels to be sent to your psychiatrist’s home and live with nearly insane women-children so again, I shouldn’t judge. But by book’s third quarter, I sort of get the feeling that his dad just isn’t very deserving of this.

One also has to consider the fact that fathers and gay sons, NOT the best of friends. In some cases, not even civil to each other. But mostly, never. In Augusten’s special case, a philosopher/Karl Marx-quoting university professor father and Vidal Sassoon-worshiping and would be NY Times Bestselling memoirist son = foes forever.

I suppose that if one wishes to badmouth one’s family member or anyone, it would have to be in a strictly literary way, which Augusten does effortlessly. It would have to be in such a movie screeplay-in-the-making kind of way so that one could get away with it with impunity. That if one wishes or itches to say ‘My brother is a worthless piece of shit’ or ‘My sister is a slut who conceives 2 sons and leaves the other at home while she skanks around with her sorry excuse of a husband’, one would have to be ambitious enough to stretch such ugly sentiments to about at least 300-400 pages and not just through one lousy tweet or corny blog post, although sometimes either of the two works too. And if disser is skilled enough to really go at it, pronounce his family as Shit to the world and manage to amuse people at his impressively written but ill-conceived memoir, by all means write it. Otherwise, it would be greatly economical to just pollute the web with your ugly, fake identity and even uglier and sometimes fake blues.

For Chrissakes

The moment Anne Rice said she’s no longer going to write about vampires, witches and bitches, and that she would instead be writing about Jesus Christ’s early years, I knew there’s no way I would enjoy any of it even she cuts out all those hefty descriptions of Italian curtains, Greek chairs and Roman marble columns. I think I actually miss her extensive cataloguing of various furniture in her books. And it’s true, I did not fully enjoy Out of Egypt, the first in her Christ the Lord series, a series that couldn’t be more different from the Vampire Chronicles and Witching Hour. However, I’m a little disgusted by myself for openly taunting her decision to write about Jesus. While it’s true that I can’t find a single reason why I should forge and pursue this series (book 2 is already out), I think it’s a little too Satanic to begrudge a writer for writing about something she really likes. I’m not that sorry though. If you’d ever read or had been fascinated by her alternate universes of vampires taking nutrition from menstruating nuns  and ghost granddaddies impregnating granddaughters, then you probably earn the right to be a little miffed that the genius behind such concepts is now satiating the very demographic that her old series’ followers isn’t from. In short, she’s gone Chistian on our asses and there’s no turning back. I’m sorry again, that seems mean. I also realize that it’s not nice to take the effort to say how unenjoyable a book is because it’s mean and frankly, a waste of time. But the thing about Out of Egypt is that it’s a big improvement in her prose. Definitely gone are the aforementioned long descriptions of inanimate and unimportant objects, and trading that for slightly better characterization of the book’s anti-Lestat, Jesus Christ. I was worried that she’d make Jesus speak tons of Egypt’s fine sands, gorgeous Egyptians, silky smooth Egyptian hair, and ornate sandals. That was not to be the case as Jesus in this book is a 7 year old, slightly clueless boy who mysteriously but skillfully heals dead people, just as skillfully and stealthily he kills them. The only people Jesus is killing in this book, I would imagine are the old Rice fans. The goths, if you will. But if you take the time to realize the radical shift in faith it took her to write this, then it might not be too hard to accept that she just had to change and that there are other vampire books to be had anyway, minus Lestat of course. Twilight series, for example. But that would probably suck more. I’m not completely sold though. If I were to be my old spiteful self, I’d probably think that this series is Anne giving the finger to those who maligned her, her faith and her skills as a writer, when the final V-Chronicle book came out and many called her, well, a witch and other unflattering names. I was honestly not too thrilled during the whole day that I sat down and consumed this. And that’s something that could not be said of any Anne Rice book, the proverbial reading in just one sitting. I came to the Author’s Note page and that was all it took for me to have a change of heart, although still  not completely. Say what you will of Anne but her immersion for the things that fascinates her are undeniable and all we could do, the followers or followers-turned hecklers, is to wait to get amazed again, even if it looks like it’s going to take quite a long time.

Fanne Rice

I’ve been obsessing about Anne Rice lately. I keep thinking, what if she dies already? Sorry for being morbid but, what if she does? She’s just 2 years shy from 70 and so far, at least for the last 5 years, all she ever wrote are her Jesus novels (which I prefer to get from the likes of Christopher Moore who gives Jesus hard-on and other sorts of unmessiah-like virtues) and her still in hardcover and therefore still expensive Christian-themed memoir Called Out of Darkness. I’ve been meaning to read that but I wouldn’t just yet as a matter of principle and because it’s still expensive at 800 PHP.

In college, I had obsessed even harder. In my so-called book review in the college paper, I prepared extra hard to write the most flattering, most know-it-all sounding book review of the last Chronicle to come out of Miss Rice’s most fabulous and most popular series, The Vampire Chronicles. I’d be the happiest fanboy if I could just get that ‘review’ on the paper. You know how college writers are: so eager to dazzle the studentry with their gorgeous poetry and prose, with their world-changing take on the latest popular novel as if their sad, would-be ignored, cookie-cutter reviews will ever be read by anyone other than the editors and their sad selves. As if hoping that major dailies such as the Philippine Daily Inquirer are on the look out for untapped literary talents in business colleges who will write life-changing book reviews on vampire fiction. Me, I didn’t care. I basically just wanted to show off and hoped that Anne Rice herself will one day will pick up some third world college paper from God knows where and see for herself that even in South East Asia, a fanboy named Me adores all the literature she throws our way.

As preparation for this, I’ve read every single Amazon review there is on Blood Canticle and they were among the most vicious criticisms I’ve ever read. The Anne Rice fans were short on cursing her entire lineage only because they weren’t happy on Lestat’s final book. Like your everyday fanboy who occasionally litter the web with his take on matters of extreme importance, I took this personally and I may even have made an Amazon account just to get back at the retards who called Anne a hack. Fortunately for them, the nasty reviewers for whom I was all set to impale with verbal bile, Amazon does not allow reviews from wannabes because they have a way of detecting. Joke lang. To be an Amazon reviewer it turns out, you need to have purchased at least one item in order to review. Then October came and I was finally able to read the book in all its tarnished glory.

It sucked.

In a way, I was more relieved because it was certainly easier for me to malign, hate, criticize and write lengthy accounts of something, anything unpleasant. And I know Anne Rice so it was very, very easy. And though she may never come across my beautiful but sinful writing as I wish she would, I still have the same hopes for vampire lit’s most enduring, most flamboyant, and sexiest vamp tramp Lestat. Lestat should have been given a more proper exit, a more bombastic one, any kind of exit befitting the true prince/king/rock star of vampire lit, anything but that. If you’ve ever cared for Anne’s works, you’ll have no trouble denouncing Blood Canticle as an  instrument of destruction which in its very slim (as far as Anne Rice’s works are concerned) form, took all but 400 pages to ruin whatever fantasies, hopes and dreams (of movie adaptations, musicals, etc) you may have had turned into, uh, ashes. My college self and those Amazon reviewers puzzle me now, looking back, because all anybody ever really needed to say about that tenth chronicle was that it was plainly bad. To be honest, it hurts me to even say that. But like the millions who slobbered in grave praise over Lestat, I was hopeful that this wouldn’t, because it simply just couldn’t be, the last. But it looks like it really, really is. :c

I’m surely, truly, irrevocably out of college and I have been looking for some thing to attach devoted fanaticism to but I just can’t find one as enduring as Anne Rice. She’s to turn 69 this October 14 and to be symbolic about it, I am rereading Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice by Katherine Ramsland. I have a month to finish it and even though it’s Anne Rice-novel long, I’d still gladly indulge and set aside Blackwood Farm for the meantime. I have yet to find a thing to fanatically follow so I really hope she doesn’t go soon, and that she starts revamping The Vampire Chronicles soon. A fanboy can hope.

Dear Anne, if you’re reading this, happy 69^th!!!

Briticism

If… most people buy books because they like to be seen reading rather than because they actually enjoy it, then I would suggest that you can’t beat a collection of letters by an author – and if that author is a poet, thenso much the better.

This adequately explains my feelings about reading a book about books. I think I took this passage out of context but the thought goes well with my current condition of wanting to read non-stop. I do jobs on the side but mostly I prefer to read. In Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt, Nick Hornby suggests reading a book comprised of letters by a famed writer/poet because it will imply that you do know or you are at least familiar with said writer’s works and that this exercise in pure braggery will surely ‘impress the hell out of anyone’ who will see you reading the stuff. I don’t know what to make of this suggestion except that it’s a slightly weird thing to say, coming from the writer of such a funny and impressive book, High Fidelity. But maybe all he’s trying to say is that any book of that type is good and that it’ll do anyone well to be reading Letters To/From Author type of books. As for his book, it’s doubtful if one is going to achieve impressive status by reading it, his collection of book criticisms because for one, it has a goofy, non-serious looking cover. And speaking of goofy, sometimes I feel like my desire to read isn’t pure. I suspect that some of my reasons for wanting to spend hours with a book is so that I could write about them? Which is goofier and so very purposeless. At least Nick Hornby gets paid to read and criticize. I normally find this sort of I Love Books sentiment corny but there are people who make book-loving sound sincere and Nick Hornby is surely one of them. And so after giving it much thought (not really), I think I’m agendaless after all. I don’t read to impress… I think. I  like the smell of paper and I like how books, when stacked nicely, make my room look really, really nice.

Oscar Wow

The day Junot Diaz decided to write the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao probably went something like, I’m bored, but I have a terrific idea for a character which I’ll make out to be funny, and to which I’ll probably be able to devote an entire book to. He then went on to have these other character ideas with which to support the very endearing Oscar, and wrote and wrote and wrote until the sun came up, or it went down, depending on which time of the day he supposedly whimsically decided to write. Or maybe Junot Diaz did think about this novel, made extensive research, and carefully pieced together little bits of Dominican Republic historical details and stringed them together with certain pop culture personages and events (J.Lo, LOTR, X-Men, etc).  Either way, the resulting book is a very funny, unintentionally hip novel that is just as wondrous as its titular character, the very fat and very smart Oscar Wao. I don’t know how anyone could think of Oscar Wao as a work thought out of nowhere but it reads to me like one in spite of the many, many footnotes. The footnotes by themselves are very interesting and you’d find yourself Wikiing certain historical things like Rafael Trujillo which turns out to be Dominican Republic’s Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos times ten. The book will attempt to bore you momentarily by going back to Oscar’s family history but it will fail. Diaz momentarily stops Oscar’s tale to tell his sister’s and mother’s and they’re just as fascinating and fucked up so you won’t mind. Lola the sister is a tough bitch whose toughness and bitchiness were proabably a result of the even  bitchier mother. Basta. Magandang nobela ‘to. It won the Pulitzer Prize but the real reason to read this is for such gems as , ‘So you’re an album cover now?’ and ‘Negro, please.’ Lots of those. So bitches, please. Read it. Hehe.

What it’s Really About is Not what it says it’s About

In his book, How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen had plenty of shit to say about TV and its evils and its disposability and its backhanded way of taking people’s attention away from the Better Activities, ie literature-making and more pointedly, novel-writing. If you work in the television industry or if you’re simply a true blue couch potato, you will hate him very much. But apart from his numerous and longish ruminations on various subjects that include American postal system, sex books marketing, smoking and TV segment pre-production, not a lot of the shit he so extensively wrote about in his collection of essays will interest you. But that is not say that you shouldn’t ever read him.

With the notable exception of privacy thievery and his widely publicized beef with TV’s undisputed queen of talk, you may actually be wishing, halfway through it, that the book be a self-help instructional on becoming alone instead. This is at least true for readers who are not crazy about America, or are from any Third World country, buy books from bargain bookstores, and readers who are immune to the intellectualizing of mundane topics.

On a side note, Franzen is the author who fell out of Oprah’s favor when the latter chose his great novel, The Corrections, as her official selection for her book club back in 2007. Franzen does seem like a jerk but his would-be Oprah Book Club book is truly Great, truly deserving of the National Book Award it garnered among all the other citations that it got. It is for me, the literary equivalent of the film The Royal Tenenbaums which ranks among my favorite dysfunctional family stories, along with that other great Dysfunctional Family story, Frannzy & Zooey and sometimes, Raise High the Roofbeam & Seymour: An Introduction. 

His perceived assholeness, not completeley unearned is clearly manifested here but he manages to signal to everyone that he doesn’t care for people who are already so convinced. And rightfully so because the man is smart and he has very interesting albeit show-offy ways of driving most of his points across. But on the subject of depression, Franzen nails it good and hard:

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed.

This essay collection is clearly not an instructional on Being Alone. It is instead a series of very long  essays that you get nuggets of other forms of How To’s and How Not To’s way  more interesting than being alone. And I do get that it’s Not a book on how to be alone although some parts of it I wished that it were. But it’s okay that it’s not because if you can’t sit through the entire thing, you can always switch to TV. But you most probably wouldn’t.

Smell This

Fuck Facebook. I haven’t read a single book since I got so attached to my mafia. I haven’t done anything progressive other than to do jobs, do heists, and buy properties and businesses. I constantly whine about my job but I won’t update my resume in Jobstreet and actually look for jobs rather than do Mafia Jobs.

In the first place, it’s getting very annoying there. A Facebook friend once updated his status saying something about FB people being very unmindful of what they share. He’s basically annoyed about people who Overshare but then again it’s a social networking site. You would surely have at least 1 or 50 or an entire set of friends who would very much feel the need to let people know that they’re Going To Sleep, are Very Tired, or are Soooo Happy, all of which equates to exactly one message: I Lack Attention. It is as how Holden would describe it, so putrid that you can’t take your eyes off it.

Patrick Suskind’s Perfume is the last excellent book I’ve read. I was instantly drawn to Jean Baptiste-Grenouille because we have similarities too disturbing to describe. I’m being OA and nothing about me is disturbing but really, we are the same. I, too, love to smell. And if I were as great, as shrewd and as manipulative as Jean Baptiste, I would definitely use this ability to kill. I’d kill and sell the scents I’d manufacture out of the bodies and sell them for profit. I really wouldn’t but I’d definitely try.

There are two sets of people whose scents I’m secretly (and disgustingly) depositing into my nose: elevator riders and gym people. It’s not as disgusting as it sounds. Like Jean Baptiste, I have such powerful smelling abilities. It’s just unfortunate that I have morning colds. But when my nose is snot-free, it really works. I would discreetly sniff an elevator person who would normally smell terrific and be just as thrilled in smelling the gym people whose odors cover the stink spectrum, ranging from pleasantly sweat-stinky and plain ma-anghit. It’s all pleasant to me.

Patrick Suskind has described lots, and I mean lots of scents, good and bad in this murder fairy-tale thriller. This Story of a Murderer isn’t so much a story of a killer as it is a guide book for smells you didn’t know existed. You know some of them but Suskind gave names and phrases to these smells. I didn’t care for the more pleasant smells such as lavender, rose oil and chamomile but am truly delighted to read about such smells as anal sweat, crotch fume and scalp scent. I forgot about most of these vividly described smells but they lingered in my odor-loving mind. Anal-sweat. Finally, I know what it’s called now.

Imagine being so great and so skilled in the act of smelling that you’re able to produce the best perfume France, and probably the world has ever known. Wouldn’t you throw yourselves at that person’s feet? I would. The French people did and with reason. Jean Baptiste, at the mercy of the French court had made the last and greatest smell and used it on himself not exactly in hopes of being acquitted but what happens instead is too good to spoil. He was let go by the court, yes but also, something else. The people of France engaged in a massive orgy, aAnd as with most orgies in fiction, the pope had to be involved. I have yet to read Patrick Suskind’s other books but if Perfume is any indication, his other works must smell really good too.

Shelf life

Mine is the bookshelf of an absolute phony. The kind of phony who sleeps better at night knowing that the books sleep beside him, which in his own phony mind make him an impressive book collector. It is truly one of the most show-offy looking collection of books I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know why I do this, collect books and never read them again (with the exception of David Sedaris and maybe a few Bret Easton Ellis, and JD Salinger – for sure), and place them exactly where I sleep. Not exactly in the bed but very near to it. Needless to say, it’s an inconvenient arrangement as some of them tend to fall whenever I turn around the bed violently. In the first place, no one ever takes interest in anybody’s book shelf. My bookshelf’s really a substitute for things, body parts mostly, that I can’t improve. But no one’s impressed.

I remember going to the Read or Die convention and seeing what I thought was a first edition Coraline. I never cared for Neil Gaiman and it’s a puzzle to me afterwards why I ever asked the book seller if it was truly a first edition. I bought it and was only mildly heartbroken that it didn’t turn out to be first or second or even a third edition. If there ever was a hierarchy for a book’s value, the Coraline I got was definitely somewhere in the 20^th tier. Serves me right for being such a wannabe geek. I have a William Faulkner book squeezed in between Booksale-bought Augusten Burroughs and I just know that the Faulkner serves no other purpose than to decorate. I kind of thought that having Light in August, in Between Burroughs and Sedaris is impressively diverse. A stupid perception, of course. But it’s there and it’s going to be there until I find another highbrow book to replace it with.

I also thought that being the kind of person who owns Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is impressive. I could only come up with this conclusion:  I have exactly 5 shirts that I look good in and nothing else that makes me look impressive so this book shelf pimping must be my way of coping up with the very social need of a 24 year old to appear impressive. Are you bored yet? This sentiment bores me too. Maybe I gathered all those books not because I want to be super literate or super poor but because I want to live in my room forever. It might also be because I want to be the type of blowhard who casually quotes from unheard of literary works because my head would simply implode if I try to casually mention anything that happened in real life. But just maybe.

I remind me of the college kid in Catherine Crawford’s JD Salinger essay collection If You Really Want to Hear About It, who may or may not have brought JD Salinger’s Nine Stories at a frat party, and who may or may not have been reading the book unironically. Because really, what could be phonier than a JD Salinger book at a frat party. But then again, if you’ve encountered more than The Catcher in the Rye in the very slim Salinger catalogue, you’ll know that his books are pretty mobile. They’re these small, inconspicuous books that you’d have no problem bringing in clubs or frat parties, for when all the drinking and general craziness bored you. Like the college kid, I may be aiming for an effect. Something that sounds like Wow, You have the 21 Uncollected Short Stories of super author JD Salinger. You’re Very Impressive. But no, it never happens. Every time I direct somebody’s attention to the room and ultimately to the book shelf, I try to magnify their attention to them with the success rate of an umbrella salesman in a pleasantly cloudy day. And as Ms Crawford funnily puts it, I didn’t have the people’s vote as an interesting person, which is, I have to admit, one grand statement from a self-proclaimed uninteresting person. The People’s Vote? Have I really gotten that deluded? Don’t answer. Only smirk. But I’m fine with being uninteresting. And I love all those paper on shelves. I should just try to learn not to crowd David, Bret and JD with phony-ass authors like Kerouac and Faulkner. But if you think my books and book shelf are pretentious, examine my CDs. You’ll puke. And maybe phonily congratulate me for trying very, very hard.

Bret Easton Ellis Philippines

I tried to join Anne Rice Philippines in hopes of having friends. Joke lang. I joined it because it was recommended by a credible geek and because I looked at their site and there are some nice looking people in there. Also, I like Anne Rice. Maybe not as much as I did back in college, when I really tried to ignore the ‘homoerotic undertones’ in the books. That was truly the height of denial. I am relatively less dense and more accepting now, which is to say that I now fully realize how homosexually oriented The Vampire Chronicles are and so it’s fitting that I join it, the ARP. It’s a little depressing to me how I’m less interested in them now because I’m not sure if I’ll be very, very interested in anything again now that I’m so old and imbalanced.

This fall out with Anne began when I started reading other stuff. It turns out that there’s more to life than vampire fiction/architectural monologue/furniture catalogue novelizations. And of course there is. There’s Catcher in the Rye. There is also American Psycho. I’m almost done with the Bret Easton Ellis catalogue of coke lit. I can’t wait for him to write the next best vampire literature since Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. If this were to happen, the Bret Easton Ellis vampires would redefine vampire lit. His vampires would be cokeheads whose idea of a good time is to eat each other out (genitals), sniff coke all night long and namedrop the hardbodies they’ve sucked. They will hunt not in alleys but in nightclubs where they can ‘do lines’ in bathrooms. They might not suck blood even. They will not suck, period. Only sniff. But I truly believe that this is never going to ever happen ever because Bret Easton Ellis is not as talented at ruining vampire lore as, say, Stephanie Meyer.

I was just thinking of how clever it would be to associate passionlessness with Bret Easton Ellis’ 80s novel, The Rules of Attraction where the characters are so… passionless. So here goes: I am passionless. I may have flunked the entrance exams for Anne Rice Philippines. I didn’t even know what sire refers to in vampire-speak. So to associate, I was thinking of founding instead Bret Easton Ellis Philippines where members’ loyalties are to be tested by how passionless they are willing to become. Like in Rules of Attraction, all you have to really be is someone who blabbers. You can go on and on about a silly fixation and it would be fine. Anyone who introduces himself as bisexual is to be hacked into tiny bits, dick first, Bateman-style. Hot lesbians are to be granted first class status because I already know two of these breed and because favoritism in Bret Easton Ellis Philippines (BEEP) will be widely tolerated. Wearing of school colors will not.

Since there’s almost no single unifying characteristic to all of Bret Ellis’ characters, and since coke sniffing is expensive and too American, anyone can just be their absolutely boring selves. Only requirement would be the ability to quote a passage from any of his books, excluding The Informers, because I don’t care for short story collections.

I know. It’s not clever enough. But if I could just muster enough passion I’m sure it could work.

Please laugh

I had coffee at French Baker where the coffee is called Tchibo and on the way home I was laughing uncontrollably which reminded me of the time my ex treated me to a shabu-shabu dinner which cost over a thousand pesos, and I didn’t pay because I was a barista (it didn’t pay much), and he gave me a Girbaud wallet and a ride home because it was our 2^nd monthsary which is a faggy, faggy thing to celebrate but I knew I had to at least show gratitude but almost didn’t because, as I’ve told him, My Emotions Are Misplaced. They are just not where I’m supposed to find them when they are seriously called for. A shabu-shabu dinner and a Girbaud wallet should have meant tears because we’re homos and I, charity case and material boy should have cried buckets because he, my precious telecoms executive ex had plenty to spend but none, no waterworks, not even from just one eye. Coming home from SM Bicutan, I knew I was having again a Misplaced Emotion because my laugh was almost uncontainable and I had to remind myself of the time I failed ROTC because I went to an interview for the Varsitarian instead of going to the ROTC field trip. I failed the interview and ROTC and I got sad. That incident is my valium. I think of that and any unexplainable laugh at any given day goes away. Anyway, those misplaced emotions. I was laughing because I remembered something I’ve read in David Sedaris’ If You Are Engulfed in Flames. In his new book, David encounters an old couple that is so profane they’re almost fake. Every other sentence is accentuated, suffixed with shit, fuck, goddamn and ass. I don’t get why I’m so amused with profanity but I’m very entertained with literature that has no qualms about using such words because really, when has niceness been amusing? Actually, what else is amusing? In the book, he encountered this couple at an airplane who sincerely believed that everything served them is shit. An in-flight dinner is called “garbage” by the wife and the husband emphasizes the garbageness of the meal by saying that the meal is indeed a box of absolute fucking shit. That shit is funny. And also true because it’s non-fiction. David Sedaris is truly fucking funny. When You are Engulfed in Flames didn’t have me laughing in stitches as much as Barrell Fever had but it’s no less funny. David Sedaris must have said everything there is to be said about being a growing/aging gay man. He and Augusten Burroughs, damn them, those cocksucking assholes. Just this afternoon I had very lousy coffee from McDo which I really should have seen coming since McDo is truly the godfather of food service lousiness, and what I immediately thought was that This Coffee Is Absolute Fucking Shit when I sipped that 45 peso garbage. Then I remembered the David Sedaris characters who referred to the food they were served at the airplane as garbage. Then shit, then absolute fucking shit. I can’t get enough of profanity. Tchibo was just too expensive so I thought of McDo as the next best thing which is just a wrong thing to think. French Baker is okay but hair seems to be one of their secret, not supposed to be seen ingredient. And it’s true, the McDo coffee is just foul and if I have tasted urine before, I probably would have proclaimed urine to be the superior beverage but I haven’t so the McDo coffee will have to retain that designation. This is the kind of incident that enrages me so often, when expensive as shit coffee isn’t as good as they’re advertised. And fuck you if think that this is my karma for being such an unfriendly barista back then. I may not have been too chummy with the coffee clients but I NEVER made coffee that resembled urine in flavor. I could never be that unfair. I could not have pulled a stunt that funny. I say fuck a lot but I’m not funny but i try my damndest.