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El amor brujo




MORE of whiner than winner he is. He was reported to have stoked flames with five or six comely maids all in a row— and if it were a game of marbles, lose all his marbles he did. He made out on a lawn a lot of love, or in tennis, a score of zero. Zilch, nada, nothing.

In a recent discourse to his Ateneo schoolmates, he bellyached anew about his lack of a love life that must have caused some bouts of earaches from listening to love songs a British singer belches aplenty. The numero uno resident of the Palace by the Pasig River even confessed he now prefers listening to classical music. 

The audience was at a loss as to what his idea of classical music is. Hazard a guess, maybe the four B’s—Bach, Beethoven, Bolling and Beatles. Then again, Paul McCartney’s ‘The Long and Winding Road’ is not exactly an allusion to “daang matuwid,” the arrow-straight road paved with good intentions that an AC/DC seven-time platinum album howls of, yeah, ‘Highway to Hell.’

A recent report had him saying that “he used to listen to Adele’s songs over and over until depression took over.” His fans and followers can soak in a wash of relief. The middle-aged bachelor has ditched Adele’s mushy numbers. He may likely have coped with depression which, as global medical findings reckon, is the top culprit that push 90 percent of depressed individuals to opt out of life, snap their necks with a length of rope or blow their brains (if they have any) out.

Not unlike erstwhile Malacanang transient-turned-Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and former Supreme Court chief magistrate Renato Corona, Adele can now be added by a cottage industry of critics into the shop-list of scapegoats dragged out and conveniently blamed for the current administration’s lacklustre performance, so-so governance, and slowpoke action.

Even Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama might earn this fiftyish bachelor’s ire for saying, “When you think everything is someone else’s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.”

“A bad attitude can,” counsels blogger-turned-author of ‘The Single Woman’ Mandy Hale, “literally block love, blessings and destiny from finding you. Don’t be the reason you don’t succeed.”
For sure, his ears won’t take a liking to a fast number, say, the rock band Mr. Big’s ‘Nobody Left to Blame.’

In November 2013, a businessman from Tacloban, Leyte griped how his store was ransacked, how a looter shot him after he tried to shoo them away. He capped his sob story asking the Palace top honcho to put Tacloban under martial law. Such no-good attitude was repaid with a nasty riposte: “Buhay ka pa naman ‘di ba? (You’re still alive, aren’t you?)”

Unlike a cottage industry of critics that trots out at the drop of a hat a line of usual suspects and convenient scapegoats to take the blame, that Tacloban trader has nobody else to blame but Yolanda and himself.

That trader and the rest of us lesser mortals with rotten attitudes ought to blame ourselves for voting such a man into the highest post in the land.

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