RAISING CAIN

I was right again, no matter how high were the praises people heaped for him, I always knew that I and the rest of the world are truly like Teddy Boy Locsin:  He and I are the same, prone to commit mistakes.  Albeit we’re worlds apart in faces and intellect.

Let alone in personal properties and finances.  But it’s a given, he’s a bourgeois if you please.

I reluctantly credit him for introducing to my vocabulary the phrase ‘dirty finger’ when I was still young.  I first read about his flashing of which in 1986 and I thought the press referred to an unmanicured one.

Little did I know that in reality, the figurative sense is much dirtier than its literal meaning.  Since then, I started to loosen my awe of the intellectuals as they seem to be no different.  When it comes to actuation, action, and speech, they could be as ill-mannered as the uneducated.

Teddy Boy really has this talent for needlessly annoying people, in contrast to his father the late Teodoro Sr. who lived by a code.  Just lately I noticed the son felt he has everything, ranging from the trivial to the tragic, I just hope he’s not in self-destruct mode.

I could not believe then he could say that speaking ‘Tagalog’ in a presidential debate is useless.  That ‘English is the language of men,’ so, does it mean that ‘Tagalog’ is definitely a “swardspeak”?  Oh, poor Balagtas, now I understand the leaf wreath around his head was actually petals of gumamela and all similar flowers.  I never knew that he was gay, and it could be Florante and Adolfo too, and all the rest of ‘men’ in Florante and Laura’s characters.

And now this, here are Teddy Boy’s tweets, “You may find this hard to believe but the Nazis were not all wrong, give or take killing millions of the wrong people.  Keep an open mind.”  Oh, well, his great father was one of the passionate defenders of our democracy, so try to respect Teddy Boy’s opinion please, no matter how opinionated it is, as if like that of a sick mind.

But on the other hand, Teddy Boy never knows it but he gave me a big relief.  With him as an example, I would no more pressure my son to pass all his subjects.  I’d rather keep my son Jackal as what he is than seeing him growing up to be an intellect like Teddy Boy and acting and thinking exactly like him.  Remembering great men of society who did great early in life but messed up in the end, I’d say the world as it was, the world as it will be again.

Truly, a father’s worst nightmare is always as old as when our planet was still under Adam’s domain.  No, not thorn or thistles the ground would bring, neither finding sweaty bread:  but raising Cain (Gen.3:18-19).