Unsolicited prescription

Netnet Camomot .

IT’S when you’re coughing like a hyena that you begin to ask friends how they were able to cure their coughs in two days. And then, there are friends who provide you with unsolicited prescription. You take all these in while wondering why at your certain age and with all the blockchains and bitcoins and artificial intelligence, coughing is still possible. It should be obsolete by now, as obsolete as the typewriter, rotary phone, Walkman, CDs, vinyl records… But vinyl is back, so…

Wait, do hyenas cough? But they do laugh. Oh, they don’t laugh, according to scientists. We only think they’re laughing because that’s what we do when we laugh. This happens, too, with people who may look like they’re laughing at you when they’re actually only taunting you. Haha! That’s why it’s important to always remember one of former President Erap Estrada’s Eraptions: “Don’t judge me, I’m not a book.”

It’s easier to recover from an illness when you’re young and your mother is still there with her TLC—tender loving care—complete with crackers and Royal Tru-Orange or 7-Up since those are the only food groups your sick appetite could swallow. No, not “Shallow”—that’s the song that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga performed at the Oscars with so much love and chemistry, to the extent that some people almost advised them with, Get a room! But Gaga later explained that’s what she and Cooper wanted the audience to see and feel. In other words, they’re actors—they act.

With the madlang pehpohl’s reaction to their performance, though, we gotta feeling the song should have been titled, Swallow, which is what some people do when Sting’s tantric sex has finally reached its point of no return. Uh. Before the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) can stamp this column with an R-18 rating, swallowing hard sticky phlegm can only worsen the cough. The best thing to do is to spit it out.

But the “18” of an R-18 rating in this age of Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook Live can only mean 18 days or 18 weeks, not 18 years. That’s why the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) in Pinas has been reduced from 15 to 12.

If only there’s also an MACR—maximum age of coughing reaction—for coughs, huh? Say, you’ve reached a certain age and you’re now exempt from coughing. Like, so over. You do reach that age and are now expected to do the mothering and even grandmothering for the younger generation, when TLC can be in the form of being awakened at dawn by your own coughs, and crawling out of bed to the bathroom where you can cough some more, with all that noise waking up the whole neighborhood. And then, you hear a neighbor coughing, too. Oh. A duet of coughs. Let’s wait for the third one. Or a chorus perhaps?

No matter how inconvenient coughing can be to you and the people nearby, you still have to go out of the house to fulfill commitments. So, on Friday evening, there’s the meeting where you keep asking the wait staff for lukewarm water which necessitates going to the rest room often since what goes in, must come out, which may now bring us back to tantric sex and swallow. But since we’re not here to challenge the MTRCB, let’s move on instead to Michael Cohen, whom the New York Times describes as US President Donald Trump’s “longtime lawyer and fixer.”

In case you’ve always suspected that only Pinas has Senate hearings, the US also conducts congressional hearings, one of which recently starred Cohen who revealed this about Trump: “He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.”

To Trump’s non-fans, that revelation is not breaking news—they already know who he is and what he stands for.

The campaign season for Pinas’ Election 2019 will also have political candidates hurling similar revelations against their rivals but the meme of the moment is that of reelectionist Sen. Nancy Binay and Miss Universe Catriona Gray. Google it if you’re curious enough. Binay has somehow accepted the fact that she’s a favorite meme target, saying, “Sa akin, so far it’s good because I’m doing well in the surveys. On my part, I shouldn’t consider the memes as bad publicity.”

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” as the saying goes. That’s a mantra that public-image experts embrace with all their heart and soul. As American journalist David Brinkley once said, “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.” Hmmm. Can hard sticky phlegm morph into a brick?