ON JOBERT'S CULTURAL DISSERTATION

My friend Jobert ignited an explosion of exploration in the preceding entry that left me shaking my brainass (assbrain?) and scampering for safety with no acknowledged weapon but a promise to come back. Because I am me, I came back. Because I am me, I came back with nothing.

Time was when my cognition of culture was abundant; my cultural eloquence was enriched with facts and faithful to the empirical. My highpoint was in my 2nd year in college when my young life's cultural chalice brimmed with prominence. That was the schoolyear when my classmates Boy and Jun, experts in the matter of Aranque flesh, confided to me that they contracted the dreaded disease brought by some user-unfriendly virus or bacteria that danced mightily to the classic tune tumutulo giliw. Boy and Jun needed my help rather than my sympathy and so I sprayed them with my cultural thought, This is great guys, let me immortalize this day by inducting you as members of the one reputable org of our generation, the one and only... Culture Club.

Over the many years, I grasped and grappled with real life and with it came the real great guys with a real take on real culture. Selwyn Cudjoe. Frantz Fanon. Bill Ashcroft. Jay and Jet David. Belle Nabor. Charlotte (Ghost) Hornets. Freude. Ree. Ronaldo. Pele. Madonna. And of course, Jobert V.

Unlike the cultured nature of Boy and Jun (they're probably multi-cultured now, knowing their sensational compulsion) Jobert's explosion is of text that exacts mental examination, not texture that ends up in a laboratory examination, probably rendering a contemporary Mary Ladd Gavell to blurt at the moment of microscopic truth, 'Watching, I am a witness to a crisis in the life of a gonococcus'. While B/J's culture reeks, JV's seeks, invents, explores - and in his query, probably experiences. His questions are bigger than my answers, and because I am afraid, I will summon my tantrums and invoke his match. Wherefore I decided to leave for now and in my return will bring Prof. Edward Said of Columbia University, whether he knows it or not.

In lieu of my cowardice, let's give in to this fragment of Billy Shakes' Love's Labour's Lost for some station i.d.:

Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
Costard: O! they have lived long on the almsbasket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.

At this juncture I'll be an Ahnold without the accent, mark this vow as exhibit "A", I shall be back.