feed the gossipmongers

They’re easy to spot, these rumormongers.

They cling to rumors more readily than cigarette smoke clings to your clothes. They suck in juicy gossips more efficiently than leeches. And sometimes, they wear high heels too.

You don’t have to look hard, they’re everywhere—in your office, in your neighborhood, in church, but mostly, they thrive in offices. Chances are, that goody-two-shoes that sits in the next cubicle is a rumormonger.

How can you tell? Look at their ears. Ears are their most prized body parts. These twitch and turn and get naturally magnetized to conversations. They’re like radars that pan the heavens to get even the faintest signals from other life forms in space.

(Panning. Panning. Panning. Stop. The computer guy’s meeting up with his kept woman again, to the chagrin of his wife who calls the office 40 times a day. Panning. Panning. Panning. Stop. That old Xerox guy spent all his money on a woman who’s young enough to be his granddaughter. Pannning. Panning. Panning. Stop. Look at that pregnant clerk, she seems to be giving birth twice a year, how many uteruses does she have?)

Go try it one time. Start talking to someone about something—say, the cup size of your bra or how your dog sniffs its pecker before peeing—and the rumormonger comes drifting, ears first, toward you like a Dementor, ready to suck out gossips through their ears.

Once you let them in the conversation, they would go “ohhh” or “Is that so?” or “I didn’t know that” or any of those standard one-liners that can come out only from brains that have not been exercised since fourth grade.

Oh, and notice their eyes, too.

When they walk down the hall, their eyes are oh-so-sharp. They can capture anything (yes, even when you secretly pick your nose or scratch your crotch). And even when you shift your eyes to avoid their penetrating stare, they’d still keep on staring—from head to foot, foot to head, head to crotch, crotch to butt, etc.

Photographic memory? Naaah. They’re better than that. They can store controversial images in their brains (which is quite easy because they have so much space in between their ears; don’t you just envy them?) and when it’s time to retrieve these images, they’d just click on some Embellishment Software up in their brains and the image comes out twisted, distorted, exaggerated, mutilated, and ten-times more controversial. And you thought Adobe Photoshop was powerful? Think again.

With how wonderfully they manufacture calumnies, you would think these people have more power than peristalsis—you know, that involuntary constriction and relaxation of the intestinal muscles that push your gooey, digested food so it could come out of your ass as...well, you get the picture.

Go bring your girlfriend into the office, talk to her in hushed tones, look her straight in the eyes, and, as sure as mucus hardens into booger, one of them rumormongers would go and proclaim to the whole office that you suddenly turned your cubicle into an extension of Luneta Park. And you haven’t even touched her hand, for crying out loud!

Such is the beauty of having rumormongers around you.

These creatures breed faster than mice. They feed on stories, never mind if they’re true or not, as long as they are stories. You can spread some half-truth and they can instantly transform it into an epic, craftily woven and dramatically recounted.

They can add some zest into your boring life by spreading that you have sex with a chimpanzee every time the moon is full, or that you are an immoral, moon-worshipping, blood-drinking Satanist just because you told them you’re not religious.

Isn’t that exciting? They spruce up your office with wonderful tales and color your world with psychedelic hues. And you haven’t even started talking about their private lives yet!

Oh, yes, they do have lives. That old, cellulite-ridden, idiotic loudmouth, for instance, cohabits with a man twenty years her junior. It’s scandalously yucky to even imagine how they do it in bed, sagging and flabby body parts jiggling in rhythm to their pumping.

Oh, but she won’t talk about it. No siree. She’d rather talk about how she came across some explosive scandal about you, say, your homemade sex videos or your naked pictures on the net. Name it, she can spread it, and spread it well.

But I am already gossiping. Let’s leave the gossiping business to them, that’s what they do best, er, that’s the only thing they can do. It would be very impolite to rob them of their only joy in life. I guess i'll just be kind to these cretins and offer myself up as fodder to their flimsy minds. It’s a worthy sacrifice to humanity.

The next time I bring my girl friend here, we’d French kiss right in the middle of the hall, just to give these gossipmongers something juicy to talk about. Life would be too gray if they all die because of lack of gossips.