But that cesspool inside your head should not have a direct pipeline to the mouth. Between the id and speech a silent chasm exists. It keeps the world safe. If everyone were to speak out their minds, sea levels would rise due to continental bloodbaths.

Then that word.

Joey de Leon or Willie Revillame would have pounced on the situation. But the Senate is neither Eat Bulaga nor Wowowee, although sometimes you can't tell the difference (There are times when the Senate resembles a karnabal, only with a worse set of grotesqueries, even uglier furniture, and excessive air conditioning). On that Monday afternoon, something happened to Senate Minority President Aquilino Pimentel: inside his antiquarian head, suddenly a bridge propped up, linking that dark part of his subconscious to his mouth. Senator Pimentel–former law school dean, Martial Law-era freedom fighter, and author of the Local Government Code–was helpless against the temptations of the word's connotations. The gentleman from Cagayan de Oro cracked a joke truly unfathomable in its tastelessness. I was following the entire proceedings on TV. A similarly crude punch line from the nasty double entendre was also simmering in my head, but then again, last time I checked, I was not a senator appearing on national TV. And also the possibility: what if somebody on the floor said something about insertions and honeymoons at this minute?

Kaboom.

I'm normally comatose in front of the TV. But that minute, you could've heard me scream from three blocks away. The last time I did that was when Michael Jordan nailed that buzzer-beating jumper over Bryon Russell to beat Utah. That was back in '98.

I could hardly believe my ears. The old sonofabitch did say it.

One tabloid headline accurately summed it up: "MGA SENADOR, NAGBASTUSAN." And we all thought that the Hayden Kho hearing was the nadir.