I read from a blog (whose author is fast becoming one of my
favorite persons in the world) how much a cliché it is for anybody with
fingers, access to a computer and half of an idea to start a blog and unleash
verbal diarrhea on anybody who cares enough to listen. What I find, though, is a lot of “bloggers”’
main focus is creating interesting content with the intent of increasing
followers, resulting to amassed traffic, and thus giving them leverage to sell ad
space. It’s all about business, isn’t
it? Nothing wrong with that, really. But
that is not my intention here.
I used to be a moderately good writer. In highschool, my bestfriend Goo and I were very
much into new wave and punk music, while everyone else had Wham and Rick
Springfield on their Walkman. How we
thought of ourselves as cool non-conformists! We created this imaginary awesome
band where I was the lead singer and she played the keyboards. The main heart of this highschool fantasy was
a fictitious magazine with brilliant articles we both wrote, about our band’s music,
our personal fabulous lives and relationships. We had no
intention of having it published let alone be read by anybody but ourselves. It
was a unique and comical form of
artistic expression which we are both still very proud of to this day. (We did successfully put up our band in our Senior year, wrote original songs, performed in school and then branded as Satanists by the nuns.)
 |
Goo and I at Fred's Revolucion
Manila, March 2012 |
This writing exercise turned into amusing letter exchanges
when we took different paths after highschool and went to different
universities. Communication was so much
different back then. Each snail mail was
carefully handwritten, beautifully composed sans syntax and spelling errors,
detailing our adventures and misadventures of what we regarded as real adult
life.
As we went through different phases of our lives, meeting
more interesting people, our letters got fewer and farther in between, until it
eventually came to an end. My writing
since then was limited to essays as academic requirements, corporate reports & correspondences and journal entries when I had time and the
occasional inspiration.
My mother has always told me that I am a talented writer.
That I am a gifted storyteller. This is
not true. It is her God-given
responsibility as a mother to encourage me and magnify a tiny piece of my skill
she may have chanced upon in the past. I
love her for it, but at the same time it annoys me to death.
This blog is my attempt to bring back my lost love for
writing. It is a self imposed exercise
to improve what I thought years ago I was fairly good at. Just like the magazine I co-produced in
highschool, I have no intention of anybody reading this blog and therefore
nothing I write here will be for the purpose of feeding my ego nor impressing
anyone I know or detest. I ‘d be lucky
if somebody stumbles upon this and understands my objective.
~~~
I just saw David Letterman telling Justin Bieber how he
should not go crazy with his tattoos by putting a mural on his chest like the
Sistine Chapel. He responds, “I’m not
going for the Sixteenth Chapel.” What
the fuck.
