Dead ends & black transmissions

If I were someone straight out of a William Blake poem, I’d say blame it on the greenish, hellish absinthe visions. But since I am no one worth obsessing about (or worth a think or two), I just have to say it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Writing, I mean.

I stared seriously writing during my last years at the royal and pontifical university. Desperation is the mother of invention, I should say. Soaking oneself in beer, gin and stringy goat stew; playing in doomed bands destined to not go anywhere (the highlight of our career was opening for Siakol in Pasay, with us sounding chirpily like air escaping from a plastic balloon while Siakol — with its use of the mixer and 10 roadies — sounded like bloody Black Sabbath); looking at one’s wasted self on a toilet mirror in a seedy bar somewhere on this cracked planet; watching one’s entire life being flushed down the toilet with orange vomit… well these things make one think, and reach for either a noose or a pen. For better or for worse, I reached for the latter. And it has been a hell of a trip ever since, like riding shotgun with the Ghost Rider, or sticking your thumb out to hitchhike and the damn Death Star decides to beam you up.

My professor in UST, the Lady Polyester, taught me the most important thing about writing: being “all there.” It means reporting straight from the frontlines of experience. One has to live through it in order to put it out. There is the famous story of William Burroughs accidentally shooting and killing his wife Joan in a drunken game of William Tell. That was mental. Burroughs had only one recourse. He said, “I have no choice but to write my way out.” 

Poetry got me to the writers’ workshop in Dumaguete. When I left Dumaguete, I left poetry there. Must be whoring itself these days on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, decaying among the discarded stories, half-written plays, and stale bits of chicken inato. A panelist said one of my poems was “adrift in a sea of its own metaphors” — which was cleverly and diabolically put. Like the Simon Cowell of letters. Another said I was a Romantic poet, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. It made me feel so anachronistic. Like a dental instrument from the Dark Ages.

I met some crazy diamonds there. There was this guy who ruined his sanity with boiled angel’s trumpet. Let’s call him Psychedelic Vic. A white-haired woman defended one of my works from ruthless thrashing by a chess-obsessed panelist. It ended in a stalemate. I also saw a fish-faced girl, and, no, I wasn’t drunk at the time.

Writing got me weird, wonky jobs. Stringing together business stories (about the rise and fall of copra production), press releases (reptile conventions, hair and makeup Olympics, singing midgets), brochure text, newsletters, supplements and such — all these activities drained the romance, the drama and the mysticism out of writing. It started resembling something tedious, like running the marathon or cross-stitching.

Got fired. Quit. Applied for a new job. Company closed. So on, so forth. One dead end after another. Didn’t matter. What did Samuel Beckett say? “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The key moment was when I started writing for Life, I mean The STAR’s Lifestyle Section. That changed everything.

I still remember the first article I wrote for Young Star, eight years ago (I think). It was a review of an Alanis Morissette album, “Under Rug Swept,” accompanied by an illustration of the Canadian singer depicted as newborn Venus. Cute, not erotic at all — much like Morissette’s music. I wanted to frame the article when it came out. I even wanted to show it to my old neighbors in Malabon — the jueteng collector who owes me money, the guy in drag who sells mysterious lotions, the panadero who looks like Zuma, and the stocky fellow who shepherds Brahmin cows, talks to himself and who weeps whenever beer meets his lips. Guys, I made it. We made it. But that would come across like a puke-inducing scene from a hometown-boy-makes-good Hollywood flick, soundtrack provided by Survivor. Besides, the cowman only talks to himself exclusively.       

That was then and this is now. There is a whole lifetime in between. I listened to music, read books, watched movies, saw gigs, attended art exhibitions, and other interesting etceteras — and wrote, wrote, wrote. Ma’am Millet Mananquil gave me the space and the courage to define myself through the written word, and the subjects I touched upon (or, more precisely, “fondled”) are varied and dramatically speckled. Dream Theater, H.R. Giger, Microsoft, Manuel Ocampo, Radioactive Sago Project, Bizarre magazine, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, David Croneberg’s Videodrome, video games, bondage movies, Lionsgate horror flicks, Juxtapoz, Joy Division, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Frank Zappa, Francis Bacon, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Hunger, Venom, Hellboy, gimps, Joel-Peter Witkin, the Beat Generation, Waiting for Godot, Watchmen, From Hell, The Waste Land, skulls, spiders, Henry Miller, free jazz, Damien Hirst, Dead Snow, Clive Barker, Alien, League of Gentlemen, Monty Python, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Robert Williams, R.K. Sloane, Dante’s Inferno, zombies, voodoo, Jane’s Addiction, Tim Burton, Nazi scientists, and things that go bump in the night.

I was able to travel, and wrote some more, channeling the gonzo ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, being inspired by the wacky alchemy of Tom Robbins, and aspiring for the naughty wordplay of Joey de Leon.

I dig everything about writing. Heck, I met my girlfriend Rebecca through my column. I get recognized by airport personnel and beer garden waiters. I got into short simmering feuds with bands and bar-owners years ago. I have received fan mail, hate mail and unclassifiable letters. One guy wrote his inscrutable message all over the envelope, inside as well as outside. Must be a code of sorts. I felt trapped in a Alejandro Jodorowsky movie. A blogger once remarked that she wishes a publishing house would put out a compilation of my articles so she could hate everything in one place. Another reader said how disappointed she is that I am not the angry Young Star writer she used to read in college. I hope she’s right.

Change is good. Reinvention is the mother of invention.

Makes me remember this press conference in Singapore a couple of years ago. Suede singer Brett Anderson was asked how come Suede doesn’t sound like the band that recorded anarchical, sexually-ambivalent tunes like Animal Nitrate or Metal Mickey. Brett answered something like this: I am not a young punk anymore, so you’re not going to hear a young punk on the record. Brett added that he has no choice but to sing his age, his temperament, whoever he is at the moment. No more cross-dressing, androgynous yawps about pantomime horses.

For me, the apocalyptic anger has given way to a cold, indifferent fury. Don’t get me wrong, I still am annoyed — since existence is still as taxing as always — but I’d rather show it in paintings and bug the hell out of housewives. As for writing, maybe in my next article I will write about the true, the good and the godawful.

This is not a dead end.