Monsters

 

In the tranquility of solitude is when the monsters come. I call them monsters because they eat away at my soul with a ravenous, insatiable appetite that demands immediate attention. Sometimes they compel me to get out of bed and fumble for pen and paper or force me to turn on the laptop. They will not rest until the last morsel of sanity has been devoured.

This has been my life for as long as I can remember. It has been an illness that has afflicted me for at least three decades. While others spend hours just sitting in front of the boob tube or hung up on a video game or senseless viral videos and showbiz gossip, I will be zoned out and like a maniac on crack, banging away at the keyboard.

I can isolate myself from any human contact—real or virtual—and enjoy the sound of my fingertips tapping at maniacal pace while consumed by EDM or trance music. Whatever I listen to affects the mood of the piece I’m writing. A dose of Linkin Park unleashes my angst while sentimental tunes take me back to when a particular song first hit the airwaves and events I can associate with it.

As I put my thoughts down, I can hear Papa saying, “Never use the same word twice.” Sometimes, it would be my late, Tito Butch uttering a line from Poe or Shakespeare in an impeccable British accent which I, too would become fascinated with though in practice, it turns out to be Australian.

When in doubt, I read the piece aloud, looking for inconsistencies, redundancies, and other grammatical errors that even I am prone to committing. I am not perfect and being aware of my humanness I think, makes me a good writer—if that’s not too much to assume?

Another thing that makes me effective as a writer is that I taught myself to touch-type long before I started working in the television industry. The speed at which I type and merely by the feel of things, I can tell if I hit a wrong key or if I misspelled a word.

Maybe, what makes me a better writer now is the fact that I am old and I have a wealth of material—memories and experiences both good and bad to put down on paper. Although there are a lot of good, young writers out there, experience adds a touch of maturity and ripeness to the piece. It’s like a singer trying to belt out a love song without having experienced romance or narrating a story about sexual encounters while remaining a virgin.

Yes, most of what I write has been born out of things I’ve done or have gone through. It will be up to the reader to discern which stories are true and which were concocted or adulterated for the sake of creativity.

But the monsters do not distinguish fact from fiction. To them, seeing me lose my sanity over a mental image of what I intend to write, whets their appetite even more. I am mere fodder in a mad feeding frenzy.

And I, too become part of the melee. I fight back at the monsters and bite back. Sometimes, I win. Often, I lose. It’s just the way it is.

As age creeps in on me, my only fear is losing the ability to hold on to a thought. With all the information stored in my head, it can get messy trying to retrieve a specific file—the ability to recall memories. All too often, I feel I am playing against time. What if one day, the memories become fragmented thoughts that cannot be pieced together?

This makes the monsters even hungrier. Despite the exhaustion from a full day’s work, the monsters deprive me of sleep or rouse me, force me to face the keyboard. Like a mindless slave, I will comply. I am a writer. I am a painter of images with words as my brush and palette and your mind as my canvas. One day, the monsters will consume me. But before that time comes, I will write until my monsters become your own!