Hello blankness, my old friend

Ah, writer’s block. Amazing. Some people never run out of life to write about. Sometimes, facing a blank sheet of paper is like facing your own death shroud: You can’t think of anything to write about so that means you as a writer are dead.

Dead, yes. In a way.

Finished.

Just like Ashlee Simpson after the lip-synching and band-blaming fiasco on Saturday Night Live. (I wonder how the music columnist, who writes glowing press releases about artists from Led Zeppelin to Lindsay Lohan, feels about her glowing article on Jessica’s phonier sis.)

Kaput!

Defunct.

Done.

Gone.

Just like the great gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson who ended his life story with a bang, a la Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain. Scott Garceau told me the news, Juaniyo Arcellana penned a moving tribute, and Krip Yuson sent me a text message saying Hunter tried shooting his own shadow but his aim was simply too good.

Ended.

Just like boy groups from hell. (Goodbye, factory-tested Backstreet Boys; hello, factory-tested rock chicks like Kelly Clarkson and 10 million gals with galling voices and guitar-heavy ditties.)

Doomed to rehash tired old skits or concoct tired new tales.

Some people ask me if the incidents I wrote about in the past are really true. Like the vampire-wannabe who puked fish crackers, or the corny pretender who once played air drums in a bus when the Introvoys’ Line to Heaven blared from the tinny speakers, or the “rock star” who used to do the Roger Rabbit and the Running Man in high school. Or me riding a bus and being forced by a thug to buy a pack of orange juice for 90 bucks. (Yes, there is a sucker riding a bus every minute.) Or me getting lockjaw and talking incoherently like one of the characters in The Name of The Rose (or like the bulol video jock who needs subtitles so that viewers could understand a word he’s mumbling). May Satan pull me under if these creatures and occurrences are just concoctions.

Wait, there’s more.

I was asked to judge a battle-of-the-bands gig. I sat there with my girlfriend Becca for about three hours and watched everything go shitty: guitarists fumbling, microphones malfunctioning, itchy caterpillars (higad) crawling down my back. Yeah, I sat beside a pot of plants and some hairy bastards escaped from their caterpillar condominium and turned my body into their wonderland. I dabbed hand-sanitizer all over. Thank God not one band covered Itchyworms.

Years ago, I went to an event which turned out to be a seminar for a miraculous product which we’ll call “Vita-shit.” It was such an astounding energy drink: It could make the cripple walk, make the sickly join the World Wrestling Federation, and probably make Lazarus rise from the dead again. It reminded me of the amazing journey scene in The Who’s Tommy, or a convention of hyperactive televangelists. Ten thousand witnesses attested to this. But how come the rest of the world hadn’t heard of it? Aye, there’s the rub. We attendees were to be recruited like disciples to spread the good word armed with bottles of the miracle brew, which could be bought at miraculous discounts.

Funny, I saw no pharaohs in sight and yet could not stop thinking about pyramids.

When I was a high school student, my buddies and I rode a jeepney home from Recto — or sumabit sa estribo, to be more precise. We parted like the Red Sea when a pretty office girl flogged the jeepney and sat just two persons away from us. Put Pamela Anderson and Traci Lords in a blender and you get an idea of what this girl looked like. She was pretty as an angel. She was hot: Her skirt couldn’t even fit Mahal or Mura because it was too damn short. My buddies and I looked at her as if we were Dick Israel and his denim-wearing minions. Each of us was like half-mascot-half-maniac. It was a sickening scene.

Then suddenly, the beautiful stranger turned pale. She looked from left to right. She pressed her fingers to her thighs. And she lifted her right butt-cheek into the general direction of the sycophants ogling her. Nothing happened for several seconds. And then came the ghastly smell. Turned out Miss Beauty Queen passed gas. We nearly fell from the estribo.

These days, the brush with quirky characters has dwindled. Life has a way of becoming terribly ordinary. The blank pages have become more oppressive, more mocking. Life has become life-like again, not a manipulated reality-show or a pseudo-gonzo article.

The great ones say that writer’s block is a crock of myth. The trick is to write, write, write. Just as guitarists who want to be as adept as Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page need to sit down with their instruments and play, play, play. Just as full-grown men with hazel-streaked hair who want to be a Universal Motion Dancer should dance, dance, dance. Easier said than done. Sometimes, you just pick up the guitar and manage to pluck away tired old blues patterns, nothing else. (I don’t know about trying to dance to Erasure’s Always, though.)

Sometimes, you just sit in front of the computer and try to grapple with the white void without progress. Sometimes, inspiration calls in sick.

I remember the first time I decided to become a writer. I was standing on the corner of Recto and Avenida Rizal at 3 a.m., waiting for a jeepney to MCU. I felt like a gatecrasher in an orgy at a house straight out of Sodom & Gomorrah. There were fifty-peso prostitutes, junkies, grease-laden lunatics, street urchins, while decaying on the gutter were one-day-old chicks, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, urine, spoiled food, dreams and discarded love. The world is such an ugly place that a writer needs to write something beautiful — ideally. Call it egotistic, but I felt like a Chilean poet summoned from the “branches of night” to decipher fires and watch “shadows riddled with arrows, fire, flowers” — or something to that effect.

There is that blank page staring at me again. Someday, I’ll fill it with something beautiful. Just let me take a sip of Vita-shit first.