A head among turnip heads

“This daily news reporting... sometimes I feel like I’d jump on it,” she complains. Perhaps, seeing too that, I, fictionist and sometime essayist, am not overly subjected to the same grind, the same pain. To deal with cold facts day in and day out: the rally at the park, a statement from the Mayor, the Congressman’s privileged speech, the latest resolution from the City Council on the motion for a separate CR for the third sex, the rape victim, the surviving relatives of the Maguindanao Massacre. To hold each in a page and to make it matter: can you do that? I am a fictionist, no deadlines to beat, no gun to my head, no shaking with politicians' greasy hands and no duty to read through dead-in-the marrow manifestos from left and right activists.

I can’t even keep at my once-a-week column. I get blocked. By one thing or another. Or I’m just too lazy for it. I have no stakes in current events: I don’t even watch TV or read the news. And I don’t care, or wish I didn’t. Cabbage journalism I’d like to call it: the poverty of information, the lack of imagination. But isn’t all human affairs like that? Garbage in garbage out, the repetitiousness of it, the so-much talk, the pretense to involvement, the useless comings and goings, the treadmill. Or maybe it’s just the painful consciousness of the audience out there, who, if you run into them while throwing in sardines and noodle packs into your blue grocery basket will ask, What are you doing now? Still that work of yours churning instant propaganda for that tabloid, for that NGO when are you going to write your first novel?

You stare at the words you chomped out of your system, words, always words that often mean nothing to most people, words which you thought stood for your hold of things, your approximation of truths as you grasp them; then the remorse upon seeing them in print, the wrong predicates, the slightest of typos, the imperfect phrasing, the play with words that don’t need playing with. Then you stare at yourself in the mirror: at your own indifference to errors made, to the sloppiness, and your anger and shame for not making every word matter, for not making yourself matter.

Not to think of the pay and the children and young relations who want this and that. The broken radio, the ceiling that needs repainting, the coveted signature dyke shoes, the coveted books. Some days you go to the bank, hand your two-hundred pesos sometimes eight-hundred pehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsos UCPB check in your name to the lady clerk, a former student at ADDU. She smiles up ever so nicely at you as the computer monitor blinks your name reporting you as bad credit agent, an electronic pillory you cannot contest or haul to court or at least banter about at the canteen over coffee and stale white bread.

I am all-sympathy. Yes, Virginia, you should be writing V.S. Naipaul stories, putting out books. Except that she's not Virginia, and Virginia is dead, so is Sylvia. She's just Germelina, she says, and a mother besides.

To live. To write. My God, she’s otherwise awful good, what’s she doing there, a head among turnip heads!