Fronting
him was a wall. It was a black and white picture of a road in Vietnam with a
large pine tree in the middle. The road was strewn with motorcycles. One of his
closest friends had taken that picture on a trip to Vietnam. He liked that
picture. In his mind he felt like it made his little breakfast nook feel like
an outdoor café.
To his
right he had a metal ashtray another friend had given him from a trip to
Singapore. You couldn’t see it anymore, but embossed on the bottom of it was
the Singapore Merlion. Around its rim were carved different Singaporean sites.
One side of the rim had the word “Singapore” carved on it. Three cigarette
butts were crumpled in it. By night’s end, he assumed, the ashtray would be
filled.
To his
left, two packs of Marlboro Reds lay, one wasting away with just a single stick
in it, waiting for the inevitable crumple and throw that would be the end of
its brief time with him. The other was fat and proud, unopened. He looked at
the blue seal that crowned the top of both packs, heralding them as “Class A”
cigarettes and that they were “Fine Tobacco”.
“Get back
to me after ten years when I’m withering away with lung cancer.” He wanted to
tell these seals.
His
electric fan hummed at his side as he typed away on his Mac. He had no bright
ideas right now. There were no clever one-liners or searing stories that fueled
his creative juices. He was just typing away for lack of anything better to do.
He looked around him, thinking of clever descriptives to apply to the everyday
objects that surrounded him.
He
glanced at a nearby bottle of Absolut Rasberri, on its last leg with just a few
good gulps in it. In front of it was a framed picture of his family; his mother
and father, brother and three sisters aside from himself. The picture was taken
on his parents’ golden wedding anniversary, so all of them looked particularly
cleaned-up.
He had a
strange relationship with his parents and his siblings. Partly it was because he
was the youngest and his parents were both forty by the time they had him. His
eldest sister was already fifteen at the time. His youngest sister was nine
years his senior. As a child, he felt more like his eldest sister’s child than
his mother’s. His parents spoiled him the way grandparents would spoil their
first grandchild. It was only in recent years that his parents and siblings
actually treated him in a more normal sense. Still, they honestly knew next to
nothing about him. They didn’t even know he smoked like a chimney in winter.
Oddly
enough, as his thoughts drifted into winter and the holidays, firecrackers
sounded on top of the melee of car horns and motors from the streets below his condominium
unit. He glanced outside his window at the cacophony outside. Ah, his window.
This was the reason he decided to live in this particular building, in this
particular unit. From his window tonight the city lights sprawled out like a
night sky scattered with stars. During those mornings when insomnia still had
its grip on him, the stars would flicker one by one into oblivion as a
yellow-purple sky slowly faded in, revealing buildings nestled between trees.
Acting as a backdrop to this cityscape, two separate mountain ranges cradled
his city.
He said
as much as he typed away. He had a lot of negative characteristics, most of
which he proudly wore like a badge of honor. He was pessimistic most times, and
aggressively short-tempered. Still, if there was one thing he was good at, it
was seeing the beauty and interest in the mundane. This made him love this
city, the city he was born and raised in. He found beauty in its hustle as well
as its bustle. Its odd nooks and crannies were a treasure trove of exoticism
for him.
He loved
to pretend he was a tourist sometimes, seeing his city for the very first time.
He would walk around his neighborhood looking at huge trees that lay scattered
at odd intervals around 1970s and 1980s houses slowly being upended by newer
condominiums. His own building stood where a bus line had once made its home
during the 80s. The old as well as the new fascinated him. This sense of wonder
was a treasure he kept that only reared its head when he was either writing or
painting.
By point
of fact, he was always somehow involved with this area of the city in one way
or another all throughout his life. He was actually born in a hospital a few
streets away from the building where he lived now. He grew up in a house a few
houses away from that selfsame building. When they moved from that house into
another farther away, his parents still owned several businesses in the area,
and he would visit often. Suffice it to say; he never imagined living anywhere
else but this city in this neighborhood. Even if he did, he never followed
through.
Upon
graduating college, he found work in a television station as a graphic and
digital effects artist. It was not a coincidence that this particular
television station’s offices can be found a hop, skip and a jump away from the
house he grew up in. During particularly mild days he would walk the one block
from his building to his workplace.
During
the past decade, his city had been undergoing a sort of renaissance. In his
neighborhood alone, where once there were houses, multicolored restaurants and
bars sprouted like mushrooms after a warm summer rain. Condominiums sprouted
with them. He wasn’t particularly alarmed by all of this. His city still knew
how to keep its character in the face of all of this, and he loved that.
He
surveyed what he had typed so far. Not much. It read more like a love letter to
his city than anything else. He felt he got too rambling at times. Still, he
felt that was part of the charm of his particular writer’s voice. It was like
listening to an impassioned story being told by a very talkative friend. There
were lots of detours and flourishes that didn’t actually belong, but they at
least added flavor to it.
He
yawned. He looked at the clock on his wall that heralded the 11th
hour. He wasn’t supposed to be writing tonight, but his internet connection had
gone haywire so there would be no playing his RPGs on his iPad. There would
also be no surfing for porn. The latter didn’t bother him as much as the former
though. Starting young had made him an old man at 38. His libido had followed
suit.
He arched
his back to relieve the stress on his spine from being in one position for the
longest time. He wondered to himself where this particular story would end up.
He stood up, scratching his buttocks. From the nearby fridge, silver like most
of the things in his tiny kitchen, he poured himself some Coke into a blood-red
cup. He looked at the cup. It clashed with everything in his house. Still, in
his mind he admired its impertinence at being the only red object in the sea of
black, white, dark brown and aqua that was his condominium unit. He smiled a
little at his cup. His cup had moxie.
After a
sip of Coke, he lit another cigarette. At this point, the distended pack of
Marlboro Reds had given up its last stick to his lips and he had already gone
through three sticks from its proud brother. He pushed on the button to open
his internet modem, hoping against hope that a connection would ensue. He was
met with the flickering, unsteady second light of disappointment.
He turned
off the modem in abject defeat and wondered about this day and age’s particular
need for internet connectivity. He had never been an avid chatter, especially
since he typed with just one hand, so he never understood other people’s
obsessions with living their lives online. He did have a Facebook account and a
Blog page as well as Twitter and Pinterest, but he saw them as tools for
sharing his thought and his art, not for actually talking to people. If you
went to his blog or his Facebook page you’d find half of the content are
painting he had done or poetry he’d written. If he wanted to talk to people,
he’d go visit his friends or call them on the phone.
The
importance of the internet for him was different. As a boy, he had two sets of
encyclopedias he poured over on his spare time. He would research about Greek
gods and ancient Egypt and planets. The internet was an updated version of an
encyclopedia to him. Sometimes, while watching television, he would Google a
certain actor that struck his fancy, or a particular place that sparked his
interest. It was wonderful. Well, that and his little Smurf and Hello Kitty
villages were, he felt, what the internet was for.
He did
love his RPG games. He took great pains placing every last house within his
little villages and cities and boutiques and restaurants and zoos. He let his
artistic eye guide him through planning and execution of these. A friend once
asked him what the fascination was with these games. At the time he was maintaining
a total of twenty separate games. His answer was clear. It was the closest
thing to being God as he was ever going to get.
He looked
up from what he was typing and looked around. The path his prose took was
meandering yet poetic. At least now he was clear what this exercise was about.
Mostly it was an exposition on how he viewed the world. He had covered a
multitude of disparate topics ranging from his condominium unit and its
contents to his love for the city he lived in to the internet and what it was to
him. He looked closely at what he wrote, his one-handed style of typing
allowing him to puff on his cigarette and sip Coke from his cheeky red cup
while managing to click a few more words away. What had seemed an exercise in
futility on the onset had taken a surprising turn that delighted him.
Yes, it
was a prose of seemingly unrelated subjects rendered more interesting than it
actually was by his florid words and sense of melodrama. Yes, it was a
45-minute excerpt from the life of a bored artist hoping against hope that his
internet connectivity would magically fix itself. Yes, half the time he was
typing he was wondering whether or not his Smurf Village honeydews weren’t
already withered up. Still, more than that it did end up being a story unto
itself…
It was
the story of a man writing a story.
