BEING a journalist, being a chronicler of events along with personalities who help shape those events, could either make or break you at the seams. Being a witness to the changes or sameness, the monotony or speed of the shifting events, the meanness or boorishness of people in the corridors of power, and of course, those power-hungry and ego-tripping politicians who have an eye always and forever, for the next vote if not the media mileage of it all, cannot but reduce the poor journalist to a jaded and cynical guy and before he knows it, can make him a smart ass, almost rotten to the core.
Being a journalist is risky if he is soft to the core, if he is not careful, if he easily blends or kowtows to the blandishment of power or money, if in short, he has not enough moral backbone to say no, for himself or his integrity—or whatever is left of it. Being a journalist is to know the pervasiveness of ignorance, mendacity and mediocrity all around and the dehumanizing effect of these all to his inner and professional growth. Being a journalist is to come face to face finally with yourself and to ask the terrifying question, have I sunk this low with myself?
Take that, when those lines of about 10 years ago perhaps in your ‘Bystander’ column of a local weekly newspaper now sadly vanished into thin air, when you were still brimming with high-minded ideas and grand emotions and not yet seemingly saturated with corrosive cynicism as you are now.
And here, to continue with that particular piece of your opinionated self, these concluding lines that sound like a bang or a sob softly heard like a whimper but still resonate until today, even today.
Now, after a fairly long enough time of hounding the news, of chasing headlines and beating deadlines, of hobnobbing with the mighty and bearing up with the petty, what do all these add up to? Nothing, perhaps. Experience, maybe. Or the sheer joy of saying, ‘Been there, done that, buddy.’ Just that, nothing big or spectacular.
Nowadays, every time you get your good wretched self into a real fix you get to recall a fallen character soliloquizing in the popular novel of the American writer Lawrence Sanders titled The Case of Lucy B:
“Life was a pisser. You could start out with the best intentions in the world, but sooner or later they all turned to shit. Then you ended up with a couple of freaky dames pounding on your skull while you ran for your life, trying to hold up your pants.”
Ah, the ingrained wit and bitter wisdom of those lines never fail to elicit a chuckle from you and yet they shock into recognition about the fickleness of fate and the imperfection of human beings such as you and your twin Tumbas Manipis persona that happens to be me.
Fast forward to today and what this manner of taking up this quiet persona of Tumbas Manipis has really gotten of me, of my whole goddamn writing life and what it is all about.
Here, for whatever, let me engage in quiet soliloquy, for whatever this is worth:
I reckon it is not for nothing that I write, even if I get to write some trash, sometimes. I write perhaps so I can get lost with myself, so that perhaps, I can spit out some of my venom that have collected in my innards about the many senseless things that forever weigh me down, and finally, perhaps just to have my quiet vengeance on the dullness and arbitrariness of the hour that oppress and possessed me despite all my efforts to make myself free and somehow, writing about it enables me to get even or allows me the sheer folly to act nonchalant and undaunted of it all.