Nightfly

I KNOW the times are dreadful, so allow me to take some time off the issues of the day and take a ride down memory lane. (This was first published in Filipino on my WordPress blog, during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic.)

I was a kid raised by radio. Seriously. Do millennials still know who Bro. Jun Banaag, Vic Felipe, Ed Verzola, Anthony Taylor, Manolo Favis, Ely Cruz Ramirez and Jon Ibanez are?

Their voices serve as a sort of sleeping pills to my mind which, unfortunately, is always racking up a “midnight sale of ideas,” as Bob Ong put it.

I had to admit, I’m a night owl. My mind works at its best at one o’clock in the morning, when everybody else in the house is asleep. That’s the time when I sit down at my desk and try to empty my mind through writing about almost anything and everything.

In the pre-pandemic period, kids would gladly anticipate vacation time as that’s one time they can stay up late and sleep until the late hours of morning.

And since I would be usually forced to get up at five in the morning to prepare for classes (four a.m. when I stepped into college), I really savor the time when I could put on paper my wandering thoughts.

-o0o-

"So you say there's a race

Of men in the trees

You're for tough legislation,

Thanks for calling

I wait all night long for calls like this..."

It helped a lot that I had a typewriter during my high school and college days. (Again, millennials will never get the joy of slamming down the keys as you pretend to be a hurried print journalist rushing a deadline.)

Call me “old-fashioned,” but I used the typewriter a lot not just for my homework but also for my literary works.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to really slam it down at midnight. Someone will surely complain about the noise. So I try to tone it down, but honestly, the joy is half gone.

There’s nothing like the sound of typewriters “rat-rat-rat”-ing, as a late editor of OpinYon once said.

That’s why some colleagues at OpinYon noticed that I really seemed to bang down on the computer keys.

In the “old normal,” my current editor, whose desk is just behind me, would tell me to tone it down.

But I couldn’t help it. Force of habit, you know. I kind of miss the times when you waste a lot of paper (if you’re not familiar with the term “liquid paper”), the times when you’re really careful about writing because one single misspelled word can render your write-up worthless, when you had to double as a mechanic with a bottle of lubricant beside you just in case the keys get stuck.