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Thursday, February 09, 2006
Garcia: Writer’s elbow
By Pablo John Garcia
Breakfast at noon
For this column, I was thinking my editor wanted me to write on “What I did on my extended vacation.”
I mean, after such a long absence from this column--–which I had not really explained to my editor--–I figured I couldn’t just pop in here without so much as a sheepish grin and a scratching of the head.
So I tried to come up with a list of plausible excuses, none of which proved acceptable to my wife, when I tried to run each one by her.
“I don’t think,” she said, “‘bad feng shui’ will wash.”
Which sort of puzzled me, as it would puzzle you, too, if you knew the conditions in which I write. I face a window where I see, to my left, a Buddhist temple and, to my right, a Chinese hospital.
“But doesn’t that explain the emptiness of my thoughts, on the one hand, and the terminal sickness of my prose, on the other?” I asked her.
That was Sunday, and to answer my question, my wife read a news article aloud, about how cause-oriented groups like Sanlakas and Bayan blamed Saturday’s stampede at the Ultra on “extreme poverty” and PGMA’s “governance.”
“My God,” I said, absent-mindedly pointing to a bottle of laxatives, in a sincere, if unconscious, wish to cure the logic of militants.
My wife smiled, as if to say, “Now stop acting like a cause-oriented group and start writing.”
So the bad feng shui line had to go. And so did what I call “writer’s elbow,” which is a condition similar to a “tennis elbow,” but in this case not caused by an incorrect grip, but by a faulty grasp of concepts and of language, in general.
My wife said I could never get to convince my editors of the existence of such a condition, even if she did find that something was causing me to double-fault on my opening paragraphs, to make wayward shots towards the audience…
She stopped only when I said, “That must explain why all I could ever score is love, my love…” and she readily agreed to trade her sarcasm for my mush.
So it was a perfectly good excuse that had to go as well. When I brought up post-partum depression, she reminded me of the fact that it was she who gave birth, and that was over a year ago. Why do tiny details have to ruin a perfect defense?
I searched in vain for an acceptable story until I stumbled on a news article while reviewing last week’s papers. It was about chemical fertilizers. Very expensive chemical fertilizers that didn’t seem to reach their intended beneficiaries.
Then I had an epiphany. An “a-ha” moment. I called my wife and told her how I might just have found the story, the perfect explanation for my missing columns.
“I coursed my columns through a foundation,” I told her, “the formation of which I had no knowledge…”
“And?”
“Can’t you see?’ I said. “It’s the foundation’s fault. Not mine. That’s how they explained away those chemical fertilizers.”
My wife had quite a mouthful to say. I’m not sure I can print it here, but it had something to do with fertilizer. About that excuse being a load of…uh, organic fertilizer.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 9, 2006 issue)
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