It's been a long, dry spell. Conflicts in the community, troubles among friends and a general feeling of malaise all contributed over the years to the writer's equivalent of erectile dysfunction: it's called writer's block. Having writer's block is like having being constipated with so much pressure to let something (anything!) out – but despite all the stress and the straining – nothing to
show at all for your sustained efforts.A decisive way to break the writer's block is to get out of the funk. Rage is a great way of breaking the vicious cycle of depression and writer's block. Hint: Let somebody pick on you, until you explode into a rage, or pick a fight, and goad the other side into goading you into exploding into a rage. Either way is fine. The rage builds up to volcanic proportions and you explode like a time bomb way past its appointed second. I suffer from periodic episodes of road rage in the chaotic, streets of Manila, the Philippines. In this Wild Wild West where you can be minding your business, driving on your lane, peacefully wishing the world well, a taxi can cut into your lane and suddenly stop to pick up a passenger, forcing you to come to a screeching halt. Bam! You see red, and you explode into road rage. The good old hormones kick in, and you blare your horn and wave the dirty finger. The taxi driver, seeing you in action, decides to taunt you by oh .. so ever slowly ... accelerating at five miles an hour only to stop dead in his tracks ... the better to enrage you, my dear. He presses his nose against the driver's window and leers wildly before waving HIS dirty finger at you– and speeding off into the distance before you can catch him.
The best course of action for a writer afflicted with periodic episodes of road rage and writer's block, is to bring a notebook along and write furiously, while the blood still remains pounding in his head, and homicidal implulses race through his brain, into his muscles, giving instructions to act. As the rage courses through your cholesterol-choked veins, you suddenly feel alive, the master of your destiny. Rage is power. Rage is control. Rage can really improve your writing. By the way, it's best to write your thoughts down furiously, before nature's chemical fix wears off.
But I must confess that as I write this, I am not in front of any steering wheel. There is no maniacal taxi driver right now to get my gonads pumping furiously. But, I am, nevertheless, enraged as I write this, thinking of all my remembered duels on the highway with testosterone-fueled taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, car drivers, horse and cart drivers, buffalo drivers, motorcycle drivers and bicyclists, not to mention inconsiderate dogs, cats, pedestrians, vendors etcetera, etcetera. What actually fuels me as I write this is that other remedy for writers: alcohol. More precisely in my case, it's Ginebra San Miguel 80% proof gin, a drink that is so strong that you can use it to fuel your car in an emergency, or use it as an accelerant to burn your house down, and collect the insurance from it.
Yep. I must thank Ginebra San Miguel gin for putting me into a rage, and breaking my writer's block of several years standing. I do not recommend this as a long term solution, because it can lead to alcoholism. But, as far as self-medication goes, it's not bad at all to motivate you to get something into the compu
ter and on-line. I've posted a picture of the very cheap but fiery Ginebra San Miguel gin beside my blank laptop screen, to show you what fuelled this blog. As you can see, there is a picture of the Saint Michael slaying a devil with his sword and sending him reeling back into the fiery depths of Hell. Well, Ginebra San Miguel is just as fiery as you swallow it, burning its way down to the the pit of your stomach.I thank you kindly, San Miguel (also known as Saint Michael) for helping me slay the writer's block conundrum. I know you're anxiously hovering over me somewhere up there; making sure that I don't overmedicate on your very own gin from now on. But I do think that I can stand on my own two feet from now on, and write without periodic assistance from “the juice,” or obnoxious Manila taxi drivers. The dry spell's been broken, as you can see from this blog.
CHEERS!
