North Luzon Monitor

North Luzon

Noise

George Babsa-ay Jr.
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After more than a decade, we’re back to writing a column. Now, this may all sound easy, this task of writing sensibly while making its message sing. But it isn’t, quite frankly, like riding a bike.

Because it is a tough task, to write something that means. To give music and some measure of depth to four hundred words and yet read like a ‘hugot.’ At the same time, to not offend sensibilities. To not sound condescending, preachy or pedantic. To not bore. And to do it on a deadline.

Crow’s feet have long ago tramped my delicate ego and, it takes, I now see, more than mere spunk to make music out of words. To matter, as a mixer of words. A maker of ageless lines. In fact, it doesn’t require spunk, at all. But only writing that works.

And therein lies the rub. For I looked up the columns that don’t stale. Ergo: writing that works. And, after reveling in the magic of their woven words, I, too, got moved to tears by the obvious. That I am neither a Jimmy Breslin nor a Conrado de Quiros. Not even a whiff of Blas Ople. Not welcome at the Cristobal breakfast table. But a pygmy, with a platitude or two, but bereft of a whorl or a fraction of Cirilo Bautista’s finger.

And while at it, why not look up the column of the late Prosecutor Benedicto Carantes whose critics, not surprisingly, crowd his cult following to this day. So I did. And I was reminded. Opposite Connection got away with melancholy because it sought to uniquely share laughter and meaning. And we were charmed, intrigued. With war stories. Sad stories. Victory stories. The folly of men and the depth of women.

It was something, a homily, once, that got us reading the next. And it was, too, once the honesty in his humor we mistook for misogyny.

For this and a ton of reasons, he will be read even long after I could figure out, and that is, if I even do, how a column works. For, in waving his magical pen on what I think is a worn keyboard, we were roused when drowsy and pleasantly perplexed when we thought nothing could no longer amuse us.

If I could only give you half of that, to get you to read past the title and see the last dot, I will be whole for the next struggle. And hopefully write something of worth.

For much work is required of my writing, clearly. To merit a part in a news outfit ran by folks I hold in esteem. To merit a millimeter of a byline. And to maintain it. But, mostly, to just be read. And to not just take space for any ability to make noise.

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