"Oh, patron saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go"

 Its happening again, like it always does. My writing process is being a thorn in my side. I know I want to write about highways and cars and Bon Jovi's Lost Highway, but for the life of me I cannot put two and two together and I'm frowning at the screen, sipping some tea and hoping for the powers that be to guide me. 

I always liked the lyric "Oh Patron Saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go" though. It reminded me of the saying, "Red sky at morning, sailor's warning" or maybe I've been reading too much Moby Dick. That novel grows on you, let me tell you. Ishmael is initially hard to crack but after a few chapters, his story becomes compelling. I wonder how much a pirate or a buccaneer prayed honestly. Well, maybe I'll be cancelled for calling someone a pirate in this day and age but the other option would be privateer isn't it? 

But yes, the idea of asking a Patron Saint, that too of lonely souls was something that struck me back when I heard this song for the first time. As it is, a Bon Jovi song never fails to get me excited, (have you heard Always?) and this was no exception. The video was also a charming one to be honest, (linked below). But now that I've spent some time rambling like Radagast the Brown, amidst the brambles and thickets of the woods, I find that I still don't know what I want to say. Is the song a prayer, an acknowledgement of the powers that be, or something about moving on, 'coz like it or not, roads do go on and on; and "Man may come and man may go, but I go on forever". 

So much imagery in this, isn't it? I like situations like this where I go on and on talking with the person reading this and it seems to me like somewhere, something clicks in them. Now I am aware that sometimes I am an editor's nightmare and that essentially most of this, if put into a book would first be deleted or furiously scratched out with a red pencil, wielded with the sorrow of ages, but yeah, thankfully this is not a book. 

The concept of a lost highway though. Is it an acknowledgement of trying to chart a course back? Is it a plea to get away from something or somewhere? Is it an embrace of loneliness or is it just the "I cannot take this anymore, I need to drive" that happens to us from time to time? Or is it pointing out the necessity of being lost, of the two roads that diverge in a yellow wood and since you cannot be one traveler...

I never thought about Bon Jovi's Lost Highway this way, not once. Yet, after putting the song as my ringtone, some of the strains have started to come and hit me and it's prompted this piece from me on a Thursday morning and my initial intention was to just have this be a small read that you could finish on the way to work or over that first coffee but well, we're beyond that now. I will however talk about the instruments in this. There's quite a solid guitar base here, but the sound is different from the usual hard hitting that Bon Jovi does. I've found it to be a case of a more subtle way of giving hope as opposed to earlier works like Keep the Faith where he was earnestly telling the listener that it gets better and that living is possible. 

My father used to say that a car is a means of getting to point B from Point A. Over the course of time, I learnt to imbibe that philosophy for the brief time that I drove a car, but then I realised it was more about being in the passenger seat as a navigator and going along for a ride.

And, sometimes...just sometimes, you need a car to get away to point B from point A and I think that Bon Jovi is actually saying that in this song. It's a hopeful song which asks you to move ahead, stay strong and trust in the powers that be in a very interesting way.

"Hey hey! I finally found my way,

Say goodbye to yesterday

Hit the gas, there ain't no brakes on this lost highway"

And the rest...is silence 

The Bilge Master

Debts

 A few years back, I reconnected with my English teacher from sixth grade and we’ve been getting along like a house on fire since then. If you haven’t been reading enough of the tripe I put out there and am tyrannical enough to call writing then you won’t know the fact that my brain immediately wanted to make an F451 reference after the first sentence, because I deeply admire Mr. Ray Bradbury and feel that his book Something Wicked This Way Comes opened my eyes to a better understanding of Shakespeare or (as I like to call him, Shakey Baby). I’m not trying to say that you should call him that, most certainly not, but calling a writer something ridiculous oftentimes makes studying that bugger’s work a little easier on the eyes and mind. But, I digress. One of the things my teacher chastised me for as a child in sixth grade was my compulsion to bite my nails and some 25 years after the fact, she chastises me for giving up on what she feels are excellent ideas for articles and stories. Well, in the light of the fact that my father passed away recently, I find that one of the story ideas I had pitched to my teacher will now (possibly, and in a way that justifies the signature at the end of this post; that alter ego of mine from 2010 looking on with bated breath as I drum a note on the Backspace key) come to see the light of day.

I want to talk about libraries and librarians today. I want to talk about books and stories and safety and how that safety is taken away by someone who had the gall to tell us books were safer than people and lived up to that quote effortlessly. Yes, Neil I am looking at you with bitterness and disgust right now as I take all the books I had of you and consign them to new homes, while my heart breaks for Sir Terry whose amazing essay about you in A Slip of the Keyboard I read this afternoon. Oh, Neil you poor excuse of a man and poster boy for the neighbourhood compost heap. But yes, moving on from that digression, the importance of libraries and books in my life is what I want to write about today and I want to talk about my family too, with or without the other animals we’ve adopted and we’ve cared for and had care for us.

The fact of my privilege is that I happen to be born in a family of bookworms and you cannot chuck a slipper in my house without hitting a book or a bookshelf or a bookmark. My flat is basically two bedrooms, with books on the beds ,three chairs, a quilt that my mother used as her personal arson practice area, (by this I mean that she would inevitably drop lit cigarettes on the poor thing), repurposed to make a small sitting room and a rocking chair and armchair belonging to my great grandfather. The rest of my flat is books and aside from the books telling their own stories, these books end up telling a second and sometimes even a third or a fourth story. There’s the book my father bought from Golpark and read in two nights before a date with my mother when they were courting, there’s the book I salvaged from the books I gave my grandmother, which has her name written on it in my handwriting, there’s a book belonging to the grandfather I never knew, which I discovered was being held together by electrical tape and I read from cover to cover, getting chills when a certain man in it asks his brother in law to “answer for Santino”. And of course, (because life isn’t all smiles and sunshine), there are the books that languish in the house,  which I do not have the heart to discard and yet know that I will never read again, unless my mental health improves a little more and it doesn’t hurt to think of the woman who they belonged to.

In the bookcases littering libraries galore, I found a different world to the one in my house. I found a world of faeries and goblins and assassins and teenagers who didn’t do maths homework but found ways to catch a murderer. I suppose my love for the whodunit stems from the discovery of the short story collections edited by Alfred Hitchcock where I was shown a whole new world of mystery and fear or the ones written by Franklin W Dixon, the quintessential Frank and Joe Hardy who were cool enough to know how to utilize karate chops while I had trouble eating with chopsticks. The happiest hours of my schooldays were the ones spent in the library in the arms of Orpheus and Eurydice and Alexander Dumas and the rebel Mowgli. I learnt that animals have voices, I heard the clarion call of gods and had a crisis of faith when I realized Batman is a psychopath. I found hope in Frodo’s loyal Sam, wishing to roam the lands of Middle Earth forever, Balrog forsooth!

Then there was the library mouse that showed up one day out of the blue and we talked for six years, daily. We shared so much of our lives and libraries with each other. We cried at the same bits in books we had discovered- me in garage sales or secondhand bookshops here and there and my friend in multiple bookstores across the sea. I suppose I owe so much to people who don’t even exist (and to those that do), for it was in books that I found a way to talk to girls at parties and became confident about language and unapologetically shout from the rooftops that I am a weird guy who reads a lot.

My debt to English teachers who saw this need in me, principals who helped me build it into a way of life and friends who came into my life because I read books knows no bounds. If you are what you eat, it follows that your mind is what you read.

And one day, fed up of being told that I would not amount to much as a writer, I found the cojones to found this blog. I should say the blog found me, not too early, not too late, but precisely when I meant it to find me. Like Prince Dastan from Prince of Persia, I found that no matter what I do, I cannot change my fate. I like to comfort myself on the long and lonely nights by reminding myself of the words I am surrounded by, the words that voices sing to me from my speakers, the words I have read and forgotten about and the words I am yet to discover and imbibe.

And when I look up at the sky at night, I see a million different stars and I see a billion things I can write about those millions.

This is a declaration of dedication. I solemnly swear fealty to words, and allow them to morph me and transport me to other realms and minds. I know that when I miss my parents a little too much, I can turn to the words they left behind for me, and I won’t be so sad.

To close, I am reminded of my uncle who owns a bookstore and has only this to say:

“I wish I had more time to read them all, more space to keep them all and more money to buy them all”

The Bilge Master