Pounding The Keyboard

       There are two things that are certain in this world: growing old and dying. Most men in my family (grandfathers, my father, uncles, cousins, etc.) don’t get to be septuagenarian; they die in their fifties and sixties, some even younger. And I don’t mind. In this world that gets harsher every year, you’d be lucky to live in your fifties—until my younger sister started sharing to us anecdotes about her precocious five year old son who is in kindergarten. The little guy took nursery school with ease and ended up with the highest honor. They would sit down to dinner and his son would regale them with information about multiverse, galaxies, solar systems, the size of the moon and the planets, how tall some famous mountains are and how numbers don’t stop in the billions. No, they don’t teach these things in kindergarten; her son would search and read them on Internet. And my sister also told us how she had noticed her son getting bored with his online classes and with his teacher’s

       Few weeks ago, a sponsored post appeared on my Facebook News Feed. The post was from a page called Reedsy Prompts, announcing a weekly short story writing contest (1,000-3,000 words) and it got me interested because the result would be quick and there’s a US$50 prize for the winner (they’ll pick only one) which they’d send through PayPal. The mechanics of the contest are, you’d get an e-mail from them, giving you five different writing prompts, you can choose one and write a story about it   (if you’re prolific, you can choose all the prompts and write different stories based on them). You have a week to write it and the result will be out a week after the deadline. Nifty, isn’t it? I learned about the contest Wednesday night, I registered that night, got the prompts instantly, I chose one, wrote it the next day, Thursday, then, submitted it on Friday. They would screen your story before it could be an official entry, and my story, luckily, was approved. But there were hundr

      Marvin thinks he has a problem.      Hailey, his girlfriend of ten years has dumped him and run off with another man and now, as he is trying to move on and forget her, he’s starting to see her everywhere. Every time he sees a bespectacled woman with long black hair, he sees Hailey in her. There’s a bespectacled long-haired woman queuing at the supermarket counter, and for a moment, he thinks it is Hailey. He’s inside a train and he can see Hailey at the bespectacled woman in front of him.   He’s in a restaurant and he thinks, for a few seconds, that the woman sitting at a table across him is Hailey.      “You’re having withdrawal symptoms,” Jimmy, his friend, tells Marvin. “That’s what happens when you stop doing something you’ve been doing for a long time. You’re a drug addict, you’d have withdrawal symptoms when you go into rehab. You’re a chain smoker, you stop smoking cold turkey and you will have withdrawal symptoms. You’re in love for so long and you suddenly stop se

       So the past few days, I’m seeing on my Facebook News Feed pictures of reunions of komiks writers (which I used to be) and editors. Reunions, plural,   meaning these are reunions/parties held in different years (always around Christmas and New Year). And I realized I wasn’t there, that I haven’t attended even a single reunion. I was invited to many of these gatherings, I acquiesced to some of them, but still I didn’t attend, preferring to stay at home, drinking alone, staring at the wall or watching some paint dry while listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s I Am A Rock .      But now, looking at these photos, and how the people there seemed jovial and in high spirits, I probably should have attended. The food seemed delicious and beer, of course, is free. Tsk! It was a terrible mistake missing these gatherings. I probably would have had a grand time being in these partie—Wait, somebody sent me a private message, it’s from a friend who’s also a writer and he’s inviting me to a