~
A few months after our Baguio workshop, VBG shows me a manuscript he’s fine-tuning into fiction, a print-out of an immense epistolary effort between him and his First Ex. He lets me read it and with VBG having an intensely whipsmart wit, it’s about as funny as can be expected, but with the narrative having the disadvantage of being real, it is also corny and trite and eventually ugly and cruel and unfair.
He doesn’t include it in his final thesis, not even in any of his two short story collections.
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Why can’t we all be like Eddie Vedder, pain and frustration of heartbreak distilled into the last lines of “Black” (Ten, Sony Music, 1994): “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life / I know you’ll be the sun / In somebody else’s sky / Why / Can’t It Be / Mine”?
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All that I have to say about “heartbreak” is in a three-line poem SRM recorded for the spoken word compilation of a long time coming, a long time gone: the 2006 Literary Apprentice Lite (self-published, 2006). It’s the first track in the audio CD, and she only had me recite it once to get it right.