ME: UPCLOSE AND CANDID

THE fictional Peter Pan who refuses to grow
old has so many likes in real persons, including Carlos Dangca Marquez Jr.
(A.KA. Boy Marquez) – in his own right a journalist, poet, artist, animal and
human rights crusader, climate change awareness advocate, friend to the poor
and few rich, and trying-to-be-good-husband-and-father. Although dissimilar in
certain aspects – depending on the social and political outlook and economic
upbringing – self-confessed Peter Pans often agree about having been forever
trapped in some nostalgic time warp and could not resist to listen, for
instance, to the music of their youth upon which they relive scenes and
conversations both liked and disliked for their inevitability and by which they
base their present and future lives. Often times they are caught in some
eternal deja vu stance, trying to re-figure out the why and wherefores of their
existence.
Until I read, and after some time engulfed
the message of, Og Mandino's “living dead” description of people who consigned
their fate to fate itself in his “The Greatest Salesman in the World” ,
that I began to understand my mission to be of the world's and not
of my parochial room of old music and torn pages. Many philosophers great and small have
espoused that whatever God gave one should appreciate and use it to the fullest
for mankind, and it made me standstill and think and made myself believe that I
have something to do and be part of the burgeoning communities of sane and
insane, of good and evil, of beautiful and not, of obscure and famous. As I
have written so many things around me – whether I liked it or not – I have not
spoken about myself so candidly and truthfully.