Authors Electric

All through the Covid pandemic, I've been under continuous low-level stress, that spikes and ebbs depending on news I receive on personal and professional fronts. April has been a surreal month for me, as I'm sure it has been for all of us (I've been self-isolating since March due to low immunity ). The most mundane things like going for a walk, grocery shopping, watching a play, seem like things I must have done in another life that I have but a vague memory of. I've worked from home for more than a decade, so the 'circuit-breaker' here in Singapore has not changed my life in a drastic fashion. It has taken away options, though. I can't pick up my laptop and write at a cafe if my muse proves elusive, or call a friend for coffee to listen to each other nattering about our lives, or work off some steam at the gym. Add to that the relentless barrage of ugly news, and it makes me want to curl up and hide. Having looked at all this in a calm fashion ...

“Whether it is a time of inner dignity and honor or a pitiful demise is completely reliant on how we live our lives right now, today. In that sense, the ‘moment of death’ truly exists in the present.” Daisaku Ikea My father’s diagnosis of a grade-4 angioblastoma, a fast-growing brain tumor, facilitated a hard realization: over the last two years I have been a very busy writer but not a very productive one. I would very much like to blame my phone and those confounded Facebook and Instagram and Twitter apps. After all those billion-dollar corporations spend millions of dollars every year figuring out which colors and flashing icons will induce me to retweet, heart, like, friend and share. They have to. What is Facebook but billions of posts, comments and shares written by us, for free? Zuckerberg, et al thank us for our efforts by flooding our streams with ads and dreck and junk to enhance the value of their business, which is our eyeballs. I get it. They have money to make and...

One of the great things about having a dog - or in my case dogs - is that they give you a guilt-free excuse for stepping away from the keyboard or catching up on the more tedious things like filling in the tax return or housework ... they keep me regularly exercised, make sure I don't forget mealtimes,and ensure plenty of breaks for essential maintenance such as grooming, training, teeth brushing, nail clipping, tummy tickling, treat feeding and general spoiling and gazing at in adoration.They also ensure that I get up at a sensible hour and don't waste the morning lolling in bed ... But just recently Archie has taken it into his head that five o'clock (we're still talking about the morning here) is the new six o'clock. The day now starts something like a variation on the old 'are we there yet?' scenario. It goes a bit like this: Archie: Quick! Quick! Wake up! Me: (sleepily) What? Why? Archie: WAKE UP!!! Me: What? Is the house on fire? Have burg...