(You write a little something every day. That is Rule 1. It doesn’t matter if you’re too brain-dead to pen something remotely comprehensible, or if lethargy is eating at your consciousness. You get some words down, even a little bit. Even a single word. And you do your best to make it count.)

***********************************************************************************

It started with a man named Odd Gleditsh.

(There’s nothing odd with Odd; it would really mean The Tip of the Blade, and it’s a nice name by Norwegian standards. This little snippet of information is taken from Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants, of which Odd Gleditsh is in no way related to.)

Odd Gleditsh was born into whaling. He whaled. And he whaled well enough to rise several ranks and made himself business supplier to a few whaling fleets. It was impressive, and he became successful enough. It was around 1920.

And somehow, being a man quite unlike most men, he saw something in Paint.

He started selling paint. And when the paint sold well enough, he started making them. He took over a bankrupt factory and resurrected it under the name Jotun Kemiske Fabrik. Odd died in 1990, but Jotun would live on to be one of the world’s most renowned paint manufacturers.

20 years after Odd’s death (in his pictures, he was a happy man. And there was a joy in his smile, which looked like he smiled from the heart, or perhaps from the brimming depths of his bank account), a man named Tan Heng Kai walked into a Jotun shop, opened – like the many thousands of Jotun shops across the world – in a Malaysian town named Kajang. There, he bought a Jotun paint. It was wood paint.

A month later, the tin of paint was opened and placed on top of several pieces of newspaper, and every quick successive moment, a brush would dip into it. And that brush would smear the paint over a wooden fence. Sometimes, if handled clumsily, some of the paint will fall on a hand. That hand would be mine.

And I would wipe it off with thinner, mostly unbothered, and continued with the painting while Fred Astaire’s Cheek to Cheek came out of my mouth in the most terrifyingly tuneless ways.

Somehow, to that man named Odd Gleditsh, who made the company that made the paint that I had applied, with as much care as leisurely painting would give, to a fence that sat on a balcony that perhaps isn’t quite a balcony, I couldn’t decide if should hate him or be thankful for him.

But even so – and I realised this after I shut the tin of paint and replaced it back into the storeroom –, and if Odd had continued whaling and never sold paint, my dad would’ve still gotten something from Nippon. That, then, would’ve been another story.

And I'm not even sure why this is here.

***

I confess:

I had meant to continue writing the novel I had put off for a month. Only that I had really missed out the bit in the Rulebook of Writing (if there ever is one, and not written by someone) that one should, perhaps, really really refrain from putting off a novel for too long. That’s because one would simply forget the plot.

So I was really reading back what I (and my amazing partner) had written, and then erasing one small bit where I had written blindly into, and now I’m trying to plot something that wouldn’t come.

I’m a failure.

The good thing is that I have my drive to work tomorrow to plot, if I’m not too busy having my mind really in the clouds and deep into dreams of skies and stars.

So right now, I’m merely writing for the sake of writing something.

***

I am also waiting.

And I might not have to wait much longer anymore. In 10 minutes time, I’ll be delving into a kind of drug that isn’t administered through needles or by sucking powder or by inhaling smoke. All it takes are words, a voice and a face.

It’s a potent drug. And I am addicted.

Severely, addicted.

And it puts me higher than this.

Much, much higher