WHEN WORDS FOUND HIM

In the same month and year when the song We Are the World by Supergroup USA for Africa was recorded, TYRONE JOHN / Tyron John Clidoro was born. 

In his years of innocence, Tyrone John was cradled in a dwelling filled with noise and conflicts. Despite that, he found a transistor radio and several piles of books as his escape from the pressing dissonances. His young mind had adapted to utilise music and books as essential elements of his everyday child’s play.

As a toddler, he witnessed his Mama busily roaming towns, selling subscription packages for TIME Magazines, Pockets Children’s Magazines, and an assortment of children’s books. He was privileged to own most of the complimentary copies. The many vibrant, artful, fantastical, and realistic images aided him to have a vivid grasp on the narratives and articles—it made his mind progressively visualise the stories in grandeur scales. It has enkindled in him an interest in letters, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs—a love for the entirety of chronicles and sagas. It made him revere literature as a stargate into the desolate and oblivious space of understanding. As he consumed books and children’s magazines, comic books were later introduced—which he favored dearly. While he immersed himself in the many worlds that these literary pieces warped him into, the old transistor radio remained his constant companion. The music it produced underscored his engagements and musings, which gave him thematic melodies as he got lost in the books’ enticing tales. Therefrom, this experience has created in him the need for the constancy of music—fuel for his brain to comprehend the mysticisms of books. This dyad of music and books has etched the love for melodic harmonies in his heart and inscribed the veneration for literature into his mind.

Fate blessed him with a Lolo (grandfather) who had a gift for telling captivating stories. He relished the lores and fables told by his Lolo, which were even rendered in progressive versions each time retold. These were grand stories of imaginary tales, legends, and fantasies imbued with theology and philosophy. This has formed in Tyrone John’s core, the love for fictitious narratives—didactic and allegorical. These stories were told each night to purposely lull him to sleep, but instead of slowly fading into dream states, he eagerly played visual projections in his mind as his process of interpretation. Each night, as Tyrone John lay on his (buri palm sleeping mat) banig, while his room atmosphere was lit by a (kerosene lantern) lampara, he would ready himself for another tale telling session with his Lolo. As each tale was told, he had accustomed himself to the nocturnal rhythmic sounds of crickets and occasional croaking of frogs. They became his lulling tunes since his battery-powered transistor radio (which was originally owned by his Lolo) had limited usage time as replacement batteries were too expensive back in the days. He was always thrilled and eager to listen to his grandfather’s stories all the time. Each word, each line, each chapter, every character, every story was seared into his young heart as they were all fun, inspiring, emotional and mostly philosophical. This episode of his life brought about his interest in storytelling. 

As he aged older, during his self-study hours, radio had remained his day’s retreat from his everyday scholastic endeavour. With his Papa’s steadfast diligence as a father, the transistor radio was replaced with an AC-powered cassette player on which he played music through cassette tapes and listened to radio broadcasts without limits.

His whole being is propelled by books, music, and to complete the trinity, cafe latte became the third element. He had excessively consumed latte like it was an energising elixir until its chronicity led into gastric ailments—which limited him from taking it in constancy since even scarcely having a cup remains a crime. But as cafe latte is his yellow sun, an occasional grande cup, maybe once every three months is a worthy trade-off for the several days of stomach torment.

On his writing: He once attempted to write a book in his early twenties; some children’s stories which eventually got lost in time as his interest in music drowned his authorship dreams. Twenty years after, his second attempt was a success that he was able to write his very first book, DESCENT OF THE GODS. But as his first authored novel revolved on extremely vast worlds, ideas for supplementation rained excessively in his mind. It made him place his first written novel back on the storysmithing table, to adjunct more details, and hopefully grow it into a trilogy. While in the process of further refining his book Descent of the Gods, unexpectedly, his interest in photography gears lead him to plot a cinema script banking on human emotions. However, as books weigh heavier over his fascination with film, he later decided to instead translate the whole script into a book form. Hence, the novel PAPER BOATS AND PARACORDS sprouted into life.