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Chapter 1: The Author's Voice, Style, and Politics

Tenderfoot Years: The Origins of Wheelerguy
     	Young MJ Argoso was known for two things in his neighborhood. One was a frail body that, to this day, still features a hole in his heart and an H-shaped gash at the back of his head. The other is that he read, wrote, and understood English at a surprisingly young age, enough that he could transliterate between it and Tagalog for his parents and other elders. Weaned on the English-language programming airing on Studio 23 and RPN-9 back in the early 2000s and strict instruction from schoolteacher Marisa Cauilan, he was enamored by the spectacle and accents that flavored Hollywood fare. And he often visited the newsstand a block away to read broadsheets, comparing the news from TV Patrol the night before to Philippine Daily Inquirer and Manila Bulletin the following day. At the same time, he was first regaled by his parents' tales of them and Marvin, the older brother, and their life in Gumaca, Quezon. On his fifth birthday, the child MJ was given an Ibong Adarna picture book and postcards upon postcards of the national heroes, with English and Tagalog captions. Come his tenth, he'd have both two encyclopedias and copies of Florante at Laura and El Filibusterismo, which his brother (now a high-schooler) eventually read to him for drills. After all, someone who's won bookmarks for speaking English back at Mater Carmeli School should also learn the intricacies of Filipino if he is to work as a translator, the child's first ambition.
     	It wasn't until pre-teen MJ entered high school that he started getting in touch with the writer within. He'd been lost in lucid daydreams only to be found committing them to paper before, but it wasn't a conscious endeavor given how many ideas were started, only to be left to rot. Only when he reached high school did he find himself reading more '70s and '80s-dated Reader's Digest and Time magazines than ever before. The first true story that harrowed him – and awakened a latent political fury – was that of Jacobo Timerman's capture and torture. It could not have come at a better time, too: junior-year Mark was being trained to be an extemporaneous speaker, and about ten contests later, he'd be hailed as Ramon Magsaysay España's best in 2014.
     	Those high school years are my big bang. Whereas my childhood coasted on imagination and comprehension, I spent my teen years creating a framework for learning and doing and focusing on what I wanted to do by leaving behind things I didn't want to do. That meant a rather embarrassing 60-line on one row of the report card.
	Still, it also brought me as far as Subic, Zambales, where, trained on the mic by voice actor Jefferson Utanes and the science of news writing by Sonia Alberto, we got as far as fourth overall in the 2014 National Schools Press Conference's radio broadcasting competition. With my extemporaneous speaking, my capacity to talk at length about anything had reached maturity, affording me more confidence in crowds and my power to string words together.


Bronze License: Behind Wheelerguy
     	The writer, on the other hand, won't come out until 2015.
     	I was a year removed from graduating high school when I finally got approved to post on Oppositelock, a commenter-run forum under Jalopnik.com. I began putting more thoughts about cars onto a place that didn't mind having me lurk around. What started as a mound of word vomit soon coalesced into a form that some of its members found comprehensible; eventually, my rants, raves, and ramblings uncrumpled themselves for that community to see. Being a relatively open forum, I got away with talking about Philippine politics and weather to American and European users while I was learning about fixing cars that will never be sold in Manila. I took part in live threads for the 24 Hours of Le Mans and played fantasy motor races while they learned about streets local to me that look and feel like racing circuits.
     	Without much thought, I began shaping myself into a blogger with a particular style. Picking up more from the likes of Seanbaby, Matt Farah, Charlie Jane Anders, and Jon Bois than Robert Frost or Edgar Allan Poe (and to think that I've read them both during free time in two school libraries), I slowly heard a new voice within and on the screen: a self-styled weirdo who would instead come off the beaten path than follow those who press the hot-button, and if I do, it's usually coming from a place of ignorance and bewilderment at how a more prosperous side of the world ends up with stale, borderline-stupid problems that a typical Filipino doesn't experience. This led to comparisons to an equally wild and wonderful beat writer, meant to be an encouragement as much as they are a jab at my inexperience.
		Then again, many blog-dwellers my age can trace their roots back to Hunter S. Thompson.
		He was the quintessential maverick writer, drug-addled yet lucid and alert as a hawk, his thoughts incisive as he committed to pages his experiences in sports, politics, travel, and the high-risk life he tends to lead. He lived a life far too dangerous for my congenitally-diseased self ever to try. But the resulting lines single-handedly turned Gonzo journalism into a complete organism: creative nonfiction at its ragged, event horizon-teasing best. Everything from amateur boxing coverage to the frequent spats between Deadspin and Barstool Sports and even the revival of Rolling Stone, as well as the public art of punditry, owe some debt to Thompson and his work. That includes me, who stumbled upon his Café Racer piece while being 20 tabs deep in motorcycle-related tangents.
     	And it was soon about to reach a new level.
		It was around 2010 or thereabouts; during that transition to high school, I caught an entire episode of TopGear and managed to see it through without interruption. Some weeks prior, Mom bought me a yellow Hot Wheels Ferrari 458 toy, and I enjoyed the car as a young fan of the Italian brand. Imagine my shock when a red vehicle whose body lines matched my toy came dancing around the Bravia CRT television on Channel 9, with an elder presenter singing praises to it as he slung the car at speed, joyous, as he drove it. "What an astonishing car!" he exclaimed in perfect harmony with the 458's 9000-rpm engine, and he enshrined it as one of the all-time greats. A decade later, the words only ring truer: not only is the car considered the benchmark for its segment (being used to compare new cars even today), but it's also appreciating in value as Ferrari moved on to shrinking and turbocharging its engines, as had become widespread industry practice in the late 2010s.
     	But it wasn't just the car that made me lean ever closer to the screen: it was Jeremy Clarkson's presentation of it, his enthusiastic, reverent delivery, and steady command of language even at high speeds that sold me on both the car and the style of car reviews that made TopGear a legend among car shows on television. Soon after, I was watching every episode since series three religiously, cheered and jeered at the hijinks of him, James May, and Richard Hammond. I felt awe at how well-produced and tightly-written their reviews are and wept when a controversy ended their run on the BBC.
		The only respite was that at the time, I was also watching and reading Chris Harris, another journalist who, like May, made his name at Autocar before being a star on YouTube, with a more laid-back yet rawer style of video reviews that better-suited millennial and Zoomer tastes who valued pure sound and long takes over heavy editing. His subsequent recruitment and eventual takeover of the show saved my then-deteriorating perception of TopGear, while Amazon gave Clarkson and the gang carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. Some commenters on Jalopnik were giving me hell for it, but I defended my position mainly because I'm glad to see two motoring shows even exist.

Silver License: Laying The Bitumen
     	And so it was my mindset for four years. Between 2014 and 2018, I only touched my Facebook by using it for login credentials. Instead, I frequented different forums and blogs that also carry comment sections and Reddit, which acted more like a message board than a social media site despite recent pivots to the latter model. Such a diet of articles, opinion pieces, and the comments reacting to them formed a massive bulk of my interactions online, eventually turning into an indirect classroom thanks to an array of YouTube channels that analyze popular media (examples include Wisecrack, Nerdwriter1, Thomas Flight, Filmento and Lindsay Ellis) and teach science and general knowledge topics (like ColdFusion, SmarterEveryDay, PolyMatter, Kurzgesagt, CGP Grey and Alternate History Hub). Alongside podcasts like 99% Invisible and thousands of other sites where I tried to corroborate every video I saw, it was my alternative to higher education, having held off on entering university after my aunt's stroke. Given how expensive college was, I didn't enter, and the time I didn't spend minding my aunt was time I spent online, but unconventionally relative to the typical Filipino diet.
		That is why I sound the way I do. Caught in a halfway house between informal, back-and-forth, reference-laden drivel and actual journalistic rigor, my writing is less influenced by great figures and more by a disjointed groupthink through myriad bloggers from a variety of different topics. It's not a hivemind, but it's also noisy enough that wading through to find coherent discussions (and forums that best facilitate that while still allowing nonsense posts) is hard work. And with the Himalayan amount of information available online, there may come a point where I veer off into tangents of image searches until I eventually find what best corroborates any word I write. Result: I became comfortable being both direct and meandering; my lines can, at times, have much swearing and dodgy use of formatting, and I found myself being more out-of-order with my thoughts until the very last moment, just before hitting publish and I start to catch errors or typos and realize just how "wrong" I write. Most days, however, I get away with it, so I had terrible habits to iron out once I finally entered STI College-Muñoz in 2018.
     	Another component is my background as a radio broadcaster and an extemporaneous speaker in high school. The former taught me both the inverted pyramid and to always be accurate in what I write; the latter forced me to think on the fly and harness my tendency to think aloud at myself in a more conversational (but still formal) manner. My coaches during those competitions helped immensely in nurturing my strengths and keeping my faults minimal while bolstering my confidence in how I string words together. And in place of my teachers in high school, presenters on TV and YouTube, like John Oliver, Lourd de Veyra, and Tom Scott, were my go-to models to imitate, even if I didn't feel like making videos myself (they've been done better and editing video is a hill too far for me). A typical educator may scoff or be horrified at how I was taking in information. Admittedly, I only had a way to convert many of the skills and knowledge I learned into something tangible for the longest time.
     	Until I tried reviewing that Hot Wheels 458 I had been playing in my childhood.
		The paint was chipped bare, and the A-pillars were bent out of shape, but I wanted to tell its story – my story – to fellow hobbyists and anyone else who's willing to listen. Today, I see it as the musings of a bored kid who can't think of anything better: the grammar is riddled with potholes, and the pictures look more like what one would see on Facebook Marketplace rather than a professional magazine, despite my best efforts to imitate EVOMag at the time. Yet it saw thousands of page views, had a few stars, and some encouraging comments. One of them, in particular, has stuck with me to this day: "It's like I was watching a TopGear episode." Back then, I didn't explicitly intend to achieve that feeling, but I suppose it comes with the territory. It's even more shocking considering that these comments are being typed from half a time zone away, so I value them more than likes: they keep the feedback loop turning, and I get to have a conversation, something I like more than mere reading.
     	This last component built my style: I wrote primarily to a Western audience. Unfortunately, being out of Facebook meant I needed to be in tune with the local diecast collector scene. It makes me the odd man out: I am possibly the only Filipino crazy enough to have this sort of online persona for four years. Even after I began earning money off of blogs that I write, it still stuns me that most of my reader base is overseas. Until I was finally dragged back into Facebook in 2018, not many Filipinos, besides friends and family, ever read my work.
     	Thus, my final weakness is revealed: only now, in this course did I open my eyes to Filipino literary tradition and the general pulse of the populace. I feel ashamed for not knowing any better despite being a denizen of the Web for so long, but at the same time, I'm not too worried that I'm late to discover (and rediscover) my local roots. Learning about our tradition in this controlled environment means that, unlike the Internet, there are fewer distractions, the integrity of each lesson is almost absolute, and the application is immediate and readily apparent to me. The techniques I've learned – and the material that best exemplified them – have enriched my writing to a level that makes me proud, even if I still think I'm not up to par.
     	Yet that is the sort of miseducation that may make Professor Conchitina Cruz say "bless your heart" to my face – after all, she has seen firsthand how American New Criticism stripped the historically-conscious and reflective nature of writing out of the craft of writing, especially in the Philippines. Renato Constantino was the first to see the significant signs in this country's education system back in 1966, and Cruz takes the idea further into the art of creative writing itself.

Without engaging structural relations in narrating its own provenance, and later, its prominence as an institution that defines Philippine literary production on a national scale, the Silliman Workshop aids and abets the miseducation that Constantino rages against. Its pedagogy perpetuates colonialist and classist ideas about language and literary production, which are camouflaged, if not naturalized, in the name of personal bonds and in the service of craft. (Cruz 7)

     	Worse, I was so oblivious to this online-addled, Western-influenced mindset and foundation that it took me until entering UST to revisit the columns of Conrado de Quiros, my first newspaper idol, and Quinito Henson, who, before encountering his Philippine Star column in high school was only the "boxing and basketball commentator" guy to me. As far as I can tell, I didn't have any frame of reference for "literary" any more than a typical resident of the Net would. Try as I might, I still wrote like a Westerner even when talking about the Duterte administration elsewhere, but without any supervision, I never felt compelled to rethink my approach. In the same way the Tiempos institutionalized a way of thinking that excluded national sensibilities, I was coming to terms with the subconscious limits of my media consumption.

Gold License: Who I Write For and Why
     	All that had to change once DriveTribe decided to pay me money.
     	I was already building up to the more typical magazine style before being a paid contributor: with a search history composed of the best from Jalopnik, Road and Track, Car and Driver, and Motor Trend, I was pushing for more sophistication in my diecast reviews, treating the toys as though they were real cars on loan. From the photos to the words, I was modeling my blogs to that of "real" magazines and magazine shows from the likes of Jason Cammisa, buoyed by (again) lessons I could find while loitering in John Lambert's theLamleyGroup blog. With it came another awakening: an economic kind. The reviews weren't merely grading the car based on looks or build quality but on value. Toys aren't a top priority when it comes to expenses, so I had to justify the value of a given diecast. "Is this car worth the steep price I tend to pay just to get it?"
     	That value question made me ask more questions about my worth as a writer and collector. Above all, it made me wonder about those who can't afford these cars at all and thus may be unable to appreciate why I fawn over them. Starting in January 2020, I began to show off those same toy cars to the neighboring kids. I did this partly to make the most of sunlight (as I had grown frustrated with my house's dim lighting, which necessitated laborious exposure stacking) and to get comfortable with having kids look and play with my toys. Ironically, they don't pick up the cars unless I let them, but they ask many questions about what they are and how they sound in real life. “Wala po kaming ganyan eh,” said one kid in rags. It was my ultimate privilege check. I was in the streets of my barangay, crouched down while taking photo after photo before running home, with nary a care about the immediate world around him. How damning.
     	From there, everything else fell into place. After apparently reading enough of my material, John Coleman introduced me to DriveTribe's Creators Program in 2020. His only advice: "Continue writing, and expand your horizons."
The money was gratifying and began enabling more diecast purchases, but the mere fact that I was getting a "salary" meant that I needed to produce work worth a place on the front page. I covered new-car reveals, motorsport news, and recalls between 2020 and the untimely closure of DriveTribe's social blogging element in 2022. I also sought out interest features, going as far as interviewing subjects over direct messages to guarantee that I have permission to use their photos and get their story right. With Ms. Alberto's voice ringing at the back of my head and a constant stream of excellent content being produced daily on Drivetribe that I can emulate (read: steal from stylistically) and refer back to, I found my follower count rising. I had a quantifiable readership (128 followers by the end), with click rates teetering in the hundreds of thousands.
     	But when I saw Alessandro Renesis, a founding contributor, cover the crushing of luxury cars by the Duterte administration four days after I heard it on TV Patrol, I felt awful. The miseducation – and simple sloth – reared its ugly head yet again.
     	I disappointed myself enough to skip supper. I could have sworn I planned to write that earlier! I could have told a more straightforward, accurate story – from an actual Filipino perspective! But the missed opportunity only put into question everything I had written up to that point.
     	What else did I miss?
     	How much have I missed?
     	Did I just become an outsider in my own country's car culture?
     	I moved on, eventually – I was too busy and apathetic at the time to dwell on those questions. Yet here they are again, front and center in my poetics, making me wonder why I chose this line of work. It made me realize that I haven't been reading enough of what's local to me. It even made me interrogate why I write in English for an audience too far away for me to even know as an acquaintance.
     	Who am I serving?
     	I'm writing for myself to justify my collection and my seemingly preternatural but slowly-rotting talent to write and speak English. I never wrote for my family or friends, as they were willing to support me as long as I did well in school, so I didn't mind what they thought. I can reasonably say that I'm writing for fellow collectors and fellow car enthusiasts – but they are still foreigners to me. So it's hard for me to truly appreciate every star and comment and share they shower my written work with.
     	However, I do have a clear want: to find my place in the CNF space, if not outright carve my own. Given the many times I've been displaced and seen as the odd man out in every place I went, I want to write works that I can offer for those who are as lost, confused, and tired as I am – as signposts. And in a connected world where anyone can stand out, I want to have people consider my work as singular, truly mine.
		Strange. Possibly more than anyone who has taken creative writing in UST before the pandemic hit, I'm the one who's the most online, the one whose voice was molded by the most significant number of outside influences that aren't considered "literary." That "upbringing" should have made me a bad writer – and I am. But even now, with better training, that voice has yet to deviate from where it was back in 2016. It only got tighter, more polished and is now founded on a more solid base. This is why I feel both free and cramped at the same time. This is why I sound like I do. And why I probably will still sound the same way.
		It's also the most significant reason my work will seem atypical to the ones my block mates will do. As far as I know, I'm one of the few writers in this age group to be squarely set on blogs and the op-ed column form, and potentially the only one focused on the Philippines' automotive industry and car culture at large. It's a niche that seems to grow smaller as cars become more expensive and begin their march to electrification. Still, it's hard to uproot myself from this space and transplant somewhere else. As it stands, it has taken me being de-platformed twice (Oppositelock and Drivetribe were shut down within a year) to make me reconsider widening my horizons far more. Paradoxically, that focus has brought me actual profit, and it's hard for me to leave when there are still people who tangibly value my contributions. Between trying to revisit and rediscover local traditions while also (re)forging an international audience, writing has stopped being merely for myself. I don't want to carry on writing on wet concrete for some apathetic lurkers.
		It comes down to whether or not I have the wherewithal to make it work. Preferably on my terms, though I at least understand that market pressures, the need to build cultural capital (as sir Jowie de los Reyes frequently mentions), and the pursuit of a good grade will serve as the lens that refocuses my efforts. I don't even own a car, but if I got by with models 64ths the size, I reckon my writing style can be adapted to any other context and subject.

The Long Stint
		So my general project lies behind ten titles. Ten concepts, eight of which were meant to be published on Drivetribe (before it closed down) and any other outlets willing to let me contribute. Ten topics, each touching on an aspect of my current life that I want to show as fruits of my toil in the soil, one where every loose bolt is tightened, where each conrod is tested for straightness, where the power and torque are tuned to the utmost and sent to all four wheels as efficiently and as tactfully as I can make it. I put these ideas on reserve because I know that it'd take me fully deploying every lesson I've learned so far – and any more I have yet to learn – to create something that only I can write.
		Admittedly, taking on long-form nonfiction was different from my initial plan coming into UST. Before this, I once aspired to write a screenplay worth an Oscar. The pandemic torpedoed that plan, but I can't help but wonder if this was a blessing in disguise. Having not paid much thought to forums before, I've come to appreciate the communities I write in as more than just lines of code: they were real places, refuges in the face of endless doom-scrolling material, and a proving ground for my abilities as a writer. Unfettered by algorithms, the forum-curated blog becomes a true bastion of good reads and can encourage people to continue writing and reacting. And indeed, I've come to appreciate the power of blogs as an art form. It strikes the right balance between news and opinion, and, as I've discovered for myself, it's the halfway house that has led me to success. Whether or not I can keep this up depends on my health and gumption, but one thing is certain: I still have a lot of stories to tell.