The Malady of Johnny Malkavian

What’s up? Change.

“Nobody believed it, but slowly it dawned on them, especially the graduates, that yes, you marry a non-graduate, then you worry about whether or not your son or daughter is going to make it to the university.“

And you wonder why nobody wants to have babies.

I count among my treasures a Forever Friends balloon (still partially inflated) my first girlfriend gave me on my 17th birthday.

This round of room cleaning (yes, it’s a perpetually on-going project), I’m actually throwing out stuff instead of just packing them in ikea boxes and stacking them around the room. My first real hurdle came when the balloon came up. I’ve kept it for more than 10 years, why throw it away now?

Why have you kept it in the first place?

I can’t remember when was the last time I allowed myself to feel special, that I was truly deserving of the attention I was getting. It was never enough, and it seemed that I kept my ‘treasures’ as constant reminders of what I’ve achieved, as if they were trophies. But they aren’t, and it was never enough anyway.

In a seperate, unintended incident, the storage harddisk crashed. I had wanted to make a digital archive of all my media, searchable by artists/actors/genre, the works, for my collection. I lost a chunk of my newer acquisitions, but had the good sense to back up those that were important to me before it happened.

It sucked. I couldn’t remember what were the titles that got deleted, but it also made me realise that if I couldn’t remember, it probably didn’t matter anyway.  I’d fallen into the trap of letting my collection define me, without realising it was so until now. I was worse than the passive consumer of content; I merely hoarded it.

A look around my room told the same sad story. It was my room, but my room wasn’t me. This was my Tyler Durden moment.

I am the Malady of Johnny Malkavian. This is my glorious detritus.

I’m clearing out my room for real this time.

I realised that the reason why I collected all those junk, was the vain hope that I might one day enter again into the situations in which they came into my possession.

Textbooks for my favourite subjects for which I subesequently went on to do well for, Men’s Health Magazine for when I was a gym nut happily filling out my tight-fit T-shirts (the RIGHT way), guitar chord sheets and other miscellaneous odds and ends from a past that will never happen again. All of them are going into the trashcan.

The past few days at the SIPF have been mindblowing, and I found myself looking forward more and more to growing as a photographer. I didn’t want to, nor need to, hold on to those old lessons anymore. In letting go, I am acknowledging that I have let them become part of me.

These chapters will now begin anew. There are now new stories to be told.

It’s because I do believe in everything.

I watched a bird drown in canal today. It was flapping like mad, and it almost looked like it was swimming. But then it got tired and went under. A few seconds later, it turned up belly up.

I can almost empathize with what it must’ve felt in those final moments.

Love is what remains when everything that is not love is taken away.