When there’s absolutely no need for trouble… it’s when trouble likes the most to make an appearance. It’s two days that I’m struggling to make USD devices work properly. First the iPhone wouldn’t charge, then the external hard disk would disconnect all the time and nobody has a solution for it. Damned hard disk… all my photos are on it. And I won’t be able to move them anywhere because before I can do anything it will disconnect again. If I lose all those photos I’m going to get really mad. Really. Mad.

The feeling is sort of alienating and bizarrely reassuring. You don’t have anything to do with your environment anymore. You don’t have to cope. What seemed so aggravating a little time ago seems so distant now. People are merging in the background. Their forms are silhouettes taken from postcards or pictures in magazines, from vehicles going somewhere else. Places acquire a strange dimension. Details ignored for decades start to form a distinctive image before the eye. Everything becomes in a sense peculiar.

It’s so true: owning things means just trouble. One never realizes how much junk one owns until it’s time to move and to sort it out. Packing can be unnerving and deciding what’s going into a box and what’s going to feed the trashbin isn’t easy. Especially when you’re the sort of person who can’t really throw away anything.
I’ve never really got rid of things, so now I find the process of condemning anything that’s been with me for years and years to eternal oblivion almost unbearable. It’s like betrayal.
Twenty boxes of books only have been piled in the living room. There are still enough books around – my books, not counting my parents’ – to fill quite a few. But all the books I couldn’t give away with bookmooch are not to be thrown away. Some really bad comic book maybe, but no more than that. With music is another story. Because I have so many crap albums I’d gladly throw away or destroy. If only… if only it didn’t seem wrong. It seems immoral, but I don’t really know why. But the real tragedy is about clothes. What the hell… I haven’t thrown away anything in the last ten years and though now I should be able to figure out the whole thing simply getting rid of older stuff, I just can’t. Clothes that may look like rags to others still look like they have a lot of life in them to me. Also, I’m really fond of some item that has a hole here or a strange stain or a cigarette mark there.
Is there a term to describe this sort of attitude? I mean, things are only things, you can’t really be fond of them to this point. To the point of going bonkers over this sort of question: “should I throw away? shouldn’t I? maybe I’ll keep it, maybe not… it’s wrong, it’s not so wrong” etc., going on for hours and hours. It must be a clinical condition with its proper description for it. But I’m not interested in knowing it, really. You learn one definition and start thinking it has to work like that. Like with medical encyclopedias: you start reading each definition and you end being completely sure you’re having at least sixty percent of the conditions you’ve been reading about.

As a nerd kid, I got caught in the vicious circle of stamps collecting. It all began one winter evening when passing in front of a philatelist’s shop I saw them. It was a wonderful sight. It was a set of five or six – I do not remember right now – stamps portraying arlequins and fairies and other masked wonders. They were so beautiful. I started gazing at those stamps in the shop’s window everyday. Till my parents agreed to buy them. Oh, happiness! To own something so precious! It was one of the best presents ever. Many other stamps came after that. I decided to only collect British stamps after careful inspection of specialized catalogues. They looked particularly nice and anyway, I was suggested to have a themed collection. Christmas specials were the ones I liked the most. They were so fancy and full of details printed in silver and gold. But I wasn’t a real stamps nerd after all. I liked stamps not for the stamps in themselves, but for the colorful miniature illustration feel they offered to the eye. They were like tiny windows opened on magical universes. Other aspects of the collecting hobby didn’t interest me at all. I wasn’t a serious collector. The old philatelist selling stamps to me though had a different opinion about my collection. Yes, he had an opinion, as the collection was his. Once I had bought all the prettier series in the British catalogue – the christmasy or the fantasy ones or the ones about animals and nature – he started requesting I enlarged my views. So I did it, also because my parents at that point were directing me and I could not object. And I started getting other stuff, the celebrative series with inventors’ or literates’ faces, with atoms and crazy scientific subjects, the ones about architectural wonders and other cultural themes on them. They weren’t bad, only not as good as the others. They were still in the realm of what can be looked at with relative interest by any kid. But those also were not available in infinite numbers. I ran out of those as well. At that point, the old man started selling me Queen’s profiles, in all colors and values. Dozens of stamps with the Queen’s face on them. How boring. That’s when I lost my interest in stamps. Collecting wasn’t anymore fun, it was a work and I didn’t like to invest my weekly allowance on something so boring and mature. I liked too many things to waste money on that. In brief: my collection is incomplete. I’m willing to sell it. I can’t bring it with me forever. It’s a burden, of the kind you’re afraid to damage all the time without knowing why the idea of damaging it is so frightening. I went to the same shop I used to go when I was a kid to buy stamps hoping the old man would take them back for a fair price. But the old philatelist wasn’t there anymore, of course. There was a younger man, who barricaded himself inside the shop and wouldn’t open the door. After a twenty minutes wait in the cold outside the damned shop – I banged and tapped on the door to attract the man’s attention with no success – I went away. What’s a man who’s supposed to sell something, even if it’s stamps, doing in a shop where no one can enter? I wonder. I don’t know what to do with those stamps. But serves me right. I was the first to be a neglectful philatelist in the first place. The moral of the story – perhaps – is: never let your children have hobbies they’re not so serious about. It’ for their own sake. And for your money’s sake too.