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’s for their own sake. And for your money’s sake too.
Author: Pu
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Absent homes
It’s weird to wake up everyday in a place where you don’t feel safe, at ease. In a place where your relations are not only strangers but enemies. Where you touch things that you should be owning and you perceive them as sly unknowns.
There was a time when home was a word with a meaning, even in my own vocabulary. When the word home aroused all sorts of familiar feelings, accompanied by reassuring images. Not that even in those days the feeling was frequent. But at least I could tell how it was to connect the idea with a factuality.
What’s home? I mean, really? I don’t see how some place has to be home just because you don’t know any better. Even with all the frustrations and disappointments. How can you constantly be disappointed in a place and still be able to call it home? Apparently it doesn’t take much for people to be contented, otherwise I wouldn’t know how to explain this constant putting up with exasperation. And how would you call home a place where your dignity, if you have some, is denied in every possible way? Getting mad for ten minutes every now and then isn’t enough to replace the dignity you keep on losing. Abulia and apathy aren’t necessarily arms in the hand of the strongest. They’re vicious maladies that gnaw at your brilliance, at your will to be and do.
A lot of talk I hear from everybody. They all have their neatly folded opinions about everything, even about what they do not know. If they do not have one, they can make some up or steal it from a TV show’s host or a magazine for bored housewives. But I reckon in their depths, where something valuable should be, where authentic home should be, there is nothing but this dull contentment, so they can go on another day.And yes, I am truly as simplistic as a kid in my notions. That must be why I do not update often, ha!
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Untitled
Around people I feel nauseous, because I see through their sordid intentions, their excuses, their unwillingness. All of us, liars. All of us, deceivers. Looking for the quickest path to shut ourselves in self-absorption. Grinning all the way through the day, rolling the eyes to conceal aversion. Requesting assistance but refusing humane barters. I don’t trust any of this. I’m too much into it to not know how it works. Every step forward you get pushed backward, isn’t it how it is? Some are a little too good at waving their arms, at overindulging, that’s why they seem to progress so, while the rest of us, the inepts, keep on regressing day in day out.
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Things to do
Time goes fast. I didn’t realize just for how long I’ve been neglecting everything. I turn around the head and it’s already a week. Then two and three. A month. How can anybody be so distracted. It’s all my doing. For delays are an addiction. One day the cat’s gone lame, the other there are bills to pay, the other mothers are going bonkers over something. Futile matters and my brain can only take so much at one time. I forget to write back, to call back. I lose books I am reading and I have to start new ones. And I’ve been stuck in one of these vicious insomnia-drowsiness-insomnia circles and every schedule’s been pretty much fucked up, as one day I would spend twelve hours sleeping and the next I wouldn’t be sleepy at all. So would end doing all things at the wrong time of the day and now that I’m feeling able to be back to a more regular pace I really have no idea where to start. And there is this thing I’ve been trapped into, and I’m not going into it because it will surely go bad before I know it, that I’ve been forced to work on for the last two three weeks and now that I’m nearly done with it it looks like I gave birth to a monster or worse, to a clownish monster. I said tomorrow I’ll be done with it anyway, and that’s what I’m going to do. This means I still have something to do.
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A remorseful teacup killer
With Autumn approaching and air getting chillier little by little, I am able again to come back to my torrential tea habits. Yes, and this means I will be soon in trouble. Because my beautiful Japanese teacup got smashed accidentally in July. It was an unpleasant accident, involving a bear, hard candy and the printer. The teacup was innocent and got mixed in this whole gory affair in spite of itself. That’s because I’m keeping all my things in a very limited space, so I deserved it. I haven’t learned a lesson from it, that’s for sure. And I don’t have decent teacup anymore. I’m browsing ebay to find a replacement; since I want my cup to come directly from Japan it’ll take some time. What will I do in the meantime? I have other cups of course. But I don’t like them. My cup was tiny and had beautiful carvings in it. Those I own are stupid cups painted with ugly flowers or fruit. I don’t remember buying them, I don’t remember anybody in the family ever buying them. Who wants something so characterless? They probably came with something else. I don’t know how some objects come to live with you in these cases. I also have a thermal cup I got as a gift ages ago, when I was in high school. There’s a dismal frog in a field on it. It’s a thermal cup. The frog tells you by turning into a prince when the content is hot. But it’s a big cup, presumably for milk rather than for tea. There’s also that expensive tea set I got for Christmas. It’s vaguely Asian in style, but it’s probably made in Italy. That’s not the point anyway. I have nothing against it. It’s that I don’t want to use a teacup that has other three twin sisters stashed away in a dark box somewhere. I don’t want to depersonalize my very intimate tea-sipping ritual. And the teapot. I don’t need that pretentious teapot. It’s small and it looks terribly fragile despite its sturdiness. I wouldn’t know where to put it. There’s enough kitchenware around this house already. I have my own teapot, something conveniently anonymous that will hold a lot of tea and I can keep in my room without fearing to break it every five minutes. I have other six or seven teapots around the house, stuff somebody bought and never even used. Again, items with gold platings and flowers and things like that. I’m not old and brain-dead enough yet to want to use something like that or even look at it on daily basis. The truth is I wish I didn’t kill my teacup. But I know if I’ll get another I’ll keep it in the same spot I used to keep its dead predecessor. Sad, but I have no other place in the room to keep it. It’s the only free spot there is, apart from the chair.
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What am I to do with you, Papa?
I‘m torn in two everytime. I can’t share your passions and views, I can’t share your being a man with all these idiosyncrasies, though I can sense and understand them all, one by one; at the same time I do praise the grace, the precision, the art that forms and shapes the writing. The intelligence, the higher degree of humanity, the respect shown in it. I’m no blind to all of that. I can’t decide which aspect results as winner in this conflict. You make me frown. And you fill me with awe. But a reading soul isn’t a soul as a whole entity, so I can’t just ignore the frowning and the reproach even when entangled in the wonder. The fragility and the impotence that envelops your being, the very human fall toward the wrong side of the natural moral, the tragedy of extreme anthropocentrism but also the longing for all that’s sacred in the natural world, the hunger for Nature’s titanic stature. Which one of this is the real you? I assume it’s both. That’s why I’m so torn. Torn between revulsion and admiration. Because how am I supposed to form an opinion that will be coherent and solid and without cracks if I am to despise one thing and admire the other? If I can’t take you as a whole, I do have to forget about the complexity of your multiple facets. Look from a vantage point at the matter that forms your creation from one side only, ignoring the rest. Betraying your essence. You do that to me every single time I pick up one of these books. And the more I read the more amazed and confused I am, because I can’t stand on firm grounds. I can only go on and on until words are over. But the conflict remains.