CDs, DVDs and Options (Oh why...?)

It’s been an odd time, lately.

Some people are, by definition, hoarders. Well, these are the definitions cast by myself, under my judgemental, neurotic eye, and are more often than not inaccurate.

I’m a hoarder. Hoarders like to hoard things away, for no reason whatsoever. Well, there is a reason that makes total sense when you decided to hoard the thing away, but over time you forget what that was.

I mean, you never know when you’ll desperately need that letter you received from a local radio station. I don’t know how many people I’ve shown that obscene email I printed out, due to it’s low-brow hilarity. Oh, that’s right. Zero. Yet, it’s still filed away “just in case”

Speaking with my ex-girlfriend the other night, she revealed that she still had a poem I wrote to her for our one month anniversary (Yes, X, I know that you don’t believe in that crap). I instructed her to grab the closest furnace and toss it in, but she yielded. I guess some people like to grasp onto crap poetry written by melodramatic and over-romantic twenty one year olds.

Anyway, due to my moving out of this house in a matter of weeks, I’ve had to go over some of the crap I’ve built up. Eventually, I made my way to the DVD and CD collection. It made me realise how much I have changed, and how much my outlook has skewed over the past five years.

I sat back and watched American Beauty, Donnie Darko, and The Red Violin. I also had a listen to Ben Folds’ Fear of Pop, Faith No More’s Album of the Year, Muse’s Showbiz and Something for Kate’s cover of Duran Duran’s Ordinary World.

And the memories flooded back.

For a while there, I had lost the ability to comprehend all the beauty that life offers, as each day melded into a long, drawn out haze of paying a mortgage and building capital.

Each scene, each note played and each tone of Mike Patton yanked me out of this current world and back into an era of wide-eyed idealism. Things seemed so much more simpler back when these visions and melodies haunted my being, and plucked at my senses.

These movies and songs represent a great lifestyle that was cast aside.

Now that I have the resources and opportunity to attempt to regain this lifestyle, I am torn between whether I should go back, or to forge out into new territory.

I’m tempted to go with the latter, although I’d be happy with the former. Sometimes in life you are forced along a certain fork in the road, and other times you are granted the luxury of option. When this luxury is staring in your face with wild, hypnotic eyes, it is difficult to stand. Sometimes you just feel like grabbing it by the short and curly eyebrows, shaking it and asking, “Why should I make this choice? Why?”

And this torment is borne from a few things like DVD’s and CD’s.

No wonder Buddhists believe that material possessions contain the seeds of suffering.

See how problematic hoarding is? It’s not healthy. Just say No.