Of Moulds and Men

Last night, mum shifted the tv with the cabinet into her room. I never watched any tv in my room so the box had stood there, served nothing more than an unsightly prop, since ages unknown. The space left behind by the cabinet exposed a huge dusty bag of tapes. Old video tapes, that is. (To my friends:) They are Not porn tapes. Unlike porn, these stuff are a little harder to find. They are my collection of cheap, dubbed tapes of classic films, quite a few of them foreign stuff. My preciousssss nonetheless and they are moulding.

I may have to admit to some sort of cheap criminal misdemeanor here. Several years ago, a friend and I would go to this video-rental shop, DnO, at Tanglin Shopping Center on a weekly basis to rent movies to watch. We usually saved up enough cash and tried to rent about 4 per week. Back then, this was the only place you could find to rent good ol' movies and stuff. LDs were just starting to get popular and VCDs were unheard of. Tapes were the common deal. I still vaguely remember the owner of DnO- Mr Odell. He passed away in recent years and his death was briefly mentioned in an article by Ong Sor Chin in the papers. He would often look somewhat stern or serious. But you would think he was pretty cool after you got to know him. Spoke good cantonese too. Usually, we wanted to watch the tapes more than once so we got into the habit of dubbing most of the tapes we rented. I know, it sounds pretty 'cheap'. Eventually, we had about 100 of these tapes. They ran from classic Westerns, black and whites to French fare and asian Jap, Taiwanese, even Indian movies.

Now, the stuff I have are moulding. I have no idea what to do with them. I wonder how my friend's tapes are doing. The fungi is eating away at the tapes as we speak. That had me thinking about moulds, fungi, maggots, bacterias and similar entities. I thought 'fungi-and-friends' are not such a bad thing after all. These creatures are nature's way of telling you to, "Pack up, shift out. Time to move on.". These guys clean up after you are done with your dirty business of living. They are like hotel room-attendants clearing your room, after you checked out, to get ready for the next guests. They do not really care who you are or what business you had. Nice attitude, come to think of it. Not trying to instigate some elitist Zen-like ideals about the impermanence of things here but it is nice to be able to just 'move on' from everything else (such as when you are sick of a place). Well, I decided to dump the tapes of course.

Just realised, this incidently had been another topic mildly to do with Death or departure of some sort. Perhaps, I should put up some sunny, fun-shine shit in the future. Ha Ha.