Paradise lost

by RAF KATIGBAK

A funny thing happens the moment you lose everything. Of course, you must realize I’m not talking about the aftermath of losing everything—those five stages of loss you read about in touchy-feely self-help books: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—I’m talking about the very instant you realize everything important to you has just poof! vanished.

It doesn’t last long, mind you, no more than a few seconds really, so you have to be tuned in or you’ll miss it. There is something surreal and sort of in between about it; it’s like that strange whisper-quiet moment that occurs in a bike accident, those couple of seconds you’re actually airborne, when everything becomes silent and the world is perfect and peaceful, just after you’re projected from your bike and just before you’ve flown through the Dairy Queen window, or landed face first into the flatbed of cow manure or something comical and slapstick like that.

I just experienced that moment last week (the losing-everything-one I mean, not the bike-and-cow-patty-one). It started like an average Wednesday, just like any other Wednesday: I got up, got dressed, had breakfast, did my hour of Pogo-ball jousting, then turned on the computer to start work.

Except that when I turned on the computer, I wasn’t greeted by the heavenly chime built into those fancy Apple computers, and there was no happy little Apple with a spinning circle thingy on the screen to tell me she was about to boot up and get ready for another day of hard work. No, instead it was a weird folder icon with a flashing question mark on it. So I started it up again. Same thing, a folder icon with a flashing question mark. One more try. Folder icon. Question-mark-question-mark-question-mark. Now, I’m no computer expert, but I know when something is wrong. So I took it to my guys at i-technique (best Mac service place EVER) and zilch. Nada. Sorry, they said, in the tone doctors use on TV, the disk is fried; there was nothing we could do.

I lost everything: photos, music, work. The only way I might be able to get it back, they said, was to send it to a data recovery service who could physically take apart the drive and rebuild it long enough to take off some of the data. The cost? About the price of a new computer. The question then became, how much is my data worth? Quick calculation: back-up of my Nuggets CD Box Set: $75. Rips of my entire Bruce Lee collection on AVI: $125. Pictures of my friend Tim dressed as Steve-O for Halloween walking around a vegan loft party with slabs of raw meat hanging from his underwear: priceless.

Two things happen when you lose everything. First, it makes you realize what you care about most. The first thing that hits you, that initial loss and the things that follow, are interesting to observe. For me, first it was all of the music, which makes sense as music has always been important to my work and well being. Then it was pictures, because memories of my friends and family are dear to me. Then it was the 65 gigs of bootleg Muppet porn, the reason, well, the jury is still out on that one.

The second thing that happens is that you realize that you actually don’t need a lot of stuff. There’s something liberating about losing everything. Sure, it would be nice to have all those rare Brazilian bossa nova albums back, and the thought of scouring the password-protected forums to find another BeakerBunsenHoneydew.mpg is rather daunting, but heck, I’m still alive. I’ve got my health. I don’t need all that.

Now I ask myself, what do I have all this crap for? It’s time to say goodbye to all the junk in my life. The collection of risqué pulp fiction that I never read, the metal lunchboxes I toted around CEGEP, the dusty grey wig from my David Suzuki costume, my carpet paintings of people walking on a sunset beach, my Hulk Hands, Thing Feet and Wolverine Muttonchop Sideburns, my John A. Macdonald action figure, my prized collection of needlepoint fishermen… all of it has to go.

It’s time to live simply, purely, like a monk. Of course, that’s it! I’m becoming a monk. I’ll just live in a temple, meditate and eat rice all day. I will remove all the clutter from my life and live unclouded by the material world. I will have nothing but a bowl to eat from and a roof over my head. Well, maybe I’ll have a few needlepoint fishermen to liven the place up a bit. And maybe a 500-gig hard drive for back-ups, yeah I totally need one of those. Oh, and one of those cool new iPhones, those are pretty rad…