By CC Pung
Justice of Peace
Tokoh Wartawan Sabah and FT Labuan
I once read a poster that said “a neat desk is a sign of a sick mind’.
I haven’t yet found the need to Google on the veracity of this contention simply because I have never had a neat desk.
Random, obsolete and i-think-it-may-be-useful-later hings have the habit of partying on my desk.
This desk calendar of 2016 shows the degree of my undying habit.
Getting rid of it made me think of eight ears ago? Where was I then.
What big events occurred that year. Was it the year Trump first got into the White House?
My Second son turned 30 and his brother turned 40. Period.
Like old calendars quietly going obsolete on desks or shelves, our days, months and years passed into memories whether we cared or bothered to make memories of them.
Here today, into the final week of the 11th month of 2024, it suddenly dawned on me that desk calendars aren’t often seen nowadays.
I suddenly recalled discarding the blue color TM (Telekom Malaysia) fixed-line phone, clearing my drawers of old pagers, and trashing an Olivetti typewriter that sustained a good part of my early life un journalism.
This desk calendar may become sought after years from now.
I don’t know enough to know if I have not a sick mind because I never knew a neat desk.
But I am aware that keeping old things is common among decent people, and such endeavour inevitably leads to messy desks. Residents in asylums don’t have keepsakes. Do they?
Unlike blood glucose and blood pressure gauges, there isn’t a gadget to monitor our mental health, or how far away we are from alziemer or dementia.
So while I still have no urge to smash up my small collection of SLR cameras or the Philips, battery-operated vinyl record player and one beaten-up, out-of-production, manual typewriter (with no ink ribbon), I’d like to think that my faculties are pretty much where they are supposed to be.
I might be a few imaginative years younger if I had kept my Sansui record-playing set, my Akai tape recorder and a aizeable collection of 45rpm and 33rpm vinyl records.
I foolishly dumped bags of cassette tapes (remember what they arw). And am nor holding dear (I don’t know for what?)
To boxes of music and movie CDs, DVDs and what have you. My car still plays the CDs. I went looking for a CD player recently.
The shop owner suggested I try the junk shop.
Like this desk calendar, it is hard to stay relevant when everything around you reminds you ‘there is a time for every purpose under heaven’.
Editor: The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of talantang.com