OLD STUFF

I’m going to move in a couple of months, and I’m sorting out what to keep and what to get rid of. My goal is to get rid of as much as possible, so I’m doing it in several waves. I’ve already purged two thirds of my books to be donated to the social bookstore in my neighbourhood as well as the comic book library Renate.

I obviously have a lot of old drawings from my childhood and youth that I’ve been carrying around with me. A lot of the stuff from my teenage years is really terrible and traumatic, and I’m happy that I can BURN it to ASHES in my wood stove. Good riddance.

Here are some pieces that I’ll keep, though:

I think this is the best drawing I made in 1995, at the age of 13 or 14. :o)

One of my very earliest comic strips, with a rather strange punchline … No idea what year it’s from, but I must have been somewhere between 5 and 9.
(Ana buys mosquito repellant in Tinneland / I’m going on a mountain trek tomorrow. So I’d better buy some mosquito repellant. / “Anti-mosquitorepellant” it says. It should be all right. / I’ll try some. / NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY IT’S CALLED ANTI-MOSQUITOREPELLANT!”)

Below is a map of my high school in Angered that I got when I started there in 1997, so I wouldn’t get lost.

I drew the little flying piggy in the upper right corner, and to cheer me on, Ainur (left), mum (bottom) and Mitsu (center right) drew little piggies for me too … Yes, Mitsu drew a self-portrait. I helped her hold the pen in her paw.
After we moved to the countryside and got Sergei, a real little piggy, we stopped making piggy jokes about poor Mitsu …

Around that time I wrote a lot of terribly pathetic poetry, mostly in English. The best ones were total Bob Dylan ripoffs. But here is one I kind of like, because it’s about Mitsu and going for morning walkies with her along Lärjeån in Hjällbo:

I walk with her through the cold of morning
Seven AM and the world is forming.

Crystallines tumble as I breathe out
She turns to me, lips in a pout.

On the embankment a streetcar rolls by
Electric blue fire through a waking sky.

The world is cold, a voice once said to me.
Do your best to keep warm, preaches she.

As for the following series of drawings … no comment.
I drew them on the back of bank statements for my mum’s weaving studio company account from 1989, so I was 8 years old at the time.

Mother – Blacky – 43 years

Puppy – Catherine the great – 16 years – girl

Puppy – Nosko – 18 years – boy

Puppy – Noska – 15 years – girl

Puppy – Tongui – 13 years – boy

Puppy – Swingy – 12 years – boy

Puppy – Neni – 15 years – girl

Puppy – Greeny – 17 years – boy

Puppy – Svea – 20 years – girl

Father – Nosne – 44 years

* * *

To be continued (maybe) as I go through more boxes …