When I was 19, and then again when I was 20, I had this very complicated thing with a guy who I kind of still think of as the perfect kind of guy for me – if circumstances had been different. Maybe it’s just stupid, thinking like that, but I can’t help it. Finding someone with whom it’s easy to talk, who’s both smart, funny and attractive and who even laughs at my jokes isn’t easy. Or then I’m just picky.
But then again, I come to think of that one thing he said to me once, and I feel that maybe he wasn’t that perfect, after all. Not for me, anyway. He said: “You should start drinking and taking drugs, live wild and rough, so that you have something to write about afterwards.” To my knowledge, he didn’t take drugs himself, but he drank quite alot.
It is possible that he found my soberness provoking. Because I don’t drink. I never have. I can honestly say that I’ve never been really drunk. I do sometimes take a glass of wine with dinner, if I’m offered, and I love Amarula, but otherwise I prefer water above anything else. And drugs are out of the question.
But for a while there I thought that maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to experience things like that in order to have anything worth writing about. Everything for the art, right?
I didn’t try anything though. Maybe I didn’t dare. Maybe I didn’t want to do anything that would have reminded me of that guy after things ended. I just know that since then, I have read alot of books written by and about those wild and crazy people, the ones that drink and take drugs and sleep around and I just can understand where the fascination lies. I find “On the road” both badly written and pathetic, “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas” tragic and “Creme fraiche” kind of sad. I don’t want to write about experiences like that, and if that is what is needed in order to write a ‘real’ book, I’d rather not. I guess I’m just boring that way.
I do other crazy things instead. Once I climbed a mountain. Huayna Potosi in Bolivia. 6088 meters above sea level, and all I could think about up there on the top, while the sun was coming up above the cottonlike strato clouds, was how the hell was I supposed to make it all the way down again, kind of regretting letting my friends talk me into this crazy scheme in the first place.
Once I posed for an art film that was to be shown at an art exhibition about Virgin Mary. I was a female Jesus hanging on the cross, totally naked except for a small cloth around my waist. I was offered the part by my friend Kirke, who was producing the film. The director told me to look angry at God, but all I could feel was sweaty. It was a very hot day in July, and the film was shot in an old factory without any air conditioning what so ever. Later that autumn, at the Virgin Mary exhibition at the museum of history in Stockholm, I remember standing in front of the screen showing the film, not at first realizing when the first snapshot of me appeared. I looked so voluptuous.
Or now, when I am going to Canada and western USA all by myself for five months, to volunteer at farms without much experience at all, just to see if I can handle it. That’s the kind of crazy things I do. And I feel that they are worth writing about too.
Katja Malmborg 