Last week, whilst searching for yet another show to watch, I thought about The Sopranos.

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After the wake, on the day my Grandfather was buried, my Mother took two of her children and two of her grandchildren to the Target in Mowbray. Going to this Target, and now any Target, has become a strange experience. The house my mother bought when she was young, that she raised her many children in and the only one she occupied for over a quarter of a decade, is now the women's clothing department. 

I made an artwork for an exhibition about this once; my younger sister and I took masking tape and laid out lines marking where the walls of the bedroom we shared growing up once were.

On this day, to distract from our grief, my Mother said she would buy us each one thing. I chose the heavily reduced box set of The Sopranos. I had already watched the show in its entirety, and had no desire to watch it again. It infact sat in the living room of my sharehouse for the next five years, untouched, still wrapped in its plastic covering. 

Like death in our current age, it was glorified but sterile. 

There is an obvious Twin Peaks reference here, but that show has its own stories to tell, with its own set of memories, connected, always connected, but not close enough to be mentioned here. 

I am not going to pretend I am not a person of things. I think things are nice and they can be, as this box set was, important. But not as something to watch,  more something that can hold memory. 

I have always been scared of losing memories. I wrote a poem about a scar on the ball of my foot, from a time I slipped on a rock because I was so excited and scared I had caught a fish. It was about how the scar would forever remind me of that weekend I had spent with that partner. 

My youth showed my innocence and naivety, and over half a decade the scar faded and disappeared, the poem was lost somewhere in emails and journals. 

Like the scar this is what the box set was; a physical memory of a person and of a time. The acquisition was not for the enjoyment of a gritty slow noir narrative, but a scream for comfort. The time spent watching The Sopranos was the partner I had watched it with, and that was gone, and so was their care and comfort. 

This is what I was trying to buy. But unfortunately, or thankfully (depending on your outlook), capitalism hasn't managed to commodify real love and care yet. It is something that can only be given for free.

I walk out of Target/my childhood bedroom with the hard cardboard box pressed tightly to my chest. Pushing down feelings of loss. I place them all on this object, and begin to forget to process.       

Something like five years pass and I am leaving Hobart, where I have been for the past decade, to return to Launceston. I am broke and need to shed a lot of possessions. Laid out across the front lawn of my current partner's previous house are books, cds, clothes, trinkets, furniture, camera’s, (at the time I had a fun sized collection of antique and collectibles) and all my DVDs.  

I sit in the sun with a few friends drinking wine and eating BBQ meats. People come by and take things away, every single Red Hot Chilli Peppers album for only 40 bucks, a jacket that I am not sure was actually ever mine, and trinkets that were gifted but never loved.

At around 6:00 in the evening the hip new age church opens across the street, by this point we are a few bottles deep and in high spirits. Most congregants are wary of our boisterous behaviour, but a young family comes over and browse through our wares. They pick up a few books, a stuffed blue monkey (his name is Ishmael), and are on their way to service. 

More wine is drunk and we get lazy, we don’t pack up the yardsale. It gets dark and prayer ceases. The family comes back as the youngest boy (aged maybe 8) has taken to the idea of having a film camera. I am in a good mood, I had made like 300 dollars (had already spent most of it on more wine and tobacco), so I give the boy a few cameras for free. 

The family share a few jokes with us and return to their mid-size sedan. We return to frivolities. As I roll a cigarette, I can smoke again now the children have gone,  the father exits his vehicle and bounds back to us; he offers 20 bucks for the Sopranos box set. I decline, and tell him that it has sentimental value and of my now dead grandfather (drinking and oversharing come natural to me). He likes the story and offers 50, I realise I have spent a lot on the second booze run and still need petrol money to get to Launceston, so I agree.

Like the scar on the ball of my foot the box set is gone. The exact shape and size fade and the memory of it is now the memory of many things. 

After writing this the scar, the poem, the box set, the man, Ishmael the blue monkey, my dead grandfather, my sadness, my grief, the things lost, given away and sold, the move from city to city, will all be tied together. These objects themselves pull in other things, the pair of floral plastic sunglasses I had borrowed from my sister that fell from my jacket pocket into the grave as I lowered his body into a gap in the earth, the motorbike I kind of crashed when I found out that the girl I was seeing had slept with an old friend of mine on the day he was buried, the tv show I am watching now (US version of The Office) for the second time, the couple I use to watch The Office with each Friday, Fridays, the warehouse I worked in at the time I watched The Office, the homewares store I worked in when I found out my grandfather had died, where I had my first panic attack when that partner left me, the waterway that ran past her house, and my house, and then my next house, and now none of our houses. The list goes on and the more I think the more they are tied back to the box set I gripped tightly as I left Target/my childhood bedroom. The box-set that is the faded scar of my grandfather's death and my longing for her care. 

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We, my current Partner, our Dog, and our Cat, are over halfway through The Office (we just cried as Jim and Pam got married), so we will soon be looking for another show to watch.

So no doubt as we do, we will think about rewatching The Sopranos, and I will think about:

Grief and longing. 

Macaroni and Gravy. 

Lovers and friends. 

Pussy’s betrayal of the family.

Silence and noise.  

Adrianna’s lepoard print and murder. 

Loss and pause. 

How to keep moving forward in an age where we need to be still.

And what when we suggest The Sopranos will my Partner, our Dog, and our Cat think about? Of that I can't be sure. 

NB:

Michael Imperioli, who plays Christopher in The Sopranos, appears in the final season of The Office as Sensei Billy.

In chaos all things tie together.