Jerome Dahdah

You can now purchase high-quality Instagram prints of my iPhone photography! This is a big step for me, as it’s my very first venture into selling prints of my work. Hopefully this will help finance a bit of my travels and enable me to continue capturing the world with my iPhone. With any purchase you are actively supporting me and getting a nice photo for your home or office in return. Please head on over and have a look. You can also spread the word by clicking that Like button below this post. Thanks and best wishes from Melbourne!

There have been a number of times over the past months when I wanted to write down random thoughts on this blog, but just couldn’t. It seemed wrong to follow up on the previous post without talking about what has happened in the meantime. I felt that I needed to carry on the narrative. Well then, I want to settle that issue once and for all, so here goes.

It’s been six months since I first set foot on Australian soil, and so much of my life has changed because of it. I doubt anyone is interested in reading all of it in detail (and I could probably fill half a book by now), so let me just take you through the major points.

In the past half year in Australia, I have:

• worked on a banana farm for three months in a small, rural town called Tully, Queensland
• met countless wonderful people in Tully, stumbled across many of them again and again road-tripping down the east coast, and now hang out with a bunch of them in Sydney
• hitchhiked to another town to buy boots with a new friend I’d met 20 minutes earlier
• raced along the beach in 4x4s on the largest sand island in the world, Fraser Island
• got used to working in 30°C heat and feel chilly when the temp goes down to 23°C
• been to Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns, Brisbane and other cities along the east coast
• been to three zoos but have yet to see a single kangaroo or koala out in the wild
• stayed in many, many hostels and learned to adjust to lower living standards
• lost so much weight I can barely believe it myself, and I feel great about it
• spent three days on a sailboat cruising through the Whitsunday Islands
• jumped out of a plane at 14,000 ft, despite my fear of flying and heights
  (and let me tell you it was absolutely amazing! So glad I did it! Try it!)
• felt the world’s whitest sand between my toes on Whitehaven Beach
• learned (and am still learning) to be a lot more relaxed about things
• discovered how lost I really am in the grand scheme of things
• camped out in the rain in a cheap, totally not waterproof tent
• swum with a sea turtle and snorkeled among beautiful reefs
• dived beneath waterfalls and jumped into crystal clear lakes
• CouchSurfed with awesome friends and kind strangers
• chased away dingoes at night and howled at the moon
• taken so many photos I had to buy a new hard drive
• experienced the New Years Eve fireworks in Sydney
• been having what you could call the time of my life.

There, that’s settled. Now I can start writing about random thoughts again.

Oh and if you need a web designer / front end developer, please get in touch. I’m kind of struggling to find a job here in Sydney.

Well, it’s official. I’ve quit my job, given notice on my flat and I’m currently selling sold almost everything I own. I’m trading all of that in for a one way ticket to the other side of the world with not much of a plan beyond that.

Yup, I’m going to Australia. I’ll be leaving on August 1st, armed with a 1-year work&travel visa, a backpack, my camera and a massive hunger for adventure. If all goes well, I want to move on to Asia and perhaps India after that. We’ll see.

Why am I doing this? Well, for the challenge, really. I’ve wanted to see the world ever since I first started thumbing through old issues of National Geographic magazine when I was a kid. That took a seat on the back-burner while I was busy doing other stuff, like going through education, building a design career, making awesome and very dear friends, trying new hobbies, failing relationships and getting drunk on weekends. As they say, life happened.

Not long ago, then, I got my hands on a global lifestyle magazine and it did a remarkable job of resurfacing that deep, forgotten longing. It’s not like I want to live the glamorous life portrayed in the magazine – I want to see the world as it is, city and country, rich and poor. It just reminded me that there is so much more going on in the world beyond our day jobs and evening parties. That may sound a little sad, but if we’re honest, we’re all sort of living in this comforting 9-to-5 bubble. Some friends I’ve made in recent years spend a lot of time traveling, incorporating that into their daily lives instead of just for holidays, and thus breaking that bubble. Watching this mobile lifestyle has been highly inspiring to me.

So I figured now is as good a time as any to just go for it. I’m still a city dweller at heart, so I don’t plan to slap on Birkenstocks, live in a tent and spend my days cursing the woes of capitalism. But I will strive to wander around a little aimlessly, do some couch surfing, try my hands at farm work and job around in Sydney or wherever opportunity and chance lead me. Perhaps I will stumble upon a career-changing idea along the way, who knows? I’m pretty much open to anything right now. I have no idea what I am doing and that’s exactly what makes this so exciting to me. It’s time to break out of my comfort zone and start living.

Bring it on.

Doing… doing… always doing. Never sitting still, feet shoving, legs twitching. Always full of energy, full of thoughts, full of feelings and intentions and memories and everything crashing around in my mind all day and all night and never ending.

Eternal stream of consciousness, never focussed on one thing, always changing, shifting, moving, evolving, resetting, rethinking, unthinking, undoing, redoing and redefining. Discovering, inhaling, remixing and exhaling. Experiencing and suppressing and forgetting and remembering. Analyzing. Overanalyzing. Finding and loving and craving and losing and hating and fearing and just not caring anymore.

Always fighting the urge to create and giving in. Always starting something new and never finishing. Racing the clock in hopes of being done before interest moves on to the next best thing. Constantly failing. Opening up the editor just to write anything for the sake of writing, the sake of creating, the sake of doing something meaningful. For the sake of being heard. Having nothing to say and saying it anyway. Shoving this into your face and not knowing what to make of it. Feeling relieved, now on to the next thing.

Forever restless. The story of my life.

Invent a memory of me. It can be anything you want, so long as it’s something that’s never happened… – Nico

It was getting rather late. Far too late for this crap. The symbols on the flickering monitor had started to doze off, glowing all blurry and washed out, and I felt the surrendering urge to join them in their slumber.

I needed to get out of this city. It was pulling me down, dragging me along its filthy streets face first, shredding away all ambition and aspiration, shredding away the last significant bits of my face. Years ago that had been different. Years ago this hole meant independance to me. Finally on my own feet, in my own appartment, in my own city. It was my life, and it was in my hands. I knew this was happiness. It was my first step into freedom.

How foolish I was.

I had walked into a cage. It had tempted me with its flashing lights and interesting faces. The longer you lived there, the more you realized how the old city resembled that cage, with its dead towers and rusty parks. The faces had dropped their masks and revealed grey shadows, creeping along the streets, one by one, each one resembling the other more and more.

I needed some fresh air, knew I would never get the papers done on time in this state. Reluctantly, I pried myself off the desk and made way for the balcony, leaving the glowing symbols to rest for a while. I slid open the shrieking glas door and stepped outside. Fresh, cool air enbosomed me as if it were trying to tell me something. For all I know, it could have been, “it’s ok now, you’re not going anywhere, but have a rest”. At that moment, it didn’t make much of a difference what it said.

The usual urban night sounds met my ears… a tumbling trash can here, a stray cat there, the occasional bypassing cars, and that familiar monotonous mumble that wove its way through the grey building blocks, gathering every little drop of noise in its path and assimilating it to an undefinable, collective matter.

I closed my eyes and absorbed it in its full essence.

“Are you coming?”

After a few deep and sighful breaths of air, I turned around and looked at you. Even now, standing in the dim light, sleepy and shaking desolately in frost, your seraphic silouette beckoned me.
My eyes swept over your delicate body and stopped at yours, which gently penetrated my clouded mind, as if they were searching through my entangled thoughts and sorting them out for me. Minutes passed, as I stood there transfixed, spellbound by your sorcery.

“Are you ok?”

This was it. This was why I was here. This is what held me here, what I was living for. I knew it now more than anything else. Fuck everything. Nothing mattered now. We had to get out of here, together.

“Yeah… yeah, I think so. I’m coming.”

 
‒‒‒‒‒
A short story by Jerome Dahdah, May 2004

Meet my bookshelf. It stands in my apartment and carries some of my favorite things: many books that I have read, lots that I haven’t yet. An awesome little textile rendition of my Richard character that my dear sister made for me. Some paintings I did when I was into acrylic and canvas one cold winter, including one I did on a cheap Converse knockoff. My old camera that introduced me to photography. Documents and receipts. A Coke bottle I liked so much I brought it home with me from a vacation in Croatia. A shoebox filled with small, trivial objects that remind me of my childhood. The kind of stuff you’d find in a shelf.

And it’s really just that: a bookshelf.

It’s also my most popular photo on Flickr. It has over 4000 views, almost over 30 favorites, it’s featured in 2 galleries, has provided me with invites to numerous groups, has won two Flickr group prizes and for a while it was one of the top results on Google Images. Whoa!

Why do I mention all that? Self-praise stinks, as we say in Germany. Well, it would, if I were trying to take credit for it, but I’m not. The whole thing just developed a life on its own, and I think it’s hilarious! Really, I love the irony: of all of the effort I put into my photos, it’s the boring, 2-minute, full frontal shot of a bookshelf that grabs all the attention.

It baffles the mind.

Some time last year, my friend Thomas and I decided to drive to the ocean rather spontaneously. For reasons beyond my control, we didn’t leave early enough, so somewhere along the way, we realized we wouldn’t make it there before it got dark. We decided to stop at the next city and look around instead.

That happened to be Nijmegen, Netherlands.

View this set on Flickr.