Halifax — As the video starts, you see a 14-year-old Malcolm Harris in his parents’ basement. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is on the screen behind him. As the clip runs, you watch Harris age years in a matter of seconds.
As the clip ends, you see a 24-year-old Harris, overweight and pimpled, in his parents’ basement, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on the screen behind him.
“I didn’t even plan it like that,” said Harris, with a prideful grin. “It just happened! It’s kinda like I’ve gone full circle, you know?”
The metaphor is apt. A line that forms a circle lacks growth, an outward direction, and is always touching itself.
By his own admission, Harris has never once had a romantic relationship, although he says this is not for lack of trying.
“Women, man. They always put the nice guy in the friend zone,” he mused, shrugging. “Not that I’d know, really. I’m actually quite hateful towards women. I think it’s due to some unresolved issues with my mother.”
Whatever those issues may be, he’s had plenty of time to work them out, living, as he has, with his mother for the past 24 years, unemployed and uneducated.
“All he ever done is play them stupid vidyah games on the TV, and takin’ pictures of himself on the computer,” said his mother. “He’s pathetic!”
She spit on the floor with disgust. The family dog dutifully lapped it up.
“I don’t even know where he gets the money to buy all that crap,” she added.
“Oh, drugs,” he explained later. “I sell drugs.”
He went on to tell The Manatee how the 10-year, 3,000-plus-picture time-lapse clip came to be, and what the video meant to him.
“I saw a video on YouTube back in ’07, and thought hey, I could do that,” he said. “As I got older and my life got worse, it became something of an obsession. It really puts your life into perspective.”
He took out his laptop and opened the video to show what he meant.
“You can actually pinpoint the exact moment I realized that life is just a series of disappointments and that I would never amount to shit, right…about…here!”
He paused the video just as the pictures turned from a chipper, happy boy, to a jaded, miserable young adult. Despite being just a single part of a continuum, the shift was immediate. It was as though all the weight of the world had fallen on him in one soul-crushing moment.
He looked up from the computer and smiled.
“Cool, huh?”