It won’t surprise you to learn that I’m a packrat. I’m not quite at the point of having 50 years of newspapers stored in my front room, but that could well be my future as the neighbourhood Crazy Cat Lady.
One thing you learn as a packrat is that a collection of anything breeds and expands on its own until it is far vaster than the sum of the parts you contributed to it. I suspect that these self-replicating piles are actually the destination end of the random and transient space-time ruptures into which lost socks and misplaced keys disappear. But that’s a topic for another post.
I’ve been happily puttering away in Last.fm the last day or so. Unsurprisingly, my library is a little heavy on the Tokio Hotel right now. A very cool benefit of using Last.fm is the ability to listen, through the Last.fm Autoscrobbler, to tracks that you don’t actually have yourself. In this case, I was listening to “recommended” tracks, including some classic rock stuff that I hadn’t listened to in years, including Survivor’s Vital Signs. Brought back a lot of memories. All that listening reminded me of the CDs I have that I’ve never loaded into iTunes, which made me start thinking about how the heck I was going to accomplish that — after an “accident”, my computer’s DVD drive no longer reads or records CDs.
Ooh, says I, I do have an external CD writer. Now where is the power cord? Power cord, power cord, where would I be if I was a power cord? There are tangles of cords everywhere. Cords for dead laptops, cords for equipment I no longer have, labelled cords for stuff I no longer use, mystery cords for Lord-knows-what. The nests have grown and spread out since I last looked. There’s one in the bookcase, another in the bedroom, yet another in a filing cabinet. Took me two days to find it, but find it I did. Then I stuffed all of the other cables back where I found them and resumed ignoring them while they continue to procreate.
The drive sounds like an air conditioner on high — from experience I know that it will overheat if left on for too long — but for the first time in well over a year, I can actually browse a CD. Celebrated by uploading the Tokio Hotel CDs that arrived recently, and ordered a copy of John Tesh’s Tour de France CD, which you just can’t find in iTunes. (“A Thousand Summers” is one of my all-time favourite instrumental songs, but I only have the album as an LP — and I don’t have a record player.)
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 