So.
It seems I have a lot of what we like to call 'stuff'. Books, Cds, Dvds, etc. No, really, working for six years at a second-hand book store, and then three years at a music store...well, it piles up. So much so that when you ask people if they want to help you move, they tend to pretend that they didn't hear the question.
(All kidding aside: thanks again to all of you who helped, and I totally understand that everyone else had other shit to do, as it was Halloween, and it's much more fun to run around pretending to be Zombies or Robots or (my favourite) Random Drunk People. I still love all of you. Except for YOU. You know who you are...)
So. I gotta do something. See, as much as I love the idea of having the largest media library this side of Alexandria, I gots bigger concerns coming up, so I gotta pare some of this down. Here's my plan so far:
1. Upload all of the 2000 Cds (no, really, how in Jeebus' name did this happen?) onto my computer, so that I can just keep the actual Cds in storage and pawn them all off in the event of an emergency, as a few of my friends might recall me doing a few years back when I was unemployed and relying on Hot Wax Records to pay my rent. Dude: at four or five bucks a pop, that shit adds up.
(Cds that I'm ripping as we speak: Quantic, One Off's, Remixes & B-Sides (nu-soul trip-hop featuring people like Mr. Scruff and Bathysphere); Puscifer, V Is For Vagina (Oh, Maynard...because no one can be as serious as Tool usually is forever...); Boris, Pink (I heart Japanese metal); Guided By Voices, Human Amusements At Hourly Rates (Robert Pollard has written 500 of the best pop hooks ever, even if they only last for 40 seconds at a time...); Eels, Souljacker (wherein the artist only known as 'E' revels in his Unabomber look); Quannum, Solesides: Greatest Bumps (the early years of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious AND Latyrx? Yes, please...); Sixtoo, Jackals & Vipers In Envy Of Man; Mogwai, Mr. Beast (epic Scottish shoegazer wankery); Pelican, Australasia (see Mogwai, only heavier and more epic; this is what we call an Essential Album, because if you do not own this then I cannot be your friend).
Whew.)
2. Read the first ten pages of every book I currently own but haven't even cracked (I'm not even bothering with counting how many I have, as the answer is obviously: TOO MANY.), and if it hasn't hooked me by that point, then too effin' bad. Also: lose some of the hardcovers I've gathered, as Hardcovers are heavy and get torn up and after a while you can find it in softcover and do I really need all of Clive Barker's stuff in both? Or Timothey Findley's? Or Douglas Coupland/Neal Stephenson/Irvine Welsh/Jeanette Winterson/Insert Your Favourite Author Here? And why the hell do I have so much Michael Ondaatje? I've only read The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid, and even then I only kinda liked it...
No one touches my William Gibson or my Palahniuk, though. Those are MINE.
(Books I've started tonight: Seven Serpents & Seven Moons by Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, which is supposed to be in the 'magical realism' tradition of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (again, who I have but have yet to read; what the hell is wrong with me?) and already has two pygmies swordfighting with their unbelievably huge penises over a sleeping virgin who has a silver moon in her belly within the first five pages, so, um, yeah, I'm hooked; and The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin by Idries Shah, which seems to be a collection of Sufi fables and stories while professing not to be related to Sufism at all, and it reads like a cross between Confucious and Mr. Bean while hinting that it's best to read it seven stories at a time, so while I might still be an ignorant white boy, colour me intrigued.
Damn. I'm never gonna get rid of any of these.)
3. Hope that some long-lost relative enters my life and offers me the use of their entire house as a storage facility for free, forever, until time stops in the year 2012 and the hyperdimensional machine elves step through the space-time membrane and hit the fast-forward button on our evolutionary remote controls so that we become one united enlightened species that travel through space using the power of MIND-RAYS and no longer concern ourselves with all this useless stuff that we use to validate our singular existences.
4. Stop buying every piece of crap that catches my eye/ear/frontal lobe/fancy.
Yeah, that'll happen...
Still: I'm committed. Here's to six months of intense multi-media immersion, as well as prenatal classes, financial finagling, and outright full-blown insanity. Oh, and alcohol. This is gonna be fun, though, because the Crazy Lady's worth it.
Bonus Interactive Bloggitry Section: if you see me in a store of any kind about to drop a wad of cash on some unbelievably stupid compendium of useless knowledge and/or combination of ridiculous words and concepts written by some pretentious literati who, in other saner, more violent societies, would be dragged into the street and beaten by small children with pointed sticks, feel free to huck a rock at me, for I am probably being my usual moronic self.
That is all.
4 comments:
You're gonna be fine. These things don't come with an instruction manual. Just because a new life is entering yours doesnt mean that yours has to end and you have to rid yourself of your books, cd;s, dvd;s etc.....
I have 100% faith in you Chris.
I'm not going to start throwing thigs at you just because you're excited about stuff, sir. I'll let you throw the ondaatje out, because he's a useless twat, but what the hell else am I going to do for your birthday than bring you to wordsworth and buy you a stack of books?? you're ruining ALL of my PLANS!
You'll figure something out, but you don't have to stop ALL of your dirty little habits .. heh.
Hey, seriously, forget the progeny: less pass the Great Archive of CDJ on to ME. I think I have a few square feet of space yet that aren't stacked with printed matter. And when you need reference material, I can be your Book in the fullest Bradburian sense—phone-a-friend steez.
You can feed this boy books:
The Incredible Book-Eating Boy
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