RANT: Lost Stuff

You know what really pisses me off? Two things this week:

For starters, don’t you hate when one simple organizing task blows up into a 14-hour cleaning marathon? You see, Lisa once kept her CDs in a nice wire rack in a corner of the living room. One Christmas, she decided that she’d rather keep her discs in DJ cases instead, so I got her a nice case from Sam Ash. And so – the wire rack just kind of sat there for a while looking for a home. Now me, I’ve kept my CDs in some stolen Dr Pepper flats, the heavy plastic kind that the 20oz. drinks used to come in. And while the flats are functional and cheap (free, even!)… they’re just not that pretty to look at. So I decided to move the now-unused wire rack to my room and put my CDs in there. The only problem with that is that I have far too many CDs for the rack. “No problem”, I’m thinkin’, “just put your 100 favorite ones in the rack and stash the rest in the closet”. Which is a great plan, only my closet is the greatest example of entropy there is. There was junk crammed all over the place. Hell, I once sent a team of Swiss hikers into my closet to find something, and I never heard from them again. So – just to make my room look a little nicer, I pulled the 14,591,278 items I had on the closet’s floor out and trashed half of it and reorganized the rest. It needed to be done, sure… but what a pain in the ass! What should have been a nice little gesture took me all day and part of the night.

But in the end, of course, my room looked better and now my closet floor looks less like a junkyard and more like an organized thing. But one thing about all this is still driving me nuts – I can’t seem to find a few CDs I know that I had. Remember, I had around 500 discs stored in five Dr Pepper flats. Most of the discs that I listened to or ripped recently were actually stacked on top of the flats, as I was too lazy at the time to put them back into their alphabetical then chronological order. But I cannot find two CDs in particular – an Australian Bananarama CD single that I picked up whilst I was there back in ’89 as well as my treasured copy of Emiliana Torrini’s Love In The Time of Science. I possibly might have taken the Torrini disc somewhere, although I hate taking my CDs out of the house and usually burn a copy to CD-R instead. But I know that the Bananarama disc hasn’t left this house. I just wouldn’t take it anywhere – it’s not worth much as a collector’s item, but I have a silly emotional attachment to it, ya know? It’s always been the one souvenir from my Australia trip that I could always locate within 30 seconds… but now I can’t find it! I obviously went through all of the crates (no luck), the drawers of my filing cabinet (no luck there, either), as well as the various CD-ROM discs I have piled around my computer (you guessed it – no luck there either). I’ve looked through Lisa’s CDs and my car… and no luck there either! And lest you think one of our friends might have sticky fingers, I ripped the Emiliana Torrini CD to FLAC back in late February of 2005, so the disc was here then.. and no one has been to our house since. Sure, I guess a burglar might have taken it, but why come all the way up to my room and take only those two CDs? Are there any Europop crackheads in Belmont that I should know about?

AUUUUUUUUUUUGH!!! I hate hate hate hate hate hate losing stuff, especially when I know it’s somewhere at home. In my 34 years on this earth, I’ve lost a grand total of one set of keys – and since I had driven my car home that day and hadn’t left since, I know those $@(# keys were in my folk’s old house. I’m often tempted to call the people that bought my parent’s house and ask if they’ve done any remodeling and if so if they’ve found a Georgia State University key ring with a VW key on it. Not because I need them – I don’t own any of the things those keys opened any more – but because I’m simply haunted by those lost keys. It’s an old joke I know, but if I really could ask God three questions when I die, one of them would be “whatever happened to those car keys I lost back in 1993?” I looked everywhere in that house for them – the fridge, behind my bolted-to-the-wall bed… hell, I even went through the trash! But no car keys.

And dammit, I don’t wanna add Emiliana Torrini and Bananarama CDs to the list of “Lost Things That Will Haunt Me ‘Till I Die”.

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