CD clearance

I’ve been a mission this month, trying to have a huge clearout of many of the books and CDs that I’ve hoarded over the years.

With the books it’s not so much of an issue – Each one made a solid impression, and it’s fairly clear which ones I’m going to read again.

With CDs however, I’m finding it more difficult, as each one isn’t so much an overall product, but the sum of many individual moments each with their own musical merits. Which is a poncey way of saying ten tracks on an album may be rubbish, but I’ve kept it for that one killer moment that I can’t bring myself to part with.

But lent alone keeping it for maybe 10% of the content, the very idea of keeping all this music on CD is archaic and unnecessary anyway. I could quite easily just copy the individual tracks I like onto my computer and be done with the shiny, space-invading slabs of plastic that currently adorn three walls of the room. But I like them too much.

I like the packaging, the artwork, the booklets, the casing. Plastic, cardboard, foam and paper, individual little moments of design. Love ‘em. Lots of other folk have written gloriously exhaustive and eloquent notes on the subject so I won’t go into it all here, but do check out the sleevage blog if you’re interested in the topic. Or even in fact if you’re not, because sleevage is unquestionably ace.

Anyhow, I’ve never seen the appeal of buying MP3s when you sacrifice all of the additional creativity that’s gone into making the music into a package. There’s no artwork, no notes, and that’s a real shame.

More to the point, it’s the packaging that makes an impression and allows me to find the album when I want to play it.

I long ago gave up ordering my CDs alphabetically – you end up with your Beastie Boys stuck up in the top corner and your Frank Zappa back-crunchingly close to the floor – instead choosing to just slap them in the shelves and allow the ones I’ve listened to most recently to slowly gravitate to the spots closest to the computer and the stereo. There are a few areas where I tend to stick compilations rather than artist albums, and the skinny little singles cases tend to huddle together for warmth, but the only subdividing I’ve consciously done is to group my albums by packaging.

Those in plastic jewel cases are in one rack, those in thin cardboard sleeves are in another and those in more ‘boxy’ cardboard packaging are in another. And this works fine for me.

And yes, I know that if they were MP3s on my hard drive I could just let the computer search for them, but often I can’t remember the name of a song, or the artist, just that it’s probably on that blue compilation CD in the cardboard sleeve that got free with the big issue a few years back, now what the hell was that called? Or that promo disc with the cow on the front, pastic box, red spine I think, maybe black letters, gawd knows what it was called… ah yes, spotted it, lovely.

all of which is to say… that I’m blatantly looking for something to distract me from having a huge clearout of my CD collection. So I’ll stop there and get back to it.

I lost the cheese tonight

Seriously: I took it out the fridge and cut a few slices while I decided what to do for tea. Put it away. Peeled some potatoes, chopped them into pieces while boiling a kettle of water, and set them bubbling away on the hob. Slipped a pie in the oven. Went to get the cheese back out the fridge for another few slices while I considered additional vegetables. Cheese wasn’t there.

We haven’t got a particularly over-stocked fridge right now, so it’s not like I just couldn’t find it amongst the jostling ranks of chilled and healthy produce. It genuinely wasn’t there. And I knew immediately that I’d put it somewhere stupid.

You know when you go to put on a CD, and you can’t find the case for the one already inside the stereo? And how when you’re feeling lazy you just pop it into the case that’s just been vacated by the album that you’re about to put on? And how after an evening of drunken laziness you awake to discover that you’ve placed ten different CDs into the cases of the ones that were played after them and you can’t find anything? I’m getting this way with food.

The cheese, for example, was in the cupboard that I’d earlier looked into, in search of some crisps. This wasn’t too bad, admittedly. Had I recently changed the bleach block in the bathroom, I might have later placed half a slab of medium cheddar in the cistern alongside it.

In most instances I’m evidently subconsciously cautious, however. Things tend to go into the fridge as a sort of unthinking default. Even bottles of washing up liquid, or occasionally books. But no harm comes to any of them. Certainly not of the kind that might result from unpacking a box of choc-ices into the DVD cabinet, for example, or putting dried cat food in with the broken biscuits.

It’s nice that even when I’m being stupid, some part of my brain is still trying to limit the damage I can cause. But I’m noticing my auto pilot is becoming less and less reliable when it comes to much simpler day-to-day tasks.

I’m finding myself sitting down to dinner, having equipped myself with an extra knife rather than a fork. The other day as I left the house for work, I grabbed my wallet, keys, bus pass, and instead of two memory sticks loaded with files that I needed that day - two lighters.

It’s not just me: a friend recently ran off a list of invited attendees for an upcoming party, counting as he went, and the first two people he said were different nicknames for the same individual. As he carried on to number three, a deep frown crept down his face as he evidently realised something was amiss. As he continued to list names he began to stare accusingly at his sequentially unfurling fingers, but he’d still got all the way to number five before he managed to pinpoint exactly what was wrong.

So from now on I’m going to pay extra special attention to my day-to-day activities, no matter how mundane. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go select some music to play. And then try and determine which case the actual CD is hiding in.