What About Tomorrow?

It has to be a long, tedious process, standing in line just to eat me. So let me fill you in on the recent reasons for delay.

Yesterday I was in a lot of pain, out of pain pills, and then at my best friend's first birthday party since she was 16 and her mother invited HER friends over for dinner. It was obviously important to be there and be supportive. Plus, it's not every day this foxy femme fatale gets out of the house. We had dinner with just a few people at our favorite Greek restaurant in town and my best friend's two very young sons. When asked if he'd like to lick the candle that came in the birthday baclava, her oldest boy misunderstood and gave it a thorough tongueing a-la cow with a salt lick. Hilarity.

Last night I couldn't sleep because of the pain and lack of pain killers. I had pretty much pushed the limits of how many aspirin/ibuprofen tabs one can take and still survive in one day to make it to dinner, so night time wasn't all that great. Did a little reading, did a little soaking in the tub to lower a pesky fever that finally broke sometime around 7 this morning.

Today I managed to buck up enough to get to the pharmacy, fill my prescription, and buy some auto wax.

I can't really explain the compulsion I had to buy auto wax. Sure, it was a great price. But as my car has been in the garage, and seen extremely little use in the past year and a half thanks to the fact that it feels like I'm being stretched on a rack when depressing the clutch, it's really not in need of any special cleaning or care. My shopping list for the drug store was short:

drugs
bandaids
sinus tabs
cough medicine

It was entirely surprising to me that I came home with a bottle of car wax. I brought everything upstairs, put away the drugs, took a couple of pain pills, and stowed bandaids strategically around the house, closest to the areas I tend to fall over/bump things/have little accidents with scissors or knives. I hopped into bed, hoping for the pain killers to kick in.

Then, it hit me. It was time to simonize a bunch of old scratched CDs. Over the past few months, I've been in the process of finding the perfect, cheapest method to repair the poor things that used to take so much abuse in the back seat of my car. I've tried boiling them, scrubbing them with abrasive soap (from the inner ring to the outer ring), then rubbing them with vaseline to fill in the crevices. I've had minor luck with some of those methods.

You may wonder why not just either 1) replace the CDs 2) buy one of those little machines that buffs them for you or 3) go to the library or video store and ask to use their CD/DVD repair machines. Well, you're not the only one, Smarty Pants. I offer no excuse than...well, fuck it, I have no excuse, and I have no reason. This is just the way I do things.

As I type this, there are about 50 CDs on a towel on my bedroom floor, completely covered with simonizing wax, hopefully drying quickly and not very toxically. Soon, I will be scrubbing them. I hope the CDs will play at least once so I can load their contents onto my computer.

The sad things about all this is that there are only two tracks I care about recovering. One is a mix I mastered on an old computer of Leonard Cohen reading the lyrics to the song "A Thousand Kisses Deep" with an on-stage improvisation of him on the guitar. The other is a dance mix someone made of Tori Amos' "Leather." It's a mix I have not been able to find since.

Neither of them is fantastic, and I'm pretty sure I won't listen to them more than once, ever, but at least it keeps me off the streets, and at least, for the relatively short time it will take me to recover these two tracks, I don't feel like I'd rather be dead than alive.

Let's hear it for the subconscious mind's desire to survive! Hooray!

So stick around. There may be some very shiny, very damaged CDs in your future too. IF you're as lucky and hopped up on opioids as I am. Psych.