RECORD STORE TALES #940: My Friend of Misery

“You insist that the weight of the world,
Should be on your shoulders,
There’s much more to life than what you see,
My friend of misery.”

James Hetfield may as well have been talking about me.  But it’s not that simple.  I don’t insist the weight of the world should be on my shoulders.  I’d give anything to take some of the weight off.  But I have a lot of responsibility.

Having somebody’s dirty bathwater leaking all over my floor and carpet the last two weeks has pushed me to the breaking point.

“These times are sent to try men’s souls,
But something’s wrong with all you see,
You, you’ll take it on all yourself,
Remember, misery loves company.”

Trying to be proactive about my health, I took a hiatus from writing.  We now have the plumbing fixed.  There’s plenty of damage to repair and lots of stress.  But I think maybe it’ll be OK dipping my toe back into writing.  A little bit.  Cross fingers, knock wood that nothing else gets fucked up.

Metallica has been a soothing remedy.  I haven’t listened to old Metallica in a long time.  This 14 CD / 6 DVD / 6 LP box set is something else.  I’ve played all the LPs and now I’m into the CDs.  James’ riffs tapes range from startling to suck!  The initial “Sad But True” riff is painfully badly recorded.  But a 22 second snippet of a punk rock “Unforgiven” is a truly cool moment.  There’s a lot to go through here.  Metallica have been taking my mind off things.

I did discover something interesting about my car stereo.  It seems to be able to read files that have been deleted.  When you “delete” something off a hard drive, it doesn’t necessarily go away unless you overwrite it.  My car appears to be able to read tracks like this.  This weekend I ripped the massive Metallica box set, and replaced the old album on my hard drive with the newly remastered one.  I also took the time to rip all my Load, Reload and Garage Inc. CD singles to the hard drive.  A complete set of singles, I might add.  Up until St. Anger, the only Metallica release I was only missing was The 6½ Year Anniversary 12″ EP and a “Neckbrace” remix of “Whiplash” (still need both).

On to the car.  The easiest way for me to clean up the car’s hard drive was to completely delete the Metallica folder and then copy over a new one.  What I discovered when I jumped in the fire…I mean car…was that the car drive now had two copies of Kill ‘Em All, Master of Puppets, etc.  My original rip of the Metallica CD was still there, even though I deleted it.  So it seems my car can read deleted files, at least until they are eventually overwritten.

The annoying thing about this is that because of the way the car reads the ID3 tags, each song gets played twice in a row.  So when I play Kill ‘Em All, I get “Hit the Lights”, then “Hit the Lights”, “The Four Horsemen”, “The Four Horsemen”, and so on.  I can fix this but it’s annoying.

So much to fix.  And I haven’t touched on the family health challenges of late.  Some things should stay private.

So let’s try a little writing again.  Because I want to give this Metallica box set a good solid listen, and I’m only about 1/6th of the way through, I won’t be writing up reviews for a little while.  Instead I’ll be focusing on Record Store Tales, a real WTF of a comment, and a new feature.  Now that I’m not trying to constantly keep my floors dry, I can try to be creative again.

I can try.  Yoda says “Do, or do not, there is no try.”

I say “Fucked, you must get, Yoda.”  I’m doing the best I can here!