Tuesday, September 17, 2002

letter to a friend, accompanying music

Okay, brother, we're takin' it back to the old school. No more cds, dammit, cos I can't burn 'em anymore anyway. I needed a return to the cassette, the mix tape, the dub and its pure and perfect theatrical form, two acts with intermission. Got a call from you tonight; you sounded down in the dumps. This makes me want to bring you flowers and kiss your forehead and stuff. So here's some stuff.

There's something I forgot to tell you on the phone, getting all caught up in the cockroach pornography on display before my cringing eyes out back, and in my horror, it just came spilling out of me like some kind of sick sports commentary. I'm awfully sorry. This tale would have made for much better conversation.

There was an electrical fire a week ago yesterday in the walls of my parents' house. Although my mother was in the house at the time, she wasn't hurt, and in fact only a small part of the house was damaged. However, a significant enough portion of the floor above this origin-point basement wall was charcoaled so to necessitate ripping out and replacing it entirely. Dad lost about ten thousand dollars worth of drums, most of which he says he won't replace. Every fabric item or article of clothing, every piece of upholstered furniture, most everything in the house was saturated by the smoke that choked its rooms; this required my parents to get rid of many things with which they would never have otherwise parted. The cost of cleaning would have been too exorbitant to save it all. In addition to this emotional stress, they're also homeless until about Christmas. Lousy luck, man. I'm only thankful it didn't happen in the middle of the night.

In order to put the fire out, the firefighters had to rip the wall down with axes and then, of course, make with the hoses and the spraying and so forth. I think you remember their house, the basement in particular, and you may even remember the wall that burned, because it's the one directly adjacent to the wall against which we unloaded box after box after big-ass box of your entire comics collection. Thousands of them, and certainly thousands of dollars' worth, all stacked and dry and exposed and deliciously combustible. Which somehow managed, in the midst of this infernal fracas of demolition, to avoid attracting so much as an errant drop of water.

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