I have a lot of music. I've been accused of obsession. But it's a gentle madness. Actually helps to maintain my sanity by helping to block the noise in my head.
There has been a box of CDs in the trunk of my car for several months now which I have only recently removed. Florida is a humid place. It's been raining a lot lately. This was a big mistake. Tray cards are stuck to cases. Booklets' pages fused together. Digipacs looking like form studies in driftwood. I've spent the last couple of days carefully peeling page from page, hoping the layers of fiber wouldn't separate, only to run into some little area near the binding of the insert where they've already glued themselves together. One old disc seems to have used had some volatile red ink that's eaten through the aluminum layer. It looks neat. It's probably unplayable now. I haven't tried yet.
I'm more than a little pissed at myself for this. There are probably somewhere around 250 discs in the box, and luckily not all of them got damaged, somehow. None of them are completely irreplaceable, but some won't be easy. Swans discs, which are just hard to find even for relatively recent releases. Old Wax Trax albums in their original pressings, before they were bought out and sold out. A few from Fifth Column Records, who went under so quickly and violently several years ago that some of the artists are still fighting to regain the rights to their own music. Even if they have, it just wouldn't be the same with a re-release. The Section25 album I spent three years hunting for someone because she loved Looking from a Hilltop so much. It was difficult to find any information at all on that band other than maybe just a discography. It will probably be just as much work to find them again in the same form. Oddly enough, I run into the Section25 almost regularly now. It's been rereleased. Just wouldn't be the same.