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Oh man, today has been a day. Let me tell you all about it in another installment of…
Tales from the Bins
I’ve been going back and forth with this woman over email, text, and phone calls since early this summer. She told me she has about 1,000 rock and blues LPs and lives about 45 minutes from Raleigh, but we just can’t seem to connect. After a few missed appointments, long lapses in communication, and other annoyances, we finally have an appointment set for this morning at 11:30. I told myself that if she cancels this time then I’m done with her, but when I text her this morning she confirms. I stop by U-haul to grab some boxes and hit the highway.
Her place is in one of those cute little towns dotted all over rural North Carolina, right off the main (well, the only) drag. I pull up and the house is charming, a mid-century building with a little garden in the front and tons of sculptures and tchotchkes in the yard and garden. It looks like the kind of place an older artist type would live. I get out of the car, and when I’m about fifteen feet from the door I’m smacked in the face with the distinctive stench of cat piss. The porch is covered in old, broken-down furniture and garbage. The woman answers the door, I introduce myself, and she lets me in, and the odor gets way, way more intense as I cross the threshold. The house is a total wreck, a maze of old furniture (way too much for the space), empty boxes (most of them from Chewy), waist-high stacks of bagged cat litter, and at least half a dozen litter boxes (all of them some degree of full). I don’t know how many cats are living there, but my guess is there must be at least eight or ten, and I heard at least one dog barking in the back room too (though I never saw it).
I hate to sound mean or judgmental because clearly these cats were rescues… there was one missing an eye and most of them were some fucked up in some way or another. God bless this woman for taking care of these animals, but this place was one of the nastiest living spaces I’ve ever been to look at a collection, and trust me when I say I’ve seen some real doozies. There was cat shit all over the place, flies buzzing around everywhere, and the cat piss odor was so strong that I had to restrain my gag impulse. Both the woman and a man who was apparently in one of the back rooms (I never saw him) were constantly coughing. I wanted to tell them they shouldn’t be living like this, but I didn’t want to be judgmental, so I just went about my business. Speaking of which… the records.
The woman showed me the records, which were on four shelves spaced around the dining room area, with a foot-wide path to each through the old furniture and other junk. Right away I could see the cats had been using the records as a scratching post for many years. The spines were all shredded. I thought about turning around and walking right out of there, but I just can’t not look through a pile of records… it’s not in my nature. I start on the first shelf, and there are a LOT of Beatles records. Which, honestly… whatever. A lot of people have a lot of Beatles records. They were clearly bought used and are in widely varying condition, but some are not bad. There’s also one of those discography box sets that came out in the early 80s, and while the box would need to be thrown away, the records inside appeared to be pristine, and we could definitely sell them individually. Then I move to the second shelf and there are thirty or forty Bowie albums. That’s when I was like, “fuck… there are cool records here. I’m not going to get out of here any time soon.”
I quickly formulated a plan. Before I got too deep, I offered the lady a per-record price if she let me go through and take what I felt like I could salvage. This was a price that I felt like made it worth my while to exist in this space for the couple of hours it would take me to go through the records, and for all the shit I would get from the staff when I brought all these nasty-ass records back for them to price. Honestly, I would have been just fine if—as is so often the case—she insisted she was sitting on a goldmine and needed to be compensated adequately. But she went for my proposal and I got to work.
As I went through the remaining shelves, the records got even better. There was a lot of 70s punk and new wave, with most of the big names from the early punk scene represented… the Clash, the Pistols, the Ramones, etc. A good amount of college rock like REM, later Hüsker Dü, and stuff like that. A lot of canon proto-punk and glam… Eno, Roxy Music, the Velvet Underground. A few more underground surprises, like Mission of Burma’s Vs., the first four Stiff Little Fingers albums… I could go on and on. And, as with the Beatles, a lot of the more popular / prolific artists had multiple copies of their records. There were probably two dozen Talking Heads LPs, multiples of all Patti Smith’s early records, and several other artists like that.
The cat claw damage on the spines was worse in some spots than others. A few of the shelves appeared to be mostly out of their reach, but some spots got it bad… I had to leave behind most of a very healthy Prince collection because they were just too fucked. The thing about cat claw marks, though, is that while they look terrible when records are shelved with the spine out, most of the time any individual record will just have a few marks on its spine and otherwise looks pretty decent from the front view. There were definitely issues other than the spine damage, though. The records clearly hadn’t been touched in years, probably decades, so some of the jackets were stuck together (thanks North Carolina humidity!). There was a thick coat of cat hair and dust across the top of everything. Just pulling them off the shelves induced fits of sneezing. I saw some silverfish running around too.
As I was going through the last shelf of records, the whole thing collapsed and a couple hundred LPs fell right on my head. The woman was in the other room when it happened, and she shouted, “are you OK?” I said “yeah, a couple hundred records just fell on my head.” No response… I just heard her go back to watching Instagram reels with her phone speaker on maximum volume.
After about two hours, I had a pile of around 400 LPs. Killer titles, and since I’d brushed off most of the dust and left behind the dross, they didn’t look too bad. I boxed them up, paid the lady, and got the fuck out of there. I’m slightly allergic to cats… just slightly. I own a cat and it only bothers me when I pet him he sits close to me for a long time. But when I was driving away I could feel my eyes swelling shut, my face itched in a way that could not be relieved, and my throat burned from the smell.
I am not a super clean person. I shower most every day and try to wash my hands several times a day, but I think a lot of the cult of cleanliness that consumes so many people is just bullshit invented to sell personal hygiene products. I have not worn deodorant for probably 20 years. There are definitely times when I go into a nice-ass suburban house and get the impression the people who live there think I’m scummy and gross. I remember earlier this summer I drove down to South Carolina to buy a collection, and at some point I got drowsy and pulled off at a highway rest stop to take a nap in the back seat of my car. When I woke up I was completely soaked in sweat, and as the sweat dried out on the rest of the drive, I noticed I was starting to smell really bad. When I got to my destination I fucking reeked, and I swear the dude winced when he let me in his house. (I still got his records, though!) All this to say that I drove straight from today’s buy to my house, where I immediately took a shower and threw all my clothes in the wash. It’s the only time I can recall doing that in my decade and a half of buying collections.
Let’s change gears completely and end on a more positive note. When I was up in Richmond last weekend I finally got a chance to visit Brian’s Books. It’s been open for a while, but even though I go to Richmond pretty often, I usually drive up there in the afternoon, get there in time for a gig, and make a late-night drive home right after. The shop was everything I expected / hoped for… basically the bookstore version of a cool-ass, highly curated record store. There are also a ton of zines (not just music) if you’re into those. I bought a pretty healthy stack, including this copy of Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human, which I’ll make my staff pick for this week.
Unlike a lot of punks who are also big readers, I didn’t grow up on sci-fi. My best friend growing up was a heavy sci-fi / fantasy head, and he lent me a few of his favorites when we were early teens. I remember reading Heinlein, Asimov, and a few others, but they did not do it for me. Heinlein in particular really turned me off… it was just so masculine, to the point of being bro-y. I decided sci-fi wasn’t for me and actively avoided it for a long time, but later in adulthood my view softened. A lot of that has to do with getting into Star Trek, another thing I didn’t like when I was a kid. I loved the episodes of The Next Generation that explored classic philosophical problems, and I particularly loved Deep Space Nine and the way it engaged with multiculturalism, empire, and other big issues in a very thoughtful way. And then a few years ago I read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin and it cracked me wide open. I don’t even remember which book I started with because after reading it I immediately devoured everything by her I could get my hands on. It turns out I love sci-fi, but it has to be philosophically engaged and consonant with my values.
At some point I did some research to find more authors I might like and added some books to my “to read” list. (BTW, I keep my reading lists on Storygraph… if you’re on there follow me @hexenduction… I’d love to see what other folks are reading!) Theodore Sturgeon was one of those authors, and I picked up a few of his books at Brian’s. More Than Human, which I gather is one of his most well-regarded books, is the one I read first. The verdict? Yes, this is my kind of sci-fi. I won’t summarize it lest I spoil it for anyone, but I really loved the book’s third and final section. The first two sections set up and explore the book’s premise, and in the third section Sturgeon explicitly takes on the moral and ethical implications of that premise, and by extension goes into some pretty deep stuff on what ethics and morality are and why they have them. This is what separates good from mediocre sci-fi for me. Yeah, it’s cool to hear creative premises about technology or speculation about the future or whatever, but for that to feel really significant, I need some kind of philosophical payoff. And that payoff in More than Humanis huge. I’m still rolling it around in my head, and probably will be for a while.
Also, now that I’m done with the book I look forward to not getting White Zombie’s “More Human than Human” stuck in my head every time I pick it up.
That’s all for this week. Tomorrow morning I’m heading up to Pittsburgh for Skull Fest. (Death Side!) I hope to see some newsletter readers and other friends while I’m there.