I spend a fair amount of time thinking about music, about the arrangements, the interplay between instruments and the human voice, the melodic genius that makes a song classic. I think about the dozens of individual performances and the vision of the songwriters that need to be magically synchronized in order to complete what used to be known as a long player. I wonder about the pictures on the cover and the liner notes and the storytelling that was intended in the naming of the songs and the thought that went into ordering the eleven tracks. And as I consider the ways in which music can enrich life and how one killer rock show can change the world, I think mostly about the reasons why there’s a clandestine conspiracy to prevent me from hearing the songs on the CD.

I still purchase a lot of music. I buy CDs. I have way over a thousand of them sitting alphabetically on a shelf where I can see them. There’s comfort in knowing they’re there. Music is a sonic trip but you also need to be able to touch something, so my CDs wait patiently, they all know that at any time they may be called upon to spin-up and provide the supernatural elixir that soothes man’s soul. Some days I hold themed concerts so that a bunch of my CDs get the chance to participate. So it’s a great day to come home to a new package that contains a new CD or two, if only I could get at the music.

Human beings typically like to work and solve problems with their hands, without the use of some special tool and without having to get up out of the chair in search of assistance … no, no I can get it! So here you sit with the box that has arrived containing your new CDs. The box can usually be opened without having to resort to a pocket knife, but the CDs themselves present an “opening” problem that can only be solved with a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth. The entire CD is wrapped in plastic and it’s as tight as that high school skirt ladies try to squeeze into for their ten-year reunion. It’s hermetically sealed, not a molecule of air between the tight plastic covering and the hard plastic CD case. If you have fingernails, the first thing to try is to run that nail along the hard edge hoping to puncture the plastic coating, therefore gaining a toehold that will allow you to peel back the plastic. You run your nail along this hard edge with increasing vigor and the friction starts to cause heat and you could swear that you see a little plume of smoke the way you do when a Cub Scout rubs two sticks together. When at last you are able to puncture the plastic, you’ll find that you have a little cut under your fingernail that will produce not a drop of blood but will sting for the next seventy-five days.

You now have the super-bionic shrinkwrap off and you’ve kinda worked up a body sweat and now the real work begins. There’s tape across the entire top rail of the CD that extends down about a quarter of an inch onto the front and the back of the CD. This is military-grade tape and should you ever get it off, the CD surface it was on will remain sticky for the rest of time. I pulled out Frampton Comes Alive last week, a disc I bought when I was twelve, and moths flying by are sticking to the plastic surface where the tape was removed during the Carter administration. Anyway, I’ve opened thousands of CDs and every time I have to open a new one it’s like being handed a completely unsolvable puzzle. Where do you start? I pick it up, flip it around, examine it from every possible angle. I pick up a knife, then a hammer, a blowtorch. Finally, you begin picking at the edges with your fingernail, but you can’t really see the edges because the tape is clear and the CD case is clear. You start holding it up to the light, you get out a flashlight, you walk out into the sun, you start tilting your head at weird angles like a Beagle that hears a siren no one else can hear … no, no I can get it! Your scratching and picking finally produce a microscopic upturn in the tape and you start to roll it back and pull it and then it rips at an impossible angle and you’re left holding an inch-long sliver of the stickiest tape in the world. You can’t get the tape off your finger and when you do it just sticks to the other finger, and when you walk into the house people say, “Is that tape on your ass?”

They want to sell me the music but they don’t seem to want me to listen to it.

♦

The same problem I have in the music room I have in the bathroom. I have a sore throat and a sinus headache. I grab something like Mucinex. In the box is an aluminum and plastic sheet holding little encapsulated pods of two, it’s like Noah’s Arc for pills. There seems to be a perforated dotted line running between the pill pods so that you can conveniently tear off just the two you need. Samson couldn’t tear these pills apart. You look for scissors but you’re in the bathroom, you grab a towel, maybe a better grip will help. You decide against separating your pills from the sheet and now you just try to push your two pills out the back of the packaging. It looks like that’s what you’re supposed to do, but they don’t push out. There’s a trick but only the pill maker knows what it is. You start poking at the packaging with your toothbrush, maybe you can make a hole in the Teflon surface and liberate the pills. Now the pills are all broken into pieces, oh well, if you ever get the pills out you can snort them.

Screw it, I’ll get a shave instead and get on with my day. Holy crap! I just bought new razor blades! They’re in a clamshell plastic package. It’s impregnable. What tools could there possibly be in the bathroom to get at the razor blades? The makers of the blades have to know that the only way the customer will ever encounter their product will be upstairs in their underwear, but to get the packaging open he will need to go downstairs and use a drill press. To get a close shave you need a sharp blade and to get the sharp blade you need a sharp blade. There will surely be bloodshed here today.

When they found me I was asleep on the couch, unshaven, three partially open CDs on the carpet and eight red pills in mutilated plastic bubbles in my hand. It looks like he tried to take his life, Fred.