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obsessions for good and ill
Saturday, October 15 2011
Without Catskill Mountain Coffee, I had to find a new source of coffee. So today I drove into midtown Kinston and got a pound of some sort of Ethiopian coffee from Monkey Joe on Broadway. It cost $15, holy shit. Gretchen tells me that pounds of coffee at Catskill Mountain Coffee had actually gone up to $9, not $6, but still, this was a 40% increase in price. Fortunately, I'm not drinking much coffee these days. But today I wanted to drink a French press of coffee recreationally, and I wanted my coffee to be top shelf. While I was out, I also bought a set of polishing wheels in hopes of resurrecting the Civic hybrid's Navigation DVD.
In my personality, obsessiveness is more of a feature than a bug, though that's only when I'm not having one of my crackhead obsessions. Mind you, it's not always clear when my obsessiveness is for good or for evil. Take for example the drywall hanging job I did in the garage back in the Summer of 2006. At the time I felt like I was rushing it a bit, but I remember Gretchen kept being dismayed at how much attention I was paying to finishing the drywall joints. Something doing is worth doing well, and I have no regrets about the amount of effort that went into the garage drywall; shitty joints are as forever as good ones are. (Mind you, those joints weren't done perfectly, but they were done well enough to satisfy me, and that's important.)
Sometimes, though, it's obvious even to me that one of my obsessions has taken a turn for the absurd. Today I found myself exhaustively researching methods for duplicating an Honda Civic navigation DVD. I'd managed to download .iso files of this DVD, but nothing I burned to DVD was acceptable to our new car's navigation computer, and, after numerous Google searches, it was clear that nobody had solved this problem. The car's navigation computer is designed to refuse perfectly good data if it is presented in a format detectably-different from a pressed DVD. It allows Honda to leverage their sales of cars into endless additional future revenue streams. What's next, a proprietary stem on your tires so that only a Honda-certified professional can put air in them? Now I'm really worried about how much maintenance I can actually do on this car. Will I be twarted by digital rights management when I need to replace the muffler?
As a backup plan, I tried polishing the old fucked-up Navigation DVD using the polishing wheels I bought today. I actually managed to improve the disk, making it less scratchy visually and even getting to the point where I could load it into a DVD drive and read its directory.
I'd drunk that French press of coffee before launching into all these navigation DVD experiments, and when it finally kicked in, my first caffeine in eleven days felt like a prescription-strength stimulant. One of its strongest effects was to keep me intently and unwaveringly focused on the navigation DVD project to the exclusion of everything else. This gets back to my earlier use of the expression "crackhead obsessions." I've heard that crackheads can spend a whole day trying to hang a picture. They use the wrong tool, mar the wall, and end up tearing out all all the sheetrock and redoing it in a crappy crackhead way. On coffee, I felt capable of such things. The effects of the caffeine lasted well into the evening, despite my my tempering it with alcohol. I would end up sleeping very badly.
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