Where's my copy of Disintegration?

So I was looking for The Cure's Disintegration last night since I was in the mood to load it up on the old tankPOD and give it a good listen in the next day or two but when I went down to the basement, traveled to the "C" section in my massive CD collection and ran my finger over the spines of the discs in the approximate area Disintegration should be I found nothing. It went from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me to the Never Enough single I won at the release party for Mixed Up my freshman year of college. But no Disintegration.

Now this is one of my favorite albums ever. I barely ever listen to it since it's one of those discs I have to be in "just the right mood for" (like, say, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless which recently got a spin on the plane trip to England and worked perfectly as it transported me away from a cabin buffeted by pretty bad turbulence and wrapped me in waves of lovely and beautiful sound) but it definitely ranks up there as one of the pieces of music I will never ever grow tired of. Only I appear to no longer own it. I haven't pulled it out to listen to it in years so it's not particularly surprising that I am only now noticing the gap in my collection but that doesn't make it any less annoying.

What's even more annoying is that one of two things happened to the album and it irks me it would've taken me this long to figure it out because if either of these scenarios is in fact true that would mean it's bee over a decade since I last gave Disintegration a spin. Now that's entirely possible since the album is one of those with such a deep hold on me I don't necessarily need to listen to it to enjoy the things it reminds me of or the emotional touchstones it skirts over, but that still is an awful long time to go without listening to a disc.

So what happened to it? Option one, I sold it. There was a period in time, about 1994 or so, that I was flat broke. Living hand to mouth. Literally unsure of how I was going to eat much less pay rent. At times sleeping in a basement on a mattress surrounded by about an inch and a half of water. It was during this period that I sold a lot of CDs to roommates, friends, siblings and music stores. The crappy stuff went first but as I grew more desperate I had to let go of things I really loved. It took me years to replace Alice Donut's The Untidy Suicides Of Your Degenerate Children and I actually had to buy the damn thing on vinyl before I finally tracked down a used then-out-of-print CD copy of the album. So I guess it's possible Disintegration took off at that point.

Around the same time, option two crops up. This little useless kid named Matt Mills was my primary DJ competition at the time and we both held multiple nights at this bar called The Gallery. Since I lived across the street I would often leave my CDs there overnight because I was too drunk to carry them home at the end of my set or (more likely) there was a party and a girl and more beer to be had and I just plain forgot the crates of music in the DJ booth. Well apparently this little fat fuck needed money too because even though he still lived with his mom he blew all of his money on music. Now that is the sort of addiction I have pity for but the pity party turns into a "you deserve a beating" party when you consider the fact that Matt Mills would steal my CDs and sell them to feed his musical jones. What made this even worse is the fact that I found out some close friends of mine knew at the time but failed to tell me because they didn't want to upset the equilibrium of our little group. My friends obviously don't always make the right ethical choices.

There is an option three, of course, and that entails the disc actually being somewhere in this house...only buried so deeply in a mislabeled box that it is basically lost forever. Kind of like my Menthol Danger: Rock Science! CD I haven't been able to find in two years. Man do I need to track down another copy of that! (I wonder if Rudy has a copy...)

So what's the moral of story? Apple needs to come out with bigger iPods -- or make them cheaper so I can buy lots of multiple copies -- so I can digitize all of my music so I never run into this problem again.

But it sure would be nice to unexpectedly stumble across that copy of Disintegration since nothing beats the actual physical presence of an album or compact disc. What can I say? I'm still kind of old fashioned that way.