Chris cracked one of my CD cases tonight. Everyone should take note: I am neurotic about CD collection maintenance. Someone with CD's in wrong cases, or worse, out of cases and spread out fractal-style around the stereo, makes my toes curl. I feel a strong desire to organize and alphabetize them immediately. If you are one of these people, you are NOT allowed to borrow a CD. Anyway, I was reading sad, sad Dougy Coupland when Chris threw the CD case across the room and said, "Well, Soooorry." So I wrote this:

We work so hard for so long to earn enough money to buy nice things. And then the nice things get cracked, broken, worn, frayed, and tired. So we try to stop this, freeze them in their fresh, nice state by not ever using anything after we have bought it. Starwars figures stay in their plastic packages for eternity. But that's absurd so we use it, turn it on, play with it, sit on it, take it for a spin, and the inevitable happens. It turns to shit. This is the dilemma of capitalism. Of the middle-class. Of America.