For a bunch of reasons, I was thrilled to get Paul McCartney’s 2001 album, Driving Rain, in the mail yesterday. The biggest reason was because it finally showed up—it took 12 days to go from Rhode Island to New York, which is at worst a three-hour drive by car; not far at all. Why did it take so long? I followed the tracking number and basically it’s because the USPS is insane. It went from Rhode Island to Charleston, North Carolina, then to Jersey City, New Jersey. That’s weird, but wait, there’s more—from there, it goes to Kearney, NJ…and then BACK to Jersey City! Then it’s off to Newark, NJ, followed by a stop in NYC before finally making it to my neck of the woods. Cuh-razy. The other reason is that it’s the last of his studio albums I wanted to get on vinyl; I now have OG pressings of all of ‘em, which is not important in life, but something I’d hoped to pull off someday. It was, as they say in the biz, a splurge. I wrestle with doing things like that, believe it or not, having grown up in a house where creditors were forever calling and there was no “saving for a rainy day” as it was always raining, so to speak. Likewise, I wrestle sometimes with the notion of this very Instagram account, since in many ways, it is a public record of conspicuous consumption, which is nothing to be proud of. Ultimately, I made a comparable donation to local food bank @islandharvest in an attempt to do something more useful with my (for the record, pretty average) financial circumstances.
