100 Things #9. Opening a package you've waited for.

[railenthe]

Hello again. New to this series? Then I offer the words of Harold Budd to you:

However vague the unknown place or star,
From a thousand years from now
I say Hello.

 

--“Nine (A Thousand Years From Now),” Harold Budd, Colorful Fortune.

I freakin’ love getting packages. I love the anticipation of waiting for it, I love camping the mailbox to get it, and I love bringing it up to my apartment so that I can rip straight into the thing.

 

The above is the package that my Blu electronic cigarettes came in (another thing that I like, but won’t be going into the details of right now because TANGENT). I’d heard that the company had a habit of not being as prompt with the shipping as they could be, but this arrived in 72 hours.

I broke into that package in 72 seconds.

In fact, now that I think about it, there’s only ever been one package that I’ve gotten that I didn’t rip straight into right off the bat.

I saved up for that. Colorful Fortune is a book of “something like poetry but not quite” by one of my favorite composers, Harold Budd. Only 200 copies of this book were made. The hardback edition is even rarer and more costly. Many of the works in these pages have appeared in this volume, backed by his haunting, minimalist compositions. There is something hauntingly, chillingly, unsettlingly beautiful about his work. I’ll admit that getting into this package, I treated the entire operation with a sort of reverence—not to the point where I anointed myself with holy oil or anything…mainly because I was out of the stuff at the time—but I did take pains to make sure my hands were as pure and clean as I could before opening the package. Rare verse, recorded in a book that was hand pressed in limited quantity…it’s something beautiful.

If this sounds like it was almost a religious experience, that’s because it very nearly was. This is one of my treasures.