I was racing around on Saturday morning this past weekend to leave on a road trip and wanted to quickly grab a few things from my CD collection to listen to in the car. What to listen to? Well, I thought perhaps some classical piano--Haydn or maybe Mozart. I opened my collection of Mozart piano concertos, 1 through 9 CDs in a boxed set, a very fine, and satisfying complete set, full and complete--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8!!! 9. CD # 7 is missing! Fucking missing. My complete set is ... incomplete. I'm missing fucking CD # 7! Where could it be? It troubles me. I was happy, so happy to have added that to my collection--It's a major hole filled--the Mozart piano concertos. But now a small hole has sprung up.

I have a hole that needs filled. (Now now, let's keep this a clean discussion--I'm speaking metaphorically here.) I have clothes that need washed. Ann tells me these phrases are possibly a "regionalism," which is to say "You, Jethro and the rest of the Clampetts sure do talk funny." hehe Well, no, she didn't mean that, but... She believes, and I think I remember others saying, that it's incorrect to say "I have a hole that needs filled." It's correct to say "I have a hole that needs TO BE filled." "I have clothes that need TO BE washed." What do others think? I want to know.

Incidently, I took Haydn piano sonatas instead. I can't face the whole issue of the missing Mozart. Once let loose, that demon will inhabit me and I'll be unable to function until the full set is restored. I think #7 contains concertos numbers 20 and 24. I'll never open the box set again. It's truly become my own private Pandora's box.

In honor of yellow shirt guy, here's a little pearl from Proust (Within a Budding Grove): "Each of us has a special god in attendence who hides from him or promises him the concealment of his defect from other people, just as he closes the eyes and nostrils of people who do not wash to the streaks of dirt which they carry in their ears and the smell of sweat that emanates from their armpits, and assures them that they can with impunity carry both of these about a world that will noctice nothing. And those who wear artificial pearls, or give then as presents, imagine that people will take them to be genuine."

I can't stop. "In the human race, the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us.... In the most distant, the most desolate corners of the earth, we marvel to see it [human kindness] blossom of its own accord, as in a remote valley a poppy like all the poppies in the rest of the world, which it has never seen as it has never known anything but the wind that occasionally stirs the folds of its lonely scarlet cloak."