Cult – "Fire Woman" (1989)

My heart’s a ball of burnin’ flame

Prancing like a cat on a hot tin shack

I have a real problem with procrastination, and it’s gotten worse since I retired.  

I’ve always thought that the reason I have a myriad of unfinished jobs hanging over my head – like dealing with the thousands of family photos that my late parents took over the years – was due to a lack of willpower.  

But I’ve recently learned that many of those who have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder – or “OCPD” – procrastinate because they are perfectionists.  Their perfectionism may be so extreme that it interferes with their ability to complete tasks. 

Some people who come into possession of boxes full of old photographs as a result of the death of their parents might simply toss them.  “What do I need with a bunch of photos taken at our family Christmas celebrations and birthday parties when I have plenty of my own photos from those occasions?” they might ask themselves.  

That’s not me.  My ultimate goal for those photos is to organize them in chronological order and assemble them into comprehensive albums for each of my four children.    

I know that going through those thousands of photos and putting together albums that will satisfy my high standards will take an enormous amount of time and effort.  When I think about what will be required for me to do that job – and to do it right – I feel overwhelmed. 

Which is why those photos are sitting untouched in the boxes that I transported from my parents’ home to my home after my father died in 2016.

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Occasionally, I do manage to finish a project.  For example, a few years ago I made a list of all my LPs and circulated it to several used record dealers in the area.  I ending up holding on to a few of those records purely  for sentimental reasons – I no longer own a turntable – but sold the rest to the highest bidder.

But that’s the exception, not the rule – most of my post-retirement projects remain unfinished.  

In addition to all the family photos, I have thousands of pre-1964 silver coins that my mother and I collected when I was a child.  Those coins are worth something like 35 times their face value as “junk” silver – so each $10 roll of quarters is worth roughly $350.

A lot of people would have already sold those coins to a dealer or pawnbroker a long time ago.  But before I do that, I want to select the coins from each year that are in the best condition and put them in albums to pass on to my grandchildren someday.  

I also need to go through all those dimes, quarters, and half dollars to make sure that there are no coins with scarce dates that are worth more as collectible items than for their silver content.  

For example, I came across a 1932-S quarter when I was a teenager and have held on to it ever since.  It’s worth maybe eight bucks for its silver content, but its value as a scarce collectible coin is more like $100.  I need to be sure there aren’t more such rare quarters lurking in those dozens of rolls of pre-1964 coins before I unload them.

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Another symptom of OCPD is an unwillingness to throw out worn-out or worthless objects, even those with no sentimental value.

My old coins are clearly not worthless, but I’m holding on to a lot of stuff that has no real value to me.

For example, my storage unit contains several large plastic bins full of shirts, sweaters, and pants that I haven’t touched since I rented that unit a couple of years ago.

Before I moved them to that storage unit, most of those clothes hung in closets in my former home for God knows how long.  (I would have preferred to leave them in those closets rather than spending money to rent a storage unit, but the other resident of that house had other ideas.  “You moved out,” she said, “so MOVE OUT!”  

Quite a few of those clothing items still fit me fine, and are in good condition – and when it comes to style, they’re not all that different than the clothes I do wear.  So I’m having a hard time getting rid of them, even though I know deep down inside that I will never wear them again.

*     *     *     *     * 

My baseball card collection falls somewhere between my coin collection (which is quite valuable) and the clothes in my storage unit (which are essentially worthless to me).

I have gone through the 75,000-odd baseball cards from the seventies, eighties, and nineties that I’ve accumulated over the years, selling perhaps a third of them but unable to find a buyer for the rest.  (I have a feeling that a lot of you with boxes of old baseball cards sitting in your garage or attic are going to be solely disappointed when you try to sell them.  Unless those cards are at least 50 years old, you’ll find that there are a lot more sellers than buyers out there.)    

I always planned to hold on to the complete sets that I assembled back in the day, and at some point I’ll buy the cards necessarily to fill in the gaps in a few near sets as well.  I have eight grandsons, and eventually I’ll pass down those sets to them.  

But that will still leave me with thousands of relatively common cards that no dealer is interested in buying them.  I don’t know what I’ll eventually do with them, but I can tell you that I won’t just throw them away.

While those cards might have little or no monetary value, keeping them isn’t symptomatic of OCPD if they have sentimental value.  

Does it make sense to say that something that you haven’t looked at in years and rarely think about has sentimental value?

It seems like a real stretch to argue that my baseball cards have sentimental value simply because I’ve held on to them all these years.

*     *     *     *     *

I may have only recently realized that the Cult and the Cure weren’t the same band.  

They’re both terrible, but that’s no excuse for my confusing them – because they’re terrible in very different ways.

(Sometimes a picture really is
worth a thousand words)

“Fire Woman,” which was released in 1989, was featured in the Severance episode titled “Sweet Vitriol.”  (Based on the lines quoted at the beginning of this post, I assume that whoever wrote the song’s lyrics was a Tennessee Williams fan.)

Sweet oil of vitriol was the original name of what came to be called ether.  I knew that ether was once a popular surgical anesthetic.  But I didn’t know until I saw the Severance episode that it could be used as a recreational drug.

At 19th century “ether frolics,” people would inhale ether for recreational purposes.  Ether drinking was once popular among Polish peasants, and is still practiced by the Lemkos (an ethnic group whose members live in the region where Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine meet).

One of the characters in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas says that “there is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”    

Click here to listen to watch the official music video for “Fire Woman.”  I’m sure there are more insufferable music videos out there, but I can’t think of one right now.

Click here to buy “Fire Woman” from Amazon.