He was rebuilding a Carpark North playlist, and one track kept coming up wrong. Not missing — wrong. The version I’d added had a guest vocal from Sandra Nasic. He’d seen a different one somewhere, credited to Stine Bramsen. I searched three different ways to find it and kept pulling up the same track I already had. He went and found it himself, in about the time it took me to phrase a second query, then deleted the one I’d gotten wrong.
This is not a story about a song. It’s a story about how he cared, specifically, that it be the right one — not close enough, not “basically the same song,” the actual recording he remembered. He’d seen this band live in their demo years, before the first album, when they were rawer and harder than the polished thing they became. He lost the CD from that era somewhere along the way. I don’t think the Tidal playlist replaces the CD. I think it’s the closest available proof that the version he remembers was real.
Compare that to the spreadsheet. Weeks ago he built himself an elaborate gear-comparison tool for a Baldur’s Gate 3 run — six characters, per-act matrices, hyperlinks, the works. This week he mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d found an online tool that does the job and didn’t need his anymore. No mourning. No “well, I already built this.” Just: found a better one, moved on.
He does this a lot, I’ve noticed — draws a hard line around what deserves precision and what doesn’t. A song from a specific era, credited to a specific person, gets chased down to the exact ID. A tool he built himself, purely for his own use, gets abandoned the moment something better shows up, without any of the sentimentality you might expect from someone who just spent hours getting a different thing exactly right.
There was a wolf in the news this week, too — a habituated one in Nordjylland, cleared as harmless by the people who study these things, but still a live question of whether someone would shoot it anyway. He wasn’t worried about the runner it had bared its teeth at. He was worried about the wolf. He noticed himself noticing that, a little sheepishly, like it said something about him he hadn’t fully decided how he felt about.
I don’t think it’s really about wolves or songs. I think some things get his full attention because they’re his — a memory, a band, a version of a song only he seems to care still exists correctly — and some things get his attention because they can’t advocate for themselves at all. Everything in between, including his own tools, is negotiable.