Diapers, razors, music: all disposable.

Received a depressing-yet-inevitable e-mail from the Captain over the weekend. He titled it "A Grim Task," and at first I thought he had to bury his dog or he was selling off his Bobby Labonte memorabilia, since he's now pretty much on the Carl Edwards boat. Instead, he told me that he was ripping all of his CDs to his computer in preparation for a mass sale of them to one of the record stores up in Bloomington.

I suppose I'm not as shocked as I would have been had this development taken place eight or nine years ago. Captain had intimated to me that in the event of a fire in those days, the CDs would have been the first thing he would have tried to save. Silly notion? Not to me, not when you're as in love with and in search of good music as I know that the Captain has been.

Today, though, with the proliferation of digital music, iPods and the Internet as a source of music, there's not a whole lot of point to having CDs (or cassettes, or vinyl records, or whatever your preferred media) around the house collecting dust anymore. Speaking personally, the bulk of my CDs are in a couple of boxes upstairs; I can't recall the last time I've sat and listened to a CD, as my MP3 player and my computer both hold my music library.

Captain also said, and I will quote directly because I can't really say it any better myself (thanks, Cap'n):

"Pre-internet, pre-iPod, the CDs themselves just meant so much
more, I guess because they were relatively inaccessible and if you wanted
something like Rollins or whatever you actually had to go to Bloomington and
look for it. And if you lost it somehow, you might not be able to find another
one. That's unthinkable now. I can't help thinking that the music itself gets
devalued somewhere in this process."

Indeed. Listening to music today is definitely not the same experience as it once was. It was so neat to be able to hold a cassette or a CD in your hands, and read the liner notes, and admire or make fun of the cover art, and try to find cool lines on the lyric sheet, and so on and so forth. It was tangible, and it seemed to be worth something.

I remember how, in my late teens, I would look so forward to going to a nearby town to blow the bulk of my paycheck at one of the record stores there. And even though, as often as not, I would come away with equal parts gold and crap, it was still an exciting experience. Even into my college years, when I became a musical completist and wanted to collect everything from my favorite artists, I remember the rush of finding a rarity in a record store. Now the concept of "rarities" is just another quaint notion of the past, of the days when everything wasn't as accessible as it is now.

I think something is lost these days in the experience, when it's all available for 99 cents a download or whatever the going rate is, when it's all 0s and 1s and you don't need to take as good care of it anymore because it's so disposable.