As the Captain will tell you based on our collective experiences in our Roaring Twenties, everything I own is shit.
This maxim was most accurate when discussing any electronic equipment I owned. I'd jerry-rigged any number of CD players, cassette decks, RCA jacks and AC adapters together solely to listen to music. It's really any wonder I'm a music fan at all, given how much of a chore it was to be able to even listen. (It's also no small achievement that I didn't burn down whatever house or apartment I was living in, given the tendency of my electronic equipment to short out with the slightest 3-millimeter movement, not to mention my tendency to compensate for those flaws with cardboard, books or other paper-based items.)
Unsurprisingly, although my earnings have increased and I'm better able to afford more reliable listening equipment like iPods, my luck has remained the same. The controls on my MP3 player are boogered up to the point where if you are listening to an album or a saved playlist, hitting the "advance to next song" button will, about 50% of the time, act as the equivalent as a "shuffle entire catalog" button.
And so it went this morning. I wanted to jump to a certain Sloan song, and instead shuffled the entire catalog.
Rats.
"Well, this might not be so bad," I thought. "There's about 5,000 songs here, and I tend to listen to about a tenth of those pretty constantly. There may be something I've forgotten about."
First up was Buck Owens. Wasn't in the mood. *skip*
Dwight Yoakam. See above. *skip*
XTC. Ditto. *skip*
Cadmium Orange. "Small Bodies of Water."
Perfect.
*turn shuffle off*
I'm in 1998 again, in a house on Hunter Street in Bloomington, crammed in a basement with 40 or 50 or more other folks, watching them tear through "Rocket Pole" and knowing that it was light years better than whatever was playing at the rock clubs in town. So raw, so visceral, yet so hooky and poppy and punky and memorable and sweaty. My ears still ring from those nights.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Monday, September 22, 2008
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My computer froze the other day and when I started it back up, my entire iTunes library was missing. Baldwin gave me some instructions to try and reclaim it, but so far, no dice. I really only have about 10% of my collection on CD at this point. During the very lean years I put pretty much everything on the computer and sold the discs. I don't think the music is actually gone from the hard drive, but if it is...oh, it's too depressing.
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