CDeez Nuts
Last weekend, in an effort to find a place to store The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, (estimated size: bigger than your TV), some stuff in the apartment had to go. Old magazines, extraneous furniture were on the chopping block, but quite possibly the easiest objects to part with were the stacks and stacks of old burnt CDs that were sitting unused around the apartment:
Note: A drop in the bucket
Click here for closeup
I was one of the first people I knew to get a CD burner, and had made good use of the medium all the way through college. Having a 200 disc CD changer and a burner always made for interesting times, as it was placed on “Random” (the ancestor of “Shuffle”) , and monitored with remote in hand. CDs would be burnt just to have on hand, you know, in case you ever needed to have a copy of Lou Reed’s 8th best solo album. I was never a big cover art guy, just some hastily scrawled sharpie writing, with occasional words crossed out or arrows drawn when mistakes were made. When all my possessions made their way across the country to San Diego, the 200 disc changer didn’t last more than a few months before breaking down. I bought a new one, 300 discs, without a second thought. A CD changer was how it had always been, but this one was bigger and better. Probably the day after it had arrived, a friend asked how much it cost and smugly remarked “huh…could’ve just gotten an iPod.”
This was probably first quarter 2004, and it’s one of those decisions that proves that time travel is impossible, because future me would have clearly come back to warn me against it, were it possible. Within two years, the disc changer was sold on Craigslist, multiple hard drives were obtained to store music and the glorious window of freeipods.com’s existence was exploited to its maximum potential. The CD-R’s, formerly a prized possession, gathered dust in a corner, waiting for us to move to I could throw them away then.
As a man of action, I decided not to wait until we move. The CD’s were gathered up, those on spindles de-spindled, those in imitation Case Logic binders left there. Some quick photos were taken, estimates of total cost attempted and abandoned, and then the CDs were uncerimoniously deposited in the alley trashcan. I’d like to think that a random hobo came by, hoping to score a banana peel with a tiny bit of banana residue, and instantly became a hobo, who, though poor in material possessions, now had a vast wealth of indie cred.
Now there’s just that matter of what to do with the binders of REAL CDs…Anyone wanna buy a grab bag?