First Published on my Old Blog on October 7th, 2015
When I was young I had the sense that I was unusual; however, it wasn’t till this summer when I ripped my old CDs that I realized that I was indeed a Proper Weirdo. I didn’t want to get rid of them till they were saved, even though I didn’t listen to them very much. An album on a disc drive is as good as one on a flat disc. Books in a digital format are sad little ghosts — the smell and tactile joy are part of the experience — but the CDs were the same if ripped or not.
It was also strange to have these things around the house that at one time seemed so cutting-edge and promising but now seemed so old-fashioned and cumbersome. My copy of the White Album had yellowed.
But more on my weirdness –. I had moved many times since my last full album buying days at the turn-of-the-century and the CDs, which I rarely listened to were getting to be a burden. It would be easy enough to dispose of them and not lose any music, and I always had to be at the ready. My recurrent case of Beatlemania could break out at anytime and I didn’t want to lose anything already acquired.
I turned out be a little surprised by what I had, even if I remembered almost everything well once I saw it. I had forgotten the strange blues obsession of my teenage years — I had piles of John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. What kind of teenager listens to that? or to the folk music — the Kingston Trio and Peter Paul and Mary? Shouldn’t I have been listening to Metallica and Soundgarden? I did and I was. I never had a lot of CDs but what I had was diverse.
I have a big chunk of the Sinatra catalog and plenty of Billie Holiday. Singers I liked at twenty and that I’ve continued listen to and to love. There is a lot of Baroque music — Monteverdi, Bach, and Purcell from my mid-20’s. I took advantage of a local radio station switching formats to buy quite a bit of it. My liking of that music was instinctive. I don’t have a great ear for sophisticated music and I think there are still things on those discs that I don’t get. Hopefully, one day I shall comprehend the magic of the fugue.
Book buying was a pathological disease for me in my 20’s but music never was, maybe because the cost was prohibitively expensive, maybe because buying music seemed more consumeristic than scholarly. I don’t know. Once ripped my CDs only occupied a tiny fraction of my external hard drive. Yet, they still take up about two square feet of space on the floor of my bedroom.
What I can I do with these outdated mathoms? Will the Mathom-House at Michel Delving take them? Would they be a valued cultural artifact to a distant descendant? I can talk to the Mayor, but I have a feeling I will continue carrying them about till someone else is inconvenienced enough by them to trash them, or till they fade on their own and are blank.
Tags: Proper Weirdos, The Blues, Books, Beatlemania, Mathoms, The Mathom-House at Michel Delving
Thomas Olivieri 