duck-shaped pain

This doesn't have to be the case - I just have had the habit, over the last ten years, of accumulating crappy music and carrying it around with me. Much of it, at the moment, is sitting snugly in my mom's attic in New Jersey, but plenty of it made it up here and has been since joined by a myriad of books and records and so forth that I've accumulated since '97. Much of it is really good, and I am glad to have it. But a good chunk is just not really necessary - it's not that I don't need (my best estimate) 1000 CDs. But not these 1000.

How did I accumulate 1000 CDs? Well, to begin with, I haven't sold off too many of 'em, even a lot of the stuff I know I'll never really listen to. For another thing, I still don't know how to drive, which tends to increase one's disposable income even if you don't work all that hard. But mainly, I - like YR, with whom it was my main activity in my time in Colorado - am an inveterate thrift shopper. Being that, in Colorado, the world had told me that my job skills were worth approximately $5.75 an hour plus free coffee, it made perfect economic sense for me to spend an hour finding the 10 or 15 $5 treasures to be dug up in one of the innumerable used record stores there. This also means, of course, that my musical purchases are biased towards those artists who frequently appear in used bins�often for good reason.

I also reviewed records for a magazine for a while; this actually didn't increase my collection too much, as much of what I was sent was just abominable crap that even I would never keep around. However, reviewing video games for the magazine did, for two reasons: 1. I was only allowed to review a game a month, but was sent 4 or 5, and 2) The video game companies, mere babes in the woods compared to record companies, were credulous enough to simply send store-perfect copies of their games, no promo hole, no markings, shrink wrap and bar code and everything. Pretty much every box set I have was, in a sense, originally a video game.