duck-shaped pain

We have baby birds. Before you all think, awwwwwwww, let me tell you that their cute phase ended weeks ago. One day, there were these extremely soft cheep cheep cheep sounds coming from right underneath the deck, the sort of thing that makes you think of new grass and spring-fresh fabric softener commercials. So little. So cute. But now they've entered a new phase in their development, the Shriek At All Hours Phase. Want to sit on the deck and read? Good luck concentrating though the CHEEEEEEP CHEEEEEEEEEP CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP that never seems to end. Couldn't sleep a couple of nights ago, so I opened the back door, stormed out onto the deck wearing my robe, and said for all to hear, "SHUT UP, BIRDS!!!!" Didn't help any. Scared the dog, though. But the cold seems to have subdued them some and they've reverted back to the cheep cheep cheep phase again. We'll see how long that lasts.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time the last two days (inordinate meaning I was there more than I was at work in the same period of time [1]) thumbing through hundreds of old records. The college radio station in town decided to liquidate their entire vinyl collection, because no on played it anymore. At least, that was the official reason. I suspect it actually has more to do with the sheer amount of space it takes to store them and their weight [2}more than anything. The last time I was personally in their record room, the shelves were sagging and seemed minutes from total collapse. This is about eight years ago, and with their budget and space limitations, things probably haven't improved any.

They had them stacked in big piles on tables, sorted according to the exacting This Is The Order We Took Them Out Of The Box method. So anything could possibly be right next to anything else -- hell for those who were looking for something specific. Not for me, though -- I was happy to slog through the piles, even if it meant getting years and years of accumulated radio station dust, and ashes from many, many covert "smoke" breaks in the record room, all over my clothes.

I was there (my first time around) for a couple of hours. I wished I had shown up right when they opened the doors instead of late in the afternoon. However, I didn't even know about the sale's existence until I heard a mention of it on the station while I was driving home from work. Which required an immediate detour, and then a search to find a parking spot on campus, and I finally got there.

I still managed to buy 45 records on my first time through. The guy on duty when I got there told me that the records were a dollar apiece. When I went up to pay, there was a new guy on duty, who claimed that the records were not a dollar -- instead, there was some Byzantine pricing system based on genre and age of the records. He counted them up, and it came to about $75 or so -- not really what I expected. I was sort of dismayed.

"Well," he said, "Since the other guy was wrong and since you're buying a whole bunch of stuff, I can give you a deal."

"Okay," I replied. "How about $45?"

He looked surprised for some reason. "Oh, okay. That sounds good. $45 it is."

So, see, they were a dollar each.

It's strange. Tons of people came in to look at the records, and very few people left with any. I know that there's a dearth of record players out there, but it's not like you can't find reasonable working models at thrift stores and yard sales. [3] Oh well -- more for me. I got so much (my trip today yielded a few more items) that it's difficult to even remember what all I bought. Since the station DJs had first pick of the records, I assume most of the gems in the rock section were gone way before I showed up. The real finds were in other genres -- there were plenty of things to be found in folk, blues, jazz and "other." I grabbed a bunch of records in all of them, going by their covers or if they had been recommended to me and, sometimes, just things I had merely heard of. I'm sure there were plenty of good things that I passed over, since the scope of my knowledge in these areas is fairly limited at times.

While I was looking through the records, this weird short guy came over and stood right next to me, nervously pawing one of the stacks and looking only sort of half-heartedly at them.

"Soooooooooo��" he asked. "What kind of music are you looking for?"

"Oh, all kinds."

"Really?" he replied. "All kinds, that's wild."

I wasn't really in the mood to talk.

He peristed. "I'm just looking for some oldies. Seen any Moby Grape?"

"Uh, no." I was really trying to concentrate on the records.

He hummed and stopped, and then continued humming. At this point, I had moved to another stack, he he moved, too, positioning himself so that he was directly across the table from me. I tried to ignore him, looking though more records, occasionally stopping to throw something more on my pile.

He stopped, too. Like, completely. He just sort of stood there and stared at the records I was going through. I was puzzled and looked at him back. He just continued to look deeply at whatever record I was looking at. It was sort of disconcerting. I mean, you usually expect someone to gaze longingly at your chest, not at the grotty Meat Loaf record in your hand.

Finally, I figured out that he was using me. By watching me thumb through the records, he could see what was available without having to actually handle the records on his own. So I started to go really slow, getting really fascinated in each record, talking my time until he went away.

I ran into him again at the checkout, right before I made my $45 triumph. All that looking, and only one single solitary Moby Grape record did he find. Now, all the records at the sale had a big label in their upper left-hand corner, on which was written the first few letters of the artist's name, for cataloging purposes. So the label on Mr. Guy's record just said, in big block letters, "MOBY." Which really excited the radio station guy. "Wow! You found a Moby record!" He picked up and looked at it, seeming confused. "This must be a really old one, but that's really cool. I haven't heard this one, but I think it's an import."

Snerk.

[1] There's nothing to do all of a sudden. People are gone and I ran out of tasks.

[2] Individual records seem pretty light, but when you assemble large groups of them, they're incredibly heavy. A couple of years ago, I had to drive my record collection from Denver to here for storage purposes. I had all of my records in four plastic crates, which were big and bulky and difficult to wrangle down the stairs and into the car. (Not helping was the fact that at the time, my records were not living with me. They were at S.'s apartment -- how they got there is a long and uninteresting story -- and we had to carry them down a tiny flight of stairs, though his foyer, which was full of bikes and a big broken refrigerator, and then brave the gauntlet of sullen smoking teens out on the porch.) So we loaded them into the car and I attempted to drive my tiny car and its contents over the mountains. I got there, eventually, but the car just acted sort of odd and didn't go as fast as usual. When I got home, out of curiosity's sake, I put one of the full crates of records on the bathroom and found that it weighed in at about 100 pounds. So when people asked me after that how many records I had, I just answered, "Four hundred pounds' worth." Which sounds a lot more impressive than the actual number of them, whatever that was at the time.

[3] Good working models are a little harder to come by. As someone who bought player after player used, searching for one that would work perfectly, and ended up leaving a six-foot-high Graveyard of Record Players out by the dumpster when I moved out of my apartment I occupied at the time, you should trust me on this. Right now, I have two that work. One is the good one -- an eleven-year-old Sony turntable that came with a rack system that my parents bought when I was in high school. I also now own the rest of the rack system. It sounds pretty good, although I'm really in no way an audiophile. Which is pretty obvious when you look at my other record player, the Tot 'N' Teen. This is a small red metal children's record player from about 1955 or so that my mom found for me at a yard sale. It was marked a dollar, but I think she might have talked them down and bought it for a quarter. It comes in its own special red metal case, has a needle made of something very stiff, and works whenever it feels like it. The sound is remarkably good for something that's basically a lunchbox with a turntable in it -- sort of wavering and trebly, but ideal for playing old children's records, 45s (it has the center thing on it that allows you to play them -- hard to find these days) and Bee Thousand, which sounds about like it's supposed to sound while enduring the Tot 'N' Teen.

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