On compact discs

I just had an apple. Apples are delicious. One of the nice things about Maine is that all throughout the fall fresh Maine apples are everywhere for next to nothing. McIntosh's are my personal favorite. I like to pick my own. I like smallish, medium sized ones. They're a nice quick fix of ENERGY. And if you're still hungry then you can have a 2nd. Because they're smallish. If you pick HUGE apples and you're not that hungry then a lot of times you may not finish the apple, probably by going light around the core. That's not my style. So oftentimes I take two, because they're small.

Anyways, I like CD's more than I like downloading music on the newfangled itunes store. Granted I listen to a ton of music on my computer, and I have a ton of music on my computer; I would just prefer to have CD's. I'd like to say it's because of the higher fidelity which CD audio provides compared to the compressed mp3 or m4a or wma or aac file formats but none of my audio players are technologically advanced enough for those subtle nuances to be audible (Actually I really like LP's. Vinyl. I took a class in college titled The Physics of Electronic Sounds and we looked at, well, listened to a lot of this. Vinyl is warm. Inviting. Imperfect. Delightful. I actually have an Ol' Dirty Bastard LP somewhere around here. Not many folks can say that. But CD's are OK, too..). Maybe it's in my 5 year plan to have a stereo with speakers so powerful they'll blow a woman's clothes off. But, probably not.

My favorite parts of CD's are the cases and liner notes. I like to read the lyrics (if they're in there) and look at the pictures. I like to have my CD's organized in the Case Logic cases which have their liner notes in them, too. Keeps my car a bit tidier. So, really I only use half of the spaces in the big CD casse because half of the slots are filled up with paper. I don't mind, it's worth it to quell my anal-retentiveness.

This also means when I take a CD out of my CD player in the Volv' the CD must return to its correct slot above or below its appropriate liner notes. This can, at times, get a bit tricky to do while driving but I don't really worry about trivial details like that. I'm a pro; it's a gift.

Some of the reasons CD's are handy, too, is that I travel a fair amount on the road (I know I could listen to an ipod, too. To those of you thinking that I say: Shut up. Ipods are for walking. Cd's are for driving. That's how I do my living). For the past month plus it's pretty much been a CD a day for the commute to and from lovely Turner, Maine. It smells beautiful in Turner this time of year, too (No joke, for three days last week it smelled like 100 people took a steamy dump together at the base of the roof. DeCoster's chicken shit is potent, and it was laid a few miles form the school..).

So with all the driving I've been doing I don't feel bad about picking up a CD or two every now and again. My problem it's never a CD or two, it's usually four or five at a go. Whatever, it's just money. Early, early, early on the 'Pad I talked of my love for used CD's, and this is still the case. My steal of last Friday was The Downward Spiral for $2.97 (I already have The Downward Spiral on my computer, but that's besides the point). It seems half the time I end up knowing very little about the CD's I am buying prior to my purchases. When I hear a song I like or someone suggests an artist or band I may like, I try to write it down. Then I get to Bull Moose and I have five or six little scraps of paper with 15 or so suggestions/reminders on there and I pick from what I've got. Most of the time there's really no rhyme or reason to my choices, though (you all could have guessed this) price can sometimes play a small deciding factor. Then I spend the next week or so playing them and seeing what I think.

With new (to me) CD's I like to listen to them straight through the first time or two. Not always all at once (because I seldom drive for an hour or more straight) but over the course of a day or two I like to start at track one and work through everything once or twice to see what it offers collectively. If I stop during a track I usually skip back to the beginning of the track really quickly as I'm shutting off the car so I can start the next trip with a whole track. I actually do that a lot of the time, new CD or not. I'm a nerd. But it gets me through the days.

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NOTICE. I just upgraded my external hard drive because I needed more space to store all of the useless bullshit I keep piling up on my desktop. So now I have my old 80gig external which I would love to part with for a nominal fee of $40 (+/-). I'll even leave the 70-odd gigs of music I have stored on it, if you would like. Don't tell the RIAA or whatever (Hell, I'll probably have lawyers at my door tomorrow. Too bad they were ALL ACQUIRED LEGALLY...big F you to the man). But, let me know. It works great, I just needed wide open spaces for my many documents and papers and I happened to happen upon a good deal last week. Good evening to all of you. Cheers.