Add a few hundred CDs and a few hundred records, plus another 500+ books and I am dangerously close to being eligible for one of those shows where the camera crew finds a dead cat under a pile of clothes that have been sitting there for eight years. Or the big overdue California earthquake will hit and everything on the wall to wall, floor to ceiling shelves in my bedroom at my parents house will fall on me and crush me to death. Last Christmas, or the one before that, I was gifted a Kindle which could conceivably probably hold PDFs of every single book I own with room to spare. Which begs the question, why books? They take up so much room and nobody I ever meet will care that I have all 50 books in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series or five copies of The Big Sleep next to every other Raymond Chandler novel. All it means is that I'll have to box up a few hundred books that I'll never read again and keep the boxes of VHS tapes out of the sun in the back of a truck next time I move so they don't melt. I love each and every one of them but I don't know if they still have a place in my life, or at least in my room. If I had regal, mint, leatherbound copies of the classics, that would be one thing, but I just have 15 Jack Reacher novels in hardback. Not exactly collectors items.
What I'm wondering is if it's all still worth it. Lately, I've been getting rid of some stuff and it's been hard, very hard! It's like having to get rid of some of your children and sell them to Rhino Records for money to buy groceries with. I love having every Stanley Kubrick movie available on hand but mostly because I have had them all since before I could just find them online in 30 seconds. And if my VCR ever takes a shit on me, I will be out of luck because I have no idea where I would take a VCR to get repaired. Maybe I should just leave the collections of obsolete entertainment to libraries. Between every library in San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties, I can find almost every book or film I want and there are still one or two video stores out there to fill in the gaps in my cinematic knowledge. The Blockbuster Video up the street has all the Star Wars movies just waiting to be watched one day. I don't need to save one square foot of shelf space for six movies I don't really even want to watch, do I?
However, as previously noted, I am about 10 years behind the technology curve which makes the thought of listening to music through Pandora or that other one instead of my trusty old iPod that is the first version that they made in color a scary thought. Having two big boxes of CDs in my closet as backup is comforting. I don't like the fact that people now just go to YouTube on their iPhone if they want to hear a song. I know it's easier, faster and more convenient but... actually I really don't have an argument against that. I just know that it doesn't work for me and I don't know why. Actually, I do know why and it's because I can't get on the internet (or "the web" as I affectionately call it) on my phone. But I do know I don't have the desire to watch a feature length movie on a phone screen. I don't even really even like watching stuff on a laptop screen but, hey, you gotta have something to do at work, right? I don't know why I am holding on so stubbornly to these outdated methods of consumption. Comfort? For old times sake? The fear of technology? I probably should have been born 50 or 60 years earlier so that when the internet was invented, I could've just said, "You know what, fuck it, it's not worth figuring all that out at my age."
I liked the "Pandora or other one" line. I was wondering about my collection of VHS tapes as well the other day. I currently do mot own a VCR in any form nor have I in years and yet we still have all these tapes gathering dust. Books are immune to this kind of obsolescence by their very self-contained nature. Do libraries even accept tapes anymore? You could go to the swap meet and sell em off to housewives and children.
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