i spent the morning stacking and scattering little piles of fractured CD cases and orphaned discs on the living room floor. after promising ourselves we'd do something about the wall of obsolete music between our swaybacked grey sectional and my nineteen eighty-four collection for like a decade, i finally built some banker boxes and got to sorting them for banishment in the top of the hall closet. there were so very many mixes: the ones my stanford roommates made for me, the several one of joe's congressional coworkers made for him, the gems from pauline, the mix-portraits from stewart, the dauntingly obscure 2009 former-college-DJ monthlies from our friends' friends. there were a shitload of foraged shoegaze singles with prices in pounds, a zillion used albums with stickers from amoeba music. at least two copies of beth orton's daybreaker, three copies of ryan adams's gold, and a bunch of bowie rarities i'd hoarded without opening. david foster wallace reading a selection of his own pieces? it seems my taste isn't nearly as bad as i'd figured i'd be forced to acknowledge it is, which leads me to suspect i've been quietly weeding our CD stacks all this time. i also didn't start acquiring CDs until my parents gave me a player for my 16th birthday, which meant my first disc was pisces iscariot and not a "we didn't start the fire" single or something.
i unkinked my back after hours crouching over old pulp albums in time to head up to midtown for a thundercat concert, the one we were supposed to see at cozy, iconic webster hall in march of 2020 that became a show at nasty, thunderdome-y terminal 5 tonight. did you know everyone wears sneakers and smokes indoors (not even just pot!) at shows now? it's true! we weren't the oldest people there, but we were close, and we were definitely older than thundercat. i felt significantly less hip than i felt when we saw slowdive at that same dreadful venue in 2014, and they and we were already old then.
