i forgot what i was going to write about…
…oh, yeah. impermanence.

i am at my pop’s house tackling the daunting task of transferring my relatively large cd collection (is 200 huge?) into mp3 files. i’ve succumb to the fear that the metal coating on the discs in my 7-15 year-old cd collection is slowly deteriorating and will leave my music to die forever and my wallet to groan at the thought of the money i spent collecting the albums that characterize my adolescence and entry into adulthood (i’m laughing at myself as i write this overly sentimental statement). i remember going through my father’s vinyl when i was a kid, putting some dusty grooves onto the old technics phono and hearing for the first time herbie mann, bob dylan, joni mitchell, chuck mangione, john coltrane. if i were to ever have kids or simply a place where friends could share all the junk i’ve collected over the years–sometimes called a “home”–i’d want my music to be accessible, not obsolete as cds will eventually be. vinyl is supposedly the only media the library of congress uses to archive their music collection. i feel gypped.

i’m not doing much for the cause by purchasing an mp3 player (albeit an open-share piece of equipment that doesn’t require me to use itunes and allows me to share my music with whomever i please. sorry, apple.). a flash memory card probably won’t outlast a plastic cd, but at least it allows me to carry eight boxes of compact discs in my pocket. i feel bad buying another lithium-ion battery, another gadget that will die in a few years time. i’ve been thinking this choice over for many years now, ever since ipods became the as fashionably cliché as converse shoes. a compact ‘walkman’ (sorry, i grew up in the eighties) that can carry over a thousand songs? what a miracle. i grew up using computers, so the technology wasn’t foreign to me. but the dependence on yet another battery-powered circuit board made me hesitate. so i waited. and waited. and kept making mix tapes and lugging my cds around with me wherever i moved.

i am excited though…music is a part of me that my luddite side cannot beat in an arm wrestling contest. the music always wins, and since we don’t all play live music on our back porch (fortunately, there’s often bluegrass musicians on my father’s back porch), we record it on albums and listen to it on speakers. and we share our music and it brings us a certain joy that is hard to get any other way. i love music. it keeps me in rhythm to life.