LPs are Babe Ruth. Qiana shirts, lava lamps, and black-light posters. But our album collection remained an inviolate part of our lives, through dorm rooms to first apartments to first homes, through various marriages and living arrangements and divorces. And through it all, each album assumed a set of snaps, crackles, and pops that ranged from irritating to infuriating, but somehow we got used to them and ultimately accepted them. The subtle series of pops at the transition point in my copy of Sgt.
CDs are cybersex e-mail.
LPs are fountain-penned love letters on ecru parchment. Over the course of a month, I privately eulogized each one before dropping it into the dumpster. More than 2,000 bit the dust before I finished. I tossed them slowly, with days of reflection in between, before relegating them to rock 'n' roll heaven. I savored the associations of time and place that came and went with each.