Decluttering Diary Volume I: Beginning To Sell My Children

Soooo…. I am old.  Recently my wife and I have come to the conclusion that we have too much stuff.  Looking around our home and in our basement it is hard to deny.  As discussed over the last several years I like music.  I listen to a lot of music.  I like to go to shows and historically I have liked to “buy” and “own” music.  I have come to realization that this is dark ages stuff.  Streaming has won and my 1500 (or so) CD’s will one day be of all the value of 1500 8-Tracks and it is going to happen sooner rather than later.  My albums… they are different at least for now. They have art and liner notes my 53 year old eyes can read.  But CD’s?  They never had any magic.  They were beautiful and functional but… they seemed like a logical place for me to start the decluttering process.

I have over the years ripped many of these onto various computer hard drives and subsequently lost some of the libraries when i got new computers.  iTunes solved that storage dilemma but only up to 25,000 songs so there was a picking and choosing process while also adding new audio files and downloads instead of actually buying new CD’s.  When I decided that this would be first test of my resolve I asked my son for my birthday to put together ripping machine and hard drive to rip all CD’s to hard drive and up into the cloud.  He built me a pretty little two disk drive Hacintosh and wrote out detailed instructions for how to rip and I have now started the process in earnest.

I type this after ripping (with Jon giving me a head start of doing 50 or so about 100 CD’s.  It is interesting and it is painful.  Interesting to see how many jewel boxes had concert tickets stuffed into them, a quaint habit I picked up somewhere along the line.  Interesting because he also hooked me up with something called “Delicious Library” which allows me to scan the barcodes of the ripped CD’s and it creates visual library of art together with information on the Cd as well as current value of CD on Amazon.  This “value” proposition remains to be tested.  But it was interesting too to see how the market has “valued” my collection (more on that later).  Painful is just because I love the music and I am a hoarder.  Seeing that I have 11 Yo La Tengo CDs is a thing of awe and beauty to me and the fact that 80% of you reading this have no idea who Yo La Tengo is magnifies my sense of the “importance” of my “collection”.

So I sit in front of my machine I load, I open as audio file in something called XLD, I get the track names downloaded and then I rip something called a FLAC file which my son tells me can then convert into an MP3 file.Each one takes about 10 minutes and I can do 2 at a time. I tried to find a high school kid to do this but couldn't and now realize that it would take all the profit out of it.  I have opened up an EBay account and I think I need to open Amazon account as well to sell.  

I took 96 CD’s to Euclid records and they were very professional with me.  I advised that I was coming in to sell my children.  The young lady did not seem sympathetic or interested but she was polite.  I left them my name and number and about ½ hour later she told me they wanted 26 of them and would pay me 72 dollars.  I had priced them Amazon as being worth about 300 total.but was looking at this first batch as an experiment.  She explained  that the ones I saw as “valuable were worth 5 bucks to them, the rest were either two dollars or one dollar,  That just happened.  I feel somewhat violated but I think when you sell your children you feel that way.  There is a site called Decluttr which will pay me .40 each for them and handle shipping but I think I try my hand at Amazon and/or Ebay and maybe make a trip to Vintage Vinyl.  I will report.  The process should take me well into the Spring and as of this point for CD’s that probably cost me 1000 bucks I am 72 dollars to the good but I still have 70 of them to get rid of. I have opened a special account for the liquidation of my “treasures” starting with the CD’s, followed by the books I am embarrassed of (Dick Francis, John Grisham and what not) and then...the comic books...scrap metal...who knows.  This might be an interesting obsession…. maybe a sad little book…”The Baby Boomers Guide To Selling Your Children, (Decluttering)”.  What could go wrong?

And Another Ones Gone...CD Reviews of Neil Young's Le Noise and Old 97's Grand theatre Volume One

Soooo...I fear that I may have purchased my last CD. This grieves me as i remember Jackson Browne's ode to his father which included the line, "make room for my 45's, along beside your 78's nothing survives... but the way we live our lives." Gosh, remember when Jackson Browne had anything interesting to say or observe, back before he beat up Daryl Hannah? That was a long time ago. I have a large CD collection but it is not an oppressively large collection. My music purchases have declined as I become more and more out of touch and irrelevant and buy more and more through iTunes. And there is at least one of the rubs. I am a fan of certain artists and I am a completist, almost obsessively regarding the artists I consider essential to my snobbish, boorish, elitist, disdainful and ultimately sad musical tastes.

So when Neil Young releases a critical well reviewed CD and my stalwart if somewhat predictable icons the Old 97's both release CD's within days of one another I have to resist the urge to download and go out... to a store... with people... and buy the CD. This is even more complicated by the fact that due to my elitist disease i cannot go to Walmart or even Target and buy a CD but i have to support our local record stores... all two of them. I know there are more but stores like that one down on Cherokee are way too cool for me. I am after all, old. So I herded myself down to Euclid records (which is close) and found both CD's and... HOLY SHIT! Both CD's are $17.99... EACH! Are you shitting me?

I can buy either of the CD's on iTunes for $9.99. What do I lose? The packaging? The CD format has limited dramatically thevalue of packaging. Albums were works of art and love and contained a wealth of information written in a font size that was legible, even for old people. they were pretty. I will treasure my 300 albums more then I can ever cherish my 1000 or so Cd's. So I guess what I am saying is that I am going to sit on my completist fetish and... perhaps never buy another CD. God, that Kills me.

So quickly, "Le Noise". It is worth the critical acclaim. It is Young playing alone with Daniel Lanois production which is sparse but rather then take the Rick Rubin approach of acoustic minimalism Lanois lets Young stretch out with electric guitar, effect and his laconic, atonal vocals and although I have only listened twice... this is a really good CD and easily a top 10 Neil CD. Nuff said.

The Old 97's Grand theatre CD... it is more ofthe same. if you love Rhett Miller and his pop sensibilities it is a must buy but as with almost all the band's CD's, no new ground is broken here. I love it but i am a fan. That is the only reason to buy it.

but if you buy them...buy them both on iTunes or even better, pick out the best tracks on each CD and just buy those. "The times, they are a changing". Or perhaps they have already changed.