I live and die by my music. Look at my tape collections - they're pretty extensive. I started listening to WLIR 92.7 back home (which was soon bought by a big corporate media company which kicked out some DJ's and renamed it to WDRE). I didn't have money to buy records (yes, you read right, records, so I recorded stuff off the radio and re-recorded the songs that I recorded randomly, making my own second-hand mixes. I called this fishing since well, I was basically fishing with a 90-minute cassette for songs that I didn't have. I miss my old tape deck; it was one of those contact-ones (not like the wimpy feather-touch decks that are sold today) so that you could control exactly when sound was written to the tape. This was critical since I hate blank space on tapes. Hate it hate it hate it. It's a waste of tape, if you think about it. I always try to time my mixes so that there's absolutely no space left at the end. That way, if you're playing one of my tapes on a deck with autoreverse, that earth-shattering pause during the time it takes for the tape deck to get to the next song on the next side is minimal. I have a tape deck that does exactly that, except that instead of draining the tape all the way to the end of the leader and straining the cassette cylinders, it reverses once it reads leader! Pretty cool, eh? It was a discontinued feature and I had to search high and low for this older model in order to get it. Too bad it has a feather-touch control.

My music collection has blossomed since then, but I still try to listen to the radio whenever I can. I have a car now, so I get my fill of radio now. I once tried to listen to all of the music that I bought, but then I felt myself becoming less and less in tune (ha! no pun, really no!) with the current music coming out, some from the very same artists whose music I was enjoying. I'd be listening to my new Smiths CD for a while, and lo and behold I find out that they came out with two more albums after that, the band has broken up, Morrissey is wailing about work being a 4 letter word, and there are two Smiths best-of CD's with all the songs that I really like and none of the ones that I hate, which could have saved me $$$$ over all those years. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. KLLC is actually doing a cool thing by putting all of their overplayed songs onto on CD and then selling that CD so either 1) you can overplay the same songs on your own CD player, or 2) you have the entire KLLC playlist in the palm of your hand so you no longer ever have to listen to KLLC ever again. I bought it anyway using one of those online CD store promo deals. And no, I'm not plugging the CD. By the time you read this, it's already sold out. Forever.

Now that I'm working full time at a computer company, I've made full use of the CD player installed on my minitower, listening to old CDs of mine that I would normally neglect just like everything else I've purchased during the past 7 years and kept. One of the amazing things about old music is that just about every song has some scene or memory associated with it. I've always had the old habit of listening to newly purchased CD's over and over again until I buy another one, so the songs of that particular CD are subliminally stapled to the current events going on at that time. REM's Shiny Happy People? End of year party at Nerissa's house. Howard Jones' New Song? Building a giant replica of the Phoenix from Battle of the Planets upstairs in my room. (That was a long long time ago, and yes, that song is old. Check your libraries.) The Sunday's Here Where the Story Ends? ARML my frosh year. (That's when I went bowling for the first time despite a massive cast on my left arm. I got a strike, then 2 gutters, then a strike, then 2 gutters during my first 4 frames ever.) I suspect that sooner or later I'll have a song that reminds me of the 1996 World Series or the famous White House cigar, but this only works with older songs.

Music is a big part of my life, as you can see. I still play some piano and sometimes even some violin or trombone with the LSJUMB. LSJUMB, you ask? Is that music? Well... yes. But I play with the LSJUMB not for the music unless I'm charting something. (I play drums in case you're wondering. Lots of pitch and tone and written music there. Yeah.) I'm there for other reasons. Maybe later I'll have another brain fart and tell you why.