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Michael considered fate at 20:26   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

stuff, man.. stuff. vice. the things we try to make dreams out of like some sort of pack rat gone wild in a garbage heap. everything's a something and if it's not let's make it.

what do you do when you check on the laundry machine only to find a sock escaped? there, lying bare on the floor like a p.o.w. shot down just over the fence. all slack and lifeless. a frozen body. do you toss it in anyway? even if it's on the rinse cycle? spin dry? what if it smells?

stuff creeps on you everywhere and, as if there were no end to such obsessive behaviour, it's got it's creepy-crawlies into our digital universe to boot - like i was saying before. emails, site hits, mp3s, pdfs, you name it. if it's made up of little 1's and 0's then we want to collect it, and archive it, and store it, and move it over to better storage after saving it from an almost ill fate. we want to restore it, remaster it, refine it. we want to store things that were never meant to be anything but fleeting moments in the first place.

my roommate sighed the other day.

"I'm done."

"Done?" I asked.

"No more.."

"No more what?" I demanded.

"No more music. I'm out. No more space."

Over the last few months he's been a virtual fiend on the run, snapping up files like they were social currency, grabbing mp3s like they defined his self-worth -> let's be honest, it may be self-worth, but it's truly a reflection back into the world.. it has no sense or meaning inside our own skulls for in there, anything goes. sit, as anti suggests, for a few moments completely alone with the lights and sounds and whirring motors turned off and you'll find crazed little demons lurking in the dark recesses of your little soul that you didn't think you could even muster. sit still long enough and you'll feel the oozing of these feelings and thoughts and emotions and odd little twitchy-twitch syndromatic flashes that make all of us "crazy".

"So how much do you have now?" I inquired.

"Well, I just finished getting the full works of The Cure and the Clash," he exclaimed proudly, "so I'm now up to 72 gigs."

Seventy... two... gigabytes. Not so long ago that was an unheard of number of bytes. Not much more than ten years ago "A dollar a megabyte" was the catch phrase in hard drive sales and that means.. let's do the calculation.. back then it would cost him roughly $74,000 to house that sort of collection. Let's not even consider that they didn't even make drives like that back then.

All told I see him listen to a few albums a day.. maybe 5. More often than not it's the same thing over and over that he's getting familiar with. Like most people. Normal.. but still a pack rat, nonetheless.

I like to throw stuff away whenever I can. I'm admittedly part of the problem but on the rare occasion that I get the urge, I can throw absolutely anything away. It's a thrill, believe me. Like skydiving for someone afraid of heights.. that more exciting because of it. The whole time I'm shitting my pants, knowing that the first time I'm going to need this item - really need it - will be tomorrow (like, say for example someone mentions an old song that hit #5 on the charts in '83 for one week then disappeared completely.. I need to be able to reproduce that song then and there, immediately.. that's as close as I get to really needing).

"I run my drives in RAID so I could have more space," he informed me, "but when I have time I'll pick up a couple 250 gigs and then I'll be off and running again."

250 gigs of music. Somewhere in the range of 150 straight days worth. 3500 hours plus. Clearly necessary. From his inflection alone I could tell the thought just tickled him pink.