As I'm clearing out my apartment in anticipation of moving at the end of the month - something I've been having a hard time with - I'm sorting my physical music into three piles: pack, digitize, or giveaway.
"I just don't understand what the point of CDs is anymore," a friend said to me, after hearing how I'd spent my day dismantling a wall of them and boxing them up.
"So, what, you just download everything?" I asked, blinking.
I suppose I could skip the packing and just digitize everything I want to listen to in the future, but I still have quite a bit attachment to the physical entities of many of my CDs. I refuse to give away or sell certain imports, limited editions, singles and promo only copies with special packaging. I know I would still have the music if I just ripped it to my laptop, but for me, music is so much more than the underlying composition or the actual recording of it. All sorts of other associations make it meaningful to me: when I first heard it, when I first bought it, that time I brought it on a trip, the time I thought I lost it, the crinkled stain on the booklet from the time I held it to my chest in the dark, eyes squeezed shut, not tightly enough to keep the tears in.
I've had an easier time getting rid of DVDs and VHS tapes, actually preferring to download them for portability. For me, movies aren't a shared experience creating sentimentality. They're a way for me to escape myself rather than immerse me in my own mind and heart the way that music does. So, aside from a few exceptions - Grease, Dirty Dancing and the like - I can let go of a movie that I've seen and probably will never see again.
But somehow, I've got five VHS tapes I don't know what to do with. I can't bear to bring them to Goodwill. I'm not planning on keeping my VCR, so I won't be watching them. I don't have a good way of transferring long-form VHS to a digital file on my laptop. And, in one way or another, I can't download them legally either because they're not available at all, or only available in some different (which I've deemed inferior) version.
- Foul Play, a movie I could watch every day, is not available digitally. I suppose I could buy the DVD.
- Chris Isaak's music video collection Wicked Game is not available digitally or on DVD. I suppose I could buy the DVD version of his greatest hits, but I really just want those videos I already have.
- Stevie Nicks In Concert is not available digitally or on DVD.
- Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas is no longer available with the Kermit the Frog intro that I have on my VHS.
- Grease's remastered sound on all currently available downloads, DVDs and broadcasts is annoying and distracting. I like the old fuzzy version I have.
So these archaic tapes, in their colorful little cardboard sleeves, are sitting on my kitchen table, staring at me as they slowly deteriorate. I know that they're just a pile of plastic and paper now, but it makes me feel better to have them and not be able to watch them than to not have them at all.
If I lost my sight, would I still keep my books, remembering the feel of cover and binding and page and dogear, inhaling its scent?
If I lost my hearing, would I still place those CDs in a player, thumbing through their booklets, placing palms on speaker to feel the vibrations that might still feel familiar?
Or are these possessions nothing more than the stuffed animals from childhood that I've hauled from apartment to apartment in a black garbage bag, eventually stuffed onto a closet floor until the next time I'm ready to move? Is knowing that I still have them the equivalent of keeping a security blanket locked away in a box somewhere, comfort derived from knowing it's there if I need it, but embarrassment and practicality preventing me from ever taking it out?
I'm the kind of person that brings home leftover mashed potatoes from a restaurant and leaves them in the fridge so long that they rot and must be thrown out. But for those days (ok weeks) that they are in there, I feel secure knowing they are there if I choose to eat them.
So these material things I'm packing up now may stay in storage or at least in their boxes for a long time to come. And when I'm ready to take them out and watch or listen to them again, they may have passed their expiration date. But for now, I think I have to keep them. I've lost enough things in this life.