Today I went and did something I swore I would never do. I went to a record sale. That’s right, vinyl people.
Now the reason why I wouldn’t do this before, is two-fold. First off, I have spent the last six years of my life trying to de-clutter and make my life smaller. Vinyl seems like the kind of thing to collect, and I don’t want to collect much of anything. I have been loaning out books with the thought that I am fully OK with not getting them back.
And for music, I have started downloading albums instead of buying CDs, because my CD collection weighs too much. My entire music collection is housed on the same hard-drives that I write my blog on. I can grab this laptop, my passport, my credit card, and a few photo albums and be gone in an instant….if I was so inclined to do that.
The other part of the reason why I haven’t ever gotten into vinyl was just that I sort of feel like I missed a boat somewhere along the line. My parents were never big music fans. Growing up, I think there were all of 25 albums in the house. And less than a dozen 8-tracks. In contrast, I have 376 albums on my computer. So, I think a lot of people who collect vinyl are people whose parents had cool collections. I’ve heard lots of my friends talk about inheriting their folks’ records. I just never was introduced to it, and I never had an in.
However, at work, there’s a ton of my friends who are collectors. And they’re all at work talking about their new finds. Truthfully, most of them try to discourage anyone else from picking up the habit.
Now, I don’t know that I’m going to become a record collector. The whole experience was kind of intimidating, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know anything about records, or what any of them are worth. I don’t really have any idea what kind of cool stuff is out there and what’s random and rare. So, today I was just hoping something would hop out at me that I must have. That didn’t happen. But it’s an interesting new thing that I’m checking out, and you never know what might happen. I could get totally swept up in this.
But there’s something to the flipside…. I hear something on Pandora, and I want to check out, I look on Amazon, and hear more of it, and if I want it real bad, I can download it and have it in my collection in moments. I guess i’ve become spoiled in that regard. If there was something that I wanted on vinyl, best case scenario, I’d order it and have it shipped to me. I guess I’m just spoiled. Spoiled digital rotten.
Just sayin’
Peggy Lu Who's Just Sayin' 