Down the street was Cheapo Records, located now in the old Best Buy store. Cheapo sells used CDs as well as new, and dumps every day’s purchases in big bins marked with the date they came in. Most of the CDs are lame, but there’s always a gem in the dross. People flip through the bins quite quickly: crap. crap. crap. crap. crap. zamfir. crap. crap. 182 blink. crap. hippie crap. crap. crap. Whoa! Woody Guthrie! The sound fills the front of the store, drowns out the music: clack clack clack clack. It’s like listening to a Difference Engine made of hard plastic, or ten people drumming their tongue studs against their front teeth.
Most of my disc collection was accumulated in the early Nineties when I used to go to Recycled Records on Haight Street every month or two. Rather than spend an hour going through the whole stock and then decide which four of my twenty selections to buy, I hit on a system: on each visit I searched one letter of the alphabet, and bought everything that struck my fancy. Saved loads of time, and exposed me to lots of stuff I’d never have tried otherwise. After about two cycles through the alphabet, there was little left to find, so I stopped going.
What if I could go back in the past, take myself aside and say: You know, in the future, you will be convinced that Russian computers are sending you messages about barnyard sex photos.
I would have gripped my future self by the shoulders: am I insane in the future? Tell me!
No, everyone gets them.