God Bless Digital Music

In the fall of 2004 I separated from my wife of 10 years. While the separation itself wasn’t terribly contentious, I did walk out with nothing more than a backpack and all of the clothes that it could carry. In other words; in addition to my wife and two kids, I walked out on hundreds of CDs, dozens of DVDs, and God only knows how many books.

Having witnessed countless divorces degrade into petty screaming matches about who bought which CD and who liked Pearl Jam more, I resolved that my separation (and subsequent divorce) wouldn’t go down like that. Besides, I reasoned, it’s just “stuff.” And stuff can easily be replaced.

My solution was simple; with every paycheck I would replace a CD, DVD, or book, until I had sufficiently replaced my original collection. The thing is, here it is three and a half years later and I’ve yet to replace anything. According to my Philosophy Major’s understanding of basic arithmetic, that’s like 91 items! Again: FAIL!

Be that as it may, the loss of one album in particular has driven me crazy: Danny Tenaglia’s Back to Basics. For the past few years I’ve satisfied my musical needs with Rhapsody. It’s an online music-streaming site that lets you listen to thousands of albums on any broadband-equipped computer. The problem is that they don’t have Danny Tenaglia’s Back to Basics. So imagine my surprise today when I was clearing the data on an old laptop that I was planning on giving to a friend and finding hundreds of the albums that I used to have ripped to the hard drive? Baby, it’s like Kwanzaa in February!

Not really having a moral to this story I’ll say this: If you think there’s any chance in Hell that you and your old lady are about to call it quits, be a man and let her have all the CDs. Just be sure to rip em to your hard drive before you walk out the door.