Template?

6-24-08 Template

I will turn 50 in a little over a month. I feel like I would like to make conscious ‘change’ as regards my position to music. For years now, I have complained about my large, unmanageable collection of music – which becomes less manageable with each passing year. I am not buying much ‘new’ music – but I still bring over 1,000 (or more) new-to-me titles each year.

My over-collecting (uber-collecting?) has sort of resulted in me having tons of stuff – maybe I am anticipating a time when I am no longer able to peruse the inventories of record stores – so I wanted to have plenty of records at my house to look at? Couldn’t tell ya. But, I definitely want to “squeeze the sponge” – to get rid of some of the parts of collections that do not (necessarily) interest me – at this time. It would be great to try and plan everything – but…I’m not that organized.

Truth is, I might just go one crate at a time – “Does this title belong to a larger collection?” “Is this a preferable edition of this title?” – stuff like that. As of the beginning of June, 2008 – my ‘Main List’ is at about 21,550 titles. About 61/2 thousand titles too many! And, seriously – that isn’t EVERYTHING, either.

I have often considered a ‘listening program’ – but as I approach 50 years of age – I seriously doubt I will ever find the time and or inclination to listen to everything I have been able to amass in the ‘first 50 years’. Could I just throw away 22,000+ music videos? Maybe. I certainly do not have the time or inclination to sift ‘em (for desirable titles) anymore. But a couple of carefully chosen CD-R’s…and I bet the 6,500+ titles I want to get rid of would be somewhat ‘easy’.

For all of 2008, I have tried to listen to at least 1 record / CD per day (either 30 or 31 titles per month, as it were). Of my 21,000+ list, about 17,000 are, indeed, full-length (album) titles. About March, I noticed I wasn’t keeping up with my template – the “one per day” idea. 50 years is approx. 18,250 days. See what I mean about the odds against listening to EVERYTHING again? Yes, I could up the quotient – 2 or more titles per day, but…there are definitely days that I don’t want to listen to anything! And there are other days when all I seem to want to hear is “The Basement Tapes” by Bob Dylan & The Band. But I do not want my listening experiences to become meaningless – to become just a ‘numbers game’.

I just noticed that I ceased keeping track of my music video collection at 21,172 titles. Perhaps 21,000 or so is just my ‘magic number’? And not all that long ago, I realized that there is a limit to the number of titles you can enter into an Excel spread sheet – something like 65,536 titles lines.

Maybe people aren’t meant to ‘collect’ stuff numbering more than 21,000? I already have more records & CD’s than I had music videos. Time to forget about it? Time to massage everything down to a manageable level? Time to listen? (Time for me to shut up?)