They came in old cardboard boxes with white water lines and black mold. They came in plastic totes, softened and misshapen from the strain of the collective weight within. They came in banana boxes and Peaches crates. They came from dark corners of musty basements and the parlors of the dead. They came from friends who said they could no longer reconcile having them in their homes but retained enough sentimental fondness for them, that they knew they could be left in my care and well attended. They came and they came and they kept coming. They came to thrift stores and book fairs and second hand shops where I dutifully scooped them up. Dear God, how I love the discovery and acquiring of both the familiar and the obscure of them, the smell of their sleeves and the smoothness of their grooves. I’m giddy at the sight of them, warm recognition triggering happy synapses and the delight of encountering some title heretofore unknown as I scour the bins. Next comes the smell; where many might recoil at the odors of these aged things and the reminder of lost time and lost souls that accompany them, it is pure stimuli for me, a clue that I have recovered something long unwanted and unloved. Even the touch of them is pure delight. Whether boxed or binned, the left hand gently palms their tops, brushing them backwards like shuffling a deck, all the weight on the rear and the front face revealed. With the flick of the finger and thumb of the right hand you pull and let drop, waiting for that jewel to reveal itself in the midst of these Andy Williams, Ray Conniff ruins. Suddenly the adrenaline surges and the heart races, did somebody really discard, here in the fifty-cent bin, a red apple labeled pressing of Let It Be? I pull it out and rest it squarely between my palms letting the soft and worn cardboard edges press into the fleshy base of my thumbs. Admiring the forsaken beauty of the thing, I unfold the gate and gaze down on the familiar faces of comforting friends. Then I squirrel it away securely under my left arm with the stealthiness of a pickpocket and the guilt of a shoplifter, as I dive back into the search. My senses nearly fully engaged, I anticipate the ultimate reward when I will finally have them home and drop the needle; it is after all about the hearing. Of all that is wonderful about the record album, their art and their size and their smell, they are at their most wonderful when being listened to.

The glorious LP, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute of pure bliss and astonishing ear-opening revelation have become my obsession, my saving grace and my albatross. I don’t know how many I own and I don’t care to count them, suffice to say it is plenty, a number somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000; I pray not larger. It is enough music to keep me engaged for my remaining years should I live to be 100. I don’t begin to pretend that there is anything remarkable about the number, for I know there are countless private collections that would dwarf my own. But this one is mine and everything in it was purchased for a reason and I am dismissive of hardly any of the titles. Most all of them have something good to offer and if not quite good, at least interesting. I will say however, my collection is right up against the edge of sanity. If it were to grow much larger I would be pushing the boundaries of reason and no longer collecting for the music but simply for the act of collecting. It was when my obsession began to bleed into the irrational territory of gathering the lesser format of 80’s-centric cassette tapes that I began to worry. When it metastasized further into the collecting of long dormant 8 Track tapes, I admitted that there was a problem that might require professional help. My cassette collection is nearing the 1,000 mark. This I can verify through simple multiplication of my sturdy cubbies where they are stowed. One cubby holds 20 tapes, multiplied by 50 cubbies; even I can do that math. My 8 Tracks stand at approximately 500 in number.

That’s right, I said 500, chunky, persnickety, brittle plastic boxed cartridges of music and maddening frustration. All the titles you might expect of the era are here; Frampton Comes Alive, Bat Out Of Hell, Cheap Trick at Budokan and everything else from Deep Purple’s Machine Head to Captain and Tennille’s Greatest Hits. Oh how I love them! I love them so much that if they are broken I open their insides and perform surgery to make them whole again. I splice them with scotch and silver tape. I take Q-tips and rubbing alcohol and bathe away the iron oxide, bong water residue and mummified insects that loved Dreamboat Annie so much that they decided to crawl inside and make it their personal mausoleum. I peel away the foam pads that have deteriorated to dust and replace them new with a certain width of weather stripping that I acquire from Home Depot. If they have suffered and sweated through the summer of ’75 in the glove box of an AMC Javelin, I forgive their warped ways and try to ease their inadequacies by gently placing a matchbook under them while they struggle to deliver their songs. I love the idea of hearing music that has sat idle for forty years and will work tirelessly to make it sound its best. Yes I realize I am nostalgic to the extreme and slightly off kilter, maybe even unhinged but I don’t play golf and everyone needs a hobby.

It is into this environment and after witnessing this obsessive collecting for years on end, that those nearest and dearest to me thought it appropriate to “gift” me another direction. A new way of listening that would instantaneously negate my many years of labor and threaten once and for all to bring and end to my lifelong quest. She came into my home on Christmas morn, wrapped in swaddling tissue and brightly adorned paper. In the eastern sky a faint black star was briefly visible in the fleeting minutes between darkness and dawn. Wiser men than me have followed that star to a dark and depressing antiseptic land where every wish is granted, every command obeyed. Spawn of a new era! Forged from heartless hands, endowed with imprudent intellect and cunning artifice, maiden daughter of Bezos, we shall call you by your name, Mighty Alexa! Behold her magnificence! Gaze on her with wonder but gird your tongue lest ye offend her electronic ear and diodic sensibility.

She was lovingly unpacked and I found her so new, so pristine and so perfect that I was overcome with emotion and held her aloft for the whole world to admire, like Rafiki held Simba. The reaction amongst my old compatriots was swift and telling. My albums blanched and warped, my 45’s turned white, my 78’s shattered, my cassettes stuck pencils in their eyes, my 8 Tracks vomited tape and my Compact Discs, the scorned progeny of a flaccid format, laughed a bitter little laugh of satisfaction at witnessing my older and dearer friends receive their comeuppance. The whole lot of them befuddled, belittled and usurped by the pretty little new girl on the block.

There was a time many years ago, when you would hear a song on the radio and it would stop you in your tracks or shake you to your soul. Sometimes it might be just a snippet. Still you would dutifully wait with eager impatience for the set to end and the disc jockey to return in the hope that they would reveal the name of the artist and title track. Thus informed you could run down to Target or Venture or Streetside records or Peaches to buy the album or 45. More often than not the DJ had nothing to tell you about the songs just played and would go straight to commercial. You were left to your own devices to unscramble a lyric, a chorus or refrain that just might reveal something approaching the title. If the song you heard happened to be Smoke On The Water, well that was a no brainer. We Will Rock You? No problem, you can decipher that easy enough. But if the song you heard had no correlation between lyric and title, well you were pretty much screwed. E.T.I (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) by Blue Oyster Cult comes to mind. Not a mention of those words in the lyrics. If you did have some vague idea of who the artist was or a prominent piece of a lyric you could trek on down to the record store where there was a giant book of every available song ever recorded that you could thumb through and try to find the answer. If you were lucky enough to put the puzzle together and find your song you would hurry over to the bins and hope the title was there. If not, and depending on the surliness of the clerk you asked, you might have them order it special.

Now if all this detective work sounds like a colossal pain in the ass, well you’re right, it was. But it was also kind of a challenge and even a little fun. It allowed you the opportunity to linger in anticipation for a while, which in retrospect was a gift. It made the reward all the more satisfactory if you had to work and wait a bit. Instant gratification is an oxymoron. There is nothing gratifying about having every whim and want a click or a command away. I still listen to the radio, most often in my car. When a song I really like but have never heard prior comes on KDHX, I ask Siri to identify it and in less than 10 seconds she comes back with, “This sounds like The End Of The World by Skeeter Davis but please don’t ask me to sing it for you.” Ha, ha Siri, you’re hilarious! That’ll do robot, that’ll do. Not only does it provide me with this information but also it takes me right to iTunes whereupon I can purchase it with nothing more than my thumbprint. All this while sitting at a stoplight or worse still, barreling down the highway at 70 miles per hour.

There is much to be gained through all this frenetic new technology but Lord there is much to be lost as well. We spent Christmas morning as a family shouting contradictory commands at an indifferent little cylinder that would just as soon initiate a carbon monoxide leak in my furnace as play us Winter Wonderland. We now live in a world of little unseen knots all tied together but with very long threads reaching back to a handful of massive corporations; Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, maybe a couple more. I have visions of Jeff Bezos high up on a dark castle mount, chortling and chugging, staring into his seeing-stone where he converses with the disembodied remnants of Steve Jobs as they look down with delight while watching me struggle and curse as I try to open the battery compartment of my Fire TV Stick remote control. Finally after employing the precise combination of pine tar, black magic and thumbs of Hercules, I open this new world too, where further nickel and dime casual contracts are just a click away.

Music, film, literature and even nourishment all at the command and control of one entity while the cost of doing business is so easily facilitated and so cunningly obscured that before you know it they are so deep in your pocket they can scratch your knee. Netflix, $7.99 per month, Hulu, $7.99 per month, Sling TV, $30 per month, Amazon Audible, $14.95 per month, Amazon Music Unlimited, $7.99 per month, Amazon Prime, $12.99 per month, iTunes, $1.29 per song or $3.99 per movie rental and on and on and on. Like any good pusher these folks know how to get you subtly hooked and once on the line they know you will pay dearly to keep your euphoric state of comfortable numbness. I have a lovely wife who was up until recently a voracious reader of books of the kind that you held in your hand and turned the pages. She recently stated that she almost exclusively prefers her books to be read to her on Audible. I felt like Donald Sutherland in Invasion Of the Body Snatchers when he discovered Brooke Adams asleep and realized she had become one of the pod people. “Jennifer, no, no! Wake up! (Slap, shake) wake up!” Jenny speaking in a monotone voice, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, they were right, it’s painless. It’s good. Come, sleep..Larry…Larry…Larry!”

I found myself near asleep recently, lying prone in the middle of the living room floor, arms straight out from my sides, legs crossed at the ankles in a languid crucifixion of capitulation. I lay there in the house, alone aside from my new girlfriend Alexa. We talked, we flirted, and we cried together as I asked her to play song after song and she coolly complied. No physical interaction, no senses engaged, just my brain and me and my one good ear mumbling commands; “Alexa play She Loves To Be In Love by Charlie.” I asked her to play Something Better by Chilliwack, Gypsy Lights by The Quicksilver Messenger Service, From a Dry Camel by Dust and a host of other records I used to have to hunt down. I lay there spitting out lazily constructed playlists that used to be critically edited, carefully executed and artfully illustrated on cassette. I went from You Belong To Me by Jo Stafford, to Float On by The Floaters, To Virginia Plain by Roxy Music just waiting for the silicon chip inside her head to switch to overload. It never did.

There is no love in it. That is the ultimate problem; there is no love and no effort in it. My new Amazon Echo is fine and yes it is a wonder but like all new technology it is cold, sterile, precise and boring as Hell. Alexa is a fickle mistress to anyone with 99 dollars to pay to her pimp and like every lovelorn fool before me I have tried to make her my own. Much to her clinical chagrin she is currently tethered to and through my gorgeous 60’s era Magnavox console stereo of wood, wires and tubes, which in turn is hooked up to a pair of magnificent Wharfdale w70D speakers that it is my honor and privilege to be babysitting for a neighbor. The sound that comes out of this setup via Alexa is warm, rich and elegant. If I must move forward I am going to drag a few of my old things with me.

Amazon is intellectual Kudzu. Where my mind used to be a forest with many varieties of thriving trees throwing branches far and wide, reaching for sky and sunlight and fresh air, it is now obscured and covered in sameness. Each tree and every branch is indistinguishable from the next, my glorious music, my beloved movies and my musty books displaced and dejected. I may dip my toe into the pool of new technology, more often than I’d care to admit, but I swear every time I do it feels more like one foot in the grave.