Soundtrack To Life

If you didn’t guess from the “soundtrack to life” title – this is all about nostalgia. You see, I’m in another one of my now infamous purge modes.

For the uninitiated, I have a tendency to be somewhat of a pack rat, but off and on through my life, as far back as I can remember, I will occasionally just go down the path of tossing junk out, and that’s what it is.

For some of us, we pick up items from our past, and the memories associated come flowing back and we attach that memory to the object, as if the memory will never come back again without that little gem.  And the longer you live, the more these objects and the memory connections grow.

Luckily, as I said, I tend to go through purge moods.  It’s been about a year and a half since the last one when I threw out some stuff I never thought would go.  This time, yet more has gone.  Right now, I’m working on a box, I kid you not, from my high school years.  There are some video tapes that I need to burn to DVD, but I need to either get a DVD recorder or something to connect up to my laptop.  I haven’t explored either device much yet.  The stack of tapes is relatively small.

The bigger part of the box is… sigh… cassettes… for the really young of you out there, they came after the late cretaceous period between 8 track and CD’s and well before MP3 was even dreamed.

So, for a week, I’ve had little mini-marathons of listening to a few tapes while burning them to MP3 on my laptop.  The tapes will go bye bye and who knows when I’ll listen to half of these songs again.  My tastes have definitely changed and evolved since High School, from which the bulk of these came.

It’s really amazing how much music can form the soundtrack of our lives.  At least for some of us.  I don’t remember at time in my life without music, from listening to whatever my parents listened to  (Dad – country, Mom classic rock and classical) to starting to make my own conscious decisions of what I liked.  I’m not sure High school even counted in that camp.  So much of this is what was either popular then or my friends liked, etc.  There are basically two bands I followed past that period of my life, INXS and Crowded House (albeit to a lesser degree but Recurring Dream, their greatest hits album was the first such compilation I ever bought). I don’t tend to repurchase music, but  I wanted those songs on CD.

College heralded alternative, modern rock, and some borderline punk stuff and the CD player and I pretty much abandoned all these cassettes and artists way back then.  It’s a definitive time capsule.  Some are in remarkably good shape and sound pretty good as MP3’s.  Some… well.. the memories are still there and they won’t take up room so much in MP3 form.

Does this mean in 10 years I’ll start having virtual purges?