Many people dismiss the rapture as absurd religious dogma, but it’s not. It’s real. Just ask my CDs.
The great reckoning came the weekend before last, when the room-by-room cleaning, organizing and culling spree Mrs. YHT and I have been conducting to make way for all things baby-related reached the office, where stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks of CDs had been accumulating for as long as we’ve been in the house. During those five years, my vinyl collection grew like crazy, but my CD stash, which included everything from albums bought with my parents’ money in high school to mix CDs burned by college friends in Kazaa’s heyday, went largely ignored. It grew too, but more gradually, like a tree you barely notice until is its roots start cracking the sidewalk. My mom still surprises me with CDs — she’ll mail me things she hears about on NPR and finds interesting — and I love when she does, but I usually upload them to iTunes and listen via my phone. Once they became part of the plastic forest in the back corner of the office, the likelihood of seeing the inside of a CD player again was slim.
That forest is gone now. It wasn’t easy — I attach sentimentality to physical objects like hapless bugs attach themselves to spiderwebs — but after dragging the whole mess out into the living room and going through it item by item, all that’s left is a nearly full 120-slot CD tower and a few binders and spindles that still need sorting. It was a serious bummer in a lot of ways, but I thought I’d share the process I used in case it’s of use when you’re forced to perform your own deforestation.
You Hear That 