It\u2019s weird, all these things I curated to a greatness in my mid-teens have come around to be the defining characteristics in haute couture. You might know the story of how I went to undergraduate Tacoma with nothing but a box of ill-fitting sweaters, two pairs of size-44 Levis 501s (that I squeezed into so I wouldn\u2019t have to buy a bigger pair), and 500 LPs ranging from Kiss to Depeche Mode to Iron Maiden to Nina Simone to Queen to Rocky Horror to Miles Davis to the Escape From New York Soundtrack. I didn\u2019t even pack a turntable and wouldn\u2019t have one for my first three months in school. I carried all of those albums into a future I had no idea what would bring; they were how I defined a pretty big part of myself. And in just 12 months, I would trade all of those albums at the Jelly\u2019s on Pensacola for the promise of about 40 \u201cpermanent\u201d compact discs.<\/p>\n
The lament I have for that moment is not financial. There are far greater \u201cwhat\u2014ifs\u201d that would have resulted in far higher values lost or found. At best, those albums might fetch five figures if the collection remained intact, and mostly undamaged (highly unlikely). I lost more selling Apple stock too early (I still made a lot, not life-changing a lot). But that makes for a good story. This one always feels like a blow long lost could-have-been. Those albums were me. And I traded them all in for the illusion of a new permanence. I rebuilt that CD collection even larger, and the mp3 collection larger still. But I\u2019ve never had something in my personal space like those discs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s weird, all these things I curated to a greatness in my mid-teens have come around to be the defining characteristics in haute couture. You might know the story of how I went to undergraduate Tacoma with nothing but a box of ill-fitting sweaters, two pairs of size-44 Levis 501s (that I squeezed into so … <\/p>\n