Fine, don't listen then!

The hard drive on my big computer died last weekend. While this little bit of tragedy might seem like I’m pandering for some sort of sympathy, I assure of two things, I am not, and, this is actually going somewhere. When I say big computer, I mean it. The thing is a beast, not in the sense that it takes up a room, rather that I purchased it in a horizontal aluminum case so that I could slide it into an audio/video rack. The computer with its high-end components is essentially an entertainment center (technically a Media Center TM, but that’s too gauche for a Saturday evening) and is used as such. But, as the hard drive went, so did the entertainment. Over the past week I replaced the hard drive and started replacing the contents of my computer, at least on the software side. This meant spending many, many hours sitting there swapping out albums as I burn them. I am in the habit of still purchasing physical CDs, but once I burn them, I don’t typically pick them up again unless I have to search something from the liner notes. This might seem a bit backwards, but I also purchase the special edition imports, the ones with the DVD of extras and then never watch the DVD, so I’m used to backwards. However, I had managed to get all the way into the O’s of my lo-fi indie section and I was on one specific band.Jonah’s OneLineDrawing. I had found one of Jonah’s MP3s floating somewhere around the vast interweb when I was looking for material for a radiostation I ran for a bit. I liked what I heard, and tracked down a pair of his EPs, Sketchy 1 and Sketch 2. After all, this is the guy who one journalist claims “killed irony” on stage with a Fender mini-amp and a drum machine built to look like R2 D2. But it wasn’t his sound that really got me about his singles. Well, not all the way. No, it was that his singles were backwards. Yes, backwards. The front cover was on the rear, the rear on the front. And the whole device is cardboard, so you can’t swap it about to make it fit neatly with the rest of the jewel cases on the album rack. There was always one line on the back of each of these singles that struck me as funny, “This Album Should Sell For Between $5 and $10.” No, that’s not the point I’m getting to. As Sketchy 2 was burning away in my computer, I noticed a logo on the back, or front, of whatever Alice-esque direction the album was supposed to sit in. The logo was for CI and I’d seen the logo, and I’d seen it recently. CI is the skateshop down the road from me. I pass it several times a day. No? Yes. I checked the address. The album was produced a mile from my current apartment. Creepy. That’s the point. Look, I didn’t say it was going to be a good point, I just said it was a point. I was burning a CD and it turned out to be recorded really close to where I was sitting. That’s it, I’m going to the bar.