Another weekend completed. We put up new record shelves. Now I must reduce my collection to what will fit on the two shelves in the downstairs bedroom, the guest suite, Chalet Q6.
There are 50 sections between the two shelves, each comfortably holding ~100 records.
It occurred to me as we were assembling the Ikean monstrosity that it has been exactly two years to the day since I left New York, Sunday. I went to our friends' wedding in Brooklyn the day before leaving.
We abandoned a similar Ikea shelf in the apartment when we left. It was too big to move to California, not worth the time, trouble, and space. Well, I didn't leave it in the apartment. Myself and a friend broke it into pieces and dragged it to the street in shattered pieces, a blast of final catharsis.
It feels good to purge. Rachel says that I am a border-line hoarder. I believe myself to be a refined collector, with great and magical powers of discernment.
This latest Ikea shelf will very likely be my last, for records. Hopefully the last I purchase for anything. Ikea is like Costco. One does not shop there because they want to. Even if it feels good to finally organize there is also that accompanying feeling: this, really?
There will be thousands of records to get rid of. Once I go through and make my final selections there will be the small matter of the remaining records. Many have offered to take them though that requires effort and expense. I'd like them to somehow survive together but I don't see how that will be possible. They will be given in boxfuls to the first, second and third takers, irrespective of merit.
Now I must assemble at least one turntable and an amplification system of some sort. A thing that is easily done, by most. The parts are all here, somewhere.
That will take another 10 years, somehow.
There was a time when it seemed improbable that I would ever live in a place in which there were not two turntables, a mixer, and an adequate amplification system.
Now, such a thing seems almost as unlikely as watching the sun come up, high in the desert.
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