New Year’s 2024 marked a 4-year anniversary of one of my first ever vinyl shit-posts before I knew it was even a thing on any sort of social media, let alone Instagram. Apparently, Facebook is for old folks, weird Microsoft Paint-era gifs, giving general contractor or childcare recommendations, and basic white girl MLM stuff. No, I don’t want your Scentsy or Lularoe. Are those still things?

This one was the first to give me that “high” where I rescued an absolute masterpiece. How could someone so casually bend these divine edges and pop parts of the sleeve, only to toss her in the discount bin? The whole situation played into the deepest part of my empathic soul.

Then, in 2022 after two years of pandemic worry, a lapse in the traditional employment path I knew well for the hope of exploring something new, and suddenly having my life packed up in one town for the next without having any choice in the matter, I felt singular, lost, and rather afraid of where that route led me.

So, I gave The Man Who Sold the World away.

Honestly, I almost gave up all my records, because they didn’t seem necessary for what I could see of my destination at the time. Afterward, I sat on a bench along the riverwalk of an Ohio River bank in southern Indiana, feeling absolutely nothing, waiting for something to spill out. It didn’t. So I just stared at the Kentucky side of the river and watched my dog take a shit and bother some geese. An older couple passing through on their way to Florida who were stretching their legs on the path stopped to ask me for local coffee house recommendations and I gave directions. A barge filled with junk traveled downstream toward Cincinnati. 

That’s not at all intended to be metaphoric, yet I think my brain highlighted those mundane pieces on a primal level. Like, the moment had such numbing intensity that I need to forever remember it happened in this cerebral pocket of my brain. Not a fight, flight, or freeze, but a reminder that helplessness can turn to action in inadvertently negative ways. You can think factually about a lot of things, and death is certain, yet blending those truths and exercising control over that process deprioritizes the people and things I know I do love, even if it was impossible to feel the importance of those things then. 

And while that’s since felt very regrettable, the album and this photo are meaningful. It helps me remember both the darkness and the growth, which are symbiotic and important to hearing life in all extensions: my daughter’s terrible 2nd-grade jokes and her giggles while delivering the punchlines, or when I fired up my mini-moto this summer for the first time, the wave of noise as an airplane switches up for take-off to transport you someplace cool, the downdraft from the wind when I got the sunroof open on my car, and all the records. 

I don’t want to live a life without my records.