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A Half Century

A lot of my "...when I was a kid..." memories are of deprivation. They shouldn't be, of course -- for example, I had two parents who, while they weren't together, loved and supported me -- but for a time in preadolescence, I lived in a rural area outside of a small town, with a couple of radio stations and a couple of VHF TV stations to periodically give me transmissions of mainstream culture. And I wanted more, and I told myself to go out and get more, within my parameters of general laziness and sloth.

As I got older, with the disposable income that comes with working jobs and being "parsimonious" (a.k.a. "cheap as fuck"), I was able to uphold that promise to myself after a fashion. I wanted more comic books to read and more movies to watch and more music to listen to, and I was able to do all three. Were the adult me able to time travel to that shitty dirt road outside of Roscommon and pop out of my underinsulated bedroom closet to show my 10-year-old self what the future would look like, he would be over the moon for certain. But because I am me and he is me and we are all together, I'm sure the first thing he would say would be "so what are you listening to?" And I'm not sure I'd have an easy answer.

This is a prosaic way of saying that I now have a lot of the physical media I lusted after as a kid. And now that I'm a couple months away from 50, I know two things about my piles of physical media: I'll never get through all of it in the rest of my life, and I don't know where I should start in shrinking the piles aside from ditching it all. It was a deep ache to part with my Netflix DVD cue earlier in the week, knowing the 400+ titles I'd curated for future viewing will never be seen by these eyes. Much of the sources of that angst and ennui can be captured by Barry Schwartz in his talk on the paradox of choice:


And the older I get, it seems like the worse my personal paralysis becomes, like the paradox is a tangible thing tugging at the skin and hair. Just today, I've finally had time to watch Betty on HBO and listen to the live U2 album I've had on my hard drive for months, but by doing that, what "better" stories and songs am I missing? However you want to frame it -- only 30 good summers left if I'm lucky, half-way through Side 2 of a crackling vinyl favorite -- that frustration seems to have more weight and heft these days, and I wish I knew the remedy. 

Oh, wait, golf is on? Nevermind.

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