Matters After All

Matters After All

Nov 02, 2022

This past September, my basement flooded for the first time during a heavy thunderstorm.  Not a lot of water, but just enough to mess with the laminate and bring out an insurance adjuster.  The result is some serious work now on the basement, getting the laminate out and an epoxy floor in. Getting a sump pump as it looks like these types of storms are going to be the new normal rainfall for Chicago.  Even the monumental Deep Tunnel project was not made to handle such water and so, chances are the system in the city will be easily overwhelmed again. 

Which leads me to moving stuff from the basement to temporary storage in the garage.  A lot of the stuff deals with Aine’s rapid eight-year evolution.  It is amazing to see boxes of baby clothes, little stuffed animals and a whole bassinet.  But some of the stuff belongs to me.  Among that stuff are CDs from other bands and musicians.  Not big names, but little names.  People who, like me, headed out to make music and along the way plopped down some money at a recording studio, then a CD manufacturing company to compile a collection of their tunes.  These musicians lugged their CDs to festivals and shows, hoping to sell them. But a goodly number of them ended up being traded by musicians to musicians.  Or given away at trade shows. They may show up in a library collection or even some secondhand music shop.  Inevitably they wind up being stored somewhere.  

And so, I have several heavy boxes of different musicians, on tapes and cassettes from the mid 1980’s up until now. In some ways, it makes me feel sad.  As a creator, as someone who wants to feel that I made a difference, these CDs are a humbling reminder that my music is probably sitting in someone else’s box. That deep desire to create, so much of it is made by people like me, that will more than likely never be a household name, but all the same, have about several thousand CD’s out there in the world.  Not to mention the several thousand they may have sitting in boxes at their homes. But to look at the CDs and see the faces of the artists.  Some of them sport a long out of fashion look.  But all of them with that same earnest hope that what they do matters. 

The hard part for me is that I cannot bear to throw them away and yet, it is almost impossible to give them away.  And there is, with them, a bit of my own hopes and dreams represented.  Eventually, I will have to collect them all into one spot and sort, organize and re-box.  A time capsule of sorts of an era that now is gone.  For all that is left is digital.  And in a way, we’ve come full circle.  Before records, people had no means of hearing a voice from the past. And now, with downloads, the need for a physical object is not a priority.  Just having the music on some cloud to listen to wherever is all that matters. But when that is over, that file can be deleted.  Only certain voices will be heard in the future.  Perhaps on some far distant galactic Antiques Roadshow, a person will lug in my box of CDs.  They will place some value on it and marvel at the crude method of recording people.  They will see some odd beauty in that each of these people felt compelled to play, sing and emote.  Perhaps they will play a CD and sit there thinking of who that person was. Maybe even feel moved by the song.  Maybe, just maybe, it does matter after all.

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