Discogito, Ergo Sum

After writing about FYE in the last blog post, the store played a profound role in my life yet again. I began selling records on the website Discogs in August for two reasons: (a) to earn money and (b) to test the online collector market as part of my plan to potentially buy/open a record store in a couple years. While the latter option had to be temporarily paused, I continued to list LPs while determining my next act in Life.

There have been some lucrative sales thus far—I wish I’d bought every available Grateful Dead CD box set I streamed and enjoyed throughout the years (I prefer to only collect what I like)—but nothing approached what happened last Saturday. Upon casually researching an FYE Exclusive copy of an album that I purchased in 2018, I was stunned to learn it was fetching some, to quote all the AARP members I know, fat stacks. I listed it and expected it would sell eventually, but not within a week for a hefty sum!

In a fit of excess excitement, I shared the news with the inner circle of goofballs I regularly text, all of them overjoyed except for one, a guy who also sells vinyl online.

“Sold a TayTay LP on Discogs for $700 this afternoon! Holy smokes.”

“Oh wow. That’s nuts. Which one?”

“Reputation on orange vinyl. Think I bought it at FYE for $30 ($35 tops).”

“That’s upsetting. But good for you.”

“Don’t be upset!”

“The fetishization of commodities, man.”

I then reminded him how our friendship was founded on me buying a Tool LP from him for four hundred dollars at a Starbucks in Springfield—I’d met him at a record store a week prior, where he’d hoped to trade in said LP for cash—and disclosed how I wished I could regularly earn so much money while doing so little.

“It’s probably better to contribute to society instead,” he replied, prompting to me to inquire if he ever got exhausted playing devil’s advocate to everything I said.

Attempting to pretend he wasn’t needling me—claiming he was joking about it being “upsetting” that one of Mrs. 13’s lesser albums sold for such a mighty figure—yielded my opting out of a response, leaving his questionable reasoning as the endgame of our dialogue.

My career as a record collector began on eBay more than two decades ago, and now doing it in reverse, I wish I could receive videos of my buyers opening the carefully packaged cardboard boxes—accompanied by sincere, handwritten notes—arriving in their mailboxes. Selling a valuable can be a bittersweet experience, but regardless of the monetary value, knowing the joy it brings strangers makes me happy. Plus, anyone can feel validation that s/he has great taste if one other person in the world wants something s/he owns.

Planning on moving in the coming months, I recently decided to cull the fold: five boxes of books got donated to Goodwill and I traded in a bunch of DVDs at a local store for cash (that paid for dinner at a Thai restaurant, not a security deposit, but packers gotta eat). When British deejay John Peel died years ago, it was revealed that he kept a box of his most cherished vinyl, essentially a fail-safe for that time-honored worst-case scenario: What do you grab if the house is burning (and you don’t have children, or “accidentally” forget they’re home)?

I love collecting art but frequently endure (silly) guilt that books go unread on my sticker-cluttered shelves for years, forever on the hunt for fresh inspiration. Constantly re-evaluating my place in the world along with my desire to escape the noise with Sue (and my stuffed pig Hamlet)—“All I need is a chair, a table, a laptop, and a TV,” I tell her about how I could live like a twenty-first century monk—has also led to this consolidation philosophy. Isn’t our most valuable stuff (cue up the George Carlin routine) ultimately just the shit that continues to inspire us?

While I’ve long been afraid that over-indulging my dearly beloveds—Wallace Stevens’s stanzas, Jack Nicholson’s ‘70s performances, Steely Dan's craftsmanship and production values, among a plethora of others—will sour me on their brilliance, I’m also constantly looking for their influence on the new and the now. I guess the point is: If being an online capitalist isn’t contributing to society, are the memories sure to be made by people like my buyer also worthy of my friend’s dismay? An album like Reputation may not be worth seven cents to some, but to others seven hundred dollars is a bargain, especially when one factors in the incalculable value of its impact on the soul.

Dreams of a utopian existence occupy my thoughts more than ever, but in its Edenic absence, I construct a simulacrum of it from the humans, locales, and shitstuff that mean The World to me. Reputation once did—I listened to it for weeks upon its release along with attending a concert that accompanied the album—and a future Swiftian release likely will too. (Hell, it could happen this week, when my favorite album of hers is reissued.) Applying the digital currency received for the sale toward a security deposit doesn't change my past feelings. Maybe I'll demand that the maintenance crew wire the doorknob at my new apartment to play "...Ready For It?" every time my key gets inserted.

"Don't be upset," my landlord will tell me, "but that's gonna be seven hundred dollars.”

“Perfect,” I’ll reply, finally on my way to becoming a productive member of society.