On clutter panic.

Right after hitting "publish" on the last one an idea occurred to me: I wonder if I'll undergo some kind of "clutter panic" as a result of all this streamlining.

I've been a slob all my life, as my mother will assure you, though I have a very good memory for which random spot I left whichever random object on my way to making a mess bigger than any sane person would live with. Whenever I do clean up my space, the difference is phenomenal: everything becomes much more clear, visually and otherwise. But I never work to make that be the case all the time; I'm used to clutter, and embrace it by default, by not doing anything about it.

I could pretty easily see the one-in-one-out method to objects (physical or otherwise) beyond music driving me to some kind of stir craziness. When you buy lots of records as an afterthought for more than half your life, it's not simply a habit. There's something psychological at hand, surely, and while what exactly that might be isn't the point here, taking it away is very likely to provoke some kind of reaction. The fact that I even thought of this wrinkle should tell you something. Greil Marcus once described an R. Crumb comic as being "about the disease of record collecting"; maybe it's something akin to that.

I just realized.

There's a side effect of Slow Listening I hadn't foreseen. Typically my iTunes folder gets huge and stays that way for most of the year, because I tended to not erase important-for-later stuff from it, not to mention that I kept the 10-track playlists through to the end of year, for final mix- or list-making or whatever. But pretty much by accident, I stopped doing it that way this month. I made a "2009" folder just to put stray MP3s in, but instead it became a weird monster, favored album tracks, new singles, and (the monstrous part) DJ mixes ranging from 20 minutes to eight hours (right, that one). It looks like an EKG chart laid out vertically, and I kind of dig it--seems/feels more like the way music occupies my life, a couple minutes here, a colossus there. So I added a "-1" to the name and am just going to do one per month. And when I'm done with that month's stuff, and have put it in its own special folder on the EHD*, I can then delete it all from hy laptop, because, at fucking last, there's nothing on it I won't have listened to.

What a relief this is. And what a strain it's already beginning to show. I am behind on the RA Podcast; I have a small but serious stack of CDs in front of me that I'm writing about in the coming week. I just downloaded another title for another review, which I'm playing now. (On track 3, of 16.) I've auditioned two CDs just before this one (the first of which was 74 minutes--can't remember the last rock album of that I even listened to), to back up my pitching them to eMusic.

This is the treadmill starting up again. It's kind of a relief: when I don't have deadlines to meet, my schedule goes to pieces. Well, it does anyway, and I've been late with things this week, though hopefully not fatally. But it's a symptom. Once my sleeping patterns are conquered (I so enjoyed being a morning person between Thanksgiving and Christmas; that's the goal), I should be able to manage even more and better listening time. But I'm doing pretty well so far. It's starting to really dawn on me how uncluttering this experiment actually is.

*I may in fact be such a fussbudget I'll copy-and-paste the tracklist of each onto a Word doc and stow it on the EHD as well. I'll try not to format it, but something tells me I won't be able to resist.