Funny Thing: Muzak

As any reader of this blog knows, I am fairly dedicated to music. I am learning how to play the guitar (for 15 years now), am a recovering mid-life crisis band member, and I provide a song recommendation with each entry in the “PS” section of the post.

I also have a good-sized CD collection. Not so large that I can start my own rebel Internet radio station anchored off the New York skyline. But large enough that it can be reasonably blamed as a major contributor to the fact that I continue to rent an apartment rather than own my own home.

I have been having a devil of a time migrating my collection out of my ‘90s-style entertainment unit--which hulks in a corner of my living room intimidating the bric-a-brac and the smaller furniture--and into my iMac. Sometimes, I sort of want to follow one well-heeled pal’s lead and just pack it all up in boxes and send it to a company that loads it onto a drive for you at a fixed price per CD...but then the Scotsman in me goes nuts and says, “Hey, English fancypants, you canna load them yourself, you valueless yuppie?!”

But the prospect of logging serious time at the computer swapping hundreds and hundreds of disks in and out is daunting. It is a mirage of discipline that fades as I walk across the desert of dinner dates and movies and work. What to do?

Well, I’ll tell you, dear reader. I determined to load one CD onto iTunes each day when I get home from work. Not more. Not less. Just a few minutes every day. In a few years I’ll have all my music in there and each day my iTunes reservoir groweth rewardingly.

This has, surprisingly, been working exceedingly well. I just refresh a small stack of CDs on my desk and pop one in nightly when I get home from the grindstone factory. I am up to 5.1 days of music already (you gotta love the Apple measurement systems).

But I did recently have one moment of panic that reminded me that I am not a digital native; that, like Larry, Curly, and Moe, I am perpetually waiting at the nun’s orphanage for digital parents to adopt me, getting older and more eccentric with each passing software release (woo woo woo).

As I got into the groove of slugging a new CD into the collection each day I inserted one that was both a DVD of music videos and a CD of songs all on one platter (damn you, broken-up R.E.M. and your tech savvy). As only Apple can, when it came time to eject the disc, my iMac wanted to know which format I wanted to eject: one, the other, or both. I panicked. I began pressing buttons at random. The pretty, rainbow wheel of “loading” began to spin perpetually like a digital Tibetan prayer wheel in the center of my screen. My system began to Escher itself into a Mobius strip of indecision. Nothing worked. Nothing responded. I was screwed.

I looked desperately for an override. I examined with minute attention to detail the body of the computer, looking for a pinhole into which I could insert a paperclip to eject the disc as in days of old. I swore. I begged Steve Job’s ghost for insight. I promised to put an Apple bumper sticker on my car. Nothing worked.

After some serious sweating, I recalled that I had a brand new, shiny, optical drived, envy-inducing iPad. Ha! Salvation. I sat by my recursive iMac and used the iPad to Google how to force a disc out of a Mac. It was so meta.

And here is what it the sum total of mankind’s knowledge, stored on the Cloud and delivered at the speed of light from a self-repairing global network of servers told me: push the eject button on your keypad. Push “|>”

Doh!

PS -- Seriously? I overlooked the eject button?! Sigh. Oh, one song you should load into your collection is "The Heartbreak Rides" by  A.C. Newman; now playing on iTunes.