Broken Hip? Do Your PT Or It's Game Over

You used to do things and have places to do them. For example, there were record stores. In my hometown in Middletown, Connecticut there was one called Record Express. Yes, I know: the cellphone in my pocket can access all the music ever made. I get that. I can’t actually buy any of the music I like on my phone, anymore, but am instead directed to commit to a subscription service that I will then have to pay for in perpetuity and which can yank any song at any time, or else hunt for a low-bitrate YouTube version that was made with an MP3 someone ripped off a scratchy CD on their Sony VAOI in 2001. But yes, my phone has all the songs.

But a record store was a place. And places demonstrate importance; sometimes they demonstrate devotion. You’d go in there and there would be a couple vaguely pretentious staff members and people pawing through racks of CDs and a wall of t-shirts and posters. And they’d play cool shit that you hadn’t heard before, which was one way to discover new stuff. So was flipping endlessly through every CD in a row. When you were there you were Doing Music. Now we’re never doing anything - we’re always getting through something to get to something else to get through, using various time-saving techniques that maximize the amount of time we have to get through things while keeping our attention divided into a thousand things we then get through. When you went to a record store you were intent on music, and sometimes, you’d care enough about a particular artist that you paid for their album, real money, so that the artist got a cut that was more than the .002 cents they get per stream now. Maybe you’d throw in a little incense to burn surreptitiously in your room. And then you went home and, precisely because you didn’t have access to all of the music that ever existed, you listened to the whole album, and then you’d listen to it again, and when you did you were just listening to it, rather than having music on in the background while you repetitively scrolled through other shit on your phone.