Yes, I was in the middle of ripping Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978, a band that incidentally, I had the chance to see live a lifetime ago, when I just tore my CD drive from my laptop mid-rip after finishing Jungle Love.

The ripper I was using in Linux was SLOW...

...the application I prefer is only available in Windows...

...I didn't wanted to muck up my pristine system with a WINE install...

...I didn't like the bloat of running a VM...

...I did not find the future prospect of managing hundreds of jewel cases to be promising in a temporarily minimal context...

And with great, flummoxed agitation and in a flurry of even greater gusto, I threw up my hands and thought, "Screw it all, I'll rent somebody else's collection!"

For reasons I do not understand, the catalyst for me was watching George Strait sing Fireman on Hee Haw. YES, that is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. Sometimes I don't the connect-the-dots EVEN for myself!

But, hey, before giving up on my rips, I'm listening to Brooks & Dunn's Hard Workin' Man (1993), an album I purchased as a new release on cassette at a K-Mart on Austin Peay, a location that hasn't been there for YEARS. Incidentally, that same store is the same place I first played the original NES, sometimes in the 80s as Super Mario totally blew my ATARI Adventure mind away.

Cassette turned to a CD as the years went by...it's among the albums I know from the first to last track, another album where I can flip through the forgotten names with fresh faces. I'll hear those old songs, like so many that I do, wondering whatever happened to old so-and-so. There's been so much of that in my life. And a part of me goes on and breathes the same air as they still do, a part of me that is as ageless as they are.