Too Many Cassettes: An Introspection

We are moving, as you know, in less than two weeks.  I have too many cassettes.  They fall into these categories:

1) Very old cassettes of me as a kid recording shit with friends & alone
2) Cassettes of things I recorded from vinyl that I either sold back or borrowed from someone (later I would do the same with CDs)
3) Cassettes people made for me
4) Cassettes I made for people but never sent (not a large number)
5) Recordings of radio shows I've done (I stopped recording them on cassette - this is true - around 2006!)
6) Commercial cassettes I either bought, got somewhere, or were given to me
7) Mix tapes I made for myself back in my walkman days (this includes tapes of albums that I taped because I couldn't carry a turntable with me on the bus)

There are a lot of cassettes.  Too many.  & I am getting rid of some, especially the ones that I have other forms, in better quality media.  Why keep them?  It's silly.

The ones that are most interesting to me are the old recordings, because I haven't listened to them in years, perhaps decades.  Some of them I don't even remember making.  There was a time when I had cassettes & a recorder nearby always, because I would send tapes to friends or I would want to talk into the recorder or whatever.  Cassettes were ubiquitous.  It's why I have so many!

But my weird insight today is this: I have romanticized my life with cassette tapes.

Let me clarify: I don't miss them.  I never liked their sub-par sound quality.  I never liked the fact that, if you had a certain number of minutes per side, you'd have to fill all of it, or get long hissing silences.  (CDs stop when the tracks you've burned onto them end, you know.)  I of course hate rewinding.  I have cassettes that I have obviously "operated" on - I cracked the case & used tape to splice broken ends together.  Scotch tape!  Nothing fancy!

What I'm talking about is that I felt like there were treasures on these tapes.  I wish I could explain it better.  I thought the me on these tapes was worth preserving, & carrying around from Austin to Huntington to Lexington to Fort Worth, from numerous residences in those cities, & now to the Pacific Northwest.  & you know what?  It's not.  The me on the tapes isn't really worth preserving.

If most of those tapes disappeared tomorrow, I might be a little sad, but I don't think I would miss them much.  I don't even know if I'll ever listen to them again as it is.

Tonight I digitized one of them, a faux recording session with two friends in high school.  They are musicians, I am someone trying (& failing) to be funny while yelping in a microphone.  These days I am way too self-conscious to do such a thing - I guess I hadn't yet become entirely aware how utterly talentless I was - so there is a kind of wistfulness to experiencing my exuberance.  I knew I was pretending to be a rock & roll star but I still also kinda believed I could be a rock & roll star.  Life had yet to knock me down a few pegs, a few feet, a few flights of stairs, a few levels.

The radio show tapes may demostrate the same thing, & maybe one day I'll digitize more of them.

Still.  I'm taking a lot of them to Portland.  But I'm hoping to leave a lot of them behind.  Half, maybe?  Or more?

"What a treasure trove!" a friend said today when I sent a pic of a big box of cassettes to her through text.  Oh yeah.  It's treasure.  But it's fucking cursed.