FULL

I've reached something I'm gonna call, for lack of a better phrase, "iPod critical mass": I now have so much music in my 160GB iPod (and with 17GB or so left to fill) that I can no longer keep track of it in my head. With all my previous iPods (I've had a 30GB, a 40GB, and a 60GB before this one), I was able to more or less remember what I had. But this one has so much storage capacity, and I've done so much Rapidshare downloading - where the previous three were filled entirely from my CD collection/hard drive - that I find myself flipping through it on a semi-regular basis and being confronted by stuff I totally forgot I had in there. Just today I realized I have albums by Nortt and the Wipers that I obtained in the last month or two, stuffed into the iPod like papers into a drawer, and promptly forgot about. How it happens is, I download stuff on impulse, frequently late at night - "Hey, I always wanted to listen to that album...wonder if it's on some blog somewhere." It sure is. So I grab it, put it in there, and then go to sleep, and by the next morning I've got a dozen CDs arriving in the morning's mail that I import into the iPod for work-related listening (gotta review 'em, gotta assign reviews to others, whatever). The stuff I thought I just had to hear a mere 24 hours earlier vanishes into the background, and I never think about it again until I'm scanning for something to listen to and say to myself, "Oh, fuck, wow, I have the first four Jon Spencer Blues Explosion albums (or the first five Curtis Mayfield albums, or the entire Cannibal Corpse discography, or five discs by Bong-Ra) in here! I forgot all about that!" And then I can't remember what I thought I wanted to listen to when I first started scanning through the "Artists" menu in the first place, mere moments earlier. My iPod is damaging my brain, and fundamentally altering the way I think about music...not for the better.

Am I alone? I doubt it.