For me, nothing transcends that musty, burnished aroma of old books...books of all sizes and shapes and topics, stacked in mottled shelves waiting eagerly for yet another reader to fumble and dogleaf their pages. I spend many hours browsing our local used book store, Hooked on Books, and, truly, those moments do wax eternal for me. Not only am I liable to find one of those out-of-print old friends I relinquished decades ago, but I sense around the spirit of the authors, the muses, the former owners and readers, the transparencies of the the layers of life and travel that have ushered these books to their home on these shelves pleading to be read once more. How can I refuse their offer? Typically I leave overflowing with reading material, rescuing paper gems from their exile, glad to replenish my shelves with their favor, even if it takes years for me to read them. Nothing better than turning a musky, browning page, nostrils swirled with the delicate frangrances of antiquity (or just plain oldness), savoring words first printed perhaps forty years ago, like the seductive prose of the old paperback of William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" which I'm now absorbing, page by page, word by word. There will always be a book in my life, nothing beats the mesmerizing read of an immortal classic, or even good pop fiction...I'll never forget the experience of reading tomes like Jaws and The Exorcist before seeing the movies. Read on!...

And, then, I am truly a vinyl dinosaur! My love for music generated such a respect for my album collection that I kept the disks (though not all the covers) impeccably fresh through all the years of inebriate partying...how, I'll never know. How I loved zipping the album out of its cover, handling it on its edge to ensure no fingerprints would ever appear on its fine lustre. Then its gentle planting onto the turntable, the aroma and velvety, almost soundless, sliding of the Parostatik over the spinning black grooves as it preened away every particle of dust, then a dab for the stylus as well. Then the reject switch and the music was off and running into the heart of another countless party. Many were the friends who offered to "put on some music" who were told "don't get your fingerprints on it...and make sure you use the Parostatik". Rituals repeated too many times to count (or remember ). And, to this day, I'll never be convinced the sound of digital recording is superior to the sound of vinyl stereophonics on a good system. Many folks agree with me. It's as if a quality creeps into the digital sound that somehow makes it less real, less present, alerting you to it's technological supremacy to spite the music it spews. A vinyl record just plays it's guts out for you. How many moments remembered rushing home with an armful of albums (bought onsale at Korvette's Dept. Store at $2.25 a clip with lawn-mowing money), so eager to hear the new music it felt like Christmas morning, opening the most-anticipated and flinging it onto the turntable while cradling that wonderful, welcoming album-cover with its artwork and artist info, and, of course, following along the lyric sheet on the first listen word-for-word. Yeah, I've got CDs, etc., etc. But I'll never get over record albums. And they say turntables are coming back! Once I find a record booth or vinyl store I'm lost among the album racks, thumbing through for new and old musical treasure. And replacing those three or four favorite albums that had a habit of disappearing at every party was more of a chore than I thought. I got back the Rolling Stone's Hot Rocks fairly soon. But it took forever to find The Allman Brother's Eat A Peach and Traffic's Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys again! And Jonathan Edward's first album...took fifteen years to find that again! I got him to sign it at a concert (I rememeber he laughed at the picture and said, "Who's this guy on the cover?", holding it up next to his "new" face ) Go vinyl! "We're gonna sit around the shanty mama/and put a good buzz on!..."

I also have to admit, that as hard as I've tried to get away from it at times, I am a child of the boob tube. I don't get hooked on many made-for-TV shows anymore (a handful a decade), but I just can't wean myself away from the small screen for sports, news, and old movies (not to mention relatively new offerings like The History Channel, Discovery, and TLC).