Saturday morning, we got up bright and early (i.e., 9ish) to go to Circuit City and get a slick new CD player put in the car. It's shiny and has bright lights and is wonderful. It was a little weird pulling all of our cassettes out of the glove compartment, and realizing that the age of the mix tape is pretty much over now. Sigh. This will be one of those points of nostalgia before we know it - I'll turn around one of these days and a "Remember the 90s" bullet list will be making the rounds of the 'Net, with "You had a mix tape with the Sundays on it," and I will know it's nearly time to die. Indeed, the mix CD is a wonderful thing, and a miracle of the modern age, but it ain't the same when you can do it in like 20 minutes instead of needing an entire afternoon. This is the kind of thing Bill Gibson forgot to warn us about.

For further nostalgia fun, bravo game designer Bruce Baugh, who's doing the new edition of Gamma World, has an entry at Rock Scissors Blog about the era when the first version of that game was making the rounds, and it's thought-provoking reading. Let's see... in 1981, I was seven, living in the basement of an unfinished house in the wilds of WV, with no floor, no indoor bathroom and only a wood-burning stove for heat; my favorite songs on the radio were "Games Without Frontiers" and "The Legend of Wooley Swamp." Star Wars was not yet a trilogy, King Crimson hadn't had their first reunion, and one of my dearest friends was not even a gleam in the milkman's eye (or the suitable Rio equivalent). How's that for sobering?

Anyway, I also spent a portion of Saturday afternoon in the CDepot in College Park, which is a dangerous place for a guy like me to go. I left with some excellent finds - Lisa Germano, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil - and lighter quite a bit of money, though certainly not poorer.

Speaking of music, tonight I'll be up past my bedtime seeing Porcupine Tree at the 9:30 Club, and no doubt fighting Gravity Eyelids of my own for the drive home. I expect it to be worth it.

And the rest of the week shall be spent preparing for Swampstock X, for which I depart Friday Morning mit mine brudder and Matt. I spent way, way too much time yesterday burning CDs for the trip, because you never know what you'll need to hear on that lonely, interminable stretch down 50 during the last leg. Come to think of it, you never know what might be a good idea to inflict on the hardcore Swampstockers in the middle of the damn night. (Track One: "Sleep Has His House." Track Two: "Sleep Is Wrong.")

In the meantime, I shall be determinedly unfazed by work and mudane things. As far as I'm concerned, my vacation is as good as begun. Whoohoo!