DAMAGED GOODS

I have an order sitting in my Newbury Comics’ shopping cart. It’s been there for a couple of days now.

One of the items in the cart is the new Broadcast comp, The Future Crayon, which has occasioned me to take this role as the Prince of Denmark.

To buy or not to buy, though, is not really the question. I will buy. The question turns more on how I will buy...

I can click the order button over at Newbury and have delivered to my door an 18-track CD for $12.95 plus whatever portion of the shipping will be attributable to one disc in a multi-item order.

Or I can one-click my way to a 20-track download of the same CD over at iTunes for $9.99.

So the math that counts here is as follows: iTunes offers two extra tracks and costs about $3.50 less. Seems like a no-brainer.

And yet. And yet.

And yet I pause...

I’m still enough of a pop-culture fetishist that I prefer to drop my dimes on tangible objects.

I like the anticipatory struggle with the CD wrapping, which can be as challenging as prying a Giger alien off a host face.

I like sliding out the accompanying booklet to see what manner of liner notes have been provided, and reading through them at the dinner table.

I like the game of sliding the booklet back into the case under the little plastic nubbins that will ultimately keep it from shifting around all willy nilly. Shit, I ripped a corner!

I like to see if there was any effort to screen print a personality onto the actual face of the disc.

I like to see the final results of all the artistic and practical decisions that went into creating the object in my hands.

And yet I pause...