The Purple Notebook

About a year ago, my wife went to Hawaii on a family vacation and left me home by myself. For a month. The first couple of days I kept myself pretty busy, but it wasn't long before I was extremely bored. You can only take so many days of watching cable all day and having the biggest decision of the day being if I was going to drink tea or beer. Around the fourth or fifth day, I decided that I needed something occupy my time.

After exhausting a couple of different ideas, I had a revelation: What if I started to catalog my various mix CD's I had made over the last couple of months? I started listening to the CD's and writing the play lists down in my newly purchased purple notebook. Rather quickly, I ran out of CD's and turned to an old box filled with old mixtapes I had never labeled.

With these tapes I was transported back to different times in my life, the mixtapes guides to places and memories I had since forgotten. Among these tapes:

Beer for Breakfast-a great country music tape I had made to take to my friend's house for a long night of drinking a few years back.
Zebra Cakes-a two cassette anthology of power pop classics.
Gorch Approved-a tape where I mixed some of my favorites of the time with dialogue from the classic Scharpling and Wurster bit.
GbV-probably the best mix I've ever made, all Bob/GbV tunes for my wife back before we even started dating.

A year later I have filled up the first third of the rather large notebook. I've taken to calling it The Bible, and have even started to decorate it (there's now a cool Sleater-Kinney sticker on the cover). Of all the thousands of mix tapes I've made over the years, most have been lost to time. I now keep track of the lists, so, even if I do lose a classic like the Cars/Cheap Trick/AC/DC mix I had at the turn of the century, the mix isn't lost to time.

Also, I plan on using the notebook to share some the lists on this blog. I am sure everyone is dying to see the tracklist of Snapshot of My Uncle's Stereo in the 70's. It's even better than it sounds. By all accounts, an absolute classic.