Gateway Drug, a personal story

It started just about 6 years ago, when I was shopping for a new car.   I had in my mind certain characteristics I wanted the car to have, certain features.  The car that we finally settled on did not have exactly everything I was looking for.  And it had several features that were not things I particularly cared about.  One of those was satellite radio.  That was where it all started.

For the most part I only listened to two radio stations.  One of them I listened to for music and the other to listen to the San Francisco Giants baseball games.  My wife and I approach new gadgets differently.  I tend to learn just enough to start using the thing as quickly as possible.  She, on the other hand, is more likely to read the manual from cover to cover.  So on a short time we had about thirty preset stations, both satellite and ground stations.

Now that might have been the end of it had I continued to commute to work everyday on the ferry.  But rising prices and a diminished schedule led me to try the casual carpool.

For a while I was a casual carpool rider.  I would catch a ride into the city in the morning, usually within 10 minutes of arriving at the park and ride.  In the afternoons I would join the long line of people waiting to snag a ride back.  The wait there was frequently over half an hour.

Now the addiction really began around this time.  Even though I was not driving every day into the city, I was was making that drive every Saturday that the weather was good to play softball.  From my house to the fields where we played was about an hour.  So there was a couple of hours I was exploring all of these channels, all of this music I had never heard before.

And then there was the online music.  It seems that the same stations available in my car were also available online, at no additional cost.  So I would frequently listen at work too.

Finally, the afternoon wait became too inconvenient for me, and I began to drive instead of ride the casual carpool.  Now I was listen to the music six days a week.  That was when I moved past the gateway drug and expanded into others.

I was hearing artists that I had never heard before, but usually only one or two songs, I needed more.  One day, after playing softball, I went to Amoeba Records in the Haight.  I bought two CDs.  Over the months that followed, this addiction only grew. There was a Rasputin Music store near my house and I started to go there too.

When Rachael Yamagata's breakthrough album Chesapeake came out, I had to have it.  And when I heard that she was coming to San Francisco, to a little place called The Independent, I had to go, even though the show was the night before I was flying out on vacation.

I looked all over the place for Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound before finally ordering it at Rasputin's.  They had never heard of it, but they found it for me.  With that action, my decent into addiction was complete.

And it was all because I bought a new car, with a feature I never wanted.

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