Every generation has its way to dispose of old, unwanted albums. Vinyl: fill a crate and drag it to a garage sale. Cassettes: get some Scotch tape out and record your new faves on the old tapes (NKOTB transforms into Alice in Chains’ Dirt). CDs: cover a wall with their flipsides, breaking a few on occasion to make the dorm room look “tough” (or, as an engineer pal taught me so many years ago, sit in a passenger’s seat while a friend drives really slowly, then hold CDs against the moving pavement until they melt).

Nowadays, the delete key isn’t nearly as dramatic a farewell to the music we eventually tire of, but the disposability of MP3s has its own quirks. I’m not sure how everyone else here downloads music, but I tend to hit MP3 and torrent sites like I’ve just won a Toys ‘R Us Shopping Spree from the ’80s, only my cart isn’t weighed down by oversized My Pet Monsters. I’ll download stuff from sites’ “most active” lists just for the hell of it, then pile on all matter of other recommended tunes, to the point where half of what I grab, I don’t listen to more than once. I’ll occasionally clear out obvious junk from my “recent downloads” catalog, but this week, I’ve been doing some deep cleaning. Everybody has their fair share of outdated or embarrassing albums, though I guess it’s interesting what piles up when everything is free—Keane, Jonathan Fireeater, a really bad J Dilla/Pet Sounds mashup, that Redman/Method Man album, the William Shatner record from a few years ago, the most recent Foo Fighters records … When these musical whims and crapshoots collect dust, they become sad mirror images of your darker musical side, as if you owned a ragged puppy that you didn’t feed or bathe on a regular basis.

But what really struck me were the number of decent-sounding records that I am never, ever, ever going to listen to in their entirety. Even after deleting the most obvious stuff, I’m still sitting on 130 GB of music—and there is no sensible reason to have this much on here, on top of the CDs and records I already have. Who’s to say I’m ever going to listen to these three Califone albums on repeat when their folder is just five away from Buffalo Tom’s Let Me Come Over? I see the latter, get a rush of My So-Called Life nostalgia, and bust out “Taillights Fade” like a damn fool. Do I really need the second Dead Boys album—as if I don’t ignore Young Loud and Snotty enough? I’ve never gotten through Disintegration Loops I and felt immediately eager to put parts II, III and IV on the stereo. I no longer give a shit about the Russian Futurists. I never actually play these Bloc Party songs. And so on and so forth, until I run into… Ryan Adams? Maybe I should delete everything with the words “Ryan” and “Adams” today.

It hasn’t all been shame and crap—Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci is currently reminding me how they long to feel that summer in their heart. After that album cheered me up, I started queuing up some other dusty gems—the bedroom pop of Suburban Kids with Household Names, an old Morphine bootleg, the dark-wave of Memphis’ Lost Sounds—but then my dumb ass had to go and do a daily torrent site check. Whoop! The Tim & Eric comedy CD is out! And this band name, The Child Readers, that sounds pretty cool, so I’m gonna grab that, too.

It begins…