Bring in the "Clean Sweep" crew, call Julie Morgenstern from Oprah Magazine, tell FlyLady to throw me a lifeline, get Martha Stewart to have her people get in touch with my people. I've created a whole new definition for the term "lost in music!"  I found my lucky socks with the Jaguars logo on them under a stack of CDs the week after our season ended. Maybe that's why we lost that playoff game. My favorite sunglasses were buried in a pile of old aerobics music cassettes. Over the years music has been delivered in a multitude of configurations. All of them have created unmanageable clutter in my homes, offices, and cars that goes beyond the realm of even the most aesthetically pleasing storage systems.

It started before I even set foot in kindergarten. My aunt and uncle owned a record store, and they would give me stacks of 45s. My mom said I would take them to my room, listen to them for hours, then leave them all over the floor so she had to pick them up. When I got old enough to go to slumber parties, my friends would show up with their collections neatly stashed in little books that had a pocket for each record. I carried mine around in stacks, usually without the covers. I started hanging out at radio stations when the DJs still played vinyl and cued songs up by bringing the needle to the point where the sound first started then scratching that first groove a few times to make sure it was set up right. This led to something called "cue-burn" - a scratchy hiss at the beginning of the song. I thought it was cool. Stations got multiple copies of records back then so they could replace them when the burn got too bad. I was often the recipient of stacks of cue burned singles. I had the best record collection on the block, probably in my school. You couldn't hear the first part of any of the songs but that didn't bother me.

When I started dating I entered into a new realm of cultural anthropology: the Boyfriend's Record Collection. Boyfriends shelved their albums by category and alphabetized each category. They played their albums one at a time. Here was the ritual: the inner sleeve always went into the cover so that the opening was at the top, protecting the album from falling out when you took it off the shelf. To play the record they would remove it from the inner sleeve in a way where the thumb touched the edge of the record and the supporting fingers touched the label so no fingerprints soiled the grooves. The vinyl would then be gently placed on the a turntable that was a marvel of precise engineering right down to calibration of the impact of the needle as it gently fell to the surface of the disc. As for me, I worked in a record store, and everyone in my dorm knew they could stop by the room, grab a hot new release off the floor, put it on our cheapie stereo, literally drop the needle and enjoy. Smoke and ashes? No problem! Same with cat fur, Coca Cola, and candle wax. Needless to say, The Boyfriends never let me near their record collections.

In those days home decor consisted of futons and music storage. As your collection grew you stacked more bricks and boards or found abandoned milk crates behind the grocery store. Album covers made great decorative art. You could leave the ones you liked on the shelf face-out, tack or tape them to the wall or, if you were really ambitious, frame them. Spines turned out on a shelf so the titles showed became a personality test. We believed that you could tell a lot about a person by the music they listened to, so first time you visited at someone's house you would scan their collection for clues to who they really were. As people graduated and got real jobs they began to buy shelves. As their careers advanced they upgraded to entertainment centers. Then you had to wait till they went to another room to run and open the doors so you could evaluate their musical tastes.

Cassettes were only a blip on the radar. They didn't take up as much space but the little plastic cases broke and the tapes would break or get chewed up and entwined in the players. The liner notes were in such small print you couldn't read them, and the only way to store them was in those storage units that had a slot for each tape. These didn't fit anywhere. They were big enough to require a whole shelf but narrow enough to leave six inches of unusable space either in front or behind them. From a decorative perspective they didn't do well at all. They looked like honeycombs of clashing colored stripes and lettering.

I was glad when the switch to CD began. I had been hauling crates of albums all over the southeast as I got out of college and began to get fired from radio stations and move a lot. I accumulated more albums at each station and had to rent a bigger U-Haul to transport them to my next adventure. We were still playing records on turntables at the station so my collection mostly consisted of studio survivors: scratched, cue-burned, covered with fingerprints and in the case of one place that had a leaky air conditioner, mildew. CDs took up less space but still had room for cover art and liner notes that you could at least see. It was hard to kill them. At least that’s what they said. On one hand they are not as vulnerable to fingerprints, dust, scratches and animal fur. I even have one that has a chunk broken off the edge and it still plays just fine. However, they don't hold up well to being left in the car during the summer in Florida, every layer of copy protection technology makes them unplayable on more and more players, and after a few years of use by people who are not particularly compulsive about putting them away they not only skip all over the place, they generate some genuinely unique sounds. Thuds, crackles, distorted rumbles, and loud hisses, to name a few.

I remember being on the air one Sunday morning, eating my usual honey bun with icing. I enthusiastically talked up a new song, hit play, and after a few seconds of music it stuck. I bailed out and started the next song, pulled the culprit CD out of the player and there was a little clump of sticky icing on the surface. I was thrilled when the station went digital. It took days to upload the music to the hard drive but I could eat iced goodies and sticky coffee drinks to my hearts content without having it stop the music.

Now CDs are taking over my house. I know most people would be thrilled to have them, but I've run out of places to put them. Seeing them just makes me feel guilty for not listening to all of them. I inherited the music library when my smooth jazz show was cancelled - 15 years worth of music including rare out of print titles. Some of those are in a stack in my storage room. The rest are in a wicker chest under the TV.  The ones that have more than one song I like on them are on the shelves that I also inherited from the station when we moved to the new building. The ones I actually listen to are in stacks in a quirky rattan entertainment center I couldn't resist when my neighbor had a yard sale. I can't find any slotted storage units that fit it though, so there are just ten or so stacks in no particular order behind closed doors. The current favorites are in a pile on top of my DVD player. It's a flat surface so that's where they ended up. I got a clever little storage unit for my home office with little cubicles for CDs and supplies. The stuff on it was in order for a few weeks after I bought it last year. There is a stack of discs with no identification at all that I am scared to confront. Backups of songs I bought on iTunes, workout mixes and such. They're on the shelf under the coffee table. Yes, there are artsy little storage units available but they tend to be made of plastic or chrome, or come in funny sizes that that clash with the rest of the room or just create even more clutter.

The advent of the MP3 should be a boon to the space-challenged among us. You can put hundreds of songs into a player the size of a credit card or a stick of gum. Then lose it or end up running over it with your own car after it falls out of your purse. If you are a tad ADD or use a lot of different computers, there is the danger of accidentally erasing your library so it's still a good idea to back up with a hard copy of the songs you really love. A person with common sense would use the label creator to make a pretty label that listed the songs on these CDs then stick it to the CD right after you have burned it. But that's too easy, and it compromises the element of surprise.

Tomorrow is my day off. I may confront the stacks of CDs I listened to over the month and never got around to putting away. I could even put them back in their cases and put the cases in alphabetical order. I could probably build a storage unit that fit the shelves and put them in order, or take them out of their cases and buy some of those storage books. Or I could spend a few hours sampling songs on Amazon.com and iTunes and buy a bunch of new music, burn it onto CDs and forget to label them. Now that sounds like a day well spent!

- Shannon West