Almost a year ago, I brought back two large boxes of old cassette tapes from my step-dad’s home in Kansas City. I’ve tallied those up in a spreadsheet and have a couple writing ideas based on the results that I will get to one day.

Yesterday, however, I took the rather new-millennium step of packing all my CDs away. I already had a large box of all the CDs in my collection that were either crap or rarely played. I still had 100 CDs, give or take, displayed in our basement. Since everything is on the Mac or the iPod these days, I figured I might as well save some space and put everything into storage.

While consolidating, I found an interesting cache of cassette tapes in my storage area. Here are some highlights:

One tape, sans case, marked “Moby.” Probably relatively recent, but before I owned a CD burner. Let’s say 2000.
One new C90 Memorex tape, still in wrapper.
Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Classic 1987 tape that was played at least 200 times before I got the CD in 1990.
Three cassettes which contain the final three games of the 1988 University of Kansas basketball team (Kansas State regional final, Duke Final Four, and Oklahoma National Championship games). One day my kids will find these and ask, “You used to listen to games on the radio?!?!”
A tape marked Mix – Dryer. From a high school buddy, a classic hip-hop mix that had to have been copied about six times before I was able to make my own dub. I recall it being quite hissy and needing to turn up my car stereo almost all the way to barely hear it.
A tape labeled New Mix. The imagination races!
Smooth Jams – Vol. 2. In college I made piles of slow jams tapes, just in case some girl was dumb or drunk enough to end up hanging out with me late at night. These tapes were rarely used, sad to say.
Summer ’91 Mix. Pre-Nirvana, so I’m guessing all hip-hop and R&B.
Ed’s Mix. I believe a tape made up of some of the best of my man E-bro’s 12″ single collection, circa 1991-2.

What is actually on all the mix tapes is pure conjecture because I can’t find a tape player anywhere in the house to review them with! How weird is that? We’ve got at least five CD players and an iPod, but nothing to handle an old school cassette tape. I’ll have to dig around in my in-laws home to see if I can track one down and listen to these fine works (assuming they don’t shred as soon as I push Play).