In honor of the possibility that I may be hosting someone I’ve known for over two decades and his band, I alphabetized our CDs.

Yes, we’ve lived in this house for over a year, and yes, they were alphabetized at the previous house. So, no, there’s really no excuse for why they haven’t been alphabetized by now. Ditto with our books, but, you know: it’s not writers who will be sleeping on my floor next week, it’s musicians. Thus, the CDs it was. The tapes under the bench will remain the same mess they’ve been for the past 15 years, however: consider yourselves informed.

I noticed, as I always do when we move and I have to re-alphabetize the CDs the next year, that somehow our rather eclectic collections combine into something almost coherent. I expect that just about anybody in their 30s could come to our house and find something to listen to. For two non-musicians, we like music. While we enjoy a fair chunk of each other’s music, the overlap in what we owned when we combined our collections was four CDs: Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral, the Machines of Loving Grace debut, and the soundtrack from The Crow. To our household, I contributed the (nearly) collected works of the Beastie Boys, Ani Difranco, Dag Nasty, Carrie Newcomer, The Cure and the rest of the Nine Inch Nails discography. My partner similarly contributed the (nearly) collected works of Skinny Puppy, The Smiths, New Order / Joy Division, and the Thrill Kill Kult. Between the two of us, we fill in the major alternative and punk bands of the 70s and 80s, almost every industrial band around, the major singer-songwriters of the 90s, key hip-hop artists, and well-known samplings from classical, jazz and country music.

Nonetheless, I’m sure it doesn’t hold a candle to the collections of actual musicians. Not to mention that the folks we’ll be seeing next week are still in their 20s, so they’re probably way too hip to want to listen to any of that old stuff. But at least they’ll be able to find it — in alphabetical order — if they do.