That time I bought (almost) 10,000 records.

Ok, so it's 2010, and I'm 20 years old. I have just moved to Brooklyn with my only slightly older boyfriend. I'm pretty fresh out of the mental hospital (a story for another time), I've never lived out of state, I'm pretty sure my parents are scared shitless about both my mental wellbeing and the relationship I'm in, and I'm aimless, looking for a job.

By this point, I'd already dropped out of college after basically failing out of three different schools for lack of attendance. I'm dating the guy I'll be with for almost ten years and eventually write several breakup songs about. I had been living back at my parents' house when I pretty much ran away from home to move in with him (again, a story for another time), and shortly after that he gets a job on Fifth Avenue designing suits for a men's tailored clothing wholesaler. For ease of storytelling, let's just call him J.

J is pretty much financially supporting me at this point. I don't really know how to pay bills or do many "adult" things yet. That doesn't happen until years later, after we break up and I'm more or less forced to figure it out.

J is busy running the food delivery company he started, running a bicoastal and illegal weed operation, and now working this fancy job on Fifth Avenue. Real go-getter.

So he puts me in charge of finding our apartment in Brooklyn, where we'll be living with his longtime friend, Rob.

Rob, who is now almost a brother to me, looked absolutely terrifying the first time I met him. Shaved head. Massive dark beard. Covered in tattoos. Strong opinions about music, fashion, and basically everything else. If you've ever been to one of our Sacramento shows, you've probably walked right past him. But at this point, I barely know the guy.

I'd never picked my own apartment before. I am pretty much 14 years old in spirit. I'm riding all over Brooklyn with this realtor and, by God, I am doing my best.

We look at apartments all over the city, and I cannot understand why none of them have laundry. At the time, the idea of coin laundry is completely foreign to me. Terrifying, honestly.

So the first apartment we walk into with a washer and dryer, I'm like, "Yep. Where's the lease?"

Never mind the condemned buildings people are squatting in on either side. Never mind that buying groceries requires a cab or a long subway ride. This building has been beautifully renovated by some very kind Hasidic Jews (shoutout BH Management), and I can do my laundry without having to put pants on.

This is where we're living.

A few days ago, Rob and I were talking about the old building on Wilson Avenue in Bushwick, and he admitted I actually did a pretty good job picking the place. Apparently being half a block from the L train made up for a lot.

My boyfriend and I pack up everything we own and head to New York. I'm so constantly stoned off spliffs that I barely remember any of it. I haven't smoked in years, but at this point in my life I'm the highest person in any room I walk into. If you think my addiction to Frasier and Bret Michaels is strong, you should've seen me during my weed-and-tobacco era. Gee whiz.

We arrive on Shabbos, and our Hasidic management company won't answer the phone because, well, it's Shabbos. So we spend the night figuring out where to park a giant Penske truck in New York City and move in the next morning.

A few nights later, we're lying in bed surrounded by cardboard boxes full of everything we own. I'm on a light dose of something my mom doesn't need to know about, scrolling eBay for vintage clothes and records when I stop.

A listing for an entire record store?

Surely not.

Turns out... yes.

See, somewhere in Denver, not far from Five Points where I'd eventually be playing shows and meeting my future boyfriend at Cervantes, some guy owned a record store. If I'm remembering correctly, he'd violated probation or parole (??) and was headed back to jail. The store had to go.

Almost 10,000 records. Dirt cheap.

Now that I'm a little older and only slightly less self-involved, I realize how devastating that must have been. Losing your business because you're going back to jail is a hell of a thing.

At the time, though, I was 20, tripping in bed in my new apartment with my Peter Pan boyfriend, and all I could think was how spending the only savings I had on buying a record store and shipping it halfway across the country sounded like an awesome idea.

I can just sell them online. One by one. That can be my new job.

Sure, Logan.

I'd always loved old things. Vintage clothes, thrift stores, dusty antique malls, flea markets. I sometimes loved the hunt more than what I’d end up finding. Records felt like treasure. I'd spend hours flipping through bins hoping to recognize an album cover or taking a chance on one I'd never heard simply because it looked cool. Honestly, all of this is still true to this day.

So when I saw someone selling an entire record store, it felt like striking gold. 

I call my friend Josh, who lives in Denver, and ask him to check the place out before I buy a plane ticket. He reports back that the guy seems legit, aside from the whole jail part, and that the collection is diverse enough to be worth the trip.

So J and I fly to Denver.

We count every record. About 9,700 of them.

We box everything up, hire a mover to haul it across the country, and wait for it to arrive in Brooklyn.

Then comes the part I somehow hadn't really thought through.

Every single box has to go up three flights of stairs to our apartment, then up the spiral staircase to the rooftop loft where I'm planning to store everything and run my new "business."

To this day, I have no idea how we got those giant wooden display bins around the turns in that staircase. By "we," of course, I mean Rob and J. I had very little to do with that part, let's be real.

I immediately get to work organizing everything. At first, I make the mistake of alphabetizing the entire collection. I've since learned people don't browse record stores alphabetically. You want genre first, then alphabet.

I sign up for a site for selling records called Discogs and use the handle LittlejohnRex. It's just my middle name and last name put together, though I also liked that "Rex" sounded a little like "recs." A little while later, Rob tells me about this new app called Instagram, and I use the same username there.

Selling records online proves to be a much bigger job than I'd imagined. Every record has to be graded. Every sleeve has to be graded. Every pressing has to be identified by serial number. I realize I'm less of a "cool record store owner" and more of an unpaid intern at a nonexistent business.

My days start around 10. By then, J was usually already gone. Either at his fancy job on Fifth Avenue, in California buying weed in bulk, or back in Florida making decisions that would eventually become breakup songs. I'd crack open a can of Café Bustelo, heap some into a moka pot, and let it sputter and burn all over the stove. Nice. Then I'd pretend it was delicious while I drank it on our green velvet couch, smoking my first spliff of the day and staring at our exposed brick wall and the assortment of Kidrobot toys I'd scattered around the apartment. Eventually I'd wander up the silver diamond-plate spiral staircase to my little record loft.

The four giant display bins from the record store came with the purchase. They looked totally ridiculous in an apartment, but they were the only practical way to store 9700 records, and they made browsing easy for the handful of people who came to shop in person.

My desk sat in the corner beside a sliding glass door that opened onto our "rooftop terrace." I'm aware this makes the apartment sound much fancier than it was. The inside was actually pretty nice, but the terrace was really just a flat patch of roof with a railing around it to discourage you from wandering onto the collapsing roofs of the condemned buildings next door.

I'd grab a fat stack of records for the day and get to work trying to guess what condition the internet would agree the vinyl and its sleeve were in, then squinting at beat-up three-millimeter spines hunting for serial numbers. It was tedious work, but the reward was getting to figure out what half these records actually were. I'd throw albums on all day, trying to decide whether something belonged in soul, funk, jazz, or R&B, accidentally giving myself the best music education I could've asked for. This particular collection was especially deep in old R&B and funk.

Every time an order came through, it felt like a tiny victory. There'd be the little chime from my computer, another small dent in paying back my investment, and an excuse to package up a record and ride the subway to Williamsburg to ship it out. It also meant something I hadn't experienced much before: leaving the house to make money instead of spending it.

When our lease in Brooklyn ended, J and I moved to California to grow weed, which meant packing up nearly 10,000 records and shipping them back across the country. By then, some of the thrill had worn off. I had traded in my record-store-owner hat for a weed-farmer one and learned that owning a record store was less about spending all day discovering music and more about the grunt work that I've since realized comes with every career path. Once we got to California, I stopped listing the records altogether and quietly abandoned my Discogs account.

Not long after that, the same risky decision-making that led us to grow weed in the first place led J to rack up a hefty debt with some of the farmers we were working with. He decided we should leave the house suddenly, so we abandoned almost everything, including the records.

Nearly a year of begging passed before I was allowed to return. I had a limited amount of time and was entirely at the mercy of the farmer who had taken over the house. There were thousands of records, but there were also my kitchen supplies, my dad’s Martin - my all-time prized possession, and all the other pieces of my life I had left behind in a panic. Those came first.

My friend Tanner came with me to help. While I packed the things I knew I couldn’t leave behind, I put him in charge of deciding which records would come with us. Luckily, he was a musician whose taste I trusted. I honestly cannot imagine anyone better suited to choosing which tiny fraction of my fever-dream record store would survive.

A couple hundred records made it back with me to the house J and I eventually shared in Delray. When I moved out of that house, I gave most of those away too.

I’ve moved nine times since then, and my records have come with me every time.

The collection I own now contains only a handful from the original store I bought from the jail man in Denver. The rest I’ve built slowly over the years. I pick up records on tour and bring them home as souvenirs. I hit the local shop when I’m feeling down and want the high of hunting for treasure, then come home and throw something new on the turntable. They remind me of places I’ve lived and different people I’ve been. Now I buy them because I love them, not because I think I can sell them.

When I moved in with Tony, who had a decent-sized collection of his own, I joked around about it some, but combining our records felt like a very big deal. Almost scary. My collection had crept up and become part of my identity, which is probably so obvious to anyone who knows me that it feels silly to say out loud. The records are my taste. They represent what I aspire to make and who I aspire to be. They're evidence of who I am and have been.

Mixing our collections somehow felt like a bigger commitment than moving in together. Ridiculous, I know.

Buying nearly 10,000 records was, in every possible way, an inconvenient decision. Keeping any of them through sudden moves, bad relationships, cross-country relocations, and years of instability was not super practical either. But being a musician isn't practical. Loving old things isn't practical. Most of the ways we show the world who we are aren't practical.

Some people cover themselves in tattoos or put patches on their denim jackets. They get a weird haircut or drive a fancy car. There are a million ways to tell the world who you are without opening your mouth.

One of mine is my records.

When I think back to being 20 and buying that store, I thought I was looking for a job.

Now I realize I was looking for an identity.

And, apparently, several decades of lifting very heavy boxes. Wish me luck. I’m moving them again next week.