The Things I Carry, by Jeff Gordinier:

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My spine aches. My shoulders are sore. I'm sitting on an American Airlines flight to Chicago - my publisher is sending me there to talk about X Saves the World downtown at The Standard Club - and I'm wondering why I choose, time and time again, to inflict such agony upon my muscles and joints. 

See, it's my fault. I'm entirely responsible for the wear-and-tear that will one day force me to hire a chiropractor and take up Ashtanga. Moments ago I pack-muled my way through a terminal at LaGuardia with, oh, roughly two or three tons of cultural paraphernalia in my bags - and probably half of it never had to make the trip.

I became a magazine writer because I love magazines, so of course I've got a floral assortment of glossies splaying out of my shoulder bag: The New Yorker, Time, Wired and Fast Company (yes, I know they compete with each other, but they both said nice things about my book and I happen to be equally fond of them), Vogue, Stop Smiling,  Tricycle  (that last one's a sentimental holdover from a two-year fling with Buddhism; my meditation practice became completely shot to hell a few months after I got the contract to do XSTW). Wedged in between the magazines, like sprigs of baby's breath in a bouquet, are odd portions of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New York Post. Yes, I subscribe. Yes, they're delivered. Yes, on paper.

Then there are the books. I think I have seven with me, possibly eight, maybe even nine. I can't check because right now most of them are floating around in my black duffel bag, which is squashed twixt a couple of demonic leviathan rolling suitcases up in the overhead, but I seem to remember jamming Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in there, as well as gobs of poetry. I'm such an unapologetic poetry junkie that if they had poetry-sniffing dogs in the airport-security lines I would be in federal lockdown by now. I know I brought James Schuyler's Selected Poems and James Tate's Selected Poems, and Famous Last Words by Catherine Pierce and Sweet Ruin by Tony Hoagland and One Above & One Below by Erin Belieu. (Erin's a friend of mine and I've been meaning to ask her if the title of that book comes from where I presume it comes from: Hole's soaring, spittle-frothing "Violet," one of my favorite songs.)

Please bear with me. I'm going somewhere with this. Or at least I think I am.

So obviously, no master of the mysteries of back pain would approve of my lugging a library through an airport. But it gets worse, and it gets weirder: I'm even carrying CDs! Yes! Everyone knows you don't need to buy CDs anymore; even if you do buy them, you certainly don't have to haul them around the country. You just load the songs into your iPod and...

And yet here they are: Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, Wilco's A Ghost Is Born, and the legendary, intoxicating Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilation, which came out in the United States in the Eighties. Now, I often take CDs with me on reporting trips for Details because I happen to think that blasting music when you're heading down an unfamiliar expressway in a rental car is one of the most sublime pleasures available to us in this spirit-crushing world. (I'm no fan of the corporate endorsement, but please allow me to give props to Avis, okay? Because Avis rental cars always seem to have CD players in them. And because when you enroll in the Avis frequent-driver program, you get a "Wizard" number. Awesome. In a perfect America, all corporations would hand out Wizard numbers, complete with magic wands and pointy hats.)

...focus, Jeff, focus...

The thing is, I'm not renting a car in Chicago. I'm taking a taxi straight to The Standard Club. So I'm not even sure why I brought the CDs.

I'm not really sure why I brought enough reading material for a month, either, considering that I'm only going to be in Chicago for...one night.

Maybe this is just another example of my own freakish and frequently Howard Hughesian behavior, in which case I shouldn't make any vast and ludicrous generalizations about it. 

But still...I'm no Luddite. I have amassed an embarrassing number of Facebook friends. I once lost my BlackBerry (for, granted, about five minutes) in a hallway at the Sunset Marquis, and the lovely folks at the front desk seemed to grow concerned that I was on the verge of a stroke.

I like technology a whole lot. But I like paper, too. I like to hold things. Even though we're all supposed to be living in the Google Cloud by now, inhaling formless and weightless data molecules as if they were wisps of ether, I view a book or a magazine or a compact disc as a pleasure delivery system, and I'll be damned if I'll ever understand why anyone would want to get rid of that. Don't you want to see the poet's sexy author photo? Don't you want to luxuriate for a few minutes in the Arcade Fire's idiosyncratic album art? Don't you want to be able to read something that won't conk out when the batteries wane or when a satellite gets creamed by an asteroid?

(True fact: Just a few minutes ago, when this plane was about to take off in New York and we were all instructed to make our electronic devices go comatose, I overheard a flight attendant tell a passenger: "These people who have the eBooks, the Amazon Kindle? They have to shut 'em off, and this is the best place to read!")

...come on, Jeff, bring it all back around to Generation X...faster! faster! shorter! shorter!...

Okay, my point is that this is a perfect example of generational straddling. Generation X really is a bridge between the old and the new. That's true of all generations, I suppose, but when you care a great deal about music and you've been the primary marketplace demographic that's experienced the epic format shift from vinyl to CD to downloads (to, presumably, implants that will beam music directly into our skulls), it has a serious impact on your perspective. (Just as I imagine that my reading too many Ray Bradbury novels when I was a kid infected me with the paranoid belief that one day, baby, all of that digitized and downloaded data is just going to vaporize - poof! - and probably at the hands of some sinister mind-controlling government cabal run by Simon Cowell.) So if everything you buy or do can be interpreted as a narrative gesture about your identity, then the act of clinging to an artifact like a CD - is that radical or conservative? Ornery or obedient? Sensible or insane?

You tell me.

Meanwhile, I wonder where in Chicago I can get a good massage...

Jeff Gordiner, X Saves the World, Penguin, Penguin Books