At what point does "a lot" become "too many"?

Or, more to the point, at what point does a problem become a Problem?

I have over 9,000 "records" (see below) at present, and see no end in sight -- in fact, my life's ambition is to listen to every piece of music ever recorded, ever, which sets the bar rather high and requires both (1) an impressive lifespan or (2) the sudden cessation of all future efforts to memorialize musical compositions. I persist in the belief that both of these contingencies may well occur.

Of course, there's listening and there's Listening -- I could have music running throughout the day (and I come pretty close) in order to get through as much as possible, listening to everything just once, but then there's the problem of not really letting anything click, not really processing anything. And so, being somewhat inclined toward obsessive-compulsive behavior, I've devised systems, which involve, without going into unnecessary detail, some of the tracking features in iTunes (e.g., Play Count and Last Played) to ensure that I've given just the proper amount of attention to the music that enters my collection (see below).

And yet systems are really not enough. It's difficult, and possibly unhealthy, to take this all in without some sort of outlet. That outlet used to be pretty much anyone who would listen, without regard to their genuine level of interest -- which has mostly been curbed, but even now when my sister's boyfriend mentions that he liked something he heard on my computer (The Leaves) while he was looking after my daughter, he gets an earful about how they recorded one of the first versions of "Hey Joe" well before Jimi Hendrix etc. etc. etc. (As a side note, the authorship of "Hey Joe" is a hotly contested subject, but is historically attributed to William Moses Roberts -- 2/3ds of which is the name of my paternal grandfather.)

So what I've decided to do, to get something out of my pointlessly large record collection, and to avoid internalizing all of this information, and, selfishly, to try to better get a sense of why I'm not content with the 4 days of music on my hard drive that I still haven't listened to, I've decided on this: as often as possible, I will randomly (see below) pick a record (again, see below) from my collection and post something or other about it here.

A few notes:

I have two Excel files (one for 60's music, one for everything else) that list every record in my collection (excepting most of my cassettes and 45's acquired before I started compiling this list in the early aughts). (In fact, I don't really feel like any of my cassettes are part of my "collection," which is why I painstakingly converted a number of them to MP3 format until I admitted to myself that the sound quality sucked and that I'd be better off seeking out better versions. But I did burn almost every actual vinyl album in my collection during the first six months of the life of my daughter Addison while I was sitting around the house all the time.) My plan is to use a random number generator to choose a record from that list for comment.

A definitional matter: I am using the word "record" to mean "publicly available musical release." I was toying with "commercially" rather than "publicly," but a substantial part of my collection is not and was never really "commercially" available. The language is awkward, I know, but I like the idea of someone making a release available to the public better than it simply be putting it into the stream of commerce anyway -- I exchanged a lot of music that way in high school and college and like the idea of someone just wanting their efforts to be out there somewhere. (That said, for the purposes of locating things in my collection -- which I correlate to CDR or DVDR numbers -- I've burned a number of demos or recording sessions by my old bands which have found their way onto my Excel files, which skews the estimate of the number of "records" in my collection somewhat.) I toyed with the idea of "releases" rather than "records" but that just sounds ugly. "Albums" was quickly ruled out because I have a number of 45's, both in "hard copy" and on CDR, and I think those legitimately qualify for inclusion on my list. So, despite my penchant for unnecessary accuracy, "records" it is.

Finally, I do not pretend to be a music critic. This is really all about me. Also, I have a really crummy ear. I cannot tell the difference between and LP and an MP3. I used to sell used records for a living, and I would tell people that records sounded "warmer" than CDs and all that hooey but the fact of the matter is it all sounds the same to me. So be it.

Yours,

Matt