Sorry for the spam, y'all.  My decluttering efforts this evening involved sorting through some of my old cassette tapes (I have several hundred to go through, dating all the way back to the 1970s).  Prior to tonight I had been working on the noncommercial tapes that were unrelated to my many years as a fiddler; tonight I got started on a box of tapes recorded at festivals, parties, bar gigs, and of course a few commercial tapes put out by old friends over the years.  I had been dreading this with good reason.  I already knew that commercial tapes tend to disintegrate/mold/whatever more readily -- I guess the manufacturers use cheaper materials than what my my friends and I used for our private endeavors.  So tonight, as I had suspected, I had to throw out most of the stuff that my old pals recorded professionally, because the tapes were full of chalky white spots and fun stuff of that nature.  What upset me, though, was that a good percentage of the personal tapes were similarly ruined.  Not all of them, certainly, and there were some happy surprises, such as the pristine condition of the tape that I made the very first time I went to a bar gig by the band that literally changed my life.  That was back in 1980 and I recorded it on a freaking MEMOREX tape (!!!!), and it has held up all these years.  But for every "oh wow, it lives!" moment there was an "oh shit I have to throw this one out" moment.  So many memories...right into the trash.  It really sucks.