was one station that could match his CD-shuffle. WYRD, a little station somewhere in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina or Georgia or someplace like that, was allegedly programmed by elves. All he knew was the one or two times he’d accidentally picked it up, it had played things he was only thinking about, as if the DJ were reading his mind. And supposedly, you could count on it to give you omens of what was going to happen to you.
No thank you. And I certainly hope and pray my CD player doesn’t start doing so.
Well, he had some pretty esoteric platters in his Celtica-mix today; stuff he hadn’t known was back in production, stuff he hadn’t known was in production in the first place. Strange little labels he’d never heard of, and some that were clearly self-produced.

“We don’t get a lot of call for this—” The clerk had said that over and over, in a bewildered voice, as Eric brought out disk after disk that wasn’t in his computer. Finally one of the assistant managers had taken pity on the poor kid and sent him off to help a Gen-Xer find the latest Smashing Pumpkins CD.
“Our owner has a hobby,” the assistant manager explained, as he patiently entered the prices and stock numbers manually. “He’s independently wealthy; as long as the store breaks even, he doesn’t care. His hobby is to make sure that no matter what someone’s musical taste is, he’ll always find fabulous surprises here. You should see the mail he gets—catalogues from individual artists, even. So—a lot of stuff may sit around for a year or more before anyone buys it. He doesn’t care; he knows that someday someone is going to want it, be amazed and thrilled that it’s here, and keep coming back to see what else shows up. That’s why the store’s called ‘Plastic Meltdown.’ He expects credit cards to go into overload when the right