Posters? He suggests in his one-word answer. It's an idea. Better than the blank I drew. I get dressed and drive a couple blocks away to a music shop that specializes in mostly used stuff. It's where I've purchased ninety percent of my video games. I make a line for the posters, but after flipping through twenty of artists and half-naked girls, I give up and opt for wandering the rest of the store. There's a display for the new Calamity Kitty album. Corey must be ecstatic.

In the back near the curtained-off 'must be 18 to enter' area, I locate a few walls of vinyl records. I've never listened to vinyls. Now that I think about it, it sort of makes me feel like I'm missing out on something. I wonder how different it is, hearing a voice on a record as it was originally intended to be heard.

Habit has me thinking I can't afford this until I remind myself that, yes, I can. Technically. I have money. A pretty good chunk of it, in fact. So if I want to buy things, I can, and there's no one to tell me what a stupid idea it is.

I start at A and work my way to Z, plucking out every album of The Beatles—solo stuff included—that I can find. I grab up some Queen, Bob Dylan, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin as I go, and take my armful of prizes to the front of the store where the clerk gives me a funny but amused look. Of course I don't have a record player, but the shop has portable turntables and I snatch one of those, too.

"Light shopper. Sure there's nothing else you need?" the guy asks, looking over my selection. My face reddens and I mutter no under my breath. He rings me up, I pay, then go home to struggle with my things up the stairs because making more than one trip doesn't cross my mind.

The vinyls don't take up anywhere near all the space on my shelf, but it fills a portion and makes the whole apartment look better. A real person lives here. I get the turntable unwrapped, plugged in and spinning, so I can pull out a record—Revolver—and figure out how to start it up. There's a faint crackle before George Harrison's voice hums through with Taxman. I stretch out on the floor in the near darkness next to the turntable, and close my eyes.

I listen until track one turns to track two, and I like the way it sounds. Deeper, heavier than a CD or mp3. I can't explain it. Then John Lennon comes on and my eyes open. I'm Only Sleeping. One of my favorites.

I get it. More than any other song he wrote.

This.

This is why people listen to records, I decide. Because the sound of his voice, so low and melancholy, breaks my heart in a hundred different ways it never has before. It's hard to breathe. Because every word of the song is true, and I know he wrote it in a period of his life where he, too, was at a loss. Drowning in apathy and sleeping away his days. People said he was lazy, that fame had gotten to him. They were too blind to realize laziness had nothing to do with it. He was sad. Sad, and on the verge of an internal meltdown that would overturn his life and everything he'd worked so hard for.