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* You no longer describe free jazz pieces as "the noisy one" or "the slow, quiet one" -- never mind "the one that sounds like cats mating" -- but have started instead to use phrases like "On Skronkitude 76, the angular contour of Zorn's first solo gives way to a more contemplative lyricism, after the subtle appearance of amplified water gongs in the eighteenth minute of the piece".
* You feel compelled to get all 375 albums that Matthew Shipp has played on in the first six months of 2003.
* Your friends and loved ones are convinced that you are listening either to sounds recorded from a steel refinery, or else cats mating.
* If that weren't enough, they keep asking you to put Opeth or Hatebreed back on so that "we can listen to something lighter".
* You start making your own refrigerator magnets -- with pictures of Evan Parker, Ken Vandermark and Billy Bang on them
* You think that normal people should be able to tell what standards Derek Bailey is actually playing on his album Standards.
* Two seconds into a solo, you can tell the difference between a soprano saxophone, a sopranino saxophone, and Eric Dolphy playing a bass clarinet played really, screamingly high.
* You get a lot of flame emails as a result of your posting on the Insound discussion forum -- the one in which you proclaimed that, while Tortoise is cool, post-rock isn't actually doing anything that wasn't done by experimental musicians 20 or 30 years prior. Rob Mazurek alone emails you 263 times.
* After spending hours trying get that Ornette Coleman solo down on kazoo, you realize it isn't quite the same thing.
* The police periodically pop by your apartment and ask "What the hell is going on in there?" This very often coincides with your putting your Coltrane boxed set, complete with two versions of Ascension, into your changer and looping all five discs, creating a 72-hour long weekend celebration of Impulse recordings from the Sixties. Once again, you are accused of owning cats that... well, you know...
* The local piano shop bans you for life after you decide to try out some Cecil Taylor-esque solo improvisations. The real clincher was when you started using your feet on the Steinway baby grand.
* In any given national chain record store, you can find about three records in the jazz section that you can actually stand listening to.
* You bought Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun album primarily due to the presence of Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen. Extra points if you did a little skipping dance when you heard that YLT released an entire EP of covers of Sun Ra's "Nuclear War".
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