I willingly admit to being a Napster addict. I Napster when I'm at my computer. I Napster when I walk by the computer; I walk by the computer just to Napster. I Napster first thing in the morning and last thing at night. When I'm asleep, my subconscious takes over and Napsters for me, regularly waking me up with hazy memories of long-forgotten tunes.

I've been told by an addiction-recovery expert that I'm in Stage 4, the final and most severe stage of Napster addiction, which entails "Distortions in Thinking, Most Notably Denial." (No way am I in Stage 4!) I've supposedly already passed through the prior three stages, which involved "Impaired Control Over Napstering," "Preoccupation With Napstering" and "Napstering Despite Adverse Consequences."

Yes, I'm an addict, but an addict with a mission: to create a new form of memoir, an MP3 catalog of the songs of my generation. My library represents all genres, from country to punk to disco to rap. It contains original recordings and covers, slick productions and basement tapes, in-studio sessions and live concerts. I've downloaded rare recordings or one-hit wonders I'd always loved but had never owned, or were buried in the piles of warping records discarded in a corner of my dank, musty basement -- songs like Roy Orbison's "Crying" (a killer version he sings with k.d. lang), "I Love You More Today Than Yesterday" by Spiral Staircase, "The Things We Do for Love" by 10CC and a blended-harmony version of the Sam Cooke song "What a Wonderful World," sung by Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor. I've got girl groups and boy groups, teen idols and pioneers of rock 'n' roll, rappers and Rat Packers. And Barry Manilow.

It wasn't always this way. Before I became an addict, searching for the songs of my youth on Napster.com, downloading them into my personal library and playing them over and over again were simple affairs that made me enormously, irrationally, deliriously happy. After all, I'm part of the techno-nostalgic boomer generation, and as any advertiser of convertibles or iMacs knows, give us a product or service that blends our longing for the '60s (the only decade that has ever mattered) with technological innovation and we're there. It's as if there had been no race riots, no body counts on the nightly news and no political assassinations during those glory days. All we remember are trips to the beach or park on endless summer days in our daddies' Caddy convertibles, with the top down and the AM radio blasting "Good Lovin'."

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