I have a pronouncement: iTunes is the coolest thing ever.

OK. I understand that I’m probably the last person in the United States to come to this realization, and I apologize for my tardiness. As I’ve stated before, I was computerationally challenged until a couple weeks after Christmas, when the new eMac, complete with iTunes software, arrived at our door.

Sweet Jesus, how have I managed to live my life to this point without access to iTunes? It’s like wandering through a Tower Records store in my underwear, sipping a glass of whiskey as I go. And it’s only going to get better.

I started with iTunes pretty much right away. The weekend after we had the new computer set up, I downloaded a couple of Jazz Mandolin Project CDs, stuff that I would have never found in a record store in Pittsburgh. And I’ve made a couple of compilation CDs from the stuff I already had in my own music collection.

But in the last couple of days, I used iTunes to fuel my skiing obsession, as we get closer to departing for Aspen (only three more days!). See, I’ve been watching Warren Miller movies almost non-stop for the last couple of weeks, thanks largely to The Wife, who bought a buttload of DVDs for me at Christmastime. The music on the older ones is, um, interesting — while Warren’s films always have had high production values, he never seemed to pay much attention to the background. It’s either really cheesy canned stuff or even cheesier original songs written specifically for the movie. One of the films The Wife got for me was a copy of the 1985 edition, which I saw in the auditorium of my high school in Columbus; it’s fantastic to be able to see it again, but some of the songs are just horrible, 80s synth-pop bands singing about skiing. Really, really awful.

The transition came in the mid-90s, when Warren sold his company to his son, who began using actual music for the soundtrack. Generally it’s stuff that I don’t know of and wouldn’t pick up in a store, but there are a lot of great tunes backing the breathtaking footage of people jumping off of cliffs and stuff.

And that’s where iTunes comes in. In two of Warren’s most recent efforts, I found probably 10 songs that I thought were really cool, some punk stuff, some hip-hop, etc. Going through the credits crawl, I picked up titles and band names and then I fired up the computer to see if they were available. Most of them were.

So I combined those downloads with other songs from the films I already owned — and also threw in a couple of hippie songs to make it mine — and came up with the Warren Miller Mountain Mix:

Chalkdust Torture, Phish
I Am, Zebrahead
Blue Sky, Allman Brothers Band
Diggin’ My Potatoes, James Mathus and his Knock-Down Society
OK, Riddlin’ Kids
Going Down The Road Feeling Bad, Grateful Dead
Snowfall, Reckless Kelly
As Good As It Gets, Grand Theft Audio
Burning Down My Sanity, Moth
Good Times Roll Part 2, RJD2
Jessica, Allman Brothers Band
Long December, Counting Crows
Slave To The Traffic Light, Phish

I repeat: iTunes is the coolest thing ever.

And it will become that much cooler when The Wife lets me buy an iPod to go with it.