Hello again. It's been a while since I've sat and written, and my story is that I'm conserving my energy for a month of Blopping. But tonight the kids are asleep, the wife is off at her book club, and I've had three beers. Time to release the hounds!
I have to tell you there's another reason I haven't written in a while, and it's especially pernicious. My birthday was a month ago tonight, and after that sweet, sweet birthday cash finished rolling in I cobbled some together and bought an iPod. I chose a Nano because it looks pretty slick, and I can stick it just about anywhere. (They could just as easily have called it the "iPlug.") Besides, everyone knows you're nobody until you've got those telltale white plug-wires leaking out of your ears. How great it feels to finally belong.
I can't say purchasing it was all that pleasant. I took TwoBert with me to the Apple store in SoHo, and if you've ever visited SoHo you know that on gorgeous fall Saturdays its streets are packed with the Gawking Fabulous. Making headway is hard enough on your own, but with a stroller it feels like you're flailing against a tapioca riptide. And each little tapiocum has yellow-tinted glasses and starched jeans.
Owning an iPod has brought to life a harsh truth: my taste in music is just awful. As I considered which CDs to load onto the iPlug I realized that almost everything I own got massive airplay about 20 years ago and is now a staple on VH1. It's mostly just high-voltage heavy-pop, combined with the Southern rock I grew to love as a teenager when I spent my summers as a beach rat in Virginia. Basically, my iTunes directory is stuffed with crap most males listen to before their hair migrates south for the winter.
Furthermore, whenever those beats are pounding in my ears, it takes a lot of willpower not to start Beavis-ing right there on the subway. (I hear that's a problem.)
But mostly, the iPod has taken away something I never thought I treasured so much: my thinking time. Since I'm almost never alone, my time on the 6 is about the only chance I get to take a breath and sort things through, and I'm wasting it with Meat Puppets blasting in my ears.
(Ahem. Please rephrase that last bit on your own.)
Somebody please suggest to me some new and interesting music I can buy from iTunes. Or I'll have to auction the iPlug off on eBay, and some unwitting sap will get stuck with the complete works of mOlly hAtchet.
