The randomizer makes me nervous sometimes
So there I was this morning at the bus stop, listening to the music and watching my neighbors drive by, one at a time, in their cars looking bored and annoyed and tired.
The morning was cool and beautiful, and the music was all over the map; I was randomizing from the big playlist (7,473 songs). And Nanci Griffith started singing "10 Degrees and Getting Colder:"
"He was standing by the highwaySo OK, I wasn't hitchhiking, my heart isn't broken, and it's certainly not ten degrees, and I'm nowhere near Boulder. But just then my friend and neighbor D. pulled up in her car and I hopped in and took the earphones out of my ears. She made some joke about picking up hitchhikers and I laughed & told her what song was playing; we both thought it was kind of funny.
With a sign that just said Mother
When he heard a driver coming
About a half a mile away
So he held the sign up higher
Where no decent soul could miss it
It was ten degrees or colder
Down by Boulder Dam that day"
My office is out of D's way, and I was in no hurry, so I had her drop me off at the central bus transfer facility downtown and I put the headphones back in, and it's Liz Phair, singing "Ride:"
"I get a rideI know it's not really paying attention to me and it has no way of knowing what I'm doing, I just thought it was kind of strange is all. Like that time I pulled into the parking ramp and Joni Mitchell started singing about how they paved paradise & put up a parking lot.
Right by your side
Under your skin
I'm digging in
Well I don't know, but I've been told
The road to heaven is paved with gold
And if I die before I wake,
I need a ride"
I'm sure the iPod randomizer really is random, but maybe there's some kind of way to focus its power and use it like Tarot cards or astrology or something. To tell the future, or answer questions about, well, whether you're likely to get a ride halfway to work.
Labels:
anecdotes: pointless and/or rambly,
music
13 comments:
You know, that thing scares me just a little. I go for an evening walk with my iPod and sometimes the music the randomizer spits out at me makes me jerk the headphones out of my ears and gape at the machine. Only once, I'm proud to say, did I startle my neighbors by shouting at it to "Quit reading my mind, you're freaking me out." But then, my neighbors are already convinced of my insanity so I suppose it really doesn't matter.
So happy to learn it's not just me. I mean, I'm not one of those people who believe that streetlights go out when I walk by them. There's a perfectly good explanation for that, and there must be one for this too.
And that explanation doesn't neccesitate either one of us to start wearing a tin foil hat! ;-)
better safe than sorry. of course the tinfoil hats are part of the whole conspiracy.
or not.
I can't keep track of it all anymore.
But mercury vapor lamps do need to turn themselves off now & again to cool down.
i dunno about this ipod-as-tarot-card stuff. i think you need to get out more :)
I KNOW I need to get out more. :-)
oh magpie, you're such a killjoy. I think that if tarot cards work, and astrology works, and palm-reading works, why the hell not use the iPod? I've been known to open Shakespeare's Sonnets at random to gain insight into what's troubling me. It sort of works.
If my Ipod told the future, I would get laid a LOT more often than I do.
And every now and then it would be "by the dashboard lights."
--I think it's a good plan, Alphabitch, to make your ipod your fortune-teller. You can determine what kind of day you will have by programming your Ipod. I think it could work.
I imagine you'd have to cut back a bit on the Leonard Cohen.
love,
T
The opening Shakespeare I buy, the other, I think it's merely you using your brain...the 75% we normally don't use, that is. The brain is, afterall, the same instrument that created Hitler and Stalin and GW Bush and Saddam and Ceasar and the Son of Sam and the list is too long to list here, but you, I hope, get the gist.
Peace.
I shuold have added some beauty to the list- Hamlet, A Mid-Summer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Prophet, all of Maya, Gandhi, Mother Teresa....
Synchronicity. I do pay attention to that sort of thing, although I tend to think of them as more descriptive than prescriptive (same goes for Tarot readings).
What's really schpooky is when sometimes i dream of a particular song, usually one that's not currently in heavy rotation or on my playlist (i keep track because i--well i used to--write down my dreams upon awakening) and then later that day or the next would hear it in the fast-food joint or grocery store.
last time it was "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay" (thankfully the Otis Redding not the Michael Howler). i did actually take it as an accurate reading of how i was feeling at the time, for better or for worse ("lettin' the clouds roll away, wasting time...").
even more interesting: in the dream it was my mother saying she'd always hated that song--again, completely random wrt real life, i've no idea what she thinks of Otis Redding.
but i do have a long-standing tension with my mother wrt let's say work ethic. particularly mine. and being "goal-oriented" in general.
so, you know: who the hell knows why or how that works. i just figure: if it works, it works. stuff for the next therapy session, you know.
I know what you mean. One time when I was in my car, the bridge to a song came on just when I was driving over a bridge!
HSC: you've always been a cynic.
TS: I hadn't thought about using it to control the future so much as maybe to predict the future or interpret the present. Like tarot card -- though I suppose you could try to use those to influence the future somehow, I guess.
and belledame: yeah, it's all just stuff for the next therapy session.
And the song lyrics on my iPod right now are this:
"A gypsy woman read my cards and she took my twenty bucks/ A gypsy woman read my cards and she took my twenty bucks/ She said 'you ain't got no future boy/no your future's all used up'/ Don't look at the hanged man..."
What are the chances????
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