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2010-05-10 - 10:35 a.m.

A lot's changed since my older brother Jake got a boombox for his birthday. I was six or seven and I coveted that boombox. It was shiny, with lots of buttons and knobs, and its two big speakers seemed to me very aggressive and grown-up. Jake somehow got a blank cassette tape and when he recorded Cyndi Lauper's song "She Bop" from GO 106, the world suddenly got a lot bigger.

Anyway, music is important. There's an adolescent girl in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, named Mick, and she loves music, especially Mozart and Beethoven. In several scenes, she sneaks off after dinner and goes to a neighbor's house. She sits quietly in their yard, just below their open window, listening. Her family doesn't have a radio and these moments she steals for herself, away from her young brothers, are the best parts of her week. McCullers takes great care in describing these moments for Mick, how she feels the music, memorizes phrases. The feeling I remember most clearly is Mick thinking of a somber, proud people rising up as one and shouting, or something like that. The music makes things flower.

Which brings me to my iPod. What a fucking wonderful device, huh? I remember a night in a hotel room in Seattle. I had a Sony Discman, with decent headphones, and I'd brought along ten or twelve CDs. And I remember how luxurious that felt, lying on that huge bed, smoking Player cigarettes, to be able to choose from among all that music. And, now. Look! Eighteen thousand songs, or whatever. Fourteen million songs. Four billion songs, inside this dense little box. In ten seconds, I can click on the Coldplay song "Clocks" and not care if Coldplay's not cool. I can just sit inside that perfectly constructed song, marveling at how the thing fits together just a like a perfect box, or a clock. I can listen to "Born to Run" and wonder how Springsteen came up with some of those phrases and get myself all revved up with suicide machines and hands strapped across engines and America. I can listen to "Hey Ya" and dance, a little, in my truck.

There's too much these days, of course, too many games, too many ways to distract, but the iPod, man, I'll keep that one.

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