Space Monkeys!

What PJ said.

I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but writing about my Goddamned iPod for the last few weeks, and I’m sure everybody’s sick of listening to me blather on about it.
But it really does change your life. I bring it with me to work every day. I bought a Griffin iTrip to listen to the thing in the car and was jammin’ the tunes in a rental car on the way to Dallas recently. [Incidentally, the iTrip is great except that in Austin proper (or as I say, ‘Propah’), it’s hard to find a free slot on the FM dial to park that signal. So I still get some static sometimes, harshing my iPodbuzz. I’ve even started looking at replacement CD decks that have an AUX input to accommodate my insatiable technolust. It’s a sickness, folks.]

When my wife is in San Antonio, I lull myself to sleep by reading a book and donning the white headphones like a sleepmask in bed.

Yesterday at work, a reporter was having trouble concentrating because of all the background noise in the room, so I handed her my iPod and told her, “Here. This’ll drown out the outside world.” 20 minutes later, her story was done.

I’m not saying that the iPod is the cure for all of society’s woes. That would be cotton candy. But I do think that there is something inherently good about being able to carry your music around with you all the time, to listen to a song exactly when you want to, to create a mix that you can patch into a theater’s audio system for pre-show music when you forgot your burned CD in Austin.

It feels like when I bought my laptop and went wireless: Feeling unencumbered by desktop machinery and dangly cords. It’s a kind of freedom: The kind William Wallace may have killed a bunch of Brits to get.