The Tao of iPod, Part Two

(my sermon continues here; part one is below)

I like listening to my iPod when I jog. I set it on “shuffle” and it takes me places I didn’t expect to go. Sometimes places I didn’t particularly want to go. I know that Corey programmed those songs onto its soulless, metal-encased trappings of zeros and ones, so the hapless little machine really isn’t some deranged Hal taking control of my brain. But I swear sometimes that iPod has its moods. Out of a selection of more than one thousand tunes, it will decide to play four Warren Zevon songs in a row. Or it will devise a peculiar time-warp around the Beatles, wrapping something from Paul McCarthy’s Wings around a song by John and Yoko and then closing the set with George Harrison singing about All Those Years Ago.

How and why did it skip the group itself, the reason those soloists even had their own songs? And isn’t it lovely that Ringo hasn’t changed a whit after all these years? And why is that? Is it that, lacking the vapid beauty that thrust the other three into the limelight, he was able to live a relatively more normal life and escape the murderous consequences of the rocker lifestyle? Or did his mediocrity as a musician have something to do with it? And what is the meaning of “mediocre” anyway—aren’t all measures of success or beauty completely subjective?

Likewise, there are days when I really don’t want to hear Ani DeFranco spew invective at society or former lovers; what I want is the good wholesome kick of a Kinks song, or the quick wit of Bach, but there instead is Ani DeFranco, spitting away in some nonlinear fashion completely at odds with my feet, and since I’m busy trying not to get hit by an oncoming SUV, I can’t look for the forward button to skip over her. So what happens is, her words disappear, and I notice, for the first time, that she’s done something canny musically right there in that measure, slid in something I think might be hip-hop, forced me to listen to something I have always despised.

Then I am thinking about the mathematics of music, and how I never would have expected that dissonance to work the way it did, and then, suddenly, I am back at my own front steps, my ode to my blood pressure and endorphin needs finished for the day.

In the past hour, I have pondered Art with a capital A, aging, failure, success, Beauty, and death—topics it never would have occurred to me to think about, had I not stuck that piece of cord in my ear.

I remember younger days when I ran along the Mississippi, headphone-free. I noted the leaves decaying into the muddy banks of the river, saw sunlight dappled by half naked branches of birch trees. I contemplated words I had memorized from wisdom traditions, and even now when I recall them, they boomerang me back to particular bridges and bends in the river that guided me back home. I treasure those memories, and I am glad I had my holy moments one-on-one with the planet around me. But just as I love red and green, company and solitude, classical and bluegrass, I am glad for the unpredictable insights that I have found with both silence and my iPod.