My Mundane Life

...and What Animates It.

Author’s Note: One of the great frustrations of my blog and Substack-writing history is the degree to which the essays that I WISH were most well-received (politics, international relations, conservatism, naval force structure) routinely go un-noticed, while the light and often throwaway musings I record on everyday matters generate more positive responses. This essay is of the latter type. Abandoned by my inamorata this weekend for the joys of daughters and New Orleans, I am left to my own devices.

The Joy of a Re-discovered iPod

To a notorious late adopter of technology, the appearance of the iPod early this century was an unimportant event. Putting aside for a moment the utter selfishness and immaturity of requiring constant access to one’s favorite music and audiobooks (etc.), the device marked yet another assault on mankind’s ability to be present in the present, to fully experience the world as it occurs. It also represented the creation of yet another means to wall oneself off from the surrounding world, one more assault on the concept of community and shared experience. All of these things mattered a great deal to me.

That is, until I finally bought one.

Sometime in 2006 or so, I looked around and it seemed all of the middle management on my ship had an iPod. I did not. It became a perverse badge of honor for me to resist, and to interrogate these reputed leaders of men and women who seemed always to have headphones in their ears when I happened upon them in their staterooms or while exercising. There was one among them—Nate Kring is the man’s name, capital fellow, great American—who finally decided to take on my Ludditism and convince me of the worth of this technology (side note: I am one of the people who couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I would need a camera on my phone). He asked me about my musical tastes and habits. I made it clear that I prefer silence when I’m working, but that I listened to music sometimes in the car and I had a nifty CDROM player with headphones (a “Walkman”—I believe) that I wore when working out. Persistent, Nate began to walk me through the obvious advantages of having thousands of songs available, not having to switch discs, being able to skip around, having a curated library of the music most important to me.

Now—Nate Kring is a very convincing man, and so I bought one. I don’t know it’s name, but it is small, thin, generally square, etc. Over time, I took all of my CD’s and transferred songs from them onto the iPod (I remember this being a laborious process), and I also downloaded music that I didn’t own. One of the little tricks someone taught me was to look at Apple’s site for downloading and bring up the part that had playlists of famous people. I would go to famous people I respected or liked, and see what it was they were listening to. Sometimes I would download things that they particularly liked that I was unfamiliar with, if for no other reason than I enjoyed their creativity in their field, so maybe I’d enjoy their assessment of the creativity of others.

I used this iPod pretty extensively over the next few years while working out and driving. It was a constant companion. When I bought a new car in 2010, it had a nifty little adapter that I could plug it right into the car’s entertainment system, and I was off and running.

But I also had satellite radio in that car. And a smartphone. And relatively quickly, I began to listen to all manner of media other than my iPod. Books and podcasts, mostly streamed. Whereas one of the great uses of the iPod in the past was to be able to access my Christmas music (beginning annually on November 1st, the traditional start of the Christmas Season), I was—in this new media age—able to access reams of Christmas music whenever and wherever I wanted, and little by little, the iPod in the car’s storage box atop which my right arm rested, fell into disuse. Complete disuse.

I recently went through the decision-making process of whether to replace the transmission in the car housing the iPod, twelve years and 275,000 miles after purchasing it. I did, and it was—for a variety of reasons—not available to be for about six weeks. It has returned to me now, and I am gingerly coaxing it along for a few more years of use. While driving it the other day, I was listening to the radio and the song “So Lonely” by the Police came on. I love the Police, and always have. So many amazing memories of high school and college take place with the Police playing in the background. I sang along, loudly and proudly, straining to nearly hit all of Sting’s highest notes in the screeching, cacophonous falsetto required. I wanted more.

And then I remembered the iPod. In it, lies digitally every song from every Police album. Same with REM. Tons of Christmas music. OODLES of fantastic classical music. Every single song on that iPod — and there are thousands of them—put there by me.

And so I selected it, chose “mix” and drove along singing and bobbing my head to songs that have memories tagged to each. To faithfully observe the Christmas Season, I skipped over those songs, but when 1 November rolls along, they’ll be front and center. It was as if I had unearthed a little treasure, or accessed a file of memories that had been put away.

Fall/Spring Clothes Transfer

Although I live surrounded by farmland, my life is not tuned to the rhythms of plant and harvest. Rather, I respond to the semi-annual switching of spring and summer clothes with fall and winter. Several admissions follow. First, I have WAY too many (much?) clothes. Several explanations apply, but two seem most important. First, I am not a trendy dresser, so the things I buy are generally not likely to either go out of or come into, fashion. Secondly, my weight varies more than most, as I seem both an accomplished weight loser and gainer. Keeping “Skinny Bryan” and “Fat Bryan” clothes on hand just makes sense, as the other is likely to appear sooner or later. This year, Fat Bryan is back in vogue, as a glance at my (meticulously maintained) weight spreadsheet indicates that I have gained 14.5 lbs since this date last year.

I chose yesterday for switching out clothes, which means removing all spring and summer clothes (except for emergency warm weather getaway supplies) and piling them on the floor, and then dragging three large containers from their storage spot in my garage office to my bedroom. The room created by the warm weather clothing removal is then taken up by bulky and dark items. This transfer is generally enjoyable, although when “Fat Bryan” returns and is unable to comfortably wear items for the coming season and must put them back into the containers, there are feelings of mortification.

As a pasty-white boy, there is little visual enjoyment for others from my wearing of spring and summer clothing, and so the switch from summer to winter puts my A-game clothes back in play. Irish tweed suit? Back, but I’ll need to drop the added pounds to get into it. Big, bulky Irish and Icelandic sweaters? Check. Winter overcoats accumulated across four decades of adulthood? Back.

Back into storage go polo shirts, shorts, light jackets, and all manner of loud summer trousers. Khaki and seersucker suits, sport-coats that belong in golf clubhouses, and long sun-shirts that protect my beluga-dermis go along too. I am committed, mostly, to cool and cold, and if the ravages of climate change throw a week of temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s at us, I am poorly prepared.

Six months from now, the process with reverse itself, and hopefully Skinny Bryan will re-appear (or at least Less Fat Bryan) to break out the colors and the shorts that might fit again. Hope springs eternal.