Place To Be

The shuffle that Apple uses is not very good. In fact, it's quite terrible. Even though I have 5,000+ songs on my computer, I think that I only hear about twenty of them in a loop (Bubba Sparxxx again??).

But sometimes, the shuffle god(s) shine down upon you and play a song you haven't heard in a long time. Fetched from some forgotten cobweb-ridden file in the depths of your hard drive. And when you hear the song you're like "ohhhh, right, I forgot about this song!" I love that, it's like finding $10 in your winter coat when you put it on for the first time in December. Or the time I found a bloody finger wrapped in a napkin in my glove compartment with a ransom note (but that's another story altogether).

Sometimes, though, that forgotten song hits you and brings you back, via time-warp, to the first time you heard it. I just recently heard Nick Drake - Pink Moon, and was whiplashed to the first week of school freshman year at St. Olaf College. While most of my contemporaries had said their prayers, adorned flannel pajamas, and sipped a glass of warm milk before bed, my roommate and I went out hunting. Hunting for the elusive drop of alcohol on a "dry Lutheran campus".

Our adventures took Knut and I to the seedy and mysterious Rand hall, where upperclassmen lived down deep and cavernous staircases. I have a hard time believing this now, but we would literally walk into rooms with 'party sounds' coming out of them, introduce ourselves, and try to score some booze.

There is a point here, I swear. One of the guys I met had an electric violin on a stand by his bed. Having taken many years of violin lessons, I figured I could play a couple of songs and earn our keep, but I heard the owner say that he was a member of the college orchestra. Maybe I shouldn't. I later celebrated my decision not to show off, when I saw the orchestra the next year and this gentleman was first chair violin.

On his playlist that night, though, was that song, Pink Moon. And as I heard it, I recognized it as a song that I had been searching for off-and-on, for years, after I had heard it in a VW Cabrio commercial. Nick Drake, he said, you should download some of his stuff. And I did. And hearing this song just the other day on my computer brought back the whole experience, like it was just yesterday.

I bet, if you have even read this far, that you are looking for a point. But there really isn't one. Maybe the point is that the power of song is an integral part of out lives. Maybe songs are the soundtrack (cliche alert!) to out lives. Maybe you should always dust for fingerprints before you open you glove box. The point is, I don't know, OK? Apple should just fix their damn shuffle program.