The Music Man

I can’t work without music. You can call it a mental crutch, and I guess you might even be right. But it’s a fact. If I don’t have headphones firmly clamped on my ears, I can’t concentrate. My focus, shaky enough as it is, goes completely to pieces. As I write this, I’m listening to…let’s see…Taj Mahal’s “Six Days on the Road.”

Let me try a little experiment. Can I finish writing this blog post without listening to the rest of this song? Hit pause…and…OK, not too bad. Concentration levels seem normal. No twitchiness, no sweaty palms, no tendency towards distraction. Hey, I think I did it! I kicked my habit, just like that! Woo hoo!

Uh…what was I writing about again?

…

…

Something about potatoes? Or rock music? Or…dang, I can’t remember! You win, Taj Mahal. The music goes back on.

Now that’s more like it! I wasn’t always like this, you know. Back in middle school I could focus on my work without Taj Mahal—or whoever—taking up real estate in my ear canal. Things changed, though, when I got to high school. Specifically, things changed when I started taking Calculus.

Calculus, if you didn’t know, is an extremely painful subject that is the academic equivalent of being repeatedly kneed in the groin by a professional soccer player. I can concentrate on things like English and History because I actually like them. Do I enjoy Calculus? Only in the way a walnut enjoys a nutcracker.

Calculus was driving me insane. I would look at my homework and my vision would get blurry, my tongue would swell up, and I would have to lie down in a cool dark place for a couple minutes. If somebody said the word “integral,” I’d break out in a nasty case of hives. It got so bad I couldn’t even touch my textbook without a particularly thick pair of gloves.

The truth was, my pea-sized high-school brain couldn’t take an injection of pure mathematics every afternoon. It would just…explode! Not in the creative sense, but in the grenade sense. I needed something to cut the potency of Calculus, the way a boozy frat boy might dilute his vodka with a little PBR.

Cue the music! Literally, I guess. First came the Walkman. It wasn’t much. Compared to your iPods and your iPhones and Nanos and Minis and Zumas and Flingos and Burples (note: I’m pretty sure all of those were real at some point) it was nothing at all. It couldn’t read MRIs or look up restaurants. Heck, it couldn’t even tell the time, unless you turned it upside and smacked it in just the right spot.

But it could play music, and I didn’t ask much more than that. That CD player got me through Calculus. If I hadn’t had a steady diet of The Band, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and a couple others pulsing through my brain, right now I’d be struggling through first-semester Calc for the third time.

To quote George Harrison, though, “All things must pass.” To paraphrase George Harrison, “All CD players must eventually break down.” My CD player was no exception. In retrospect, I’m glad I never anthropomorphized that player the way I’ve done some of my other appliances. I would’ve been heartbroken at its untimely passing. It would have been like losing a friend, albeit a midget friend made of plastic whose conversation consisted entirely of R.E.M songs.

His death, like all non-boa constrictor related deaths, came swiftly. One second he was working. Then, as “The Weight” segued into “Chest Fever,” he coughed once or twice and gave up the digital ghost.

The player may be dead, but his legacy survives. I have an iPod, and I have Pandora radio, and both are pretty dang nice, but they’re only following in the footsteps of that first CD player. If I were to anthropomorphize them, I’m sure I’d see them as a pair of neglected little children who wonder why their Daddy doesn’t love them very much.

One last point. If you’re wondering, I wrote this post after Ruckus met an untimely death. I knew Ruckus. I liked Ruckus. I miss Ruckus. If you ever learn of his whereabouts, please let me know. He owes me 2000+ songs.