The Best Day Ever

I finally wised up the other day.

For the past week, I kept telling myself that I needed to grab one of my kids' mp3 players before I left for work. It would give me something to do while I stood there waiting for the No. 10 bus and drowned out some of the chatter I overhear during my commute.

The sound of cars and squawking birds gave way to the Cars, Cheap Trick, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ramones.

A little back story is in store here: The only reason we bought some cheap ass mp3 player for our 5-year-old son was because we had gotten an mp3 player for his older brother when he turned seven and that became an obsession for him in so much that he carried it everywhere (so we went with the placating bribe with my younger son to avoid them fighting over it).

I downloaded about 60 songs on it for him.

Then I figured out I could download a shitload of songs (some not age appropriate) and put them in another folder slash playlist. But this summer when we took the great family road trip we ran into a problem where his player would only play my songs but this wasn't discovered until well into the trip.

So there I was trying to remedy the problem while driving through some tunnel on the verge of getting light-headed and ill so that my two kids could listen to their own music in the back seat even though several of their musical choices were housed in the family car's multi-disc changer.


Suddenly the sound of rubber tires on asphalt didn't sound so bad.


Fast forward to the other day: I'm standing at the bus top and groovin' to some tunes. About four stops later on the inbound bus, I deduct that the contraption is running through the playlist in alphabetical order.

Soundgarden came on and I had an epiphany about Kim Thayil and how despite that rhythm section and Cornell's yelp, the band would have been nothing without Thayil's guitar.

I guess that Powerbar I ate ahd kicked in.

The song ended and suddenly Spongebob came on.

I fumbled through my jacket to find the player to try and make sense of the settings but once again looking at it made me light-headed; I'm not one who can read in the car obviously.

The next day I switched out players.

Avail came on at the bus stop.

I mouthed the words to two songs as I watched my shadow bounced in front of me.

The bus came and I climbed on.

Song crazy song that reminded me of the label came on but I for the life of me had no idea who it was; once again I was forced to dig into my jacket to see who the artist was only to be shut out as the player listed song titles only.

I forwarded to the next song.

As I suspected this too was going through the playlist in alphabetical order.

Must have been Clockcleaner I thought.

Next song was some dub reggae.

I tried to check the title, got light-headed and decided to turn the mp3 player off.

So now it's back to car horns, bus stop alerts and random chatter.

But that beats feeling light-headed...