Creative Audio Should Contribute To My Ritalin Fund

It has recently been brought to my attention that I may suffer from the affliction ADD. I think we can go ahead and assume that I do not have the HD of AD/HD as I have been labeled many things in my life (some unmentionable), but not one of them has ever been hyperactive. Now I'm not suggesting that Creative Audio, makers of my fine MP3 player, actually brought about my "condition." I contend, however, that it has exacerbated my preexisting ADD tendencies.

The other night I made my ritualistic trip to the back porch for a spurious round of drinking and writing. As usual, I brought my MP3 player and headphones along for the occasion and sat down to work (which usually consists of a generous amount of internet surfing peppered with brief moments of actual writing). I have filled roughly two-thirds of the 40gb hard drive of my player with my music collection. There are a few random cds that I have yet to add, but for the most part, it's everything I own. This fact alone, the idea that I can carry around every cd I own in my pocket, is mind-boggling in itself.

After writing a good 2 minutes, I decided to pause for a smoke break and concentrate solely on the music at hand. I scrolled through the artist list, settled on a particular song and then promptly changed it 15 seconds later. I moved to the next track, thinking to myself, "Oh, I haven't heard this one in awhile" and then proceeded to scroll back through the artist list to switch to something else. At this point, I decided to start counting the number of times I changed songs before they ended. I lost count somewhere around thirty in a span of 10 minutes. I would like to say that I was consistent in my choices, or at least thematic in the playlist, but that was not the case. I started with Radiohead and ended with Marvin Gaye, with various artists such as Television, The Talking Heads and Wu-Tang Clan interspersed in-between. I'm eclectic, if nothing else.

The root problem is that my listening playlist is constructed solely out of the current mood on the radar screen. I find music to be both mood altering and mood enhancing. For example, repetitively listening to Tori Amos makes me want to call every man who has ever pissed me off and scream, "Fuck you. You lying bastard." When I'm depressed, I want to drown my sorrows in whatever Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, has been drinking. I also find that constant listening to The Smiths will cause me to not want to leave my chair. My point is, music can either put me into a certain mood or I use it to amplify and add to my mood. So, I'm on a perpetual quest to find the perfect song for my mood.

This is where the MP3 player is my downfall. Before this little God-send, if I got some burning desire to hear the live version of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" with Edge doing vocals and playing his guitar unaccompanied, that meant I would have to get up off my ass and dig through several thousand cds in order to find it. Generally, the task would seem too daunting initially and combined with an inherent laziness, I wouldn't actually get up to find it. Or, on the off-chance that the need to hear said song was so great that it overrode the laziness factor, I would venture inside to dig through several boxes of cds and invariably lose interest half-way through the search, forget what I was initially looking for and select something else.

Now that I have the MP3 player, everything's right at my fingertips. I can change tracks to my heart's content. This has also caused at least one social problem with my friends. I have learned it's perfectly fine to do this within the privacy of my headphones, but others not directly involved in the playlist selection find it annoying and grow quite testy. I have often been accosted with idle threats that people will not ride in a vehicle with me or some have had the actual nerve to try to impound the MP3 player in hopes of restricting the endless string of 30 second music clips. I think it's much akin to watching late-nite Time Life music infomercials where all you get to hear are snatches of songs. I have learned to confuse my audience by playing a game of "Name That Tune" which is in all actuality, a thinly veiled attempt to blind others to the fact that I'm still changing the song. Another trick I've learned is the subtle, yet effective, method I like to call the "Fade Out." It requires a fairly inattentive audience who may not be familiar with the particular song and might not notice that half-way through the first verse of "Sweet Jane" the song mysteriously decreased in volume and changed to "Piss Factory". Timing is key and I am a master of the volume button.

I see no problem in any of this. Others like to point out that most people can listen to entire albums, if not entire songs without changing it. I think it's an urban legend perpetuated by the people who want to stop my mad Djing skills.

Creative Audio has now forced me into a mental state requiring medication and I think the bastards should have to pay for part of it.