My Sanctum Was Violated

My sanctum was violated this week. Someone took a brick to my precious little car, my little Smurf-mobile, the only thing my husband and I own (or almost own) that makes us truly proud. We do not own our cat, she owns us, which is why I'm not including her in the pride-fest.

This is how imagine it went: "Oh look! Pretty car, parked at this place of business, in the wee hours of the morning! Let's take a look inside! There's an auxiliary cord snaking under the seat from the center console! Surely that cord is connected to something! Oh-HO! An iPod! I can certainly make some scratch selling this to an unseemly type downtown! Perhaps I can trade it for some fine bathtub meth or perhaps some time with that nice young woman on Blackstone with the pleather and the daddy issues!" Big brick, meet itty bitty window. Bye bye, personal accessory of choice. Adios, my downloaded "Glee" pilot that took 45 minutes to load. Which brings me to: the crap on my iPod that this yutz is going to find, and what it says about me. Imagine the picture he (because you know it's a dude) will draw in his head. Given his head isn't full of swiss cheese brains, all idiocy and syphilis and shifty eyes.

We build such a bond with our iPods, don't we? They are extensions of our brains in a way that no other possession can be. It holds our music. Most of us have an intense connection to the artists we love, to the albums in which we wear a metaphorical groove (love you, vinyl!). We scroll past the same albums every time, thinking we'll listen to them eventually (for me: The Donnas, Ray LaMontagne, The Cure); we have entire albums on there that only have one song we ever listen to (Ting Tings, Jason Mraz, Nina Simone.) There are the solo songs, downloaded in a fit of nostalgia (Can't Find My Way Home by Blind Faith, White Lines by Grandmaster Flash, the cover of Easy by Faith No More) and albums we've held on to since we were wee grunge acolytes in the '90's (Badmotorfinger, the "Singles" soundtrack, STP's Core.) I personally have stuff I listen to over and over again: Vampire Weekend, Soul Coughing, Ozomatli, and Neko Case. I have stuff I would never want certain of my indie rock gestapo friends to ever ever see: Timberlake, Clarkson, Aguilera, Fall Out Boy. I've got records I only listen to every once in a while, when I need to evoke a very specific mood: OK Go, Ting Tings, Patsy Cline. Then there's all the miscellany, the stuff that tickles me but doesn't necessarily fit into the current pop culture landscape: Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, the soundtrack to the Buffy episode "Once More With Feeling," the Old Crow Medicine Show...

You get where I'm going. And yes, I do have the vast majority of this music backed up digitally or, at least, on CD somewhere. But the original chemistry of my iPod is gone forever. It was a very specific brew of music; a very specific list of alphabetically arranged artists that I was used to and loved and that my eyes skimmed with a familiarity that will never be reproduced exactly. Sigh. DAMN YOU, syphilitic philistine!

Originally written 5.09