In the mornings while I sit here and do my silly little daily drawings and write these silly little blog posts, I listen to music on my laptop. I realized recently that I hadn’t been listening to music. I think podcasts have taken over my life. In the Before Times I listened to music mostly in the car and I haven’t used my car much in the past year and so without even meaning to, I stopped listening to music.
So recently I have been looking for ways to inject more music into my life.
I don’t have a little Alexa robot, because it has just never struck me as something I need in my life. I don’t have Spotify because I still just use my free Pandora that I’ve used for just about forever, and I am very conscious of not signing up for crap that has monthly subscription fees. I kind of abandoned iTunes years ago when it somehow became the central hub of Apple’s walled garden, and as much as I appreciate my iPhone, I’m just generally over Apple and their $60 dongles and faux minimalism.
There was a hot minute when I considered buying a record player and becoming the guy who puts on a nice piece of vinyl in the mornings and then I came to my senses and I was like: I don’t buy things I don’t at least kind of need, I don’t need a record player, and how am I going to shop for records during a pandemic anyway?
I thought back to times when I had music in my life to deconstruct how I’d done it. There was a specific moment I remember when I lived in San Diego. I was walking back from a store listening to my iPod and walked into my apartment and plugged the iPod into a little speaker dock and the song switched from my ears to the speaker and flowed out into the room. That great! So I was like: do iPods still exist? And then I remembered that I have this iPhone and can do basically the same thing wirelessly now. So I looked at Bluetooth speakers and quickly discovered that is one of those weird rabbit holes where some people take these things extremely seriously. And I don’t know … I am always weary of that. Much like there are people who are super into vinyl, there are people who are super into their Bose. I feel this way too about the Beats by Dre stuff too. It just seems that generally in this life people get real precious about various forms of expensive plastic. I mean, to each their own, but I don’t know … it doesn’t suit me. Especially since the weird thing I am precious about is not owning a lot of stuff. So the Bluetooth speaker thing is out because it makes me think too much about it and I have enough weird shit to think about already.
Then I had a marvelously retro idea: I should just get a radio. Remember radios?!?
So I looked at radios online and as I was reading about all the “features” that radios have (which have not changed in like 40 years) and ended up thinking to myself, “My phone can do all of this.” So radios are out. (Admittedly, I do already own a small emergency radio, it is solar charged and it can charge my phone with a hand crank!)
Thinking about the phone again brought me full circle and I realized that I already HAVE this phone that can play music, I already HAVE a laptop that can play music, I already HAVE a smart TV that can play music. I have access to Youtube and some access to Amazon music (via Prime, which I do pay for, but only once a year) and there are like a million streaming radio stations and, as mentioned, I have my little free Pandora. I already HAVE all the STUFF I need.
My problem was not a lack of expensive plastic, my problem was me and how I live. So I have gone about fixing that, which is actually much harder than just one-click buying a record player.
I have found places in my day where I can incorporate music, where I can return it into my life. One of those places is right here, each morning while I sit at my kitchen table.
I’m listening to Cold War Kids right now. I like it.
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