A few hours ago, Joanna caused my MP3 player to stray from its usual random-order playback and instead play Pink Floyd. This was good. Joanna and I both simultaneously noticed and admired the line, “come on you target of far away laughter.” This was odd, since neither of us had previously paid any attention or consciously processed this line in nearly ten years of listening to this song. It’s only got a dozen lines, which for a 12 minute song is a very low lyrics:length ratio. such a ratio is accomplished by either playing lots of instrumental stuff with occaisional lyrical intervention (e.g. Floyd) or by simply taking 9 minutes to sing a 3 minute song (e.g. Low).

A few minutes ago, I noticed with some consternation that my MP3 player was producing rather unpleasant noise. What was unusual about this was that it had been doing so for quite some time. Often it plays a song I don’t like or am not in the mood for, but it’s just a song and then it moves on to the next song. It has 5,500 songs to chose from. Sadly, many of them are songs I once liked but don’t like any more, or songs that I thought I might grow to like but instead grew to hate. Or, more frequently, songs I like sometimes, but never when XMMS decides to play them. The platters are okay. In that 1950’s way. A song every year or two is enough to keep my sphere large enough. Eight songs in a row is enough to make me murderous.

At this point I realized that after playing Pink Floyd, which was cool, XMMS progressed to playing the Pixies which is cool too. And then the Platters. Which are a lot of things, but not cool. Fortunately for me and any potential victims, I found the random button again.

After so much time trying to get as many MP3’s as possible, I’m working on culling them. I moved several things that I couldn’t bring myself to actually delete which I moved to a separate place so they wouldn’t get played inadvertently. Like Sting. Sting is thrust upon me in enough grocery stores and the like, that I really don’t need to intentionally play sting, ever, in order to hear much more than I ever need to. In fact, I’ve probably heard enough sting for my entire life.

I’m sending out an SOS…