June 3, 2003
6/4/03 Columbia County, NY Look,
Look, I'd love to chat and all, but Tessa gave me an iPod as a belated birthday present, and I've been making sweet, sweet love to it all night long. There were dinner napkins and the finest sparkling domestic wines. There were votive candles scented from the rare flowers growing along the flooded Nile. There was corn.
Here's the thing about the iPod: it becomes the living embodiment of the eternal mix tape. It is the fruition of every night I spent up until 4am in 1984 trying to find just the right track off Seven and the Ragged Tiger to win Marcie Montagna's heart. It is the platinum end game for all of those brilliant mix tapes I made - and left - in the tape players of various rental cars at O'Hare Airport. With this baby, road trips are not only do-able, they're must-able.
You just have to live long enough to experience all the cool shit getting invented. My grandma told me about the first time she saw a car in Utah, circa 1919. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd even known, instantly seeing the possibilities and developing a lifelong habit of embracing change. Me and my little iPod can only hope to capture an iota of her attitude.
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Klea Worlsey, my grandma, circa 1928