Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6oUDZboDxI&feature=youtu.be
or read his tale below:
I GOT THE PARANOID BLUES OH YEAH
The beat of the city gets into your head sometimes. And some days it’s hard to control.
You can get so carried away by the multi-tasking immediacy of the city that you begin to suspect everything’s amiss in the normal ebb and flow of things.
It’s like this, you see:
I get into my car and switch on the ignition and this rock ‘n’ roll song is blaring forth. Huh? I don’t voluntarily listen to rock and pretty much remain a dyed-in-the-wool nerdnik. Jazz and classical music dominate, along with specific tunes from my childhood and young adult years.
That’s why, suddenly, I get this creepy feeling:
How did rock ‘n’ roll music get into my car radio speakers?
My brain races:
Did anybody else drive the car lately?
No, nobody would be caught live or dead driving my old rusty trusty station wagon bookmobile. So it couldn’t be that.
Did one of the wandering street people get into the car and sleep there overnight, staying warm and listening through stockinged cap?
Don’t know. It’s a possibility, since the door lock fell out a year ago and therefore I can’t secure the car anyhow.
Hmm…
I haven’t had the car serviced in a long time–usually at car washes and car repair places, employees fulfill their ironclad job description provision that you must immediately change the station in the vehicle you’re working on or washing, else the owner won’t know that you’ve actually been inside doing anything useful.
Uh, maybe the FM switch got hit accidentally and I’m hearing some AM oldies station.
Horror of horrors—somebody ELSE’S music!
Nope, that switch doesn’t work anyhow.
And then, of course, the rock and roll music fades down and the National Public Radio announcer comes on and continues reading news, having employed the music as a kind of meaningless bridge from one story to another.
Now I feel kind of silly and comforted at the same time, but that’s about normal, cause the big city does that kind of thing to you if you let it and don’t I need a vacation about now?
Maybe some nice classical music would calm me down—but then, the station plays such music only at zero-listener times of day.
I’ll have to resort to punching the out-of-fashion audio cassette player PLAY button, then descending into the peaceful and calming sounds of Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal and Gershwin and Mozart.
Musical nerdnikness settles me down and gives me permission to manage my day in the only way I know how.
I’ll be OK any moment now
© 2018 A.D. by Jim Reed