on headphones, love, and life

the other day on my way to work a thought occurred to me, as thoughts are wont to do. at the time, i was listening to infected mushroom's latest and greatest, and i had an onion tied around my waist, which was the fashion at the time. It was a white onion, because of the war. You couldn't get yellow onions at the time, because of the war, so I tied the white onion around my waist, which was the style at the time.

as i listened to "heavyweight" reach its crescendo, i thought to myself, as i tend to do when "heavyweight" reaches its crescendo: this is music in its purest form. of course, my assessment is ridiculously subjective, but in my experience, there are very few songs where the artist chooses to take the music precisely where i would have chosen to take it, had i been the artist, had i been given the preceding portion of the song. "heavyweight" delivers the music i would make, were i a musician, and picks the proper instrumentation.

so, i thought to myself, why is it that for the past week or two, i haven't been listening at work to IM, or shpongle, or (as i'd recall today) ozric tentacles, or pink floyd, or amon tobin, or any of the most excellent and favored artists in my collection? why was i listening to tracks-o-crap that were mostly relegated to the "delete" queue?

the answer: bureaucracy. i was "cleaning house", sifting through old mp3s that i'd found in my collection but which had not yet been screened, sorted, and filed away. in a more general sense, i was paying attention to my music collection, but not the music.

the observation came as a realization, as all the best observations do. i generalized to other areas of my life, taking the easy first step from the music collection to the music listening equipment: i was doing a similar thing there, obsessing about the various choices of gear instead of listening to the gear i've got.

it's easy to see where the generalization leads, of course. straight through a variety of detail-oriented obsessions to The Big Picture, where not only is it possible to do everything right and still fail (you know, like that episode of TNG where data does not win at strategema, where they tell him that it's possible to do everything right and still fail, heh) but it is also possible, and common, to have many outstanding suboptimal details and still have a pretty good time of things.

so that's what i figured, while i was driving to work the other day, that despite all my little side-obsessions and worries and problems and suboptimal compromises, i'm still doing all right, if not better than that.