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 I
invented the iPod fifteen years before Apple, in my dorm room,
frustrated with my wheezy Walkmen and skippy Discmen and their feeble
inability to play more than a single album. A history major, I had no
knowledge of electronics, design, or marketing, so my invention, the
MemoryMachine-JoyDevice-Emototron had to wait for Apple to see the light
of day. But the idea was exactly the same. More or less.
My first design would have been a few times larger than a full-rack
component-stereo, as it had to hold 600 CDs in it. (Actually, not in it
but sort of above and behind it, in an enormous twisting modular tube,
like the habitrail of an atomic hamster). You would choose a song (from
a bulging photo-album), then you would access that song by typing your
request—into your Commodore 64 or Macintosh 512K—and that would somehow
produce the song.
Portability was obviously the next challenge. So I went back to the
drawing board (by which I mean bed) and came up with a new version no
larger than your thumbnail, which communicated via radio waves back to
the central unit in your dorm room, where an associate—a roommate—would,
at your murmured request, dutifully type your next song into the Mac 512
for you.
Back in those halcyon days of limitless irresponsibility, (I recall now,
listening to one of Apple’s tiny white knock-offs of the
MemoryMachine-JoyDevice-Emototron), I could casually slaughter hours
just listening to music, sometimes so excited by a new CD or an old LP
that I could not leave the stereo’s side, could hardly sleep from, for
example, the beauty of Chet Baker’s solo on “Moon and Sand” or the bass
line of The Smiths’ “Barbarism Begins at Home.”
My official studies—medieval history—were neglected, slightly, for this
commitment to more pertinent research, and I discovered that music was
humanity’s only functional time machine, able to carry the devoted
explorer forward and back across years, re-living old sorrows and walks
and kisses and dreams, pre-living future triumphs and drives and kisses
and memories.
The iPod is for me, as it might be for you, a very distracting device,
since the 6805 songs I have lovingly inserted into it must be played
with a certain care. Although one of its great pleasures is the shuffle
mode (precisely what I dreamt of those decades ago), the shuffle mode
also can hurtle me back in time in less time than it takes to hear a
single measure of this or that over-potent song. 2008 and 1988 have a
very porous boundary, apparently guarded by The Smiths, escorting me as
I pick up my kids from kindergarten, escorting me to a party across
campus.
And now my continuing research has revealed that music even functions as
a meta-time-machine, a fantasy-rewinder. I can now (as a gentleman in my
settled middle years) listen to “Barbarism Begins at Home,” and of
course the song works in the past, future, and present (that bass line
is still overwhelming); but it can also remind me of a past imagining a
future that never occurred. I am brought back to that dorm-room where I
can watch myself at 19 imagining myself at 39, and I can compare the two
(very different) men: the one I expected and the one I became. Since I’m
a novelist, I am always much more interested in the fellow I never was.
I can imagine a thousand versions of him, parting ways with me there on
the dorm-room floor as “Barbarism Begins at Home” is played again,
louder (drowning out the complaints of roommates). I went my one way, he
went his thousand.
In one of those lives, he is alone by now. He is exhausted. He is just
realizing that he may have made too many irreparable mistakes, lost too
many unrecoverable treasures, wasted too many once-in-a-lifetime
opportunities. He is desperate to find someone or something to save him.
And one night, listening to “Barbarism Begins at Home” on his iPod (the
kind with videos – I only have the audio), he walks into a Brooklyn bar
and sees a woman singing. She’s half his age. She’s beautiful.
And it occurs to me (listening to my iPod) that this could turn out to
be a good story…
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