Shutting Out Todays World

  A couple of weeks ago I began doing something I never thought I would. I began listening to music with headphones on to drown out annoyances when I'm on the street or in what passes for a coffee shop today. Ok, I would never wear headphones at night because I still like listening to the night even though mechanical noise, humming electricity and hissing steam is a thing of the past. What pushed me over the edge was being bombarded with "Millennial Speak" which consists of an overabundance use of the words "super" and "literally" even though what they're talking about is not super or literal. It's like listening to a record skip over and over. To add to this English language word salad there's the people who say "like" 20 or 30 times in 5 minutes. Due I even have to say anything about those who hold zoom meetings in coffee shops or the stroller mommies who think it's so cute that their kid is screaming his lungs out, so everyone else should also think it's cute. My over attention to todays messy world is due to the fact that I'm a trained observer in which being a photographer has only made worse and that I'm one of the few who isn't glued to a smartphone. It's like being the only sober person at a party.

    As much as I would love to have a cassette walkman like the ones I had in the 1980s the cost of a refurbished model is out of my price range. So in the end I settled on a 19 year old Ipod that's been sitting in Natasha's desk drawer for a very long time. I only needed to add a simple par of headphones and I was good to go. They also act like a par of earmuffs when it's cold outside. I have no idea why people like the Airpods so much. They're just one more that needs to be charged and makes your ears are having an orgasm. So I'll take my $12 Sony head phones over those $100+ disposable pieces of technology that I see littering the subway tracks. 

    Overall it's worked out well so far with only a couple of occasions of people trying to figure what model phone this ipod is.