iPod

We were in a small cabin deep in a pine forest. White pines mostly there in the North Carolina mountains, tall trees forming a high canopy. Slate outcroppings made for treacherous walks outside, so slippery, fractured and crackly. A steady rain had been falling for several days and gave no sign of letting up. Nothing was dry. The cabin had a palpable dampness, though by comparison to the outside world, it was downright arid. Arid, extra dry. For our purposes... Arid, not completely wet.

We were far from electricity; most of our modern gadgetry was drained of all battery power, but a few devices held out as long as they could. You never know when the end is coming with the iPod. It just stops playing. I remember how tape decks would slow down near the end of battery life, comically lowering voices and slowing down music, sadly and gradually marking the end. If you did it right you could turn the tape player off (even after the battery petered out), let it sit, then turn it back on... there would be some power remaining so you could choose your last sounds. But with the iPod, it was music straight into silence. How very digital of it. Analog was always more forgiving. The past is usually more forgiving than the present. Surely some metaphorically analogous something is begging to be formally revealed here, maybe another time. Probably not.

Knowing the iPod would give out eventually, I wanted to be sure to hear the song of my choice when the end came. By my best count I had played "Three Seed" by the Silversun Pickups twenty-three times in a row. The song has an epic air about it even though it is only five and a half minutes long. When played twenty-three times in a row, epic doesn't begin to describe it. By the time the replays had reached the teens, I was pretty sick of it. But I was committed. When the music stopped in the middle of the twenty-fourth play, I was left with a song in my brain I now hated, it made me edgy and no fun to be around. That seemed to be the consensus. It kept raining. I wondered if it would slow to an exhausted mist of a suspended wetness, or if it would just stop.

The rain continued its siege for several more days following the demise of the iPod. I awoke one morning as the sun came up through a well-rested blue sky. I don't know how the rain ended, but I know it did.