Why Bush won the Election and God wants me to upgrade my ipod

Why Bush won the Election and God wants me to upgrade my ipod

Where to begin... well, last Saturday night my roommate River and I were excitedly leaving our apartment on our way to the Avalon to see the fantastic Mr. Miguel Migs. Since I always drive everywhere, River offered this time. I was wearing my awesome brown leather jacket, and my ipod was in the right coat pocket, freshly loaded with some new tunes to play in the car. River drives a red Dodge Stealth, which rides about 3 inches from the ground, its a high performance machine. Well, the combination of me not being used to River's car, and not being used to wearing this leather jacket often, spelled the 1st foot in the grave for my beloved ipod. To be fair I must tell you that I had 3 beers in me, which didn't help with my subconcious awareness of where exactly in 3D space all of my extremities were at any given time, let alone extremities like a jacket which fortunately my nervous system doesn't extend into. So as I'm climbing into the passenger seat, which puts my ass at about 6 inches off the ground, my right jacket flap is hanging out the door unbeknownst to me, that is until I slam that door and it bounces wide open, off of the ipod in my jacket pocket. "What was that?" River asked. "Uh, oh, I think I closed the door on the corner of my jacket." 30 seconds later I pull out my ipod to plug it in and low and behold I'm staring in disbelief at a shattered spiderweb of glowing white screen and black LCD fluid. After mentally castrating myself and spewing several expletives, I plugged it in to test its condition. The ipod played fine, it just has a cracked screen, which actually creates kind of a beautiful flowing rainbowey effect with the back light turned on. Well there goes 400 bucks. Its not fixable (I called), and they don't have anything like a cell phone plan does where you can pretty much take a piss on your phone and then roof test it and they'll just give you a brand new current model for under 50 bucks. Nope, if you break it, its gone.

Several days later and several thousand curses later, I'm in Chicago contemplating where I'll scrounge $400 from since obviously the ipod needs to be replaced immediately. I am one of those people you read about in Rolling Stone or Newsweek who's life was changed by the ipod. For a music lover/collector, its a bit like having 20/400 vision your whole life, and then putting on a pair of glasses. I never knew it could be SO much better. So when you lose your glasses/ipod after that, you're blind and helpless, and you want to kill yourself for being so retarded. So after obsessing over how retarded I was last Saturday for 4 hours on the plane to Chicago, and then every day on the train to work, I was lying in bed the other night and I said,
"no you simply can't afford $400 until sometime next year, and since it functions properly, you're going to teach yourself a lesson about being careful with expensive equipment. You're going to fucking tough this out, and navigate by the number of clicks away from the main menu. I won't be able to browse individual artists or songs, but when I plug it into a Mac I can see everything and I'll just make really organized playlists and at least I'll have music. I'll draw up a tiny hierarchical schematic of the submenus in Illustrator if necessary, and tape it to the back. But the playlists are just: down one click, enter. As long as I know what order the playlists are in, I've got music in an acceptable consumable form." Yes I’m spoiled.

So the next day, I leave work and go see The Incredibles. Awesome movie. Can't think of a negative thing to say about it. Anyway, I get home and decide to charge the ipod, who KNOWS how much battery is left? I certainly can't SEE the goddamn thing. Hmmm, pat, pat, where the fuck is it!? I know it was in my pocket when I left work. Shit. Its not anywhere, it probably slid out of my pocket in the movie theater when I put my feet up. Wouldn't I hear it fall though? With my luck it hit the ground just as a huge explosion was happening or maybe it was just on the seat cushion and it slipped from there down onto the frame or something. I did look back at my seat to check if anything fell out. I always do that. I didn't look UNDER the seat though.
"Well, I might luck out here, its really no good to anyone else being broken, I'll go back tomorrow." I go back to the theater and go to the lost and found, and ask if a broken ipod was found in theater 8.
"Normally I wouldn't even bother," I told the guy, "did anyone one turn in my briefcase full of money? Ha ha. But the screen is broken, its no good to anyone else, I just need it back to send it in for repair," I lied, too embarrassed to explain my plan for continued use. The manager goes, "no, I don't see it, but let me check in the office, something like that they might put in a safer place." I'm thinking there's a fair chance he'll come back out with it. While he's back there, the other clerk who's still standing there, not an unintelligent looking fellow, says,
"What was it?"
"My ipod," I said, "it broken and no good to anyone else," I re-emphasize out of embarrassment that I'm not stupid enough to think there'd be a chance it hell anyone would turn it in otherwise.

okay... ready for this, this guy asks me,
"what's a ipod?"

"WHAT'S AN IPOD!?!" I said incredulously, "an I POD. I said very clearly because he must have misunderstood me and I have a tendency to mumble sometimes.

"yeah?"

I must have made the guy feel really stupid. I was at a loss for word for a good 5 seconds, I didn't even know how to react, or where to begin.
"its a music player, an mp3 player," I said trying to limit the biting sarcasm surging through my brain.

"oh," the guys says, obviously still clueless but nervous because he at least understood that he was supposed to know what a fucking ipod is.

"You must have seen the ads with like, neon color backgrounds and a black silouette of a person dancing…. U2 is in the TV commercials…" I said, a bit more restrained this time, but still reeling from the intoxicating ignorance wafting through the air. At that point the manager comes back and says,
"sorry."

"yeaaaah I figured." I said to myself and walked out. For the entire 1.2 mile walk back to the train station I kept going over it in my head, "never heard of an IPOD! WHAT THE FUCK!! How can that even be physically possible!?" On the way back to the train station I saw 4, FOUR, F-O-U-R ads. The train station was, guess, wallpapered with ipod ads. Like, 5 different ones in a row, all the different poses and the all the colors, in a big strip. Peering out at them contemplating the oppressive ignorance I had just witnessed, as the train took off and passed rapidly by a station that I guess it doesn't stop at during certain times of day, I saw the 5 ad spread whiz by me again, the colors blending together into white like a color wheel. (I’ve got my poetic liscence okay?)

Still in disbelief, I think, now this guy works in a movie theater so he's can't be too bright even though he looked it, but he should be remotely media savvy. I concluded that he absolutely, inescapably, MUST have been exposed to ipod ads, and he just never noticed them. I also think, is this America, is the American populous, the American voter? Yes. If there are people that live in the heart of a major city, and work in the entertainment industry, and the existence of the Apple ipod has never broken through into their conciousness, how can we expect people to make educated informed decisions about the fate of our country? If he doesn't know what an ipod is he certainly doesn't know jack about the evils of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Pearle, and John Ashcroft. He certainly doesn't know about say, that all government projects have to be triple bid unless you’re Halliburton, which is why now there’s 3 billion unaccounted for dollars that Halliburton has to pay back to the US government after being caught trying to bury it in the budget (if they ever DO pay it back). He certainly doesn't know that The Clean Skies initiative actually allows for more pollution of our air and water, or that the Healthy Forest Act gives a free pass to the timber industry to clear cut forrested areas of the US that add up to almost the entire square mileage of the state of California, or that the tax cuts that probably gave him reason to vote for Bush actually take money away from poor people like him and give it to the rich. The opposite of Robin Hood. Or that the so called war on terror actually makes Americans residing on our home soil more vulnerable to attack and far less safe in general. If he hasn't heard of a fucking ipod, I doubt he knows anything about the Patriot Act and what it means for say, he penchant for late night internet porn whackoff sessions, or mail-ordering a double chamber bong from Tommy Chong's website, Let alone anything serious he might be involved in, like publicly speaking out against corruption in the US government or being a member of a non-violent environmental activist group. (LATER ADDITION 8/02/05: A recent scandal exposed in the FBI revealed that the ACLU has been under an extensive terrorism investigation by the FBI. Again, that's the ACLU being investigated by the FBI for being terrorists. Or at least that's the only way they can justify the snooping.)

Anyway, political implications of this aside, I think God is telling me to get the new click wheel ipod. I've had my eye on that (purported) 12 hour battery ever since mine only charged for 2 or 3. Literally, the day before I set out for a month long travel binge of Chicago-LA-Chicago again-LA-Hawaii-LA-San Francisco-LA-Mammoth and back to LA again, I smash the screen. Then, the day after I decide, “no God, you bastard, I'm still not buying a new click wheel, I'm going to be resourceful and keep using this one,” I lose it in a damn movie theater, and some dickhead who has no use for it whatsoever except maybe downloading podworks and taking the music or something, keeps it. So God wants me to buy a click wheel.
LET THERE BE BEATS!