New pair of headphones: I bought mine at the Metreon this evening. They say Sony MDR-A44 on each arm. They’re made of black plastic. They bend if you blow on them hard. But music comes through them real clear, it does. This evening, it was a spin through the “S” section, starting with Armand Van Helden’s remix of the Sneaker Pimps’ “Spin Spin Sugar” and pausing midway through Stevie Wonder’s “As” to take up arms against a sea of chicken noodle pho at Ba Vo on 13th Street. Flipping through the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Bay Area’s only indie paper now that the deal has gone down, I came across a mention of the disquiet I’ve been feeling in two pauses between things — the interval between my old ‘phones coming apart after months of battering in my overstuffed black backpack and the purchase of my new ones, and the mere days remaining between the end of the Clinton presidency and the beginning of the Bush “residency.”
Every time I shade my experience with something no one else is conscious of, I probably lose another point. All I’ve done is prove I have an overhealthy imagination and a lack of interest in facing the world without added atmosphere, the world as it “really” is. But maybe until the world becomes a place I like enough to accept on its own, I’ll keep my headphones handy.