I have decreed that walkmans are evil, not least my one. I have a Sony Minidisc thing that I bought off of ebay a couple of years ago. It’s fucked. If I have it in my back pocket and anything touches my leg (including my hip) then it just stops. If I put my foot on the floor with enough force to snap a digestive, it stops. If I hold it in my hand and walk, it stops.
This isn’t my gripe with all walkmans, after all, you can’t hold a prejudice against a whole race of gadgets just because one has let you down.
I think they are evil as they block my head-popping space. Normally when I’m walking around and wandering about my head is fairly empty to take the world in, it is at these points that I tend to have ideas for things pop into my head, often these are pointless things, like reminders to invent a hover-bath.
But sometimes these ideas are corkers, like bits of stand up or something new to write or how to go about inventing the hover-bath.
Problem is, that wandering around with a walkman fills in the head-popping space with Kathryn Williams, Crosby Stills & Nash or Kings of Convenience, which, although gives me a beautiful soundtrack to walk through London with, it does mean that things don’t get thought.
How many more things would have gotten thought by people if it wasn’t for walkmans?
Maybe a lot of other people don’t have head-popping space, or what they have is just a void that is needed to be filled. Or maybe a lot of people would have ideas about killing people popping in.
Maybe walkmans are good.
And besides, I want an ipod to be part of the cool gang, and to listen to Kool & The Gang.