Chrome Germs
 Max Gudmunson

My beloved Panasonic walkman died about four months ago. It might have been the last one in New York, judging from the looks that I received in the subway. It was a painful, prolonged death. During the last two or three months of the walkman's existence, its headphone connection would intermittently cut out on one side. This ailment required the constant placement of one hand in my satchel, holding the headphone jack in such a way that both left and right signals would function.
To replace the walkman would have been simple and inexpensive. But that wasn't the point. I was reluctant to acknowledge that this cheaply manufactured object which I had spent countless hours with, which had provided comfort and distraction from the outside world for almost five years, which had jammed every conceivable type of music and was employed in the majority of daily time spent listening to recorded sound, was dying. The denial period lasted for a long time before I decided to pull the plug.
The first day I left my walkman at home (I don't own a portable CD or MP3 player) the world became loud again. Gossip on the train, construction machinery, car horns and crying babies all were free to invade my ears. More than anything else, though, I realized how many people own i-Pods.
This isn't a rant about how digital file players are destroying our youth or something. Whether someone purchases an MP3 player because of practicality, a love of music or to make a fashion statement is up to them. The irksome thing about portable music newbies (I have a theory that many i-Podders have never owned non-digital players) is total ignorance of etiquette.
The most annoying aspects of portable music abuse are a) being forced to hear what a headphone-donning person is listening to from five feet away and b) the wearer asking questions or conversing without bothering to remove the headphones. These agitations multiply exponentially when the perpetrator is indoors. What force of nature prompts the urge to listen to "indie" rock while perusing the shelves of a grocery store? Is the music that good that you can't be separated for five minutes? Because I can hear it too, and heartily disagree. I'm not even going to get into wannabe gangsters who rap along with their Nanos. And of course the couples with one earphone each- sort of makes you want to yank the cord like those nose-to-ear chains that mall punks used to wear.
To admit a fault in some already extremely biased data collecting, I never used daily public transport in a major city until the MP3 player was beginning to enter the mass conscious as "the new thing." Were there teeming hoards of portable CD listeners or walkmen jammers previous to the current phenomenon of playlist-fidgeting pedestrians? Are the children of the 80s to fault for all of this? In any case it's easy to spot a typical i-Podder given that most never bother to upgrade the standard bud-like earphones. On an average weekday morning, out of roughly 60 people in a large subway car, one could invariably count at least 10 to 15 heads bearing this clone-like fruit of social status. Why does this sound like a Cronenberg movie?
The idea of storing an entire collection in one format and one device is a foreign one to me. Throughout my life I've been burdened with the presence of my music collection. Each tape, record and CD takes up physical space, and I share my life with them for better or worse. They will only leave my possession if I sell them, trade them, lose them by some other means or die. After moving four times, once across the US, I have become intimate with the feeling of hefting crate upon crate of records up multiple flights of stairs. Tapes aren't as burdensome, but if a shelf tips over you'll be trying to sort through unlabeled Hanson cassettes for days. Walking into a collector's house and seeing 10,000 or more recordings consuming entire walls, spilling onto floors and in extreme cases kitchens, staircases and bathrooms (it happens) is awe inspiring. Watching someone browsing through 10,000 albums stored on a hard drive makes me wonder how much time they spend on the internet. But they say you can't stop progress, so maybe one day I'll be playing an i-Pod retrofitted to look like my dearly deceased walkman.