"You could call it an omen/point ya where you're goin'

So, I just spent five hours downstairs, waiting to sign for a FedEx package for my mother. I spent the time reading Chuck Klosterman's book Killing Yourself to Live and listening to Radiohead's Kid A album and a collection of Pixies B-Sides. And I'm worried about what that says about the kind of person I am, or maybe I'm just worrying about worrying about that. I'm not sure. Now I'm listening to Bob Dyan's "Caribbean Wind", a song that most people, even most casual Dylan fans, have never heard of, because I couldn't get the instrumental part out of my head, and I'm not sure if that means something either.

I've always been strangely hesitant to read Klosterman. I have no idea why, except I had a strange, vague and utterly irrational fear of becoming the kind of person who reads Klosterman books and talks incessantly about their favorite Wilco record (despite the fact that I like Wilco) and firmly believes that Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted is a better record than, say, Revolver, (although, again, I really do like Slanted and Enchanted.

The next track on Biograph, at least the parts of Biograph that I have copied on my iPod because only parts of the Box Set were previously unreleased is "Up To Me", which is an outtake from either Desire or Blood On The Tracks, and a really good song, but one that I can't bear to listen to, so I switch, more or less randomly, to the Ramones song "I Just Want To Have Something To Do" (this is the song that they sing in the bedroom in Rock n Roll High School, if that helps). It's not my favorite Ramones song, but it cleanses my sonic palate in the exact way that I want, and now I'm worried that I'm semi-consciously aping Klosterman's style, or at least that I think I am. Which is more troubling, I'm not sure, I'm just sure that I am troubled by it, which is troubling in and of itself.

The lesson here is that I can disappear into Mobius strips in my head way too easily. Especially when I'm reading rock critics.

Maybe my brain is punishing me for spending nearly 24 hours (non-consecutively) playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii and listening to podcasts about old video games.

After the Ramones song, I think about switching to the new Atmosphere collection that I downloaded the other day and haven't gotten around to yet, or listening to In Rainbows again. I know that I don't want to listen to one of the albums that I've really fallen into in the last fifteen months or so, which rules out Daydream Nation and Pleased To Meet Me and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and The Undisputed Truth and American Idiot and Low so I wind up putting on the most recent Springsteen album, mainly to hear "Radio Nowhere" and the title cut.

The stacks of CDs on my desk (which I never use anymore, since I have a laptop but not a chair) are pretty much openly mocking me now. I reorganized the hip hop section of my cds right before Christmas, which solved one problem, but because I had to take the down the shelf of random Reggae/Soul/Funk/Dire Straits/Velvet Underground/bunch of other stuff cds to make room for the weird assortment of new albums and things I picked up at all of the shows from the last six or seven months, but you'd assume that the size of the stack on my desk would remain the same- just differently composed. But that's not the case.

After hearing the Springsteen songs I wanted to hear, I change to a song by The Band called "Acadian Driftwood" that is heart-breakingly perfect, but because it was on a mediocre album called Northern Lights-Southern Cross most people haven't heard of. It makes "The Weight", which seems to be the most enduring song of the Band's on the radio, seem like an amateur effort in comparison. Levon Helm pretty much exists to do things so beautiful that you want to cry, but even so, this song is breathtaking. The picture is of The Band. At one point, Eric Clapton wanted to be in the band. But Robbie Robertson will always be secretly better than Clapton. I consider this to be almost gnostic wisdom. And that's slightly troubling.

Reading the part of the book where Klosterman visits the site where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil makes me think about the sheer number of words I've read about the significance of Bob Dylan choosing Highway 61 to revisit in a song and album title. And I marvel at the sheer weight of the bullshit that's piled on top of some music, and how I'm just as guilty of this as everyone else. Maybe Dylan wasn't really thinking about the musical traditions associated with that particular road. Maybe he just needed a street that rhymed with "God told Abraham, Kill me a son". It's really not that inconceivable. So I decided to stop thinking about music for a while and to just half watch a rerun of Malcolm In the Middle. I really need a proper job to take my mind off of, well, all the things I think about.