My journey through life within the cocoon of musical self-imposed isolation began with the advent of the first of the portable enablers, the cassette-playing Walkman.  I nurtured considerable (and inexplicable) disdain for these devices until I actually obtained one, a cheap Sony knock-off sometime in the mid-80’s.  The playlist was linear and unchanging, and varied only as much as the number of mixed tapes you could afford to make or how much FF or rewind your battery power would permit.   I similarly held out when iPods emerged, for reasons which have now faded beyond understanding.  I have always found these things double-edged: an upside in  the impenetrable wall of the aforementioned isolation, the soundtrack added as a layer to the mundane and routine; the walk to class, the dishes, the mechanical chores of life, exercise.  The downside is the silencing of the inner voice, something I’m becoming increasingly aware of.   However, I think the single greatest aspect of the iPod to me was a very unexpected one, the quasi-mystical power of randomness, the shuffle.  A large library means that you are no longer on a rail of predictability but can experience startling jogs of memory, superimpositions and the introduction of the long forgotten into a present and novel context.  As irrational as it may be,  it is eerie how often what I really “need’ to hear but didn’t know appears, how often it sets up a string of resonant truth so strong it feels undeniable and material.  I recall hearing Jeff Buckley’s version of L Cohen’s Hallelujah for the first time – something I didn’t even know I owned, that had come to me in a block of 500 songs (the so called Rolling Stones “Top  500 Songs of All Time”, courtesy one of my siblings), and it stopped me dead cold, and reduced to weeping with the emotion of it.  I recall standing on the platform waiting for my commuter train to the city (see “mundane”, above) watching the sun creep up wards, just as “Watch the Sun Rise” by Big Star shuffled on.  The other day it was Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation”, and I had no idea that was exactly what I wanted to hear until it shuffled, followed closely by Brother Joe May, in an incandescent “Mercy, Lord”, blasting his microphone to distortion in sheer Gospel power…  Have those two tracks ever been juxtaposed together, ever, in anyone’s personal listening experience?  More on randomness in later posts, I fade to the mundane,