I thought I’d give this iPod business a spin without actually buying an iPod. Instead, I have the sweet Treo 600 cell phone (which so far, has given me no reason to be replaced by the reportedly sweeter Treo 650.) As part of the deal of buying it, I got PocketTunes, a PalmOS MP3 player, for free. I already had a big 1G SD card that I’d bought on special at Sam’s Club. So all I needed, theoretically, was a pair of earphones.

Now, I’ll just tell you straight out that I hate ear phones and ear buds — they are painful, and if they’re not, they’re falling out of my ears. I’d never really noticed before ear buds that my ears are oddly constructed, but apparently they are. To use any of that type of device, I have to wedge them in so deep as to be dangerous. And not just to me, but to anyone else, since once they’re in, I can’t hear a damn thing. But I went ahead and bought some of these Seido thingies, since they can be switched back and forth from a music headset to a phone headset, and thus actually have some value besides clogging up my head.

So, I loaded up one gigabytes worth of music on the SD card, about 400 songs, and took it with me on the next plane trip. And played it during the hour of flight-time that I was able to turn on acceptable electronic devices.

Good. Gravy. I absolutely hated it. For one thing, even my favorite artists of all time have some horribly crappy songs that should never have been recorded. The amount of filler in those 400 songs is easily 50%. For another thing, how can anyone stand being disconnected from the real world like that? I’m having a hard time imagining a better situation for listening to music than on a plane where there is zero desire to interact with my fellow human beings, and even then I felt like I was too far into a bubble.

OK, so a head full of music and nothing else is not for me. Fine. But I still love listening to music when I’m driving, so we’ll try one of those FM broadcast tuners buddies. Found one online for $30 and ordered it up. Plugged in all the wires and connectors, tuned the truck to 88.1, and hit Play. And everything worked like it was supposed to, so for that I should be happy, probably. But it still doesn’t get around the fact that bloody well 50% of the music on my SD card was filler. I spent half my time running the stupid thing, hitting the Fast Forward button, sometimes 3, 4 songs in a row.

Which means, I guess, that I’m going to have to start making playlists. And that gets to my point about the iPod thingy. It seems like whenever I read about them, most folks have dumped 40 gajillion CDs into them so that they have all their music right there in the palm of their hand. So, the questions are: are all these people spending time building big-ass playlists? Do they just hit FF all the time like I was doing? Or do they sit through the krep? Or does the iPod have some magic algorithm that skips the sawdust? Or am I just a picky sonofabitch that doesn’t have the patience for those little-known jewels hidden between what I judge to be the good songs?

Bottom line, it looks like the iPod is yet another indication that my time has passed. I just don’t get it. Not till I have the time to eff around with it a whole lot more. And by that time, I’ll be past the point of needing it, really…something new will have come along, like a brain implant that plays the songs I want to hear over satellite directly into my head, and it will be controlled by eyebrow twitches.

Note to musicians: please, for your sake and mine, think long and hard about having more than one or two slow, mournful, drag-ass eulogies per CD.