Generally when I drive home from D.C., I like to take a backroad that lets me drive two hours straight to my house, and has a peach farm halfway. This has less to do with romantic ideals of lovely backroads (though that is an advantage) and more to do with the fact that I really like peaches.
Unfortunately, I missed the exit. I toiled along 95 and then 64 in a sort of meandering sleepy stagger. I had just found my iPod (with 958 songs I did not put on there--likely remnants of hipper kids sharing their hipper music on my computer years ago) but couldn't recognize any of the songs on shuffle. I moaned, I drifted, I wanted a peach so badly I could almost taste the glorious things. When I grabbed some on the way up, Farmer Joe told me, "These was picked from a tree this morning!" while he handed the boxes of peaches off to me, shotgun over shoulder (I wish this was a caricature. He really greeted me with a shotgun). I didn't care how campy it was, it was goddamn good. I ate one while I was driving up, and my whole chin and chest and stomach, as well as the steering wheel and a few spots on the windshield were sticky with peach. It was the juiciest sweetest thing I had ever enjoyed.
So maybe I was sulking a bit. Grumpy, sleepy, and generally unpleasant to be around, I wandered listlessly across the interstates, staring at the TomTom while it clocked down. My iPod played random, unknowable songs left by hip kids, or 80s hits left by a younger, less-hip me.
But then a new song shuffled onto my iPod, and everything changed.
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So you, too, can experience the transformation:
