Earlier today, I was listening to the streaming radio over at Thumbs Up Radio. It's another of the predictive online radio stations; you tell it what songs you like and dislike, and it funnels you others that it feels are similar in style. I found it through the Guitar Zeros, a band whose main selling point is that they've converted their Guitar Hero controllers into actual music-producing instruments; their songs are decently entertaining, but they're definitely a gimmick band. I'd wandered across their site by way of the Zero Guide, their step-by-step instructions on how to convert the controller into an instrument. I believe I found that through a link on my friends page, although I can't say that for sure. Perhaps the link arrived in email. Perhaps it came by IM. Perhaps the internet spoke to me directly. My memory is fuzzy on this point.

It is, in any case, immaterial; the point is not that I was listening to internet radio, but that I'd been intending to listen to something else. On the way into work, I'd had Voltaire's "Brains" in my head, followed by a few Humanwine songs. I hadn't listened to them in a while, so I'd planned to queue them up once I got to work. Work turned out to be busy when I arrived, though, and I completely forgot about my initial plan.

Once I remembered, though, I paused the radio and pulled up the songs I'd initially intended to listen to. About halfway through the first song, though, I realized that it was no longer what I wanted to hear; I'd been enjoying the random stuff on the radio. So I stopped iTunes and flipped back over to the radio -- only to realize that I no longer wanted to hear what was on the radio, either. I'd managed to work myself into a place where I wanted to hear whichever song I wasn't currently listening to.

After pondering this predicament for a minute or two, I hit upon the obvious solution -- play both songs at once. Since they were playing in different programs, they were perfectly happy to overlap. The resulting reggae-gothic discordance was relatively horrible, but it ended up serving as a sort of mental sorbet; it cleansed my palate entirely of both sorts of music, allowing me to move on without a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction.

Mood of the Moment: cheerful
Auditory Hallucination: King Kong & D Jungle Girls -- Boom Boom Dollar