I have one of those adapter thingies that allow me to play my iPod through my car stereo.

I have more than 1,200 songs on my iPod. That means I could turn it on and listen to it for more than three consecutive days and not hear the same song twice. How sweet is that? One of these days when I finally have the nervous breakdown that I have worked so hard to earn, I am going to get in my car, turn on my iPod and start driving west (stopping only for gas and comfort breaks) until EVERY song has played. When the final song is over, that’s where I’m going to stop. I’m going to build a cabin, plant some corn and live off the fat of the land. Just me and the possums living in harmony the way nature intended.

The reason I bought an iPod in the first place is so I could listen to 80s music. There hasn’t really been anything recorded worth listening to since that decade ended. My own personal philosophy about this is that we should hunt down everyone who has recorded a song after 1989 and club them with a blunt instrument.

See, I’m a music kind of guy. I’m the guy you pull up next to at the red light and you look over and he’s banging on the steering wheel like it’s a drum set, tapping the center console like it’s a cymbal and running his fingers along the dashboard like it’s a keyboard. I’m like John Candy in that scene in the movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” where he’s driving along and the song “Mess Around” by Ray Charles comes on the radio.

This kind of behavior can sometimes prove dangerous. For example, the other day the wife and I went to Walmart and I let her out in front of the store and cruised around the parking lot for awhile trying to find a spot closer to the door. This is what men do. We try to find a spot closer to the door and when we finally do find one, we get out and look around and hope somebody sees us so we can gloat a little. And as drivers go by and look enviously in our direction, we say under our breath, “Yeah baby, that’s right. I’ll sell you this spot for 20 bucks.”

As I was driving between rows of vehicles, I was jamming to something that was blaring from the iPod, behaving in the aforementioned manner. I was a-gyrating and a-singing at the top of my lungs and a-moving my head around like a bobblehead doll.

There was this guy walking toward the store in the middle of the driving lane as some people are prone to do and as I went by him he must have misinterpreted my gyrations and head movements as some sort of hostility gesture. He probably thought I was criticizing his walking in the middle of the driving lane. He probably thought I was saying something like “Get out of the driving lane, you moron. There’s plenty of room to walk on either side.”

But he was mistaken. I did NOT say that. (P.S.: OK, I WAS thinking it.)

And he was a big old boy, too. He was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt and looked like he had just finished clearing the south 40 — by himself. He looked like that guy on the Brawny paper towel package.

I checked the rear view mirror and there he was, standing in the middle of the driving lane with his hands on his hips, glaring in my direction.

So I ducked down as low as I could while still being able to drive and waited outside until he came back out and left the store. Last thing I need is to get in some sort of fisticuffs/car-vs.-pedestrian-type of incident with a lumberjack.

Besides, if we got to brawling, my iPod might get broken and we can’t have that.