A different kind of Apple ad

It wasn't until I held my iPod in my own hands for the very first time this evening that I understood. Now I do. I understand the iPod craze. It has reached my fingertips and I am truly grooving with the whole Apple concept of living.

It is a magnificent object. I rarely actually fall in love with inanimate objects. I can get turbo fond of clothes and shoes, and find it difficult to give them away. I have a kind of a serious thing about this pendant I wear around my neck. There's a gold cross my mum gave me, and if I were ever to find that I was parted with it, that would surely hurt. But the arrival of this MacBook and iPod three weeks ago has totally rocked my world.

I am Mac'd.

I have been using Macs for twelve years now. I started out on a lover's dad's Performa, which I typed away at in a cold tunnel-shaped Dublin dive while playing Koji the Frog until 4 or 5 in the morning. My first very own Mac was also a Performa, which was brought to me on the very last day of a very unpleasant gig I had been working on for three months.

The big event of that Mac was a nine month-long daily email courtship with a man who had recently become a father for the first time, in Nashville Tennessee, and led right up to the morning my flight was about to take off for my very first trip to America to meet him. More recently, I got a second hand g4 desktop which was my first introduction to the new apple interface.

You've got to love interfaces. They're our little protecting veils between the technology that is finding increasing intimacy with us, to us, in us, and they can make things smoother, at one with us, or they can really be a pain in the arse and will always make it unpleasant to operate this kiss-close part of the ever-expanding-it-seems human consciousness.

Take Nokia for instance. They made the mobile phone system that just makes sense like your first night on crack makes sense. It just makes sense. I can't explain why. It's not that I like it, not that it's great, it's that it just makes sense.

That's all. And now I can't use anything else without getting tetchy.

I suppose that's what it's all about, creating addicts. Everything shouting and looking shiny and hotlipped and fuckable. Come purchase me. You whip out your wad or your plastic honey c'mon, we'll go places you never dreamed.

Yeah, so this is me tonight, on a saturday night in New York city, sitting in a room with two whippets I didn't know ten days ago and have subsequently fallen a bit in love with, working on my MacBook and listening to Seal on my iPod.

This is my crack.

How's that, Apple?