NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO . . .

“God is in the details,” legendary skyscraper architect Mies van der Rohe reminds us. . . . So this morning I got up and put on my favorite pair of Levi’s® and my favorite t-shirt advertising Gibson® guitars. With rain in the forecast, I chose my Teva® sandals over my Birkenstocks.® My new Ray Ban® polarized sunglasses at the ready in case the weather forecast was wrong, I headed out the door, revved up my beloved Volvo S60,® fired up my Garmin nuvi 260W GPS Navigator® . . . and then just sat there.

Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Was that the emptiness that I suddenly felt as I paused so fully “detailed” in my suburban driveway?

Or was it that I had forgotten to plug my 120gb iPod classic® into the Kensington Digital FM Transmitter®? Seeking a cure for what ailed me, I thumbed my way through several hundred tunes until I landed on “No Particular Place to Go,” that old Chuck Berry number that laments the “trouble” caused by a different sort of “device”:

No particular place to go,
So we parked way out on the Kokomo.
The night was young and the moon was bold,
So we both decided to take a stroll.
Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!

Perhaps the YouTube video of Berry performing this tune live reminds us of the flipside to van der Rohe's belief: “Man proposes, God disposes . . .”