There was an ice cream truck that went through my neighborhood all the time when I was a kid...it had this crazy broken tape loop instead of just tinkling bells or anything like that. The music loop could cut out at any moment and start over, or sometimes it would just skip ahead 5 seconds, or back 10 seconds; it was completely unpredictable.
It actually was very good for the guy's business, because there was a strange sense of urgency created by that unpredictability...somehow, if you were at all in the mood for ice cream, the feeling of not knowing when the music might reset or jump to another part of itself would get conflated with a sense of unease about where the ice cream truck ITSELF was, physically. You might be able to go to a window and tell that it was still off to the right, or to the left, but suddenly you would feel a lot less sure that it hadn't already passed by your house, as if in skipping 10 seconds forward in the tape loop the truck had gone through some bizarre cherry popsicle version of a wormhole and had become unobservable to you for that time. You never seemed to have the familiar Doppler shift letting you know that, OK, now he's still approaching...OK, now he's past; there was always just a sense that if you wanted some ice cream, you'd better get your ass out there and see if you could get some, because nothing's guaranteed in this life, punk, especially nothing as trivial as ice cream.
The ice cream wasn't even very good, although as a child I didn't know that of course; now you couldn't pay me to eat something that a guy who likely is an ex-con digs out of a freezer with hands that could be described as "clean" only in the most charitable of senses. I guess I've lost that part of my innocence, or gained some measure of a self-preservation instinct, I'm not sure.
