Maybe I’m skiing in blue jeans with a pen sticking out of my hat, listening to Bonnie Rait on an iPod, but I’m still pretty sure I’m cool.

That’s because I’m wearing the new Arriva headphones, invented by Tellurider Ben Blouse.

And maybe I fall on Spiral Stairs and tumble and the tush of my jeans gets wet.
(My mom says I’m cool.)

Because the Arriva headphones don’t fall off, even during a fall, and Bonnie Rait doesn’t miss a beat.

“I did a yard sale once,” Blouse says. “And after I got up I was like, ‘damn, they’re still on.’”

What’s cool about these headphones is that there aren’t any wires. They connect to the iPod shuffle, the tiny square music player, and they hold it to the back of your head by flexible wires.

It’s a cool low-tech improvement over the old system for music players, which is that you put your iPod in your coat, and you have to fish it out to change the song like a mom fishing through her overstuffed purse.

Plus, no wires! I ruined my last pair of stereo headphones when I skied by a tree and a branch ripped the headphones in half.

Now, all you have to do to pause the music is to reach your hand (with your glove still on) behind your head and push the buttons.

Blouse uses them running, hiking, skiing, even sometimes sleeping.

Bill Glasscock, a ski instructor, says he uses them all the time. They work under his helmet just fine.

Maybe nobody could have invented this besides Ben Blouse. Look at him. He’s all wired up. Blouse gets up early, around 4 a.m., and because the Internet was down he didn’t have anything to do this morning but wait for the lifts to start running.

He’s wired up, but his goal is to do away with wires.

“I hate wires,” he says. “I hate wires.”

There are so many ways to get rid of them, starting with the Arriva. He hopes to start doing more with Bluetooth technology in the future, creating integrated wireless systems for iPods and radios and phones.

Blouse skis old-school: no hat, sunglasses, and flowing hair that covers up the Shuffle that’s stuck to the back of his head like the input device from “Matrix.” Which is how he likes it, so that the iPod is virtually invisible.

Blouse has always been a tinkerer. He and his friend built a hang glider by following directions from a magazine. “How we didn’t kill ourselves I don’t know,” he says. Then he tried to make a radio/Walkman for swimmers that works underwater, which didn’t  quite work out, but at least nobody died on that project, either.

For the past eight years or so, he’s been working on these headphones.
He hired out the engineering and had them manufactured in China, and he has a patent pending.

Five thousand have been manufactured. They sell for $39.95, and you can buy them at arriva.com or Boot Doctors.

Coming back from skiing, I changed out of my ski jacket and wet jeans and into work clothes without taking off the Arriva. You could practically live with Arriva, if you wanted to, though you should probably load your iPod with somebody other than Bonnie Rait.