I don’t get tunes stuck in my head. They burrow into my brain like ticks, and it takes some serious countermeasures to lodge them loose, like extreme zen-like concentration, or dynamite.
But even worse is when I get a tune stuck in my head that I associate with a particular visual memory. 99 percent of the time, that visual memory is an old TV show or commercial. It’s a bizarre sensory memory, almost Proustian–in that it makes me want to lock myself in a cork-lined room and never come out again.
Since I seem to be the only idiot who remembers the bygone TV fare of yesteryear, there’s usually no point in explaining the whole Madison Avenue spectacle going on in my head. All it does is make me appear more insane than usual, like I’m starring in my own private version of Gaslight. Except I’m not being tortured by a sadistic husband, but my own steel-trap memory (if steel traps only clamped down on pointless garbage).
Why, for instance, can’t I simply get “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang stuck in my head? No, it has to be accompanied by an endless loop of Kool and the Gang dancing with Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets.
Regardless, I want to give you a glimpse of the hell that has been my brain for the last few days. Over the holidays, I heard “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” more than once. So it got stuck in my head, right? Oh, if only t’were so simple!