Just so I’m not ending the working week on a total down note, please enjoy this workout video from the glorious, un-self-aware 1980s starring Phil Simms. This came over my transom thanks to Dan Epstein, author of the great retrospective of 1970s baseball Big Hair and Plastic Grass. I interviewed Dan on this site way back in May of last year. Why not read it, tough guy?
We all have motifs that run through our lives, whether we realize it or not. I do realize mine, and I realized it a long time ago. It is the feeling of being completely out of my element. On a nearly daily basis, I find myself in a situation that comes out of nowhere and makes zero sense in the context of my experience and existence. As if the rules of The Universe were changed, and everyone received the memo but me.
I’d call this feeling Kafka-esque, except that it’s not confined to bureaucratic encounters. It can surface at any time, anywhere, for no reason at all.
For an intro to this series, click here. For the original series way back in 2009, click here.
Not too long ago, I had the Men at Work song “Overkill” stuck in my head for a while. And when I say “a while,” I mean a month. There are two reasons why this was especially infuriating:
My theory is, I’d heard this song at a friend’s house while watching MTV when I was young (I was cable-less as a kid), and it lay in wait ever since then, like a latent virus staying dormant for decades. What could have triggered it back to life? I can’t say. Does it even matter when the suffering sets in? Not that it’s a bad song, because it’s not, really. But anything is horrible if it’s inescapable.
It had been so long since I’d heard this song anywhere other than my brain that at first, I didn’t even know the song title or who sang it. I had to google random lines just find out this piece of vital information. Once I found out the responsible artists, I listened to it in full, hoping that would dislodge it from my synapses.
Big mistake. That just made it stronger and more virulent. It fed upon my brain matter and grew larger and larger, threatening to consume my very sanity.
And then one day, it left. I think it did as much damage as it could and crawled out of my ear as I slept to plague some other unsuspecting soul. I do not wish such a fate on anyone. So while this song is inappropriate as walk up music, it is particularly inappropriate to me, as I live in constant fear that it may return to haunt me again.
On a related note: Not long after my harrowing ordeal, Twitterer extraordinaire @trumpetcake–a master of the twitpic–posted a screencap of the YouTube comments for this video, with the caption “No one’s got any fucking sympathy anymore.”* As you can see, there’s a big drop-off in the content and tone from comment #1 to comment #2.
* Paraphrasing from memory. My efforts to find his original post proved pointless because searching for anything in Twitter older than yesterday is a baffling ordeal.