I do believe I've written about the soundtrack for my life. I do believe I've explained that TheGirlWithTheHair gave me a theme song--Long Train Running by the Doobie Brothers. I think she just liked to think of us both walking down the street with our hair doing what our hair does while that song sings, "Without love, where would you be now?"
Ha ha! Losers! We have the hair! Without hair like this? You'd be right where you are now, kid.
Um, so maybe I have to grow into that song. It doesn't seem to apply to me as passionately as the singer would like it to.
At any rate, I took the dogs for a walk today. They aren't good at holding conversation with me, so I tend to think.
A confession for you. Please, you must not reveal this. I often think too much.
Oh! Well, the cat's out of the bag now. And if I were going to think too much, I would ask who the hell put a cat in a bag anyway? And what does it mean, exactly? Why don't we say that the crayons are out of the box? Or the keys are out of the lock? Or the filling is out of the tooth? All three of those things could have sticky consequences. And none of them involve trapping a live animal in a bag of any sort.
Sometimes thinking too much begins to be a problem for me. When it's silliness, I'm all for it. Almost all. It is generally inappropriate at funerals. But when the thinking is not silliness, when it's the kind of thinking that people do when they're driving to work or standing in line for the elevator, too much of that kind of thinking isn't such a good thing.
What I need to do, you see, is to have some kind of valve to let these thoughts out. I imagine them as a growing piece of licorice. When I'm thinking silly things, the licorice is tasty and so I eat it up and mmmmmm yummy licorice. When the thoughts are serious (I swear, I've been serious at least once. At least.) the licorice is not tasty. Thus, I have an ever increasing spool of not-tasty licorice growing in my brain. It makes my thoughts squish around and there isn't enough room for them to be teased apart so that the wheat might be separated from the chaff.
Instead, the thoughts are plucked at and torn so that the original idea can only be found in tatters and threads, yet the processing isn't complete. And it's all because there are too many useless thoughts in my head.
It should be perfectly obvious that I need to have a non-tasty licorice dispenser. I could probably sell the stuff to the Scandanavians. They eat the licorice that's very black and tastes like salt and licorice and burned things. I betcha that's what the non-tasty licorice would taste like.
The short story is that I think too much and have decided to think too much only at pre-approved times. I do the approving, of course.
To not think so much today, I started singing to myself. There's no one around; the dogs don't care; I can entertain myself by making up lyrics I can't remember. It's all great.
When I got into the car after our walk, though, I started thinking. Not too much, but thinking. I thought, "Why do I choose the songs that I choose? Does this mean that I'm crafting my own soundtrack? And if that's true, perhaps I should take a song list with me in case anyone's writing down the songs I'm singing to myself." Well, yeah, it might be too much. But it's meaningless. So it doesn't count.
This may seem absurd, but imagine going through your whole life hearing someone singing, "High on a hill, was a lonely goat herd...yodel yodel yodel." I bet you wouldn't be satisfied with your personal soundtrack, even if it did come from The Sound of Music.
Today's Dotty Soundtrack consisted largely of showtunes from The King and I,
I grow certain that I'm going to have a life full of surreal exchanges and the certainty of being impatient for mundane things to be interrupted by weirdness. It seems to me that a bunch of showtunes, a Doobie Brothers song, some Christmas carols, and a few madrigals and motets from high school won't cut it. Not for me. I want to be fancy.
Fancy, though. That's something that's hard to get a handle on.
Posted by dotty at December 6, 2004 10:05 PM