Radio Silence

In my last post I mentioned that I was basically going brain dead between my periods of furious activity on my three projects. This weekend I got "away from it all" and spend a couple days doing maintenance on our lake house. A wind storm had blown down quite a few large branches that needed to be cut up and burned, and the lawn needed mowing. It is nice to take a break from mental work and constant communication and just have a time of silence and hard physical labor.

After a few hours of working my mind began to come alive again. Soon I was going over the remaining tasks on the project in Thailand and how to fold them all into the next couple months, and my mind began working on the Christian Media organization that has been brewing for almost a year now. But then something terrible happened. I had gotten the fire burning, which was no easy task since the wood was soaked from several days of rain. The fire was very smokey. The billows of smoke sometimes cast a shadow over the whole yard. As I piled branches onto the raging fire the smoke billowed even more. Then "it" happened. The phrase "old smokey" popped into my head, then the song "on top of old smokey" started playing in my head. It is bad enough when a song gets stuck in your head, and of course it is usually just one line of the song, and it just goes over and over. But what happened next is truly sickening, the words changed into the childish version of the song. The words of the song usually sung by very, very young children are as follows: "On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese, I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed." So, that infantile chorus kept running over and over in my head to the tune of "on top of old smokey," for about three hours. Three hours! I'm not exaggerating to make a point, I was actually tormented for that long. I could not get it to stop! Dave Barry wrote in one of his humorous books that the only way to get a stupid song out of your head was to sing it to someone else and infect them. The "song infection" will then jump out of your head and into theirs. I agree it is not the nicest thing to do, but hey, sometimes it is just survival of the fittest. In my situation I had no one around to infect. I was considering calling the guy in Thailand (the one who called me late Friday night) wake him up, sing the one line of the song, then hang up. I didn't do it but it crossed my mind. The song finally left me, but not without first bringing me to the brink of insanity.

I came home after the weekend of work and solitude. It was nice to see my family. Tonight my wife made dinner, we had spaghetti and meatballs. Can you believe it? I excercised enormous restraint. I could have infected the whole family with that stupid song at dinner time, it would have been great fun. My considerate side won out over my childish side, this time.