That Annoying Inner Music

I've long harbored a theory that the songs we wake up with in our heads and just can't shake are sent to us from our subconscious, transmitting a secret message like little aural dream fragments.  Once we decipher the message, my theory goes, we can dispel the annoying song bits and be freed of them.

It actually works, and (no surprise) it turns out that the subconscious has quite the little sense of humor.

These days, thanks in part to the long road trip that Roger and I just took, I have two songs.  They are incessant, and they are specific.  Because Roger and I are old Dead heads, the messages also happen to be taking the form of two Grateful Dead songs.

The first one is sixteen bars from Going Down the Road.

Going down the road, feeling bad (dum dee dum de dum de dum)
Going down the road, feeling bad (dum dee dum de dum de dum)
Going down the road, feeling baa-haa-haa-haa-haa-had
Don't want to be feeling this a-ways...

I hear every note, every syllable, every nuance.  At the end of the loop, it neatly splices onto itself and starts up again at the beginning, going around, and around, and around, and around again. Ridiculously annoying.

The other one: Wharf Rat.  Same album.  There's some intro music that floats around in my head when this one is going on, and then we get into it:

I'll get up and fly away... fly away..

 And then that repeats a few hundred times.

Wharf Rat as an annoying bit of inner music is a lot less specific, until it comes to that refrain.  That comes in loud and clear.

Seriously, people?  I mean, look at these lyrics.  Going Down the Road is in my head every time I'm going down the road feeling, well, bad.  And Wharf Rat tends to show up when I'm feeling pretty good. I feel like maybe I could get up and fly away.

I bounce between the two of them and, if I'm not really super sure how I'm doing, I can listen to the annoying music in my head and find out.


Hopefully by stating this out in the open, I will have acknowledged to my psyche that I'm getting it already and can move on to some other annoying songs.  We will see.

In the meantime...I'm going down the road.