I am seriously disappointed in myself. After dinner, bathing twerp, and contemplating and then rejecting the idea of finally folding the clean laundry from Saturday (anyone else having a completely slacker week?), I put on the kettle to make myself a cup of Suisse Mocha from a tin (I normally stick to water or decaf. tea at night…okay, it was an admitted moment of weakness), and as I am spooning the sugary powder into my mug, randomly, from the back of my brain comes the phrase, “Celebrate the moments of your life.” Crap. Isn’t this commercial like from the 80’s? And then it occurs to me that there are these really pointless pieces of information stuck all over my cerebellum. “Raise your hand, raise your hand if you're sure.” “You’re not fully clean until you’re Zestfully clean.” “The best part of waking up is Folder’s in your cup.”
A bit less of a sin, but still pretty sad, is that I have entire songs, not the good ones, but really stupid ones, the ones you’d never admit to your friends that you knew, memorized. “Take the last train to Clarksville/ and I’ll meet you at the station/ you can be here by 4:30/and I’ve paid your reservation/ don’t be slow/oh no, no no/oh no, no, no…” And movie lines: “You keep eating your hands like that, and you won’t be hungry for lunch.” And television shows, “No people’s poet, don’t go…we’ll rip off all our clothes for you.” There is no real pattern as to when they pop up, but lately, they remind me of a nervous tick, and I worry that my eyes may stare blankly or roll to the back of my head as I lapse into another pop-culture revelry.
I watched the Muppet Show the other night with my daughter. Rachel Welch was on as a guest and she sang “I’m a Woman” with Miss Piggy. They sing, “’I can bring home the bacon/ fry it up in a pan/and never let you forget you're a man/Cause I’m a woman” and in my mind, I’m going, “Ah' Jolene”. I’m not even sure what that was. A perfume? A commercial for French lessons? I’m stumped. Some of the best songs I know make me want to run out and buy a bottle of Windex (They used Jimmy Cliff’s song, remember?) or a box of hair dye (poor Aretha).
For years it has bothered me that my memory stooped over and went geriatric on me decades before my body was ready to quit. My best friend would start out conversations with, “Do you remember when…?” and I’d honestly have to say, “No.” I worried that at one point in my life I unwittingly abused substances enough to wipe out most of my adolescent experience, but no, it’s not anything I ingested other than years and years of pointless catch phrases and rhyming lyrics.
I can no longer lighten up this very troubling problem. Everything that has stuck firmly in my frontal lobe seems to be based on something I watched on television or heard on the radio sometime between the 80’s and the 90’s. I need to squeegee my brain, roll a lint brush along and take up all of this random jingle noise, so that I don’t make it to 78 and wonder where I put the lower half of my body. Most importantly, I don’t ever want a conversation with my daughter to sound like this:
“Mom, how did you and Dad meet?”
“On a warm summer’s eve, on a train bound to no where, I met up with the Gambler; we were both too tired to sleep. His name was Rico, he wore the diamonds, he was escorted to his chair…”
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