I kind of crashed last week. I was dead tired, but it felt like I had bugs in my brain. I called the so-called emergency number from the company lab and they said, yeah, that might be a side effect. Bugs in the brain might be a side effect. They said when I came in on Friday they'd look and see if everything was ok. I'm just thinking, this never happened on my own stuff. I may have slipped a few times, but I never felt this megawatt locust swarm bouncing off the back of my eyeballs.
So I've been just lying in bed a lot the past few days with the lights off, listening to music. I think I may have actually played every last song on my ipod. It was interesting. I remembered all kinds of things. Like how much I used to love Van Halen in junior high. They were deeply and painfully over by then of course, deep into the senescence of the Van Hagar years. (VH - DLR = Whitesnake, ya heard?) But my dad had their old albums and I guess I liked them partly because he did and partly because the VH brothers were Indo, half-Dutch/half-Indonesian, like my dad. (And now I'm in Holland. How something. I should go see where they grew up.) But also because their music was this totally awesome combination of demonic power and slapstick. They were like this funny, dangerous animal and that's what I wanted to be. I knew that if I could just trade my single-pickup mortal coil for Eddie Van Halen's tipsy, growling humbucker then I'd be popular and cool and not afraid and Jill Daniels would invite me to her birthday party. Simple.
So one day during lunch, I saw Jill and her posse and was like, WWVHD? I cranked up "Unchained" in my head like a tweener Ride of the Valkyries, then I just walked up to them and went for it. Not only did I not get invited to her party, the school had to call my mom to come pick me up. They thought I was having some kind of seizure. She took me to McDonald's which was usually a big treat because dad would never let me go there, but it became one of those times when the fact that someone still loves you just makes you feel more pathetic and I never ate there again. All I wanted was to become that funny, dangerous animal I heard stalking around, caged up in my head. I'm still working on the funny part.
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