(Un)Comfortably Numb

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

When we were first dating, Rob was apparently pulled aside by a friend of mine who warned him to never play Pink Floyd in front of me. I would have told him eventually.

I don't remember the song that was playing on the radio the night I totaled my car, though the person in the passenger seat cringed at the opening chords for many months. I never remember the actual words spoken in the most heated of moments (the average marital argument, for example, comes no where close to reaching that temperature) but remember only the gist and feel of the words. Auditory details just seem beyond my memory's interest.

I also can't remember which Pink Floyd song was the one that turned my stomach to a band whose tee-shirt I likely would have worn otherwise - just that Pink Floyd was playing while my then-boyfriend rocked himself on the floor of our bedroom, his knees pulled to his chest. I left to sit on the sofa, next to the woman whose apartment it was, and listened as he tore apart our room. Of all that was destroyed, the most notable was a photo I had taken of him in which he was torn into two jagged pieces. It wasn't a particularly traumatic evening, particularly in comparison to other moments with him, but it's always remained vivid to me.

Years later, as the assistant leader of a Girl Scout troop, I found myself lost in a corn maze with the teen-aged staff playing Dark Side of the Moon from start to finish. I gladly followed one of the teens down the quitter's path to the exit. No hives, no sobbing - just discomfort and a willingness to end its source -the worst of my reactions to Pink Floyd, but why bother with even that, I thought.

But as each year that passes, being song-averse increasingly strikes me as a waste of time, an unnecessary thing for Rob to have to be vigilant of (as he slowly reaches for the radio and presses the first available button, often before I've identified the song)... as plain old stupid.

So, last week, Comfortably Numb came on the radio, Rob did his usual hubby-to-the-rescue swoop-and-tune, and I insisted we turn back. We sang along (I don't think a lifetime would be long enough to forget those lyrics) and, in a turn of Alanis Morissette's version of ironic, I've had the song stuck in my head since. It's arguably a better situation that the song I used to get stuck in my head: the theme song for Three's Company, but I'd still rather not. My usual remedy, singing the theme song for Inspector Gadget (two theme songs for shows I watched as a kid... I wonder what that says about me...), has failed miserably, though I've had some temporary success by singing Claypool's Up on the Roof ( I'm up on the roof again/Watchin' the sparklers dance and play/Up on the roof again/Please don't take my ladder away)...

As a last ditch effort to exorcise the Pink demon from my head, I've decided to write about it. Writing, for me, if often a brain-dumping exercise - I roll a topic around in my head until I can write about it and then I don't have to think about it anymore. I often even draw a blank when people ask what I've been writing about lately... I don't know; I already wrote about it.

Thanks for being a part of my experiment; hopefully I won't have to write about this again...