The Worms
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Words can have a funny way of crawling up inside your head and squatting, rent free, for as long as they damn well please. It might be a single word, or an entire sentence or more. Most often I have long-forgotten phrases kicking around up there, bossy as fuck, demanding I pay attention to them.
Mind worms (a nearly perfect term) can be so pervasive they become a problem. I have gone weeks, if not months, with any given song’s lyrics and melody playing on endless repeat inside my head. The ability to recall music in such depth and detail is something I enjoy, but, in the form of a mind worm, that same ability can hit an insidious autopilot mode, becoming so loud it pushes other thoughts away. That is not as fun. And it can happen just as—if not more—often with songs I don’t particularly care for. Part of that might be due to my not being a huge fan of bouncy catchy pop music, and those are exactly the types of songs which get lodged up in your craw on loop. It might also be because a mind worm is pure id, and that the id has zero concern for style or taste, or damn near anything else that seems so important in the “real” world.
Hey asshole, here’s a catchy little section of Hip to be Square. Enjoy, fuckface!
Music mind worms are the ones we hear the most about, because they are so common. Less commonly discussed are verbal mind worms. These worms are not tied to verse or music, and yet they can be just as pervasive. You are going about your day when you suddenly realize that some term or short phrase is clinging tenaciously to the forefront of your awareness. Once you become aware of them, you make an effort to identify why this is happening. Sometimes the words might be from a book, an article, a TV show or movie, and those resonated with you for whatever reason. Other times these words seem to be almost random, or their origin is a complete mystery. And as you go about your life, they keep coming back over and over, even after you’ve forgotten about them for days at a time.
If you have a tendency, as I do, to personify weird things like traits or inanimate objects, then you may also experience mind worms in abstract. A characteristic or quirk, something through which your mind identifies someone or something, gets stuck in your mind. For instance, you go to a store to return something, and when you get to the counter, you discover that the customer service person has a particular way of saying a certain word. For this post let’s use the word “box.” Right away you pick up on the way the rep says box, pronouncing it like “boaks.”
Kindly, she asks:
Did you keep the boaks it came in?
Maligned and diseased, you think:
Boaks?! What the fuck is that? Is she Canadian, from South Carolina? Is it a deliberate age-related cultural affectation? Where did that come from? Boaks? Boaks?? Who the fuck says Boaks? Boaks. Hmm. Boaks. Boaks. Boaks… AHHHHHH!
The moment you hear it you’re doomed. That fucker is already stuck deep in one of your brain ridges and you can say goodbye to the next couple hours because that person’s way of saying box is now your cross to bear, you word martyr.
This whole stuck in the brain thing carries over to damn near anything, a fact you will become aware of once you are willing to admit to yourself that you are an obsessive lunatic who slaves at the whims of their sick mind. Smells both good and very bad, the way the wind catches a couple strands of someone’s hair, waving about in the sun, the design of a t-shirt, the untied shoelaces of a grown-ass man walking in front of you in a movie theater, the booger that’s been stuck on the break room ceiling for years now. These things will consume you. They worm their way in, cozy up right next to Katy Perry’s Firework and the term “string theory”, and fuck your entire life, harder than a rock. Right out of the boaks. Like a virgin. Like an atom bomb. One step beyond, for whom the bell tolls, let’s get down to business, someone said fair warning, and do you really want to live forever? Forever young?