A few nights ago, I heard a splendid feature by my pal Charlie Cover, where he ended the night by sharing with us a little bit of his mind, he says. I’m familiar with the impulse, as most of you know – but the result is something else entirely.
See, earlier that same evening, I found myself watching YouTube videos of “Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this particular bit of nostalgia, LLSC was a Saturday morning parody of “Get Smart” (and if you don’t know “Get Smart”, well, I can’t help you) featuring – yes – chimpanzees. For some reason, I had grown obsessed with trying to figure out why this had stuck in my head, and after watching the videos on YouTube, I can tell you – I have no idea.
It’s like my parent’s basement up there. Theme songs from sitcoms that vanished in 1978, plots of movies I’ve seen and should have already forgotten, phone numbers that friends of mine haven’t had in three decades. My brain is elbow-deep in the sort of trivia that any rational person would dispense with in favor of, say, linear algebra or the way to fix a leaky toilet. I can’t even claim to be holding onto it because I’ll want it someday – I’d be grateful to be relieved of my friend Theresa’s phone number from 1975, because then maybe I’d be able to forget Rachel’s phone number from 1983, which is one digit off.
Occasionally, something really does out to be relevant when you hang onto so much detritus; it’s just the odds. When we moved from Danbury, CT to Cleveland, OH in 1966, my parents dismantled the illegal kitchen they’d set up for my grandmother on the second floor of the house, and somehow, the vent fan from the stove ended up in our basement. Fifteen years later, we remodeled the kitchen in Cleveland, and my father went down to the basement, dusted off the fifteen-year-old range hood, and installed it above the new stove. And it’s still there. For a while, I was afraid that my father would use this example as a justification for not throwing anything else away, but thankfully, he never resorted to that line of argument.
The most frightening part of it is, this is the stuff I’m going to remember when I have Alzheimer’s. Clearly, it’s lodged up there with some sort of otherworldly glue, and I doubt even senility could dislodge it. I suppose I could think of worse things than spending eternity with Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp – but I can’t think of many things more pointless.
So thank you, Charlie, for sharing a little bit of your mind with us the other night. I believe I’ll return the favor by writing a song called “All the Crap in My Head”. I don’t think that it’ll clear any of it out – but at least I can share the misery.