THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMM

Have you ever woken up some morning humming a melody in your head that you can’t place? To make it worse you can remember the hook line and closing line but not all of the lyrics? I did this the other morning and went through every resource I could think of (and a few I hadn’t thought of before) and couldn’t find ONE reference for it. I found an odd word or two but not the whole phrase much less a similar tune. It seems, for the moment, the song has yet to be written and this disturbs me on a number of levels. It’s a little too sappy and “touchy-feely” to have come from my heretic brain. Am I doomed to show up on the talk show circuit blubbering about how I “found” myself one morning because of this stupid melody? (Hang on I have Oprah and Dr. Phil holding on both lines…) Anyone who knows me is painfully aware that I am no musician of any kind. I have been prevented by law from singing in several states, counties and cities or doing anything else remotely “musical”. Karaoke bars in the places without such a legal obstacle have been known to duct tape my mouth shut save a small slit for a straw so I can drink myself under the table with the rest of them. I have close friends who are professional musicians, songwriters and instrument makers who won’t let me anywhere near their equipment fearing I may dispatch irreparable harm to those things and render them useless junk…so where the hell did this song come from?! I have no unrequited love or relationships I wish had happened differently to lament. I tell my wife several times a day I love her and mean it without getting poetic about it. She’d think I’d been replaced by an alien for doing something that romantic even though I do love her that much. Besides, if I did it would be about as short and as caustic a poem as “Howl” was for Allen Ginsburg. If I wrote a song about her she’d either die laughing or finally get me that monogrammed straight jacket I’ve had my eye on for a while…either way it would somehow be a fitting gesture. I’m too old to be a rapper. I have no anarchistic agenda to promote or scream incoherently about at the top of my lungs, clubs have no stages big enough to hold a band anymore and the few who do have a pole in the middle of it these days…yet I can’t seem to get this song out of my head. My only fear about the tune is that I find out somewhere along the way that it isn’t original at all it was written by David Cassidy or someone like him of that period of time. That would suck in ways one could not imagine…no matter how medicated one got. What a world.