This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Third Time's Far from Charming

Hammering out a couple posts today as time's been a bit scarce lately, but, uh we'll get that fixed here soonish. Round one looked something like this, and round two this. The skinny is this: Bad songs get stuck in my head. I don't know how they get there, and I don't know how to get them out. Sometimes they're there, quiet and fading, before my feet hit the floor in the morning. And by the time I'm in the shower, they're blasting like the nine-song rotation at the strip club.

Usually, I've had the fortune of at least one good song getting stuck in my head. Last week was not so usual.

5. "Dixieland Delight" by Alabama



Life isn't fair. It really isn't. Every once in a while, though, a bit of grace lands in our lap. Kind of like the rhythm of this song, which if you think about it, serves as a nice little ice-pick-to-the-forehead metronome. Get stabbin'!

4. "We Are Siamese" from the Lady and the Tramp soundtrack



Don't ask. I've no idea.

3. "Pull Me Under" by Dream Theater



My freshman year of college was spent at a school called Pittsburg State University. I lived in Tanner Hall, room 201. Two doors down was the most immaculate mullet you have ever seen, and it was attached to a guy who'd been nicknamed "Lightning Arms." Or "Kid Lightning," or something like that. I think his name was actually Ryan, but the kid could play the bejeezus outta some drums. And he was a huge Dream Theater fan. Wait. Sorry. He was the huge Dream Theater fan. Anyway, I guess the Dream Theater drummer was really good. Or is. I dunno. That was the first, and last, time I ever heard anybody willfully talk about Dream Theater.

I don't really have anything else to say about this song or that band, except for the fact that this number was once, for a minute, on the radio rotations.

I wish it hadn't been.

2. "Hard Habit to Break" by Chicago



I'm not going to sit here and knock on Chicago. I know Chicago has always had a pretty big fan base. That said, this song is terrible, and if I can figure out what it was I did to deserve having this one plugged into the old cortex, believe me: I'd hire Matlock, Magmum P.I., Kojak, and David Carradine to get on the case so that I could plead forgiveness. Jiminy Christmas is this song terrible. It's so far off the soulful spectrum that Christopher Cross recently called Chicago the whitest band in America after his Spotify account pulled up "Hard Habit to Break."

1. "Something to Believe in" by Poison



Every once in a while, I'll walk into the men's room of a local bar and there will be these framed advertisements on the wall above the toilet. You know what I'm talking about? They're usually matted into four panes, and each vertical rectangle has an ad for a particular company. There's usually one for a local restaurant corporation, one for a radio station, one for some smutty cable channel that doesn't have a you-can-hide-it-from-the-wife footnote, and one for some kind of medical study they're looking to conduct that requires you to come stay overnight twice and eat a handfull of pills for money.

This last one is always the ad that prompts me to double-take. Go sleep in a hospital bed for two nights, get studied and get paid? (Note to these companies: Put a text-us option on these ads. Really.)

I always walk out of the restroom, though, thinking about signing up for that action. I never do it, but I think about it. With the other three ads, I think about the money those poor saps wasted thinking they were going to influence me to ponder something, but with the medical-study ads, I'm usually exiting the can rubbing my chin with my thumb and forefinger.

I never follow through, but you know what would get me to write those details down? I'll tell you.

Remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I'd settle my tab and drive straight to the hospital if one of those ads boasted a study that involved some drugs or a technique that would forever burn Poison and Bret Michaels and everything associated with both from the folds of my brain.

Forget Poison.

Forget the ever-loving spunk out of them.

That is all.

As you were.