More and more, though, when I'm online, or at the music store or even listening to the radio, I find myself doing something that some folks might find odd or even disturbing. That is, listening to songs that I hate. I don't mean like the songs that make me ill, like that Jack & Diane song, but songs that just irritate me, like disco or show tunes or anything by Barry Manilow, or songs that my third grade music teacher thought were hip and cool in 1973 (or 75 or whenever the hell it was). Songs that get stuck in your head when really you would rather have anything else stuck there. Like an ice pick.

 

Seriously, some of these songs are the musical equiivalent of slamming your hand in a car door. I think it all started in high school when my friend made a cassette tape that took that one really annoying Michael Jackson song that goes "Mama say mama sah mama ku-sah" and kept dubbing it over and over so that it lasted like 45 minutes. And then he would play it at a party or something and you'd be talking and not paying attention much to the music until you reach this "moment" when you realize that this song is way too long and there is no variation in it to suggest it's an extended dance re-mix or something. It was really, really annoying.

 

And I think after that I kind of got it into my head that annoying music is really funny. But if somewhere along the line I got this little germ of a notion that music should annoy you, then today you might say that I have pneumonia.

 

In my collection, I have five songs by Glen Campbell, three songs by John Denver, various TV Themes, showtunes, disco hits, "AM Gold", and at various points in the past few weeks I have caught myself singing "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun..." and "Sing, sing a song, make it happy, to last the whole day long..."

 

There's a scene in the movie Star Trek: Generations where Data has just installed his emotion chip and he takes a drink in a bar that he totally can't stand and he's like "It is revolting! I love it!" It's like he's so thrilled to be feeling anything at all that even being disgusted makes him happy. Has my taste in music become this corrupted?

 

I may have doubted it, or felt that this was just one facet of my varied musical experience, bizarre as it may sound. But yesterday I downloaded "Georgie Girl" by the Seekers, and for those of you unfamiliar with this song, let me just say that downloading it was for me when I hit bottom, like when an alcoholic's wife leaves him and he loses his job and wakes up in a cell next to a guy named Bruno, all in one day. It's like running your car into a telephone pole, or choking on your own vomit.

 

I'm ready to admit it.

 

I need help.

 

They say that one half of your brain is all highly-ordered stuff like math and science, and that the other half is all the subjective personal stuff like art and music and language. So I wonder if maybe at some point something happened to my brain that made me this way. And come to think of it, how come when someone has a stroke it just paralyzes one half of their body, and how come they don't suddely get all artsy and liberal and write poetry and get tattoos? Or join a gun club and work on Wall Street? Or is this exactly what's happened to me?