Those Old Mind Games
At some point last week I found I had to stand up and confront some Dylan lyrics running through my head. Okay, yes, Dylan-in-head is a commonplace, not every danged day but possibly most. And, indeed, I love him for it. But as I had other things on my mind at the time, I was a titch annoyed that I could not pigeonhole these lyrics with a song title and possibly thus find a way to put that ear-worm temporarily behind me.
If you see Saint Annie, please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot
I don’t even have the strength to get up and take another shot
And my best friend the doctor won’t even tell me what it is I’ve got.
After ten or more mental reprises (you know what a couple synapses can do), I was riffing on the idea of a variant for 43 with “knickers in a knot,” and Laura howling at the moon, but still aggravated at not having the title. Figuring out how the lyric/worm got to me was a bit improbable, even for an optimist like me.
But, like so many things in life, a little of those Time-Passages Al Stewart sang about can work wonders.
I finally established that it was Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues that was terrorizing me. It wasn’t long after that minor revelation that I recalled that I had just listened over the past week or so to an intense audio-book mystery set in southern New Mexico that featured lots of Juarez action (Michael McGarrity’s “Tularoso,” highly recommended, likewise his “Mexican Hat,” which I read in conventional book form earlier). I am convinced that it was the "Juarez" references that set my last few gray cells off.
Of course JLTTB starts off with:
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter-time too
That helped a lot in my yen for tracking cerebral connections.
The next day I was setting up to paint the underside of the carport (honey do!), and trundled out our primitive portable cd-player. I’ll be damned if my second or third disk involved Ms. Ronstadt (recently high on play-list courtesy of reading of Zevon biography “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”) doing a yeo-woman job on JLTTB!
Yowzah!
Keep on playing those mind-games.
If you see Saint Annie, please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot
I don’t even have the strength to get up and take another shot
And my best friend the doctor won’t even tell me what it is I’ve got.
After ten or more mental reprises (you know what a couple synapses can do), I was riffing on the idea of a variant for 43 with “knickers in a knot,” and Laura howling at the moon, but still aggravated at not having the title. Figuring out how the lyric/worm got to me was a bit improbable, even for an optimist like me.
But, like so many things in life, a little of those Time-Passages Al Stewart sang about can work wonders.
I finally established that it was Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues that was terrorizing me. It wasn’t long after that minor revelation that I recalled that I had just listened over the past week or so to an intense audio-book mystery set in southern New Mexico that featured lots of Juarez action (Michael McGarrity’s “Tularoso,” highly recommended, likewise his “Mexican Hat,” which I read in conventional book form earlier). I am convinced that it was the "Juarez" references that set my last few gray cells off.
Of course JLTTB starts off with:
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter-time too
That helped a lot in my yen for tracking cerebral connections.
The next day I was setting up to paint the underside of the carport (honey do!), and trundled out our primitive portable cd-player. I’ll be damned if my second or third disk involved Ms. Ronstadt (recently high on play-list courtesy of reading of Zevon biography “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”) doing a yeo-woman job on JLTTB!
Yowzah!
Keep on playing those mind-games.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:37 PM
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