Funny how the mind works at times

Dwain Walden

October 22, 2008 11:53 pm

— It’s funny how the mind works sometimes. I was sitting in the porch swing reading about a UCLA executive who had plead guilty to trafficking in human body parts. He was making big bucks selling bones and other stuff from cadavers.
Now this is a very serious, morbid, callous kind of thing. It is disrespectful to those who have donated their bodies to science.
But even so, I could not control where my mind would go, and all of a sudden I was singing an old John Prine song called “Please Don’t Bury Me.”
For those who don’t know, John Prine is a folk singer. Some folks like him, some folks don’t. I do.
Anyway the singer wakes up, puts on his slippers, goes into the kitchen, slips, bangs his head on the floor and dies.
Now given this scenario, it would seem the fodder for a very short song. And some songs should be short. I was listening to one on the sound system in the gym while working out the other day, and I thought it would never end. The same lyrics were repeated over and over. There was a time when that would have meant the record was stuck. But today, I think it just means that vocabularies are very limited.
Anyway, it’s the chorus of John’s song that came to me after reading this morbid news.
It goes in part likes this:
“Please don’t bury me
down in the cold, cold ground.
No I’d druther have ‘em’ cut me up and spread my parts around.
Throw my brain in a hurricane and the blind can have my eyes.
And the deaf can take both of my ears, if they don’t mind the size.
Give my stomach to Milwaukee, if they run out of beer.
...Hand me down my walking cane, I cannot tell a lie.
Send my mouth way down South and kiss my “a....” goodbye.”
Now sometimes when a song gets in my head, it stays there all day long. It doesn’t matter what else might be going on. What I mean is, the next bit of news was about how people were losing lots of money in their 401ks because of the poor economy. And there I was singing that part about “sending my mouth, way down South” and bidding my posterior adieu. Well, maybe the lyric was still applicable to the 401K thing. I guess it’s all about perception.
Maybe I should have been singing that old Johnny Cash song, “Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, and I’’m busted.” But I think my mind was trying to provide me some comic relief.
The very next day I was trying to make a phone call to Chicago to check on my 401K. I kept getting told that I could push certain numbers if I had specific inquiries. And eventually, a robot told me that if I wanted to speak to a warm body, they would try to find me one. They never did. I’m thinking someone must have sold all the warm body parts.
Anyway, I got to thinking about deputy Barney Fife just picking up the telephone and simply saying, “Hello Sara. Would you get me Juanita over at the diner?”
So the rest of the day I was whistling the theme to “The Andy Griffith Show..” And having become very frustrated trying to call Chicago, the character Otis Campbell sort of stuck in my mind for a while.
(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com.