Dear brain – control yourself!

Today we are going on a journey, into the deepest darkest realms of my mind, where strange green cats eat laptop shaped lollipops and birds flap past singing... well perhaps that would be too much information...

Beneath my short reddish hair, far beyond my cranium, disguised by my smiling, friendly exterior and deceptive green eyes, a large, grey, spongy matter resides, commonly referred to as the devil. I mean my brain. For the most part it functions tolerably well, between it, my spinal cord and my legs, I have come quite far in this life. On occasion the stringy neurons within it spark witty comments and intelligent ideas. Most of the time however I just thank god that nobody else has ever heard what’s going on within its preposterous grey walls.

Lately, I’ve been having a hard time telling it who is boss. It likes to take hold of catchy song lyrics and replay them over and over and over again until I’m about ready to clobber it over the head in search of the off switch, before realising, its head is my head, and that would hurt.

Unfortunately it’s not just song lyrics that get stuck on repeat, but words. Words that sound weird, roll off the tongue lazily or that I just can’t remember for the life of me what they mean... This morning as the words I was trying to power-absorb from the 100 pages that I didn’t read for my tutorial so I’d be able to survive the 45 minutes to follow with a not-quite-blank look on my face flew meaninglessly past my eyes, “quasi-incestuous” jumped off the page at me.

I’m sorry what?!

QUASI-INCESTUOUS the page yelled at me. Fair enough, I thought, closed the book and tried to tune in to what was being said, but my brain simply wouldn’t let the word go. Quaasssiii-incestuous it hummed. Quasi-incestuuuuoouuussss, it droned. Quasi.Quasi. Quasi. Incest.u.ous it sung. Quasi-incestuous, it questioned, quasi-incestuous, it affirmed.

That horrible word, denoting all manner of dodgy relationships, simply would not leave my brain. I left the tutorial and still it skipped about my brain, engineering no thought-lines, simply sitting there.

Excuse me brain, couldn’t you pick something else to go over and over and over?

Quasi-incestuous is all it had to say for itself. And then a snippet of conservation sneaks into my brain, Hippopotamus. Excuse me? Hippopotamus sounds like bottommoss. Hip-hip-hipppooo-pot-ur-maus goes my brain.

I don’t know much about Freud and I never met the guy, personally I’m sure I wouldn’t like him or his libido, and I don’t want anything to do with his couch. (I have a couch phobia, but that is not ultimately the subject of this blog.) And I certainly would not want to hear what he has to say about my brain. I’m not repressing anything, in fact I’m quite certain there are no hippopotamuses inside me trying to get out and yet it seems to be capable of some extraordinarily odd fantasies. It relishes in inappropriate thoughts and pretty much goes... wherever it likes.

Picture this, its 2.14pm. The room is stuffy and quiet, dominated by the sound of the deliberate clunk of the clock. It’s not even a tick tock, it just goes clunk, very matter-of-fact. Joan of Arc is sitting in the corner of the room cleaning her sword. She readjusts her helmet, leans against the wall and sighs, like nothing has ever been as dull as this class. The professor responds to know-it-alls statement and hms and hars her way through a monologue... when suddenly Joan of Arc, leaps upon the table, strides from end to end yelling in French before dropping to her knees and looking to the ceiling, searching fitfully for god. Then with an abrupt and violent swing, she thrusts her sword through the professors heart.

Have you ever had a thought that made you physically stop and go, God I hope nobody heard that! You cast your eyes warily about you, checking people’s faces to see if they heard it. In the moments that ensue, you open the little door above your temple, clamper delicately outside of yourself and look back at the fool that appears to be you. You stride up to said fool, tap it on the nose and demand it get a grip on itself.

It doesn’t answer of course, only sings that same old song it’s been singing over and over all day ...

“I think I’m going to need some therapy, oh babe I hope you got a PhD....”

I maintain I am not responsible for what goes on in my head. Blame the neurons, the grey matter, the devil itself resides there, Freud would love him.