Sharp about everyone but yourself.
I had a song stuck in my head.
When I get a song stuck in my head, I go and play it loud. It's the cheapest form of exorcism— Spotify bills me monthly and pays a few fractions of a penny to the artist and this house is clean. This works every time.
But not this time.
This time I was on board a cruise ship, and I hadn't had cell service in days. The song started haunting me first thing in the morning on an at-sea day, and when we arrived in a foreign port my phone wouldn't connect to anything. Onboard wi-fi isn't worth a cold bucket of sea water. I started humming the tiny snippet of song that I could snatch in memory, but it wasn't correct or complete. I had a ghost loose in the house of my memory. Its business was unfinished. And it would not let me rest.
We left the port, sunburned and hungover. I went to karaoke and the ghost rattled its chains. I sat in the hottub and the ghost howled bubbles beneath the water. I spoke to friends and they could see the spectre in me. But they could not identify the two plaintive bars, minor key, and the vague feeling that it was a song from the 90s.
The next day we were again at sea.
The song gnawed at me with its ghostly melodic teeth. It took on mythic status in my mind— was it the lost and forgotten work of genius by some indie band I'd forgotten I was into? Did I have on CD once, an overlooked b-side to which I alone could connect? The desire to know fueled me; I wanted those ghost teeth to stay stuck in my neck. It reminded me of life before the internet.
I don't wish we didn't have access to the sum of human knowledge in our pocket devices. I just wish we did better with it. I remember thinking that the net would fundamentally change humanity— and it has! Just not the way I believed it would. Ignorant as a peasant in 1455 who believed that cheap mass production of the Bible through movable type would make the Good News of the gospel inescapably plain to anyone who could read, I believed that the internet would make it impossible for people to be misinformed, factually incorrect, or able to lie with impunity.
You see how that has worked out.
No, what I miss is the way my mind used to work ceaselessly at a problem before deciding to solve it through the external memory and processing power in a union of machines unknowable to me. I believe there's a creative space in that loop, much as Dalí believed in the liminal power of hypnogogia (sleep paralysis) to provoke works of surrealist genius from his bathed-in-banality bodymind. I began to exalt in this this phantom fragment, knowing that it would feel like religious ecstasy when at last I could put my fingers on the eye of the Ouija board inside the internet and make the ghost tell me its name. My hair would stand on end and I would feel the shock of revelation.
Hungover again (cruise ships are a brutal place for people struggling in sobriety) we steamed into some harbor in Florida (they all look the same) at an hour when no self-respecting drunk is awake. But I had left my phone on, and as soon as we were in in range it began to explode with notifications from everyone who had been trying to reach me for days. Every impacted bowel suddenly let loose with emails and texts and tweets and DMs, and I woke up before the dawn to start wading through the shit. Once I had opened my eyes enough to separate the useful shit from the flushable shit, I remembered the song.
I opened up a Chrome window and tried a few plausible strings of lyrics that I thought belonged in the bridge of a song I hadn't heard in twenty years. What I thought I had was in the middle of a world on a fish hook/you're the wave you're the wave you're the wave. Turned out that was it, word for word.
The song was "Swallowed," by Bush. It was the lead single off of 1996's Razorblade Suitcase. It was not obscure in the slightest; this ghost went triple platinum and spent seven weeks at #1 in the United States. It was only obscure in my memory; half-remembered from reptition in a time of turmoil and so an ideal candidate for the haunting of the hippocampus. Satisfaction is the word; revelation is not.
That's the gift of the internet. It's a miracle that has become mundane; a hit song that's been played out, a moment of ecstasy made into a meme. You have to laugh. At least, I did.
If you didn't like this story, I've got another one about Freudian analysis and the little god who lives in houses where you're not allowed to tell what happened to you. Happy spooky season to all my creepy kids.
Fat characters are winning the day, and I've got a list of good ones for you here, if you're up for more of the unruly body problem.
I'm in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction about a designated sleeper aboard a space ship, but you can't find that one by haunting the internet. You've got to find it in print, where some mystery is preserved but the truth is just as elusive as it was when Gutenberg was grinding them out.
I hope you get all the exorcisms you can eat. I hope your ghosts are hungry enough to join you at your table and tell you their names. I hope your revelations are less Sam Goody and more Goody Proctor.
Heavy about everything but my love,
Meg
When I get a song stuck in my head, I go and play it loud. It's the cheapest form of exorcism— Spotify bills me monthly and pays a few fractions of a penny to the artist and this house is clean. This works every time.
But not this time.
This time I was on board a cruise ship, and I hadn't had cell service in days. The song started haunting me first thing in the morning on an at-sea day, and when we arrived in a foreign port my phone wouldn't connect to anything. Onboard wi-fi isn't worth a cold bucket of sea water. I started humming the tiny snippet of song that I could snatch in memory, but it wasn't correct or complete. I had a ghost loose in the house of my memory. Its business was unfinished. And it would not let me rest.
We left the port, sunburned and hungover. I went to karaoke and the ghost rattled its chains. I sat in the hottub and the ghost howled bubbles beneath the water. I spoke to friends and they could see the spectre in me. But they could not identify the two plaintive bars, minor key, and the vague feeling that it was a song from the 90s.
The next day we were again at sea.
The song gnawed at me with its ghostly melodic teeth. It took on mythic status in my mind— was it the lost and forgotten work of genius by some indie band I'd forgotten I was into? Did I have on CD once, an overlooked b-side to which I alone could connect? The desire to know fueled me; I wanted those ghost teeth to stay stuck in my neck. It reminded me of life before the internet.
I don't wish we didn't have access to the sum of human knowledge in our pocket devices. I just wish we did better with it. I remember thinking that the net would fundamentally change humanity— and it has! Just not the way I believed it would. Ignorant as a peasant in 1455 who believed that cheap mass production of the Bible through movable type would make the Good News of the gospel inescapably plain to anyone who could read, I believed that the internet would make it impossible for people to be misinformed, factually incorrect, or able to lie with impunity.
You see how that has worked out.
No, what I miss is the way my mind used to work ceaselessly at a problem before deciding to solve it through the external memory and processing power in a union of machines unknowable to me. I believe there's a creative space in that loop, much as Dalí believed in the liminal power of hypnogogia (sleep paralysis) to provoke works of surrealist genius from his bathed-in-banality bodymind. I began to exalt in this this phantom fragment, knowing that it would feel like religious ecstasy when at last I could put my fingers on the eye of the Ouija board inside the internet and make the ghost tell me its name. My hair would stand on end and I would feel the shock of revelation.
Hungover again (cruise ships are a brutal place for people struggling in sobriety) we steamed into some harbor in Florida (they all look the same) at an hour when no self-respecting drunk is awake. But I had left my phone on, and as soon as we were in in range it began to explode with notifications from everyone who had been trying to reach me for days. Every impacted bowel suddenly let loose with emails and texts and tweets and DMs, and I woke up before the dawn to start wading through the shit. Once I had opened my eyes enough to separate the useful shit from the flushable shit, I remembered the song.
I opened up a Chrome window and tried a few plausible strings of lyrics that I thought belonged in the bridge of a song I hadn't heard in twenty years. What I thought I had was in the middle of a world on a fish hook/you're the wave you're the wave you're the wave. Turned out that was it, word for word.
The song was "Swallowed," by Bush. It was the lead single off of 1996's Razorblade Suitcase. It was not obscure in the slightest; this ghost went triple platinum and spent seven weeks at #1 in the United States. It was only obscure in my memory; half-remembered from reptition in a time of turmoil and so an ideal candidate for the haunting of the hippocampus. Satisfaction is the word; revelation is not.
That's the gift of the internet. It's a miracle that has become mundane; a hit song that's been played out, a moment of ecstasy made into a meme. You have to laugh. At least, I did.
If you didn't like this story, I've got another one about Freudian analysis and the little god who lives in houses where you're not allowed to tell what happened to you. Happy spooky season to all my creepy kids.
Fat characters are winning the day, and I've got a list of good ones for you here, if you're up for more of the unruly body problem.
I'm in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction about a designated sleeper aboard a space ship, but you can't find that one by haunting the internet. You've got to find it in print, where some mystery is preserved but the truth is just as elusive as it was when Gutenberg was grinding them out.
I hope you get all the exorcisms you can eat. I hope your ghosts are hungry enough to join you at your table and tell you their names. I hope your revelations are less Sam Goody and more Goody Proctor.
Heavy about everything but my love,
Meg
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