Earworm

by Aaron Thomas Milstead

  Here come the world, with the look in its eye.

  Future uncertain, but certainly slight.

  Look at the faces, listen to the bells.

  It’s hard to believe we need a place called Hell. Place called Hell.

  —INXS

  4.

  Raging Erection

  I sat up in bed and took a physical inventory. Lately, I had been waking up with an ache that started somewhere deep inside and pulsed its way out through every nerve and pain receptor. I would typically wake up with my eyes glued shut because I’d been crying in my sleep and my bones would feel as brittle as sand dollars, my muscles would be betraying me with spasms and my head would feel like it was being squeezed by some foreign and malignant force bent upon inflicting as much punishment as possible.

  But not that morning.

  For the first time in as long as I could remember I awoke with my body feeling healthy. I glanced down at my soft flesh, round belly, and what my wife disdainfully referred to as “white man thighs.” My outer shell seemed to contradict an inexplicable feeling of inner strength. Danger? That incessant echo was just a vestige of a bad dream. If anything, I was coming to grips with an alien feeling that took me a few moments of careful contemplation to properly name: hope.

  I suddenly felt hopeful.

  The sounds of the birds outside were so clear and pure that I almost thought they were artificial sounds being piped in through speakers and generated by retired hippies for maximum relaxation or a deep meditation exercise. My next thought was that my body must have finally begun to really respond to the patch that slowly exuded heavy drugs into my system, but I glanced over at the ground and realized I had peeled it off sometime during the night.

  This next detail is particularly personal, but maybe more relevant than all of my other claims put together. I had a full-on raging erection. It was pointed straight up at the ceiling as if giving a shout-out to God for bringing it back to life. It had been years since I had woken up that way and if you’ve never been a fan of nostalgia then at least give me that one allowance.

  I stood and, as my bare feet touched the cold ground, I felt light and . . . dangerous? I again was left to question my own thoughts. Dangerous? That was certainly not an adjective I would have ever ascribed to myself. I walked into the living room and realized I was hungry. No, that was selling it short, I was ravenous.

  I went over to the cupboard and surveyed the goods. Suddenly I was overcome with an urge to eat Kraft macaroni and cheese. It surpassed any craving I had ever felt towards alcohol. Call it a compulsion. Typically, I’d boil the elbow noodles until they were just a tad past al dente, then drain them, sprinkle on the orange powder and a nice handful of shredded sharp cheese, pour in a dab of butter and a cup of milk, and finally mix it together over low heat. This time I tore open the box and shoved a handful of the dry noodles into my mouth. On one level it tasted just like you’d expect, crunchy, gluey cardboard that stuck to my teeth and fought its way down my throat, but on the level that mattered in that moment, it was more satisfying than anything I had ever consumed. I quickly gulped down the box. You know how sometimes you hear foodies describe fine dining like it’s an almost orgasmic experience? Yeah.

  I ate three boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese with as much gusto as Guy Pearce in that cult-classic movie Ravenous when he was cannibalizing his fellow soldiers on a frozen wasteland. Before I could even take a breath, I was eating a box of blueberry-flavored frozen waffles with the frost from the freezer still stuck to them. It was all a blur, but I also threw down a box of Cheerios, Fruit Loops, and a ton of assorted Halloween candies that I had been storing in a bucket up on top of my refrigerator because I’d developed a bit of a sweet tooth after I quit drinking. To wax poetic, it was half a bag of miniature Snickers, six full-sized Hershey’s bars, a few dozen single packs of pumpkin-shaped Reese’s peanut butter cups, several bags of Skittles, two bags of Famous Amos’s chocolate chip cookies, and a large bag of candy corn that I had been meaning to throw away, but that suddenly tasted better than Chicken Parmesan from the Olive Garden.

  It happened so quickly that only the chocolatey froth on my lower lip served as proof of the atrocity I’d committed upon the sugar filled edibles. Usually I’d be brewing a pot of coffee and smoking cigarettes, but all I could think about was a donut shop run by a Vietnamese family down the road. I quickly dressed and as my truck roared down the driveway I was wondering how many donuts I could buy with the forty bucks I had in my billfold. Those thoughts were interrupted with the realization that another song was repeating on a loop in my mind. Another ear worm.

  Revving up your engine. Listen to her howling roar. Metal under tension. Begging you to touch and go. Highway to the danger zone. Ride into the danger zone.

  Kenny Loggins? It was a disappointing development to be certain. I’d thought that Randy Newman was bad, but this was a new low. It wasn’t a song I had ever appreciated, even in the context of Top Gun, which I thought was okay, but certainly overrated. I was kind of a Goose guy and you know what happened to him. I tried to find a connecting point between that song and my previous earworm, but all I could think of was the homoerotic tendencies of the protagonists within each movie. Hard to dismiss that Tom Cruise was clearly way more into the Ice Man, Val Kilmer, than Kelly McGillis.

  Ride into the danger zone.

  Maybe my subconscious was reflecting on the animated spy, Archer, and his fascination with Top Gun and that song in particular. A few weeks ago, I’d binged every season of Archer while I watched Twitch Plays Dark Souls and listened to a podcast called The Message through a Bluetooth that was fitted in my left ear—maybe exposing myself to all of that stimuli forced my brain into processing it incrementally. Of course, a much simpler explanation was that within my previous night’s dream the wooden puppet named Bogart had warned me that I was in danger and I had inserted the warning into an irritating ear worm.

  Whatever.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a small white building located on South Street across from Laird’s Funeral Home and right next to the Gorilla Pawn Shop. The building had a cheap looking canvas sign tied to the top of the roof which read: Donut Palace. This is not to be confused with the restaurant at the end of North Street called Doughnut Palace. There was also a Dunkin’ Donuts, Shipley Do-nuts, Dick’s Donuts, and that is not accounting for the fact that Kroger’s, Wal-Mart, and both Brookshire Brothers also had bakeries that sold fresh donuts each morning. Probably a dozen places in town to get fresh donuts each morning and not a single health food store or Smoothie King. The healthiest alternative in Nacogdoches for eating out was to order the Southwest Grilled Chicken salad at McDonalds, which I’d read actually has about as many calories as a heart attack.

  I stepped inside and was temporarily taken aback; as long as I’d eaten at the Donut Palace it had been run by a handful of pleasant Burmese people. The miniscule race of hard workers had originally been brought to Nacogdoches to endure servitude at the Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processing center, but some of them had found refuge in the forms of The Donut Palace, a sushi stand in Kroger’s, and several manicure/pedicure shops. I actually preferred Dunkin’ Donuts, but I felt a twinge of white guilt and stayed loyal to the immigrants. The golden Buddha statue still stoically sat on the counter, but everyone in the shop was Mexican, except for an old black guy who was clearing the tables. Where had the immigrants gone?

  I walked up to the counter and an attractive young woman with dark hair and chestnut skin smiled at me, waiting for my order. I asked, “Where are the Burmese—”

  She waved away my question. “No hablo Ingles.”

  Her long red nails had been perfectly manicured, so I figured she knew where the Burmese people were. Maybe they had taken over the palace and the polite little Asians were tied up in the back. I considered interrogating her, but the smell of glazed apple fritters took precedent and I left the subject of the coup d’état for another time. I stared into the glass displa
ys and said: “Two dozen donut holes, a dozen chocolate iced glazed, six of those apple fritters . . . ” I paused as she scrambled to fulfill my order; her nails were only getting in the way—a downside to her vanity. After a minute I continued, “Give me a dozen of those with the pink icing and . . . ten of those jalapeno and cheese, sausage kolaches. For here.”

  Her eyebrows raised as she asked, “Here?”

  “Yeah.”

  She stared at me solemnly, then took out two plastic trays and piled my order on them. I began eating while she rang it up at the register. The total was thirty-six bucks, so I ordered a drink with it and realized that Orange Crush suddenly sounded like nectar from the Gods. I sat down at a cheap table with my eyes fixed on the entrance and ate it all like a dog who was afraid that his chew toy might be ripped away from him at any moment. If someone had been ballsy enough to reach down towards me, I fear I might have bitten them.

  I ate the donuts too fast to really appreciate any of the flavors, but my first bite of kolache was transcendent. I had a vague thought of Humphrey as I tore through the casing of the sausage, but as soon as the moist meat hit my taste buds I was lost in rapture. Why had I deprived myself of this for so long?

  I felt satiated and vaguely guilty a few minutes later as I rose from the table. The girl behind the counter stared at me almost fearfully, and as I waved goodbye she shook her head, her eyes conveying that she witnessed some great, unspeakable violence.

  Whatever.

  As I cranked my truck, I felt the rush of adrenaline that had fueled my food massacre quickly ebbing. I yawned and wondered if I was headed toward a diabetic coma. As I drove back home I struggled to maintain consciousness and twice swerved onto the curb. I pulled past the mansion, down my narrow driveway, and almost drove into the swimming pool. I stumbled into the pool house and fell into a heap on the bed. Sleep took me.

  Once upon a time I could take anything, anything.

  Always stepped in time, regardless of the beat.

  I moved my feet, I carried weight.

  What I could not do, I faked.

  I dug seeking treasure

  Just to wake up in an early grave.

  So I stopped right there and said:

  Go on alone, ‘cause I won’t follow.

  This isn’t giving up, no this is letting go.

  Out with the old dreams I’ve borrowed.

  The path I carve from here on out will be my own.

  The path will be my own.

  —Rise Against

  5.

  Constipation and the Psychic Mind

  When I awoke it was dark outside and I realized I was seated in front of my computer monitor. The website was blackdeath.com and there was a picture of a bundle of garlic and the following article:

  Garlic—Toxic And A Brain Synchronization Destroyer

  Reiki Empowerment Seminars

  4-30-7

  I have been telling people this for years, all you need is a ECG of the brain to see the truth .. it totally desynchronizes the brain and cause us to loose our psychic mind . . . yes our psychic mind, we are Human not slaves to the race of beings that control us . . . this doesn’t mean much to most . . .

  Garlic is not only repulsive to any one that eats it for hours . . . but it makes us stupid slow and simple . . . this is hard for most people to grasp, do the ECG and do the experiment yourselves . . . read this article on this and you will be amazed it does clean the blood but it also destroys the total mind synchronization of the two hemispheres .. I was heart broken, when I heard of this because I love the smell of garlic and onions . . . but oh well . . . once you find out they are a neuro poison then it makes al the sense in the world when you eat it . . . what happens to you ! . . . you smell awful and are totally repulsed by others . most are generally being nice not to tell you . . . YOU STINK .. stay your distance !

  it is also the best organic insect killer, too, is there a reason why no bug will eat garlic or any of the onion family . . . because it kills them.

  The reason garlic is so toxic, the sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates the blood brain barrier, just like DMSO, and is a specific poison for higher life forms and brain cells. We discovered this much to our horror, when I was the world’s largest manufacturer of ethical EEG biofeedback equipment. We’d have people come back from lunch that looked clinically dead on the encephalograph, which we used to calibrate their progress. “Well, what happened?” “ Well, I went to an Italian restaurant and there was some garlic in my salad dressing!”

  So we had ‘em sign things that they won’t touch garlic before classes or we were wasting their time, and money and my time. I guess those of you who are pilots or have been in flight tests . . . I was in flight test engineering in Doc Hallan’s group in the 1950’s. The flight surgeon would come around every month and remind all of us: “Don’t you dare touch any garlic 72 hours before you fly one of our airplanes, because it’ll double or triple your reaction time. You’re three times slower than you would be if you’d [not] had a few drops of garlic.”

  Well, we didn’t know why for 20 years later, until I owned the Alpha-Metrics Corporation. We were building biofeedback equipment and found out that garlic totally desynchronizes your brain waves. So I funded a study at Stanford and, sure enough, they found that it’s a poison. You can rub a clove of garlic on your foot - on the sole of your foot - and you can smell it shortly later on your wrists. So it penetrates the body. This is why DMSO smells a lot like garlic: that sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates all the barriers including the corpus callosum in the brain. Any of you who are organic gardeners know that if you don’t want to use DDT, garlic will kill anything in the way of insects. Now, most people have heard most of their lives that garlic is good for you, and we put those people in the same class of ignorance as the mothers who at the turn of the century would buy morphine sulphate in the drugstore and give it to their babies to put ‘em to sleep. If you have any patients who have low-grade headaches or attention deficit [disorder], they can’t quite focus on the computer in the afternoon, just do an experiment - you owe it to yourselves. Take those people off garlic and see how much better they get, very,very shortly. And then let them eat a little garlic after about three weeks. They’ll say: “My God, I had no idea that this was the cause of our problems.” And this includes the de-skunked garlic’s, Kyolic, some of the other products. Very unpopular, but I’ve got to tell you the truth. (Source: From a lecture by Dr Robert [Bob] C. Beck, DSc., given at the Whole Life Expo, Seattle, WA, USA, in March 1996)

  Bob Beck also found in his research on human brain function in the 1980’s that garlic has a detrimental effect on the brain and researching this further he learned that many yoga groups and philosophical teachings caution against the use of garlic and onions as they are known to interfere with meditation practices. Some aware individuals have actually described themselves as experiencing brain fog after having garlic.

  Garlic is toxic to humans because its sulphone hydroxyl ions penetrate the blood-brain barrier and are poisonous to brain cells.(1) For precisely the same reason the garlic family of plants has been widely recognized as being harmful to dogs.(2)

  As far back as the 1950s it was known that garlic reduced reaction time by two to three times when consumed by pilots taking flight tests. This is because the toxic effects of garlic desynchronize brain waves.

  The Taoists realized thousands of years ago that plants of the alliaceous family were detrimental to humans.(3) They labeled this group of plants—onions, garlic, leeks, chives and spring onions—the ‘five spicy-scented plants.’ They noticed that onions are harmful to the lungs, garlic to the heart, leeks to the spleen, chives to the liver and spring onions to the kidneys. Hindus also avoid this group, which they have called the ‘five pungent plants.’(4) As well as producing offensive breath and body odour, these plants induce aggravation, agitation, anxiety and aggression. Thus they are harmful physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

  Even when gar
lic is used as food in Chinese culture it is considered harmful to the stomach, liver and eyes, and a cause of dizziness and scattered energy when consumed in immoderate amounts.(5) Nor is garlic always seen as having entirely beneficial properties in Western cooking and medicine. It is widely accepted among health care professionals that, as well as killing harmful bacteria, garlic also destroys beneficial bacteria,(6) which are essential to the proper functioning of the digestive system. Furthermore, Ken Bergeron, in Professional Vegetarian Cooking, p. 16, writes: “garlic in the raw state can carry harmful (potentially fatal) botulism bacteria.” Perhaps it is with an awareness of this that the Roman poet Horace wrote of garlic that it is “more harmful than hemlock.”(7)

  In the practice of Reiki, we have noticed that garlic and onions are some of the first toxic substances that are expelled from a person’s system—along with tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical medications. This makes it apparent that alliaceous plants have a negative effect on the human body and should be avoided for health reasons. Homeopathic medicine comes to the same conclusion when it recognizes that red onion produces a dry cough, watery eyes, sneezing, runny nose and other familiar cold-related symptoms when consumed.

  —https://rense.com/general76/Dpi.htm

  I quickly read the article twice and shook my head with disbelief. I remembered falling asleep, but nothing afterwards. At some point I had obviously gotten out of bed, gone to the computer, and found the article. I didn’t recognize Drew Williams or blackdeath.com. A quick scan of the website revealed several other articles which held controversial viewpoints such as: Hitler Was Wrongish, Detoxing with Drew, and You Dagon Right. The website was obviously a culmination of some of the most blatant bullshit ever posted on the internet, but obviously my subconscious mind was trying to tell me something or I wouldn’t have been sleep reading it.

  Bingo, buster.

  Bingo, buster? Why had I thought that? It wasn’t a turn of phrase I’d ever use and the inner voice . . . it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t even a voice I’d ever heard, though it was strangely familiar. It kind of sounded like Robin Williams doing an imitation of Edward G. Robinson, but a pitch higher. It was like three or four different accents were fighting for supremacy and ultimately drowned one another out.