Earworm

A few months back I was afflicted by an earworm.

Well, afflicted is a bit melodramatic, but over a period of weeks the damn thing just wouldn’t quit.

Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer, but something I have learned over the years that an earworm that persistent is more than a simple irritant and most likely my subconscious messing with the radio dial looking to get my attention.

The tune in question was an old Morphine track. Back in my twenties a friend introduced me to the album Good, and I loved it. I saw the band play once at the Powerstation in Auckland. It was the first time I’d seen someone doubling on sax, and as a fairly basic student struggling to wrest a decent tone from just one of those instruments, that blew me away.

As the band name would suggest, Morphine had a grimy sound born of extended study in the use of the sponsor’s product. I’ve never gotten into opiates, but something in the hypnotic rhythms of their sound has always resonated for me.

I spent a little while parsing the lyrics of the tune and got stuck on the overt theme of addiction. In the covid times, I – like a great many people – practiced medication by alcohol. It’d certainly make sense if my better parts were reaching out with a warning to dial it back, but the earworm was not appeased by the small efforts I made there. Presumably there was more.

I went back to trying to ignore it, and it followed me around like a persistent house pet.

Through the Covid years, I was riled beyond measure, and yet I couldn’t look away from the conflict. Every day I was immersed in the internet, reading contrarian medical opinion, arguing with strangers on blog sites. Friends urged me to give it a rest for a bit since it was so clearly disrupting any peace of mind I might once have possessed. But somehow I just couldn’t.

And therein I found the message:

“my biggest fear; is if I let you go;

you’ll come and get me in my sleep”

This wasn’t a caution against addiction – as originally written I expect – but a remarkably tight precis of my inner struggle. Every day the outside world exhorted me to set aside my inner convictions and to join – in my world it felt more like submit to – their world view.

To mask, to distance, to get jabbed, to avail myself of a jab “passport”. To abandon those Doubting Thomas holdouts practicing first-principles thinking and demanding concrete evidence. To forsake my genuine tribe and to join the masses.

To become a Replicant.

And with that message duly delivered and received by my conscious, the earworm was promptly gone.