Brown River Queen cover art

Sunday, February 17, 2013

This is Your Brain on Benadryl

Brain chemistry is a tricky bag of worms.

Or is it cat of bags?

You see my problem today.

Many people must resort to LSD or mushrooms or a quart jar of mecsaline to achieve what clinicians term an altered state of consciousness.

All I need to do is swallow a single Benadryl.  Which is what I did, early this morning, in a desperate attempt to rid myself of the concrete which somehow found its way into my overly large and pointlessly aggravating nasal passages.

The Benadryl worked. I can now breathe, but I cannot think. Honest. I have the attention span of a pole-axed gnat, and I keep having to look back at what I've typed because I keep re-typing portions of the same sentence.

In short, I've been rendered temporarily idiotic.

Hey, I see you out there, you with that 'Why is that different from any other day?' grin. Grin. Other day.

What was I saying? Something about cats?

Sunday is a bad day for me to drop 200 IQ points. I always do my blog entries on Sunday. This is the last day to check the ARC of BROWN RIVER QUEEN over for errors. I need to work on my writing class material for Thursday evening.

I still have to do all these things, but now I have to do them while commanding the mental acuity of a shoe.

I decided to finish my blog entry first. I correctly surmised I'm in no shape to write, so I decided to make another short stop motion movie instead. That's mostly physical, and extremely repetitive, so I thought I could handle it.

Wrong. I checked the camera, found it needed fresh batteries. Went downstairs to get the fresh set out of the charger. Forgot the dead batteries. Came back upstairs, got the dead batteries, left the good ones down there. Back downstairs, forgot camera. Back upstairs, have camera, good batteries forgotten again. Charged back downstairs to load good batteries in camera. Left camera upstairs. Went back upstairs. Missing one battery. Came back down. Found missing battery. Forgot camera.

All I needed was the Benny Hill chase music in the background.

Undaunted, I tried to compose a story for my hapless stop-motion skeleton. Wound up with a hopeless mishmash of disjointed and unfilmable scenes involving a mailbox in a tree and a sack of bone meal. While toying with the skeleton, his head fell off, probably in protest at the doomed film project's story line.

Nix that idea. I'd probably still be chasing batteries across the entire property. Or I'd get stuck in the tree and require a rescue from the Lafayette County Sheriff's Office.

Next, I settled on the idea of blogging about something mysterious and creepy. That's not a bad idea, really, but it needs refinement, i.e., a specific instance of mysterious and creepy.

Okay, so, um, Bigfoot. Hairy dude, nine feet tall, camera shy.

That's all I've got.

Ghosts? Right! I've got a lot to say about ghosts. They're insubstantial, filmy, and share Bigfoot's reluctance to be photographed. Boo?

EVPs! I'm loaded with EVP recording gear. I fired up a white noise generator and conducted an EVP session right here at my desk, hoping for something -- anything -- anomalous to happen, because frankly I'm exhausted from chasing cameras and batteries up and down the stairs.

The spirits, as usual, showed no mercy. I did record a faint disembodied yawn, followed quickly by a ghostly voice saying 'Change the bleeding channel, he's really off his game today,' but otherwise, just white noise. Oh, and in the process of recording, I somehow bit the end off a black magic marker, so now I resemble an overfed Marilyn Manson after a bad blond dye job.

Is any of this breaking exciting new ground in the realm of paranormal investigation?

Yeesh. Not really.

In closing, let me assure you I'll be back in fine fettle next week, because I might clear my sinuses with modest amounts of gunpowder or a masonry bit on my hammer drill, but I will NOT take another Benadryl on a Sunday.

And now, without further ado, Frank Tuttle and the Seven Dog Choir present Beethoven's Ode To Joy, arranged for canine and primate:

Ode to Joy by the Seven Dog Choir

Finis.