Nuthouse

Welcome to where time stands still
No one leaves and no one will.

I was working late tonight(again), when my former cubicle-neighbor came by to get printouts. Into the tranquil silence of the office she cast out a comment: “Hccch! I see all tha' other nuts're workin' late t'night as usual!” There was more silence before I and the tech-guy nearby installing something on one of my neighbor's computers turned and gave her our best “Excuse me?” looks before shaking our heads. She laughed, taking it as assent, and as she departed I told her I preferred the term “phantom”.

Dream the same thing every night
I see our freedom in my sight

I was exhausted and fighting a cold, my nose running like a faucet all day, my nostrils raw from repeated blottings. I've worked too late to get down to the gym for two days now. I sure wasn't going to miss last night's Lost(and by the way, WHOA!), and tonight I wanted to get home for the long-awaited return of Tru Calling. As the clock neared seven, I had a choice to make. Keep working and skip the gym for the third day in a row, or break free and get in some much-needed exercise before heading home.

They keep me locked up in this cage
Can't they see it's why my brain says “rage”

It was good to run again, literally clearing my head as my heart pumped faster. There's only so long a body can sit at a desk before the fog settles in like a shroud. So caught up was I in the joy of motion that I lost track of time. I had ten minutes to get home when I left the parking lot finally, and my commute has never been accomplished in less than 25 minutes.

Build my fear of what's out there
Cannot breathe the open air
Whisper things into my brain
Assuring me that I'm insane.

There have been 2 or 3 thankfully brief moments when my dizzy spells while driving have resurfaced in the last week or so. I've all but forgotten the problem, and having a lot on my mind kept me from dwelling and reinforcing a problem I can only suspect was fueled by stress or anxiety. I was sailing home as I always did, listening to music and thinking about girls, and work, and life, and geek pop culture, a unique MCF stream-of-consciousness often imitated, rarely duplicated. I was two minutes from home when the KRock D.J., talking over a significant portion of a song's guitar intro, caught my attention. It wasn't the goofy banter with the caller that made me slow down, and I in fact cannot recall what nonsense he was spewing. It's more and more common for D.J.s to talk over songs and make more “use” of their airtime. It's a lot like how sitcoms and other shows now splitscreen during credits so they can run coming attractions or commercials for other shows. I can't remember the last time a show ended fullscreen with a montage of chronological stills from the episode I'd just watched. As a kid I used to play a game with it, and try to guess how close to the end of the episode the last still would be. “I bet they show the last hilarious thing ARNOLD did...”

They think our heads are in their hands
But violent use brings violent plans
Keep him tied, it makes him well
He's getting better, can't you tell?

I remember when this band was GOOD, and the guitar solo the idiot was talking over brought me back to better days. I hoped he would stop talking and that they would actually play the song, and I was actually driving slower so I'd get to hear some of it, even though it meant missing more than I already had of Tru Calling. He stopped talking just shy of the part where the vocals come in, so I did get a bit of a treat tonight. It's good I left my nuthouse when I did.

No more can they keep us in
Listen, damn it, we will win.

In conclusion, I learned three things tonight:

1) If a person at work refers to an individual as one of the “other nuts,” that individual has definitely stayed at his desk too long.

2) Alan Thicke of Growing Pains wrote and SANG the theme to Diff'rent Strokes.

3) As usual, FOX has cut down another great show without giving it a chance. The two episodes that aired tonight, especially the second one, make me sad that we'll never see where Tru Calling might have gone.