Archives for "Irrational Fears"

'We regret NOTHING!'

You know the noise of a jammed car horn at a crash scene?

Only a noise so annoying that it takes every ounce of strength to not wind down your window and yell at the ambos ‘can you PLEASE just stop that fucking horn! If you want, I’ll drive my own car hard into the flaming wreckage to try and dislodge it.’

Inappropriate? Possibly. Callous? Certainly not. For if I was trapped in my own fiery auto wreck, I would rather slip away into unconsciousness, or die immediately, than keep listening to that god-awful noise.

One of my greatest fears involves being the victim in a similar scenario but instead of a broken horn, my car radio is stuck at full volume on either a classic hits or easy listening radio station.

As paramedics frantically clamp my severed arteries, a single working car speaker belts out:

♫ Marconi plays the Mamba,
Listen to the radio
Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll! ♫

I try to give my rescuers a knowing wink, ‘ha! can you believe this song, what were they thinking?’, but I don’t seem to have eyelids any more. As I slip into death, the last thing I hear is:

Paramedic 1: What the fuck does ‘Marconi plays the mamba’ mean?
Paramedic 2: They must have thought ‘mamba’ was an African drum or a musical style or something, stupid degenerate cokeheads.
Radio: ♫ Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight, too many runaways eating up the night… ♫
Paramedic 1: I don’t get even the slightest ironic pleasure from this trash.
Paramedic 2: You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I kind of hope this douche doesn’t make it.
Radio: ♫ Who counts the money, underneath the bar, who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars… ♫

Fade to black.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, my fear has a second part, post mortem.

In a bizarre twist of bureaucratic lunacy, crash scene investigators are now required to include, if known, the ‘song at time of death’ in their reports.

As my death is the first official instance of this new policy in action, it makes national headlines. Man, I bet you feel stupid now for thinking your irrational fears were bad.

Here’s my top 5 ‘dream team’ of shameful guilty pleasure songs:

1. We built this city – Starship, as discussed
2. More than a feeling – Boston
3. The final countdown – Europe
4. I want to know what love is – Foreigner
5. I think we’re alone now – Tiffany

You might be thinking that what I’m really doing here, in a rather labourious and convoluted way, is nothing more than repackaging this old chestnut, only in the negative sense: ‘what song would you want at your funeral?’

And you would be right.

However, I’m not about to attempt a list of songs I would most want to represent me. Chances are I haven’t even heard them yet, and the whole thing is so fraught with pitfalls. You don’t want something too indy (‘wanker!’) or too mainstream (‘boring!’), or too 90s (‘move on!’), etc.

Conclusion

My fear is very Hitchcockian. Just as so many of his leading men were wrongly accused of crimes they didn’t commit, I am terrified of being similarly misrepresented, and being powerless to do anything about it.