NONFICTION  - 
      With the Theme of Choices

"when a song gets stuck in your head and repeats ad nauseum"
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                  Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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Should I Stay, or
Should I Go Now?  
by  Mickey Eliason

​I need to tell you right now that I’m prone to earworms. You know, when a song, or more often, just one line of a song gets stuck in your head and repeats ad nauseum until you want to scream. I’ve been that way for decades, and it used to be mostly catchy tunes or phrases with the occasional truly offensive song sticking for days. If you are as old as I am, you may remember this sexist gem that to this day often plagues me: “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife. Get an ugly girl to marry you.”
 
Other common earworms were “it’s gunna take an ocean of Calamine lotion,” “where the deer and the antelope play,” and “En-ery the eighth I am I am.” So mostly old songs from my childhood, with some newer songs thrown in for a variety. A frequent offender is Walk Like an Egyptian. I only know that title line, which is very frustrating. If you know more of the words, sometimes you can sing your way out of an earworm, but not this one.
 
While I was experiencing a lot of conflict and stress at work ten years ago, Sia’s angst-ridden tune, “I’m going to swing from the chandelier, the chan-de-LI-EER” would wake me up at night in an adrenaline rush of anxiety. I often contemplated following the advice of another line of the song, “one, two, three, one, two, three, drink.”
 
In the past three years, a few mysterious events in my life altered the course of my earworm affliction. Now the songs that get stuck have lyrics that seem to hint at the answer to whatever dilemma is facing me. The feeling that accompanies these earworms is not as much annoyance about the stuck song, but a conviction that the song carries an important message. Sometimes the meaning is obvious, other times it takes me days to figure out what it means. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” started to appear regularly along with a few other songs.

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​While I was writing about a relationship loss that I’ve never gotten over and was pondering why I’m so stuck, Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” played over and over on the radio and in my head. “I’ve been afraid of changing cuz I built my life around you,” seemed to be the biggest lesson, but the whole song matched my melancholic mood as I wrote about unexpressed pent-up grief. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s rendition of a Lucinda Williams song played relentlessly: “I’ve got a big chain around my neck, I’m broken down like a train wreck. It’s over, I know it, but I can’t let go.” Duh, this isn’t rocket science.
 
Some songs took longer to figure out, like REM’s “Losing My Religion.” The lines “like a hurt, lost and blinded fool” and “that was just a dream” bounced around in my head until I realized that I was blaming a third person for the loss of the relationship and my resentment towards her was like a dogmatic religion, like wanting a vengeful god to smite her for the ways she wronged me. I knew I had to give up this religion and forgive her.
 
But one song stands out from all the rest, both in the frequency at which it appears in my head and on the radio in the car, really the only time I listen to music. The Clash’s punk rock anthem, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” This is really about choice, right? It can apply to so many situations. Should I leave an intimate relationship, stay in an unfulfilling job, retire now or work another year, take that dream vacation or save money for a rainy day? It points out that there is generally no easy path: “if I go there will be trouble, if I stay it will be double.” It also suggests that doubt and uncertainty are uncomfortable: “indecision’s bugging me,” and “don’t know which clothes even fit me.”
 
Some decisions are of the everyday variety, but even then we can get mired in indecision: leave this disappointing movie or stick it out; grit your teeth and finish the boring book or stop reading and always wonder if it got better; wash the dishes or take a nap. The song implies a simple answer: cool it or blow, stay or go. Lately I’ve been considering moving, so the song has been on a daily mental playlist. I think I’ve made up my mind, but then I second-guess myself and start over with pros and cons lists. I can’t seem to access my intuition. Maybe the stuck song is physically located in my guts, thus blocking intuition.
 

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​The discomfort of being in uncertainty and not knowing which decision is right is causing more distress lately. A few nights ago, I woke up in my usual fit of insomnia at 3 AM with a song ringing in my ears. As my head cleared to some level of alertness, I recognized it as a 1980s song by a group called Scandal: “Shooting at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am the warrior.”
 
I opened my eyes and contemplated the meaning. I had finished another draft of the memoir about the lost relationship and I’ve been doing a lot of hard inner work. Yes, dammit, I am a warrior! This was confirmation of my bad-assery. Then I sat up, thinking I might as well go to the bathroom before trying to return to sleep. But I was distracted by a sudden shift in the mental playlist. Now the song that was stuck was saying “Shooting at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am the walrus. Coo coo ca-choo.”
 
Crap, this was creepy. The Beatle’s song has a lot of icky imagery and truly weird lyrics . . .  “sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come,” “crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess,” “elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna.”
 
What am I to make of this turn of events? Was I deceiving myself and being too self-congratulatory about my progress toward wisdom? Maybe I’m not a warrior at all, but an obscene sea creature who spouts gibberish. I was up for another hour furiously writing in my journal, trying to make meaning of this earworm mashup.
 
The next morning, after finally getting a few hours of solid sleep, the answer came to me. Don’t listen to the nonsense your mind makes up at three in the morning. But later that day, the Stay or Go earworm returned, and another lesson came to me. I had a choice. Am I using the time I have left to me wisely? Should I stay with the insane rantings of my anxious mind, or choose to go, that is, let go? In another twist of fate, a quote from Pema Chodron appeared in my Facebook feed that afternoon. “We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same.” I can avoid this anxious overanalyzing and wait for my heart to tell me the answer. I don’t have to be a crabalocker fishwife. It’s a choice.

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​Mickey Eliason is a recently retired faculty member from San Francisco State University with a background in nursing, psychology, and public health. She harkens originally from Iowa and spent twenty-five years on faculty at the University of Iowa. She was propelled to San Francisco in 2005 by a midlife crisis, and transitioned from land-locked stoic midwestern to California beach bum. After a lifetime of academic writing, she is experimenting with different writing genres, but mostly with creative nonfiction. She has self-published two volumes of humor writing: a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual outlining unique lesbian pathologies (The Dyke Dykignostic Manual) and short stories written recently (Pandemic Procrastination and Ponderings). Both are available on Amazon.

Other works in this issue:
Nonfiction:
​What Did She Just Say ? ? ?

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