Well ladies and gentlemen, as I sit here this morning on Saturday, September 5th, pounding out another dispatch to the internet while I patiently wait for the canine contingent of the organization to breach the gates of the Blogatorium with demands placed on me, the Blogatoriumist, to take her for a walk and capture her colonic extrusions in a gray, plastic baggie, I find myself scrolling through the notes application on my smart phone looking for the tidbits of brilliance I’ve captured in the last few weeks that I can exploit for all they’re worth in yet another unexpurgated foray into the written word.

Man alive, talk about waiting for stuff to happen with a baggie in hand.

I’ve recently become more cognizant of the relationships between various activities and the neural pathways they create.

You know how many times I had to type that word before I got the clue that that ‘e’ comes before the ‘u’?  It’s pretty tricky when you learned to spell by sounding things out.

Thanks fonix.

Back to the nEural pathways, a pretty good example is having a TV in the bedroom.  If you turn the TV on when you’re going to bed and generally fall asleep watching syndicated reruns of Fonzie jumping a shark, or your ship’s physician Dr. Bricker hitting on anything in a skirt,…..  

Okay, cheese it.  The dog just showed up.

False alarm.  She seems to be sleep walking.  She’ll be back in about 30 minutes.

So generally speaking, if….

She’s back.

She’s obviously still a little bleary eyed and stupid, and is still trying to recover from the Amazon-sourced sedative I gave her yesterday in light of the thunderstorm.

If you can’t go to sleep without the TV being on, you’ve created a neural pathway between those two activities.

There are plenty of other examples I could list, however at this time, my ability to belt this one out while the ideas are still fresh in mind is limited to the dog’s current ability to clear the mental fog and execute her daily itinerary; of which I’m a featured player.

Just to complete the background, last year I moved the TV out of the bedroom and into the Blogatorium.  I’m sleeping better as a result. 

There have been a couple of times since March when I began working at home that I pondered doing my daily work for the financial services industry in the bedroom.  I immediately ruled that notion out because I want to maintain the neural pathway that the bedroom should just be associated with bedroom activities (sleeping, dressing, racquetball, etc.), and not the goings-on in the mutual fund industry.

Okay, I’m back from walking the dog.  Sooner or later, I’m going to get a shirt to wear specifically when I walk her.  On the back, it will say “In Tow”. 

Earlier this week, I went to the dentist in order to get one my molars (the dentist called it “Number 31”) prepared for a crown.

Now I’ve had this done before.  Even though the whole area has been treated with a barrage of Novocain to remove any pain and inhibit my ability to drink from a cup for the next four hours, the experience is up there with a rectal exam conducted by Mohammed Ali when rating it for pleasantry.

The thought had crossed my mind to pop in the ear buds and listen to some music while a dental Dremel is used to reshape Number 31 into an unrecognizable shadow of itself.  The problem there is that if the procedure should become more unpleasanter than it already is, I could easily associate some of my favorite songs with a bunch of grinding, poking, prodding, high pitched drill noises, water jets, water vacuums, and a sporadically clenched orifice or two.

I didn’t want to do that, so I decided just to gut it out and not try to distract myself from the experience.

Fortunately, the dentist office had music going.  It generally featured the top 40 hits from the early and mid-80’s salted with more recent fiascos.  There’s a reason none of the crap I heard that day appears in my library.  As such, there was no danger of any potential associations being made as the dentist revved up the drill.

And so it began.

There was grinding and excavating.

There was a high pitched whining sound.

There was enough noise going on in my head that I couldn’t even hear the office sound system.  It’s safe to assume using ear buds wouldn’t have been very productive.

The doctor stopped to inspect his work and the external audible events became more pronounced.  The song playing overhead is sung by one of those over-hyped types who maintains relevance not by the quality of their singing, but by the stupid ass things they say and do in order to be provocative.

“Come on doc,” I said.  “Let’s get that grinder fired back up so I don’t have to listen to this crap.”

The aggressive dental work resumed and the dental noise gave me a respite from the really bad noise.

More grinding.

More drilling.

By the time the phase 2 excavation stopped, another song was playing.

Granted, this song wasn’t being played by the same over-hyped type who maintains relevance not by the quality of their singing, but by the stupid ass things they say and do in order to be provocative.  Instead, it was a song which littered the airwaves in the early 80’s sung by another over-hyped type who maintains relevance not by the quality of their singing, but by the stupid ass things they say and do in order to be provocative.  Furthermore, it’s safe to assume that “artist” from the over 30 years ago is the one that inspired the other “artist” who’s a little more current, yet just as bad.

Once the crown preparations grinded to a halt, the dentist turned things over to the assistant who was then charged with fitting me for a temporary crown.

Ladies and gentlemen, as I’ve told you before, I shit thee not.  As different crowns were placed on my newly formed nub (FKA Number 31) and I was told to bite down to insure a good fit, the song “Another One Bites The Dust” played overhead.

But that’s just an exercise in irony (or ironing, take your pick) and co-inky-dinkery. 

The real takeaway is this.

On that Monday evening, without even trying, or setting out to do so, I successfully altered the neural pathways in my skull and associated really lousy music with an unpleasant dental experience.

I think my work here is done.