punchless

I woke up strangely today. The alarm was set to wake me up with music at 9:30, and I awoke about that time, due to some combination of classic rock and direct sunlight. My first thought was that all my hair had somehow turned completely white overnight. A nightmare I could not remember had sucked all of the color right out. Maybe a really loud noise had frightened me awake so thoroughly that the shock both uncolored my hair and put me right back to sleep with no memory. All this I thought without even opening my eyes. I just knew it, just knew, with my face still mashed into the pillow, that something had changed. My scalp tingled. Red and orange shapes danced where the sun was jabbing at my eyelids. Would my hair be grey, white, or some kind of clear? I thought about this for a couple of minutes without moving, without breathing even. Something had changed last night, I knew it.

After a few minutes of that, I woke up more fully and considered the music blaring from by bedside table. "Welcome to the Machine" sounded terrible. It was a little early in the day for that kind of thing, but normally a little Pink Floyd sounds great pressed through a tinny little speaker. Today, though, it was making me feel a little ill. How could they afford to play ten in a row if one was a monster track like this? I wanted to roll over and turn it off, spin the dial, anything. Instead, I lay still, breathing as softly as possible. Maybe if I pretended to be dead, it would go away. Eventually it did. Next came the Pretenders. I was shocked they hadn't gone directly to commercial. "Middle of the Road" sounded awful too. Something _must_ have gone horribly wrong last night; I no longer liked classic rock. My steady diet of low-fi amateurish indie pop had finally leached album-oriented rock from my bones. Like osteoporosis, but with my southern Ohio, post-industrial, service industry roots instead of calcium. I got the Led out just the other day -- how could this happen?

I changed the channel. Everything sounded horrible. Casey Kasem introduced the nation's number one single for the third week in a row and I'd never heard it before. It was rotten. The Tejano music at the end of the dial sounded flat and limp. I went backwards, to the safety of the low end of the dial. Someone tried to sell me something, someone tried to tell me about Nicaragua, someone wanted me to come to the Lord. Nothing I found sounded good. I got up and took a shower. I shaved. My hair was its normal color.