It is often said that one half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. I had no idea that this was true of brains as well. I have long been aware that there is a part of my brain that does the hidden work of creating characters and so forth. What I hadn’t realized is that this bit of my brain has such different tastes and interests as to verge on being the Other Half.
What has the Other Half been doing to spark these wild surmises, you wonder. Playing chess? Concocting recipes for a new and improved pain au chocolat? Alas, no. What I caught the other half of my brain doing, shortly before I woke this morning, was writing a country song.
I can’t remember all of it, but it started by talking (or rather singing) about “senior year” – a pair of high school sweethearts worrying that they’ll end up getting married in the high school gymnasium.
The next verse spoke of their desire to run away and get married somewhere else, out in the big wide world – possibly North Carolina? Furthermore, they intended to “steal a car marked His and a car marked Hers” – for the wedding, naturally.
I am not entirely familiar with the vehicular tastes of the good people of North Carolina, but this seems to me to be leaving rather too much of the wedding planning to luck (not to mention the unpleasantness associated with spending one’s honeymoon in chokey for grand theft auto).
But in the end the song fell back to reality, with the refrain (haunting, as refrains so often are), “What are we doing here?“
Not that that was the question I found myself asking when I awoke. No, what I wanted to know was how the Other Half of my brain had even formed a taste for country music, let alone started writing the stuff. And what did it think it was doing, working on that kind of thing when I still had plot problems to solve?
But perhaps I must accept that the Other Half, like the Smell of Foul Ole Ron, has in some measure a life of its own – and apparently that life involves giving voice to the woes and romantic yearnings of small-town American teenagers (rolls eyes). Truly, one half does not know how the other half lives.
Have you ever watched the NZ police/detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries? It features a police detective who loves country music, and is forever playing it in his car as he drives through the local rural landscapes. This has virtually nothing to do with your subject, apart from the randomness of country music’s ability to turn up unexpectedly.
Alas, I have not, though the DVD is currently on my library list.
A question to ponder: did the Spanish Inquisition like country music, given their commonality of being unexpected?