mahiwaga

Life is definitely different when you are rotating through a pediatrics service.

So I was listening to “kid a” on the way home from work today, and I thought about how the opening measures sort of resemble the music a demented child’s mobile would sound like, or perhaps an evil ice cream truck.

The first thing came to mind was to use the song as a soundtrack for a scene where a baby is delivered after a really hard and long labor. Maybe the mother has even died. And the baby isn’t doing too well either. The neonatalogists are doing their routine things quickly, trying to hurry up so that they can get the baby to the NICU. (The sensation of hurrying is carried by the bass rhythm of the song.) The baby isn’t moving all that well, and is starting to turn blue. The neonatalogists have to intervene at a frenetic pace. Perhaps they are <p>bagging the baby</p> , or maybe even intubating. IVs are started, medicines are injected, electrodes are placed for monitoring. (There is an interlude in the song that sounds like hospital monitors beeping.) The baby is stabilized, the heart is still beating and the baby is still warm, but is not breathing on his/her own. They rush the baby to the NICU. Eventually they decide to call a code and the crash cart is pulled out. And at the end of it all, the baby starts breathing, and cries.

How melodramatic and somewhat depressing, huh?

The other thing I thought about is that the song might describe how an obstetrician or neonatalogist might feel during a delivery in the case when he/she is low on sleep, and have perhaps accidentally (or perhaps purposefully) ingested a psychotropic substance, and is trying to do a delivery.

Makes you have great confidence in health care professionals, huh?

razor sharp edges
slashed open
scar like the coastline of california
tattered shreds of skin
in the region where the heart beats
slip a knife right here, right here
you won’t feel a goddamn thing

mashed and oozing
everything crushed and crumpled
mixed and rearranged
the music of metal upon metal
the screeching and then the burning
explosive symphony of shattered glass
the bending of steel
eyes wide open
gashed and bloody windows to the soul

do you feel me tremble?
numb and cold
stomach churning
sewing it all up like some dirty rag
i picked off the street
sopped with blood
garish red, like the lipstick on a whore

the wound will never heal

in and out, like so much refuse
worlds end in this sterile, tiny room
i am atropos, snipping the fine polymer threads
tossing it all into the red bag with the biohazard markings
warning: contaminated

it is an illusion really
to think that the blood doesn’t touch you
that the screams don’t pierce your heart
death is never easy
whether it is the death rattle of the man in the car crash
or whether it is evaporation of your own immortal soul

After a couple of years of searching, I finally figured it out. (Thank you, Google. God only know why I didn’t think of it before.)

So there was this song that they played on the now-defunct Energy 92.7&5 in Chicago (which, remarkably, has the same format as the San Francisco Bay Area station The Party 92.7. I can’t seem to find an official website for it, though.) This was in, I think 2000 or maybe 2001, entitled “Sunchyme” by Dario G, which is a sample with the repeated lyrics of “Oh heyo, ma, ma, ma. Oh heyo, ma, ma, he-e-e-e-yo.”

Earlier this summer, I heard the original song from which this sample was culled, only I didn’t catch the lyrics, and was therefore unable to search Google for it.

But, at last. Dream Academy “Life in a Northern Town”. [lyrics]

(Another link I found on my Google travels: Bay Area Radio on blogspot.com. Seems like they stopped posting in April, though.)

I see what’s happening here. They did it to Jesus, and now they’re doing it to me. — Homer J Simpson

You can run, but you can’t glide! — Homer J Simpson

Ooh, I am truly screwed — Apu Nahasapeemapetilon

If this gets out, the next words you say will be muffled by your own butt! — Moe Szyslak