Recently, I received a catalog from “The Vermont Country
Store.” Its products are an
excursion in nostalgia, and include everything from Old Spice soap-on-a-rope to
Midnight In Paris perfume. Ah, the
memories of the olfactory.
Coincidentally, I had just been watching a rerun of the
original “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” and was craving a Kress hot dog with
relish.
It was then that I noticed the headlines of the Tribune
proclaiming the news: Dracula was
dead! Christopher Lee, the actor
who portrayed the iconic figure of fear, was 93 at the time of his passing. (I thought he was much older.) Oh, that face, that fiend, those fangs…gone!
Lee had been knighted by Prince Charles at Buckingham
Palace, and became “Sir” Christopher Lee.
But titles be danged. He
will always be “Count” Dracula to me.
As the intricate iconic creature conjured from the stuff of
nightmares by Bram Stoker, the guy transformed coagulating blood clots into
full course meals, extracted from the jugulars of willowy but stupid blond
women. (He liked stupid brunettes,
too.)
This vampire would materialize from the misty woods all
spooky, incandescent, aerodynamic, and morph from biped to bat in the twinkling
of an eye, catapulting me into oxygen debt. His was a strange and palpable menace that unnerved me to
the core. After seeing “Horror of
Dracula,” I kept telling myself that this was preposterous , fictional nonsense,
but I could never quite shake the feeling I was being watched. (I, too, am blond, stupid and endowed
with fully-engorged corpuscles.) I
draped my windows with garlic left over from dinner to push down my unease, and
I filled my emergency first-aid kit with sharpened steak knives. (It was the closest thing to actual stakes
I could find.)
And there was never any comic relief in these Hammer
movies. Dracula was no Uncle
Fester. He was a graduate emeritus
from the School of the Disembodied. He was impulse without conscience.
His eyes were hollow with shadows
underneath. He’d pull back his
Mick Jagger lips and unsheathe incisors searching for high volume capillaries
for his nocturnal banquet. (He was
on a totally liquid diet.) His pointy fangs were self-correcting devices
concealed behind a pasty mouth, capable of puncturing a carotid artery with the
surgical skill of Nurse Ratchet.
The singular incriminating evidence of his presence were two puncture
wounds on the victim’s neck that only Dr. Van Helsing knew were not mosquito
bites, but the sinister ravages of a fiend bent on binge sucking from the
jugulars of the vacuously dull-witted.
This is all prelude to the ultimate question. With Dracula
down for the count comes this simple dilemma: Now, what have I to fear? It’s certainly not fear itself. Maybe I should go for delusional paranoia. That covers a
multitude of possibilities for dread and is also vocabularily impressive. Of
course, the up-coming presidential elections are enough to strike fear even in
the stout-hearted. What a
conundrum. Surely we’re not expected to live life undaunted, without
a single daunt. We must have
something to be afraid of.
I suppose we
all have moments when hiding under the covers is the only solution to a bad
case of “The Creeps.” I have times
when I wish I had a purely ornamental African war mask to hide behind. Then I get a glimpse of myself first
thing in the morning and realize…I do.
I no longer fret about alien abduction. That’s sooo last year. That phobia has since been replaced by
something more sinister, more ominous: my personal suspicion that our brains have become weakened by
too much intellectual inbreeding from today’s technology. Like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Now
there’s a reason for trepidation.
It has turned us into a nation of feeble minds, spongey cortexes, where
we only communicate in abbrs. and smiley faces. :)
In fact, I read recently that goldfish have a longer
attention span than most people:
Goldfish – 9 seconds;
Humans – 8. Wow! Bested by a set of gills and a pucker. I had rather hoped mankind was a little higher up on the
evolutionary scale. I stand
corrected.
Species evolve according to what they’re good at. I have always wanted to evolve into a
powerful mind, one with an attention span that might expand to 10 seconds…and
even beyond. I don’t need the
intellectual huskiness to break cinder blocks. But I would like to bend spoons with my mind. And I don’t want to rely on technology
to do it.
I want to generate wildly complicated concepts like abstract
reasoning, humor, logic, deduction and imagination, concentration, and mental
engineering. I want to be the
anti-Donald Trump.
I’d like to deliver a sermon like the Gettysburg Address or
Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Sadly, the closest I can get to Dr. King’s address is
“I. HAVE. INSOMNIA.” Doesn’t have the same ring.
It seems the brain actually needs to have sleep to have a
dream. Hmmmm. I always considered sleep an expendable
commodity. Whenever I had too much to do, I would simply go
to bed later and get up earlier. I
would out-run the sun. What could
possibly go wrong?
Apparently everything.
Insufficient sleep has side effects. I can bear witness. I suffer from wheezing levers and my
steam engine is out of steam. I
pant before I exert. Not good.
I just learned that bodies NEED sleep. When we sleep, our brain goes into
housekeeping mode, and cerebrospinal fluid mops away metabolic wastes that have
accumulated during the day.
It appears I
have been hoarding metabolic
wastes over the years. My head is
full of mental clutter; dust bunnies of the brain. I have a slovenly cranium.
Lack of sleep causes us to be unable to concentrate, grumpy
(oh, yeah!) accident prone, clumsy, forgetful…and I can’t remember what
else.
Toxic waste products collect in the brain (aka “brain poop”)
and this results in brain shrinkage.
Seriously, brain shrinkage???
(Although I must admit I often get lost in small thoughts…teeny, weeny
microscopic thoughts.)
The brain areas where cells are lost are the ones that
regulate decision-making, emotions, alertness, learning, attention, recall,
memory, and…I lost my train of thought.
This condition is known as BAD BRAINS IN GOOD PEOPLE.
I suffer from this affliction. I waddle through my day with the heavy inertia of the sleep
deprived, like I’ve been non-surgically lobotomized. I can’t seem to decide if I should stage my own intervention
and commit myself to an institution for the criminally geriatric, or write a
book of memoirs based on the decomposition of brain cells called “50 Shades of
Gray…Matter.”
Insomnia cannibalizes the brain. So does technology. Therefore, after 8 seconds of monumental
concentration, I’ve come up with a plan.
I have decided to get more sleep. And then I’m going to buy a goldfish
to gauge any improvement in mental acuity, and try to elevate my intellect to a
level of inspired befuddlement.
I’ll become a GEYSER OF JOYFUL ERUDITION!
I will up my torque ratio, whatever that is, and smother my
brain in muscle. I’m tired of midgety
synapses. No more brain flab. I’ll immerse myself in sleep, until I’m
neurologically ripped. I will
wither the world’s phrenologists with awe, and live out my life in tranquil
cognition.
I will reverse the ravages of Bad Brains
In Good People Syndrome, and when I’m done, I will bend not just spoons, but
all the steak knives I’ve been hoarding in my storage supply for emergency vampire
invasions.
But I must admit I would like to return to a simpler time,
to the days of yore when Kress, not Costco, supplied all our nutritional needs,
real men smelled like Old Spice and women like Midnight in Paris, “The Brain
That Wouldn’t Die” was playing at the Bijou, there were no computers, and the
only thing we had to fear was…Dracula himself.
