Nemesis

The past has a horrible habit of catching up with you…. and fair enough if you’ve got crimes or deplorable behaviour to answer for. Sometimes, if you’re wired that way, gangs of less heinous former embarrassments and awkwardnesses sneak into the mind. Like small, snivelling distant relatives of the Classical Furies, they often ply their trade in the small hours of the morning.

Sadly, the Furies don’t do much in the way of relentless pursuit these days. Hellhounds don’t dog many heels. We’ve got the toxic banality of 70’s pop/rock instead. Any day touched by its rank tendrils is not a good day.

As far as I can tell, I’ve violated no tombs, offended no gods, desecrated no shrines. I can’t identify a single action that would merit what happened. There was no warning, no trigger, no fragment of a tune from a passing vehicle. Nothing. For no reason at all, I found myself thinking of a song by The Captain and Tennille. Hearing it would have been bad enough. Having it come to mind unbidden was downright diabolical. Some weird, random firing of a dodgy neuron made me think of one of the most ghastly perversions of the songwriter’s craft ever committed to record. The song was “Muskrat Love”. Look it up if you dare, and then tell me if you can that we don’t live in a Hell dimension.

If you’ve no experience of The Captain and Tennille, your life has been blessed. He was a failed enigma in a mariner’s cap who played piano. She was a glittering set of teeth who shrilled and warbled. Together, they made what a slice of that blindingly white packaged bread that has the nutritional value of a roof tile would make if smeared with margarine, topped with aerosol mock cream and endowed with the gift of sound.

I don’t listen to commercial radio. The occasional bits of Top 40 music I catch sound like auto-tuned nursery rhymes to my jaded ears. They’re easily dismissed, just as easily avoided, and don’t get the chance to get established in consciousness. Is any of it as horrendous as The Captain and Tennille? It may be, but I’m not giving it the chance to lay its fungal spores in my brain. I lived through the 70s, and I’ve suffered enough. On top of that, I have to endure muck from 40-odd years ago popping up at random like badly interred corpses

The 70s produced some truly, epically foetid shit. It’s quaint nostalgia to some, but give me the choice between listening to “The Best of Paper Lace” and stabbing myself repeatedly in the thigh with a knitting needle, I’ll be adjusting my trousers in a heartbeat. Once, a family member, with uncharacteristic cruelty, subjected me to the warbling loathsomeness of “The Way that You Do It” by Pussyfoot. She thought my discomfort was hilarious. For a while I didn’t recognise my own flesh and blood.

Eventually, the disturbing presence of The Captain and Tennille faded… only to be replaced with the knowledge that there was a band called the Doobie Brothers, and that I have heard their music. I’m still wondering what I was being punished for.

I really don’t want to end my days in a nursing home, because I’m pretty sure commercial pop/rock from the 70s is the sort of drivel well-meaning staff would be trying to get me and my fellow dotards to sing along with….And if I have a solitary, medication-fogged wit remaining, I’ll demand death with dignity if I have to sing along to “Muskrat Love”.