Two Days of This - Two Whole Days. The Horror, Oh The Huge Manatee.
Rob was caught in that hormonal no man's land of late adolescence and
early adulthood where he was trying to be bold and manly but still
have tastes that caused one to question his manliness. He worked out
and liked to get his shirt off to display his newly developed muscles
whenever possible. He had a assault rifle that he would break down,
oil and clean about once a week. He was quick to flip off and
threaten if there was not a good chance of being observed. All really
manly things right? Dang right they are. But then there was those
paradoxical behaviors that were fun for my brother and I to tease my
dad's kind-of young charge, which he loved. He really like
euro-invasion techno pop music that made me want to explode with rage
when he would turn up the tunes and put it on repeat. He would be
getting fired up on a little Depeche Mode or something equally horrid
and my brother and I would tell him to shut if off. He would decline,
we would insist and battle would be joined. At first it was a
physical confrontation but turned into full blown sonic warfare when
Rob bought a more sonorous radio then we owned with money he had
earned working for my dad. Then when he wanted to listen to INXS or
the Cure he would do so to his hearts content and he would just
drowned out our Guns-n-Roses, Metalica, Sir Mix A Lot, Nirvana, or
Beastie Boys with a little volume from his musical arms race nuclear
bomb. In a most unmanly display one day he got the bug for a little
Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like A Record), so much
of a bug that he took the single he had recently purchased and put it
in powerful CD player and not just played it in our room at high
volume but played that repulsive tune on repeat for no less then two
full days. No Joke. Every second he was awake and in earshot he was
playing that song over and over and over and over. I hadn't minded
the song that much at first but by the 50th and 500th
trips down the banal paths of late eighties techno-pop insipidity I
was ready to destroy anything of beauty in the world. Every beautiful
thing. We started making disabling sorties risking physical harm to
keep what shreds of humanity were still left in the tatters of our
minds. Rob would angrily restart his ritual of sonic horror and
threaten death and dismemberment on anyone who would stop his tribute
in kind to spinning right around like a record. . .baby. The issue
was finally resolved by my anti music dad saying that no one could
listen to anything at any time from the moment of his decree until
the end of time. The mandate was not strictly followed but it did
break the spell of the Dead or Alive repetition and Rob lost interest
in the song and I had not heard it again until I found the link for
this story. I still hate it.
