HOW MY BRAIN MELTED

I reckon if you opened up my head right now, you’d just get a sort of soupy goo where my brain used to be. It’s like melted chocolate.

We’re still in the middle of the heatwave. Soaring temperatures, brown grass, hot, sweltering nights, and the humidity that causes all your clothes to stick to you.

The first bit of my brain to go was the social processor. I got caught in a bind yesterday, between feeling useless, and looking lazy. I don’t know why it is but some people are just so good at the practical - clearing up or setting up or just knowing what to do. They’re so good at it that they don’t even have to talk about it; they simply get on with it.

The trouble is that not everyone is like that. I am absolutely not, even at the best of times. I need a little help.

“Shall I wash this up?” I say, like a child. “Shall I take out this rubbish? What do you want me to do next?” So many questions. They must be thinking I should just use my initiative. But on hot days, the social processor is kaput, and so ultimately I stand around looking for jobs that might need doing, but also with no idea about the right way to do them. Sitting down was logically the best/most infuriating option in the useless/lazy window.

The next bit to melt inside my head, was the bit that controls musical knowhow - the muso chip. That snapped this morning at church when I heard myself playing a 4/4 pattern over a 6/8 rhythm. I never normally do that, and while I think I got away with it, it was an experiment too far - like when I played a slowed-down version of the Jurassic Park theme in a ministry time, years ago in a similar heatwave. The muso chip normally disciplines me out of sliding into sloppy jazz patterns and weird tripletty fills. When it’s gone though, I might as well be Thelonious Monk. Only without the talent.

Then this afternoon, the stuff that normally keeps me awake got fried in the heat and I fell asleep instead of doing jobs. Then I lost the politeness centre and almost sent an email I would have regretted. Thankfully, the writing generator was still working, and acted as a failover for the politeness centre by getting me to reconsider hitting the send button. Any hotter though and I would have been in trouble.

So I can’t talk to people, I can’t do jobs, I can’t play anything properly on the piano, and I can’t stay awake. I’m not unhappy though, in this sweltering mess of stringy brain. The fact library is still working, and the writing generator is doing a splendid job of rerouting power.

How long will this heatwave go on? Still we long for a bit of rain, maybe a cloudy, drizzly day like summers of old. Still the sun burns through the hot July sky, still the air sweats at night.

Still the brain melts. Maybe like chocolate I could refreeze it; I could stick my head in the freezer and hope for the best. The thing is though - it’s never the same; what comes out is a mangled mass of frozen chocolate that you have to chomp through as though it were a deformed lump discarded by the factory. My brain is far from that. And in any case, I’d have to bring it out again and make it work in time for my air-conditioned desk job tomorrow.

Though I rarely use my brain there anyway, most days.