Sunday, June 29, 2008

Popsicle Psycho


This Bizarro cartoon is made possible by Mind-Numbing Confections, Inc.
Like anyone, I loved hearing the ice cream truck coming when I was a kid. But now I've got this damned OCD-type mechanism in my brain that hangs onto any melody I hear for hours or days, playing it over and over in my head.

My studio is on the second floor of our apartment, overlooking our street in Brooklyn, and I like to have the windows open when it is between 65 and 85 degrees. For most of the summer, this leaves me totally vulnerable to the local popsicle vendors and their satanic soundtracks.

How a person with any hearing at all can work these trucks is beyond my imagination. I'd rather drive a school bus full of hungry badgers.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Angry Badgers, eh?
That sounds like a wonderful idea! I'll get right on it!!
Hahah

That or you could sniper those ice cream trucks.

doug nicodemus said...

yah i live in a kids infested neighborhood and it sucks...all that happy happy and noisey energy..blah

Jym said...

=v= I thought Mayor Mike banned that sort of thing. Polling showed that the #2 complaints of New Yorkers were (1) car horns, and (2) car alarms, so Bloomberg went after Mr. Softee.

Maybe that's only in Manhattan ...

Anonymous said...

Don't you hate it when you can't get a song out of your head?

I worked my way through college in a grocery market, and the ever-looping Muzak Christmas music ruined the holidays for me. (Took me years before I could appreciate Christmas music again...)

Mel2 said...

I'd drive a bus full of hungry badgers before I'd drive a bus full of kids. Less cleanup after they leave.

Brad Reid said...

I can more than sympathize with your problem of getting a tune trapped in your head. At the age of 40 and after having spent much of my life avidly plugged in to every form of junk culture there is, I find that I have a tremendous shitheap in my head already crowding out the place. And then, when a tune gets trapped in my head, there just isn't room up there for it at all. The tune actually hurts. I now have whole new appreciation for the idea of something grating on one's nerves.

Bryan R. Terry said...

In our old neighborhood there was an ice cream truck that came around after 11:00 p.m. on a regular basis. The general consensus/local joke was that he was dealing drugs out of the back. About a month ago, some friends of ours blogged that that self-same "ice cream man" was busted for *gasp* dealing drugs out of the back of his truck (http://brudisandbrudette.blogspot.com/2008/06/joke-turned-reality.html)

Anonymous said...

We had one ice cream truck in our neighborhood that played Greensleeves. Never could get them to sell me pot.

I’ve also found that the best way to get an ear worm out is to sing the choral movement to Beethoven's Ninth. Since I don’t speak German that well, I’ve learned it phonetically. Afterwords, my auditory mind is so wiped out, nothing can live.

disabled account said...

if you have a song stuck in your head just sing the thermos song from "the jerk" and it will vanish....poof! i promise.

now go rent the movie so you can learn the song. works for me every freaking time.

L. Erskine said...

A woman in my hometown (Santa Rosa, CA) sued to get the ice cream truck to cease playing music in her neighborhood, claiming that it was noise pollution. She won.

We don't have ice cream trucks in my neighborhood, just the Hispanics with the carts and little horn/bell. It's considerably less invasive than the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple next door that goes "bong bong bong" every day, all day.

Anonymous said...

regarding: "...the second floor of our apartment,..."

Second floor? What the f#%k? This is in NY, right? So what your saying is... you don't have your bathtub/shower in the kitchen, right next to the stove.?

Anonymous said...

Talk about song stuck in your head, I was driving through Wisconsin and reading bumper stickers when all the sudden this song came to mind and I sang it for a week. http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/

B.A.D. said...

I'd be thankful for the ice cream truck, apparently in some parts of your crazy country there are steak trucks.

disabled account said...

haha! i parked next to one of those meat trucks tonight at the grocery store. perhaps he ran out of meat and had to stock up.

even when i ate meat i used to get grossed out by those.

Tom Finnigan said...

So, I knew an ex-con that got a job driving an icecream truck after getting out.

After a few months he told his boss he needed to quit, because he just couldn't take the same song, all day, every day.

His boss told him that there was a switch in the glove compartment to change the song.

He still quit a couple weeks after that.

Also, good advice for getting songs out of your head: http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/06/17/earworms/