Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!



There, I feel much better now.



Oh, hi, gang. You know, maybe there's something to this Primal Scream business after all.



What's that? What was I screaming about?



Well, let's just say that I was "marginally ticked" this morning (vaguely disconcerted, let's say? somewhat miffed?) over Google's ongoing practice of failing to properly index ANY BLOODY THING THAT I'M DOING ONLINE!!!!!!



Oh, dear, it sounds like I'm still rather upset (to put it mildly). I apparently didn't scream long enough above to get everything "out of my system." Pardon me while I try again:



Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!



There, that's more like it. Thank you, Dr. Janov.



Of course, I'm joking. My problems don't take a hike just because I scream.



No, I'm perfectly aware that Primal Therapy (to quote one of the many Pro-Primal websites on this point) "is not just making people scream."




I just wish I had known that 10 years ago when I had my first close encounter of the primal kind.



But "stay," you shall hear!



I left work at midnight or whatever (from a former employer whose name is not relevant to this particular discourse) and there I am, driving home on the Beltway or whatever from Vienna to Alexandria.



Suddenly, I get this crazy notion: "Brian," I says to myself, "you've been 'out of sorts' lately, haven't you, old boy?"



Well, naturally, I had to admit that I was right. So I think about it, right? (What to do? What to do?)



Suddenly I get this "bright idea" of trying out my own version of primal therapy, right then and there, in my actual car while heading toward the Springfield Interchange on Interstate 95. Seriously. I wanted to see if an episode of unbridled yelling on my part could, indeed, give me any psychological solace, or at least vouchsafe me a deeper insight into the causes of my ongoing "funk" (to use the word in its pejorative attitudinal acceptation of yesteryear, as in the time-honored expression "blue funk," which, indeed, dates all the way back to the Civil War: just ask the OED. Meanwhile, cool funk, as practiced by the Parliament Funkadelics and their ilk (and, verily, they had a HUGE and very vocal ilk), was not to come into vogue until almost a hundred years later, in the 1970s.)



So there I am, going at it, hollering at the top of my lungs as I pass by the exit for route 236 on my multi-laned trip to the east and home, sweet home (or in my case, apartment, sweet apartment).



Fortunately, of course, it was nighttime, so I don't think that any fellow drivers noticed my no doubt somewhat atypical proceedings. But shout I did with all the festering venom of my.... of my.... Well, I'm not a medical man so I don't know where one's "festering venom" comes from (one's gullet, perhaps?), but I was getting it OUT of my system, that's the point.



Finally, three loud minutes later, I had come to the left-hand turn for 395 (this was years before the advent of the 2007 Springfield overpass project that was to obviate the need for that latter maneuver, replacing it with the somewhat more plausible egress that we see there today in the form of a right-hand exit ramp leading to a two-lane fly-over to the Shirley Highway). Now, I don't know how long John Lennon had to scream before he could write the soul-baring "Mother," "Isolation," and "Remember" for his "Plastic Ono Band" album, but I figured that three minutes was enough screaming for my purposes, and that if I still considered myself a lunatic tomorrow or was in any way "hung up," I could repeat my experiment for a longer period of time, or even at higher decibels, if such a thing were possible, considering the fact that I had been really giving it all I had in the vocal cords department.



But here comes the kicker, guys:



I woke up the next morning, and I was as hoarse as a flippin' DONKEY! I kid you not, every time I opened my mouth, I was simply braying!



Aye, it took me a good two days to rest my vocal cords enough to resume my ordinary relaxed manner of speaking. Meanwhile, I felt like Pinocchio after his ill-advised trip to Pleasure Island. Every time I opened my mouth I was like: Hee-Haw!!!!



Yes, I learned the hard way that you can't shortcut the Primal therapeutic process merely by shouting at the top of your lungs.



And, as you might imagine, I didn't know what to say the next day when folks asked me what had happened to my voice. I finally broke down (although it's against my nature to lie) and invented a riotous local basketball game of the previous evening at which my many spirited asseverations might have been supposed to leave me hoarse. Unfortunately, one person pressed me for the names of the teams involved in this noisy match, wondering how he, being a major sports fan, had failed to hear of the contest in question. Suddenly, of course, I had to downgrade the event to a high-school basketball game, which I had merely attended out of familial duty, being the godfather of one of the point guards. I was like, "Yeah, it was one of the Fairfax County schools: I forget which one."




Well, that's the last time I'm going to practice medicine (psychiatric or otherwise) without a license!



Anyway, that naturally put me off "Primal Scream Therapy" for years to come.



Yes, I've been on the wagon for over a decade now when it comes to hollering at the top of my lungs out of sheer vexation -- but I resumed the practice this morning, after taking one glance at my site's online statistics at Google -- because (God love 'em for the knuckleheaded monopoly that they are!) they had me indexed as if the last time I had so much as tapped on my computer keyboard was back in 1997....



the mere recollection of which outlandish fact makes me....




Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!



Don't worry, by the way: I saw a voice coach several years ago who showed me how to shout like this without unduly straining my vocal cords.



So there's a silver lining of sorts, right? For no matter how mad Google may make me (and believe me, they really appear to be trying hard to do so this morning!), I'll never again have to invent another godson and a local basketball game to account for my therapy-driven hoarseness.