Fishes in the Deep Blue Sea

You know that song “Joy to the World”? Not the Christ­mas car­ol, but the Three Dog Night song?

I like that song, but it pro­vokes mixed feelings:

While it’s play­ing you love it, and you wish they’d keep play­ing it for anoth­er 20 min­utes because it’s so much fun, but when it ends you feel dis­ap­point­ed for about 10 sec­onds and then you real­ize if it was one of those self-indul­gent eter­nal jams, like when Led Zep­pelin jammed on “Dazed and Con­fused” in the movie The Song Remains the Same for FORTY-FIVE FREAKING MINUTES, and by the time it was over you decid­ed you nev­er want­ed to hear it again as long as you lived, except next time you’re on a road trip and you hit shuf­fle on your phone and it shows up, you lis­ten to the ENTIRE FREAKING FORTY-FIVE MINUTE CURSED JAM AGAIN and you hate every sec­ond of it but some­how you can’t quite bring your­self to skip to the next song, so instead you wait till you see an over­pass com­ing up so you unbuck­le your seat belt and floor it and you smash into a con­crete bridge pil­ing at 130MPH+, and as you lie bro­ken and bleed­ing in the twist­ed, steam­ing wreck­age you smile, because you see the Grim Reaper him­self approach­ing you wear­ing his black robe and car­ry­ing his scythe, and you won­der idly why he car­ries a scythe instead of rid­ing in a com­bine or even using a string trim­mer, and as he approach­es you look for­ward to his sweet, qui­et embrace, but then you sud­den­ly real­ize even though your car and your body look like giant owl pel­lets, THE STEREO IS STILL PLAYING, and in abject hor­ror you watch as Death pulls out an iPhone 5s and wig­gles his index fin­ger at you in a silent “naughty naughty” and he claps a pair of Beats Solo 3 wire­less head­phones on you and taps the iPhone, then drops it in the dirt next to you, and mean­while you’re won­der­ing why Death uses an anachro­nis­tic reap­ing tool like a scythe but also has some spiffy head­phones and an iPhone 5s, which was released only 7 years ago, but then you real­ize you’ll have all eter­ni­ty to pon­der the rid­dle because the iPhone 5s is play­ing “Dazed and Con­fused” from The Song Remains the Same on repeat, but instead of play­ing the whole song it starts at 9:05 and plays until 13:20, then skips back and starts at 9:05 again, and as every diehard Zep­pelin fan knows, Jim­my Page starts man­gling a poor inno­cent cel­lo bow at 9:05 and treats the audi­ence to a ghast­ly cat­er­waul­ing shriek of a cel­lo bow/guitar solo so awful and infa­mous the only way This Is Spinal Tap could spoof it was hav­ing Nigel Tufnel play gui­tar not with a bow, but with a vio­lin, and while he’s screech­ing around with it he also kicks anoth­er gui­tar on the floor, and you get to enjoy eter­ni­ty lis­ten­ing to it.

To Jim­my Page’s cel­lo bow/guitar solo, that is.

I hate it when that happens.