A sordid tale of oddly specific amnesia, and how remembering nearly killed me

I'm fifty. Fifty years old. (I like to kick, stretch, aaand kick)

I first saw Rocky when I was 14. I'll let you do the math. It was shown at this summer camp, sponsored and run by this huge 22 year old crew-cut muscle-ripped marine. He had a sheaf of papers and a box of items, and he belted out the lines and threw the items with the force and demand of formation drill precision. I had never seen anything so surreal. (wasn't supposed to see it, either, I snuck in)

From age 16 to 18, I must have gone 100+ times to the local theater that put it on. This was the usual RHPS scene, very rowdy, huge cleanup needed after, with costumed participants acting out the show below the screen. Somewhere around number 80, they convinced me I had to play RiffRaff. The lines were burned into my head anyway, why not? So, something like 20 times, I did that routine.

But, time is fleeting, and my old brain jar said goodbye to all this, and hello to Oblivion. It's not quite like riding a bike, but akin, so there was a shadow burned on the wall, the perfect outline of Fred Flintstone as a hole in the wall. Shreds, pieces, still remained despite not being updated in literal decades. However, as I would learn, these shadows are burned in quite deeply.

I was reminded of this time in my life very recently, came up quite randomly, as someone was reporting that they'd seen it for the first time. I astounded by whipping out my best Evil Minion Smirk and letting loose in that sultry, buttery voice, "The darkness must go dow-hown the river of night's drea-he-ming..." and of course then nothing would do but I go through the whole routine, right?

...only, almost immediately, something was wrong. I knew many of the lyrics to the Time Warp, sure. The rest, though....gone. Like holes in a sail, the wind went right through, whoosh. I wracked my brain and wracked my brain and COULD NOT get past that first verse.

I remembered doing the Time Warp (kick, kick). But when I tried to do the time warp again...BLANK. The second and third verses were just utterly gone. I couldn't understand how I could forget the entirety of the rest of that song. I must have belted those words out a hundred times. I was left embarrassed by this inexplicable failure to remember so iconic a song. Other bits came to me, floating in the void..."I was only away for a moment...*heavy leaden pause*....maassster." Maybe it was MY lifestyle that had been too extreme? Whatever the case, the blackness hit me, the Time Warp was gone to the void.

Several days later...

I was driving for five hours. It's a thing I do, it's normal. To entertain myself on long drives I listen to very random stuff. In this case, I thought, yeah, Time Warp...maybe actually hearing the actual song would bring it back. One Instant Access To All Human Knowledge later, those first guitar licks caress my ears for the first time in many years.

First verse plays...I sing along, hit every nuance, every pause, every growl, perfect. No problem.

Chorus plays, guy explains, crowd dances, it drove me insane. All very normal.

Second verse plays...Magenta starts her lyrics. I still have nothing. No recall at all, I cannot sing along. I recognize them as she says them, oh yeah that, right....but I have inexplicably zero impulse to sing along. They just come back to me as she sings. Then, out of nowhere, they come back, and my RiffRaff voice kicked in again.

"With a bit of a mind flip"....ohhhhhhh I understand now. Yes. I get it!! This is Magenta's bit. I skip her line, natch. My next line hits and just falls out of my face unbidden. "And nothing...can ever be the same". I'm still marveling over this realization, this weird idea that I had literally conditioned myself and had no clue at all, when Magenta, oddly appropriately, states that I'm spaced out on sensation.

And then...oh, my dear reader, then I nearly died.

Driving 80 up the interstate, surrounded by tons upon tons of metal moving at ridiculously lethal speeds, with no will or choice of my own, utterly unbidden, my body automatically sang that next line, and it did so at full power:

"LIKEYOUREUNDERSEDAAAAAAAASHUUUUNN"

My body tensed to its limits from bow to stern and this sound tore its way out of me like some xenomorph birthing itself from my chest in a shower of sonic gore and viscera. It began in my toes, as if I were some kind of kung fu master drawing power up from the core of the earth, channeling it through every sinew and bone to form a black hole of collapsing pressure in my sternum. My arms tried to rip the steering wheel from the column, my ribs contracted so hard that I pulled muscles in my back, and my throat, oh god... I have not produced a sound that loud or high in decades, and it felt much akin to vomiting a shattered glass bottle of glowing lava.

I had no idea what had happened until well after I'd fought the car back under control. I'm not entirely sure I ended up in the same lane I started in, and fairly sure it's more a testament to everyone else's driving skill than to mine, but I got it straightened out. I still had to pull over and just twitch weakly for a while. I've literally been electrocuted before, it was not this bad. My voice was so jagged I could not speak right for days.

And...I should point out...all this swerving around, spasming in full body pain, coughing my larynx out, nearly dying in a twisted tangle of high speed metal...all this is done to the chirpy voice of Columbia singing her part.

The moral of this story is quite clear, never activate muscle memory without having the actual muscles still around.