Radiohead - Karma Police

Long ago, before I became this pinnacle of sanity you have now grown to know and love, I “dropped my basket.” I had succumbed completely to my then undiagnosed Panic disorder completely and turned my life and adrenal glands over to a drug called Effexor. This drug, while you are on it, seems to be a kind of miracle drug. Nothing switches, no wild uncontrollable thoughts about death, no racing heart and sweaty palms in otherwise safe situations; synthetic calm after years of self-torture and exhaustion. However, there was a downside or two to this “miracle drug”. My serotonin levels eventually became so evenly leveled that my brain tricked me into believing that I had no consequences what-so-ever; I was like a blank sheet of paper. I wasn’t high, I wasn’t low, and I wasn’t anything but a poor decision maker with no shoes on. I got laid off, I didn’t care. I lost my fiancé, I didn’t care. I had to move home with my parents… whatever. I didn’t wear shoes for a year or two… who cares?

Somewhere in the midst of this haze, as I found myself every day at the same damn coffee shop, doing puzzles and chain smoking, I met a girl who would become my anchor and partner in crime; Anne, who has affectionately become known as “N’abney” through a manipulated pronunciation of her first and last names. I had known her barely a heartbeat when she walked across the street and bought me a crossword puzzle dictionary from the used book store. It was love at first nerd. What followed was a then several month progression of Anne and me clinging to each other throughout our follies and downfalls. I was losing grip on life in general, Anne was lost and trying to finish school. All we knew to do was to smoke drugs and go wild and have earth shattering conversations while we bawled our eyes out in our cars.

Eventually, everything came to a head. My family was slowly cutting me off in every way. I had no money and my dad took away my cell phone first, and then my car. Anne saved the day by letting me borrow her early 80s beige town & country, affectionately known as the “Nazgul”, for the screeching death sounds it made due to its lack of power steering. My friends, one by one, took me aside and said “get your shit together or we can’t be friends anymore.” (This is a testament to how evil SSRI’s, especially Effexor, are when not properly administered or monitored.) My friends gave me an intervention over a medication my doctors intentionally put me on. Then the last straw… my health insurance granted me as a severance from my last job ran out. My parents refused to pay for the then $120/mo prescription, as there was no generic, and I literally went completely cold turkey off Effexor. You can do a quick Google search and see how dangerous and wrong and terrible this experience was for me.

Digression/point of post: one of the things I do the best and I know I do a lot is give people nicknames. Whether that nickname is something you did once that was silly or just a ridiculous mispronunciation of your name; everyone at one point or another gets a nickname from me. Some people have more than one. It’s an endearing thing I do; it means I care enough about you or something. I have only been the recipient of a nickname that stuck once, and that was from N’abney… One night in the midst of all this haze, Anne, while driving around with another of my long time best friends, Bart, called and sang the entirety of this song, all the while substituting my name in place of “Karma”. I had, at one point, had a few friends that would sing Culture Club’s “KARLA Chameleon” to me in the halls at school, but it never really caught on. Some people outside of the N’abney inner sanctum still call me “karla police” now. Piggybacking off the nickname, I once had a brilliant idea to start a cable access show where I would dress as a cop, walk around NCSU’s brickyard and stop kids listening to headphones and ask what they were listening to. If what they said did not please me, I would “arrest” them and make them listen to some Joy Division or the Buzzcocks or something. This idea, as all great ideas that rise from the haze of marijuana smoke, never came to fruition, not unlike the great “cheese as currency” debate of ’03.

I have never heard Karma Police without thinking of N’abs. I somehow have more “in jokes” with N’abney than just about anyone else in my whole life. That girl has saved my life so many times I can’t even count anymore….

N’abney & Karla Police = burning the 80s… 4ever! xoxox