DUST BUNNIES OF THE BRAIN

by James Lincoln Warren

We’ve all seen them and shuddered with horror at the eldritch confrontation: agglutinations of dust and hair that mysteriously appear under furniture or sometimes brazenly on an open floor, almost as insubstantial as fading nightmares.

Dust bunnies. Ghost turds. At Officer Candidate School, back yonder when I was starting my naval career in the spring of 1980, they were called NRDLs (pronounced “nerdles”, an abbreviation for “non-regulation dust and lint”), a passionless and clinical soubriquet intended to deprive them of the bone-chilling dread they might otherwise inspire. (Military officers are expected to be brave.)

Nobody knows where they come from or how they are formed, these Lilliputian storm clouds invading our most retired domestic recesses, although I suspect having two cats constantly shedding strands of gossamer-fine fur might have something to do with it. But never mind that.

Yes, you may fight them, arm yourself with the devastating roar of a vacuum cleaner and mercilessly attack. You can hold them at bay. But they will return as relentlessly and as unwelcome as the most hackneyed cliché, as an embarrassing chronic skin disease without cure, as a neutronium-dense regifted Christmas fruitcake, as a sappy and sentimental chain email illustrated with sickeningly cute animated cartoons that closes with a direct threat of reprisal if you do not propagate it to everybody in your address book within five hours.

Yes, a veritable plague. One may well wonder why they aren’t even mentioned in the book of Revelation.

Imprecise thought is often attributed to having mental cobwebs. Either that or bad hangovers. There may be some justification for the Bad Hangover Theory, but I utterly reject the Mental Cobweb Hypothesis. Cobwebs are made by spiders, that much we do know. Spiders do not spontaneously appear out of chaos. Can the same be said for NRDLs? I think not. For my money, fuzzy thinking comes from dust bunnies forming in your frontal lobes, cutting off contact with the rest of the central nervous system. They are attracted to this likewise retired recess because it is very difficult to vacuum your brain. (Although the brains of certain of my acquaintances do seem to consist almost entirely of vacuum. This may be why those with vacuous minds are the people who are the most inflexibly certain of their opinions, because the ghost turds fail to form.)

I blame Neurological NRDLs for every bad idea I’ve ever had. I’m sure all of you, or at least those of you who sometimes aspire to eloquence, have had the experience of reading something you wrote you regarded as searingly brilliant at its inception, but which at second glance presents irrefutable evidence of a pathological sloth in the arena of mental housekeeping. (“@#$%! I can’t believe I wrote such crap! It’s hopeless!”)

There are countermeasures, though. Like the vacuum cleaner, they are not permanent solutions, but they may help alleviate spectral scatological influences in the short run.

ONE: Slap yourself violently on the forehead.

TWO: Delete the offending passage immediately.

THREE: Perform some strenuous intellectual exercise to cleanse the bilious aftertaste from your mental palate. I find Minesweeper or Computer Solitaire ideal for this purpose, but your approach may be different. (Do not under any circumstances, however, play Facebook games. They are succubi and will annihilate your free will.) It may require repeated applications. Sooner or later, an acceptable substitution will present itself.

FOUR: Apply the new passage to your deathless prose. Click SAVE.

FIVE: Reward yourself. (Try not to reward yourself with a shot of tequila, though, since you should never write while under the influence, unless that’s the only way you can write.) This is a very important step, because it provides positive reinforcement for murdering your depraved brainchildren, an act which might otherwise violate your literary maternal instinct.

SIX: Vigorously vacuum your workspace. Other dust bunnies may be lurking, waiting for the chance to invade your head. (I should note that lining your hat with aluminum foil to deny them entry is a mere placebo. To truly armor your brain, you should sit down and read something really good.)

This advice could save your life. All right, so it won’t save your life, but it’s Monday and my brain hasn’t started to work yet, and it seemed like a good idea when I started. Unless . . . am I even now under their influence? “Warren” is a word meaning a colony of rabbits. Maybe it’s congenital.

Never mind.