Only slightly fictionalized

Sometimes the goings-on in my brain don't realize that that's where they're supposed to stay.

External situation:
I was eating a banana as my mid-morning snack while sitting at my desk at work. A large, unopened can of V-8 sat between my computer monitor and keyboard. I'd take a bite of banana, then put it down next to the can so I could mouse around and type while I chewed.

Internal sequence of thoughts:
Last week, in yoga, our instructor read aloud a passage from a book which referenced the phrase, "going with the flow." In high school, I had stumbled upon a passage from David Cassidy's autobiography which also included that phrase. There was an episode of Malcolm in the Middle in which David Cassidy guest-starred as a Vegas lounge singer at whom women threw their panties. On Saturday Night Live, Amy Poehler recently gave a brief commentary about using the word "panties," as opposed to simply calling them "underwear." One instance where the word underwear is used is the song, Walking 'Round in Women's Underwear. This song is sung to the tune of Winter Wonderland.

Soon, two worlds, the Internal and the External, will collide. I pick up the banana to take another bite, and the peel hits something on my desk, resulting in a pleasant pong. "From whence commeth such an beauteous noyse?" thought I. There's still a musician lurking inside me, so I hit various objects with the hard end of the banana peel to try to reproduce the sound. V-8 can? No. Keyboard? No. Monitor? No. Other side of the V-8 can? Yes. Pong. Pong.

At this point, I have Winter Wonderland running through my head, so I start to hum, accompanying myself with the banana:

Sleigh bells ring (pong)
Are you listening? (pong)
In the lane (pong)
Snow is glistening (pong)
A beautiful sight (pong)
We're happy tonight (pong)
Walking in a winter wonderland (swing - thwack! - CRASH- SCREAM!)

Thinking I'd give it a big finish, and failing utterly to foresee the consequences of my own actions, I managed to scare myself and attract the attention of coworkers by hitting the can too hard and sending it ricocheting off sundry desktop items. The scream was my own. The barely suppressed laughter was everyone else's.


The Truth
I have a compulsion toward confession, so I feel the need to tell you all which parts of that story are true and which aren't. You don't have to read this if you find such distinctions boring. Anyway, the only part I made up is the playing out of the humming and ponging. The train of thought was real, as was the fact that a coworker caught me hitting the can with the banana peel. There was, alas, no crash and no scream, unless you count me laughing a little too raucously when he told me I reminded him of both his two-year-old daughter and a mental patient. I wanted to pong my way through Winter Wonderland, but by the time it was in my head I'd already thrown the peel away, and I wasn't going to fish it out of the garbage, even for the sake of art.