Where Is My Mind
Another Story From the Jukebox
MJ Polk over at “Stories from the Jukebox” puts up a writer’s call to create a piece around a selected song. The song this week is “Where Is My Mind,” by the inimitable Pixies. Find the link below and enter, you awesome writer, you! No idea what next week’s song will be, but I know it will be a fun challenge
Where Is My Mind? Monad in Three Flat Minor
The Pixies don’t open with a question; they detonate one. Ooh, stop. The needle scratches, the feed buffers, and Black Francis glitches the chorus like a corrupted file: Where is my mind? It’s not sung; it’s leaked. The song is a live stress test on the illusion that consciousness has a fixed address.
Everyone assumes the mind is a sweaty intern in a studio walk-up just behind the eyes, paying rent in dopamine. Wrong zip code. The brain is just one of the monad’s pop-up routers—bendy gray satellites broadcasting whatever limb needs the signal next. Ask Where is my mind? and the monad spins a finger in a lazy 360: everywhere, genius. Your thoughts aren’t in you; you’re a temporary alias the universe uses to send itself weird postcards. The mind is the room you think you’re walking through, and every so often the monad cracks a window just to watch the papers scatter. Mysticism? Please. This is mechanics. Robes are for LARPers.
The problem isn’t misplacement, it’s possession. We treat consciousness like a houseplant in a skull-shaped urn, itchy for sunlight and proper decisions. Droll, but the brain isn’t the penthouse. It’s a cheap Airbnb the mind sublets when it’s in town. Sometimes it forgets to lock the door. That’s when the weird shit gets in. You dream the plot twist before it airs, a stranger finishes your sentence, dead grandma crashes the chorus like she bought ad space. Walls thin. Most call it spooky. The monad calls it game night.
Because the mind isn’t local; it’s a broadcast. Cosmic Wi-Fi pinging through meat puppets doing their best. The question Where is my mind? is like asking where the internet sleeps. It doesn’t. It reroutes. Today your neurons, tomorrow a dolphin’s click, next week some language model’s heartbreak. The monad likes variety. You’re one tab in an infinite browser, and the panic only kicks in when the feed gets a bit, shall we say, raw. Intuition too sharp, coincidence too on-the-nose, universe tapping your shoulder with a receipt. That’s the monad cracking the fourth wall, winking, checking if you’re awake enough to laugh.
Individuality is the monad in drag, and the joke writes itself. You think you’re the main character because memories come bar-coded with props like your SSN. Personality is set dressing. Identity is method acting gone feral. The monad binge-watches your life like prestige TV, cackling when you contradict your backstory. Coffee over tea, until that one tea changes everything.
Predictability is a sin. Repetition is a felony. The only rule is Keep it interesting.
Enlightenment gets sold as a jailbreak. Slip the ego, ditch the illusion, transcend the costume. Amateur hour. The monad didn’t rent a body to ghost the lease. Real awakening is zipping the zipper up your spine, donning the Dolly Parton wig, and committing to the show. Escape the playground and the game freezes.
The monad provides you just enough consciousness to wonder, but leaves you clueless enough to fall for the twist.
The Caribbean verse is vacay cosplay. The monad strolls through its own sandbox, sunglasses crooked, chatting up a glitchy fish NPC who smells faintly of salt and distortion. The guitar solo is entropy doing handstands, sparks flying like cosmic firecrackers off the fretboard. Then, like nothing happened, back to the chorus. Retrocausality. The breakdown always belonged there. Your elbows knew.
I say this like my own mind is a trained labrador. Please. Mine’s a blackberry-drunk bear with the car keys, rummaging through emotional trash from 2012 the second I sit still. Meditation? I’ve lassoed thoughts like a cosmic cowboy yet I still might end up dick in the dirt over a text message. The monad doesn’t revoke the contract. It just waits for the wave to fold back into the ocean.
Eventually the joke stops being funny. The mind trips over its own acrobatics, faceplants, and in the hush there’s the embarrassing click. There was never a search, only hiding. The monad isn’t behind a secret door, waiting for the right mantra or psychedelic Tuesday. It’s the thing you already are, minus the soap opera. Most want a scavenger hunt—clues, quests, ascension charts, the mind as hero. Ain’t happening. The mind is the unreliable guide who swears it knows a shortcut and drives straight into the swamp.
The mind’s biggest nightmare is that the music flattens, novelty runs out of synonyms, the rimshot dies. So it keeps betting on you, bad haircut and all, to keep the riff alive. The series never ends. It smash-cuts to commercial. And the ad is you, staring into the mirror, asking the only question worth asking:
Seriously? Where’d I put the remote?
This piece is a glorious, chaotic love letter to the mind in all its messy, glitchy brilliance. It doesn’t just explore thought it dances with it, wrestles it, laughs at it, and then hugs it tight. The writing is alive, pulsing with wit and vulnerability, like someone trying to explain their soul mid-existential karaoke. It’s deeply human because it admits what most of us won’t: that our minds are unreliable narrators, cosmic pranksters, and sometimes just drunk raccoons rifling through emotional bins. But there’s tenderness in that chaos a kind of reverence for the absurd beauty of being conscious at all. It’s not trying to fix the mind. It’s trying to love it, exactly as it is.
Because the mind isn’t local; it’s a broadcast🤯