Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and pigeons taking baths

I've started and stopped a few drafts on some additional thoughts dealing with Pengolodh, but I am going to take an interim break and write on something just more fun or light-hearted, maybe.

A few days ago, I woke up with the clear phrase "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" on my mind.  Very clear phrase.  It was a strange and random thought, but as I lay there and thought about it, an image of a magical flying car came to my mind. I have never watched the movie, and if you asked me in waking life what it was about, I might or might not be able to tell you that a flying car was involved.  I probably could, actually, but it might take just a second to remember.

However, upon waking the association with a flying car was instantaneous.  As I thought of this, I then played a memory of when I was a little kid, and I was getting out of the bath tub and my dad was drying me off, singing the song Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I haven't thought of it for quite awhile, but it is true that when we were very little (so this would go back, I don't know, to when I was 4 or 5 years old), my dad would come get us out of the tub, cover us with a towel, and dry us off, kind of in a fake rough playhouse way that would make me laugh.  While he was drying us off like this, he would sing a song.  The Chitty Chitty Bang Bang phrase made me think of that, and I could hear my dad singing it.

Here is the weird part, though:  My dad actually never sang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at least that I can recall.

I realized this as I pulled up the video for the song. It was not one of the songs that my dad sang (at least that I can remember). I had been so convinced, though, that this was in fact the song that my immediate reaction was that my dad must have sang his own version. But this couldn't be right, I concluded. It must have been a different song I was remembering.



It turns out the song I was thinking of was The Witch Doctor. Specifically, the part I was remembering was my dad singing the chorus, which went:

Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang
Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bang bang

This was the song.  It must have been the "bang bang" at the end of the chorus that had me associate this song with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as the nonsensical language and words that are used in both songs.  When I was young, I wouldn't have known either song, or really cared what the titles were, so I don't actually remember if I ever knew before I just looked it up a couple days ago what song that chorus was from.

In any case, here is the Witch Doctor song (I learned that the singer actually went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks using the sped up singing technique featured in this song):

Back to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Before it was a movie (which I was familiar with), it was a book written by none other than Ian Fleming.  That was surprising.  Fleming is more famous for his James Bond books.  The complete name of the novel included the tagline "The Magical Car".

I was thinking through the movie depiction, or must have, because the car I pictured was not this green car, but a stranger and more colorful car.  In looking up the movie, that image was pretty much how I pictured it, as a winged flying car:

My mind, you can already guess, went to Stones even before looking any of this up, given my association between them and Cars in my dreams.  Once I saw the image above, however, seeing musical notes seeming to come out of the car itself, as well as the tagline above including the phrase "the history of everything!" had me further thinking specifically of our Sawtooth Stone, which I propose has a song or story on it, and that it does in fact represent the history of everything (as Joseph saw it).

I had to look up the plot, and it seems the movie is loosely based on the book, so it isn't necessarily the same story between the two.  In just looking at the movie version (for simplicity and because that is the car I pictured, and the song I thought I had remembered my dad signing is from the movie as well), you have an old beat up car that gets rebuilt.  The car turns out to be magical, able to do some things like turning into a boat, as well as sprouting wings and flying.  Both of these details, again, stood out to me in comparison of Stones and means of transportation in some fashion.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the name of the car, and it gets if from the strange noises the engine makes while it runs.  This becomes one of the main musical numbers from the movie, titled "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and was nominated for an Academy Award.  Here is the song clip (so this is what I had thought I remembered my dad singing, but turned out not to be so):

I am not sure why I am even writing about this, in case you are wondering where this is going.  I have no idea.

Here we get the scene of Chitty transforming into a car with wings:

There is an entire plot point around a Baron Bomburst attempting to steal Chitty, and then we find out that he has kidnapped other inventors who he has ordered to make him a flying car.  Bomburst doesn't have one.  This type of plot element has come up before in our my story here, with a reference to Doug wanting a ticket to "peek the peak" and an earlier warning of thinking of taking a ship (as mentioned in my post "Penalties and red cards").

In any case, I probably could have shortened this post by saying I had thoughts one morning of a magical flying car that somehow merged with a very happy memory of my dad drying me off after a bath.  I was thinking more on this later, though, and was reminded of some things I wrote down back in 2021.  So, to make this even longer....

I think I mentioned that I has started writing out almost a dialogue with myself in 2021, but at the same time thinking it might be with another Being.  I don't make a claim that this is actually what happened - I can definitely see my own voice or words in things I wrote, so 'channelling' isn't something I would say I was doing.  Maybe almost like pretending would be the simplest way of describing something no one could object to - like how a person might talk to an imaginary friend, or something, might be a good analogy.  Not at least how Doug describes his own writing, or even hearing how Leo would describe some things he wrote.  It never felt like word for word dictation - more like thoughts that I would put words around.

 

But I was lost, and I didn't know what had happened to me.  So I wrote.  Quite a bit.  It actually extended out from the habit I formed in 2020 of writing out my thoughts and feelings.  Part of my therapy and fixing my brain involved cognitive-type rehabilitation.  Usually when a person gets like how I was in 2020 and 2021, it is the feelings that are overwhelming - it is like you can't deal or process with things effectively, and at least for me, it was just one wave after another of anxiety, fear, guilt, sadness, whatever.

In any case, one of the beliefs of a cognitive therapy approach is that if you can somehow trace the feelings back to your thoughts, and then alter or develop different patterns of thinking, this will lead to healthier feelings and behaviors.  Part of doing this, for me at least, was writing out the situations I found myself in, describing the thoughts I was having, the resulting feelings, and any behaviors I engaged in as part of this.  At first, the objective wasn't to change anything necessarily, but rather just try to identify, which strangely just sometimes being able to identify what was going on would help.  I like to solve problems, so it became an exercise in doing just that, which helped me step outside of myself.  It would be later that I could try and shape or change my thoughts through different tools and approaches.

In doing this, I filled up whole notebooks.  I carried around a notebook and pen everywhere, and spent a significant portion of every day writing in this way.  I can go to any day in the latter part of 2020, and find multiple entries of me just writing out things using this Situation-Thoughts-Feelings-Behavior framework.

At some point in 2021, when I was a bit 'healthier', but still pretty troubled about things, I would find myself writing out questions about what happened.  This was probably fueled by the fact that the 'words' and dreams never really stopped completely, and I needed to find a way to cope with the fact that maybe they never would.  They were still happening - what was I supposed to do?

So, I sometimes wrote out questions, and then thought through an answer.  What would someone else tell me about this?  It helped to think that maybe the answers were coming from somewhere else, but again, I wouldn't go so far as to say they definitely were.  All that being said, as I've mentioned before, I would actually stop this practice later in 2021 as I did start to feel another voice outside of my own was perhaps mixing their thoughts into these answers, and it wasn't a good voice.  So, I stopped doing that, and haven't taken up that style of writing since.

What to make of the earlier stuff - before I noticed (or thought I did) this intrusion of thought?  I am not sure.  I don't trust long-form writing of this kind dealing with these topics stating they come from another Being, full stop.  That applies to my own little Q&A-type writing.  But, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing is crap... I just don't know for sure what is crap and what isn't, which is obviously a problem.

Anyway, like I said I didn't know where I was going with this, but I bring up that whole thing about writing because when I thought more about this memory of my dad drying me off after my bath as a little kid, and this being a fun memory, I thought of something I wrote down in March 2021.  The context for this was I was actually having quite a few existential fears and anxiety so I was writing out questions relating to this (pro-tip:  if you are suffering from anxiety, try not to figure out the universe!).  At this time I was also still worried that these experiences just pointed to the undeniable fact that I was dying or something.  It was all soon going to go black.  In the answer I wrote out to my last question, I made mention of a bath, and how truth, and the washing away of falseness, is like taking a nice warm bath:

Q: But I worry that I am false – that I am part of that.


A: “No, you are not false, but falseness exists within and around you. And it is this that will fade away. If any part of you is dying or will die, it is only everything that is not you. You will see. Don’t think so hard on this, but only in terms of a nice warm bath, the grime is gone, and you will be glad to see it gone, and you feel all the more clean, and like you  – rejuvenated – for having once been in the dirt, but it now being no longer. It’s a great feeling!

“Sometimes people don’t want to take baths, but they always feel better after they do.  Always.  Without exception.”

It would be not too long after this that my youngest son would become infatuated with the author/ illustrator Mo Willems.  Willems wrote the short children's book "The Pigeon Needs a Bath", and it was this book that my son would always want me to read him before bed.  I was going to explain the book, but I found a video of someone reading it.  Here it is: