Funny what goes through your head when you’re alone with your thoughts and no distractions for a while.

I’m lying in this MRI machine listening to all the thumping and pumping and wondering how I’m going to keep still for 30 minutes without going bananas. So I tune my brain to the last song I heard on Pandora and, with Madonna’s La Isla Bonita playing in the background (don’t judge me), start thinking about all my MRIs over the past 20 years or so.

Turns out I’ve had both feet, both knees, lower abdomen, chest, back, right elbow, left hand, both shoulders, sinuses and brains scanned, some lots of times. The only body parts that haven’t been explored by a superconducting magnet shaped like a giant donut are my left elbow, right hand, neck, butt, groin and the long bones between my joints.

No wonder a confused radiology tech asked, “Dude, are we doing your right or left foot? The order says right but you filled out all the forms left.” The order was right. I swear I’m not dyslexic, just a little overwhelmed.

So why is any of that important? It’s not. But it got me through the first 10 minutes.

Then I got to thinking about how weird it is that one machine can make so many different incredibly loud and incredibly annoying sounds with perfect syncopation, and yet none of it works with any of the rock & roll songs playing in my head. And it’s so damn loud you can’t possibly block it out.

Believe me, I had all the time in the world so I tried a whole bunch of tunes, whatever popped into my head: Monkey Man, I’m Happy Just to Dance With You, It’s the End of the World As We Know It, You Got That Right, Hello It’s Me, What’s My Age Again. Nothing worked. I mean, how F—-d up is that?

Finally I thought about the drive there. I was sitting at a dead end stop sign waiting for traffic to pass so I could turn left onto a 35-mph road and some freakin’ moron just stopped cold, risked getting rear-ended, and waved for me to turn in front of him. What a dope.

I mean, courtesy on the road is great, but not if it breaks the rules. The reason we have rules of the road is so everyone will follow them. If they did, nobody would ever get hurt (except for random accidents, of course). When you do unexpected things that break the rules, that’s when someone gets hurt.

So follow the rules of the road, damn it. And would someone please tell Philips, GE and Siemens to do something about those dumb MRI scanners. I mean, would it be so hard to add a display with a playlist of songs that go with the machine’s beat? Sheesh.

Image credit  Roy Blumenthal and Alex Foster (brain scan, and no, that’s not me) via Flickr