It's Electric! Boogie Woogie Woogie Woogie!!!

A pretty crazy thing happened to me this morning in the bungalow.

After getting off of a phone call while fiddling around with wires to figure out why my internet connection had suddenly gone down, a cloud of pale brown smoke suddenly puffed out of my mouth, filling my nostrils with the smell of something burning while a metallic taste filled my mouth.

After which I got disoriented...which might have just been the result of being utterly freaked out by the sight, smell and taste of smoke coming out of my mouth.

As my mind frantically sought to diagnose the situation, my fingers dialed 911.

"I'm not crazy!" I hysterically sought to assure the operator. "But something in me seems to be burning. There is smoke coming out of my mouth! Could there be a fire inside of me??"

Wondering if my youngest son was going to return home to a pile of ashes and bone inside a pair of sneakers, I called HOBB and kept him on the phone while the ambulance arrived. The smell of burning was very pronounced where I was sitting so I went to another room in the bungalow but it remained. Then I stood outside and still smelled something burnt though it was raining outside. HOBB was trying to figure out what was going on with me.

In about 15 minutes, the ambulance came screaming down to the bungalow, by which time I was vacillating between panic, the fear that I might spontaneously combust (that could happen, couldn't it??) and the worry that I would look like a big idiot because nothing was actually the matter with me and I was making everything up.

After checking the bottoms of my feet and palms of my hands for burn marks (there were none) and hearing I had been fiddling with wires, the guys offered the opinion that I had received a mile electric shock and suggested that I go to the hospital to be further checked out. They were about to offer to take me when they got a call from the day camp across the road that a camper had a seizure.

I felt glad that they were able to be of service to someone more severely afflicted than me and rationalized that the true meaning of bringing them to my cabin was so they might help this girl. The bungalow colony owner, Scott, came down to check on me about half an hour later and told me that the burning smell in my nose was likely singed nose hairs. He also advised me to skip the ER visit, stating that I seemed okay to him. Not eager to spend my day traveling there and waiting to be seen, I took Scott's advice as I would my own doctor's.

It is now about six hours later. I still have the smell of burning something in my nostrils and a warm metallic sensation in my mouth. I feel somewhat disoriented, in fact, if I concentrate too much, my brain feels kind of...fried.

After Scott left, I had my drum lesson with Jeff, my fifth, probably my best one yet. I was able to drag really well and got the complicated jazz beat for the first time, the one I was unable to get last time, the one that requires four different motions from all four limbs. I worked on my rock beat, the one with the ghost notes, the one that works as well for "Californication" as it does for the majority of "Otherside." I practiced a couple of fills. I played a couple of RHCP songs perfectly in beat with the music.

As I played, I felt a new mastery and fluidity. I wondered if this was the result of practicing or whether the electric shock had rewired my brain circuitry, giving me enhanced musical abilities. Like some superhero animated by electricity, I closed my eyes and imagined myself newly possessed of super drummer abilities, jolted into greatness, She-Ra, Princess of Percussion.