I actually don’t mind this one. But I wish it were more than an anomaly.

Somehow, even miraculously, I’ve been spared the ordeal of tinnitus, despite the countless hours I’ve spent listening to rock and roll at high volume. Also despite the fact that hearing is a vulnerability on both sides of my lineage. My mother wound up nearly deaf. Her father spent 40 years in a glass factory and then down in a basement full of power tools, receiving the unexpected benefit of tuning out my grandmother’s nagging by the simple expedient of removing his hearing aid. My dad had the ringing from his days as a fighter pilot. Engines too loud for the ear to recover from ever.

Regardless, my hearing is still perfect. My own wife suffers from tinnitus, and we have to calibrate volumes carefully between what is inaudible to her and what is too loud for me. We use onscreen captions a lot. But however loud it is, I can still hear the mail Jeep stopping at our mailbox, and I can also identify almost all the celebrity voiceovers on TV commercials. I have a trick auditory memory, it seems. I am blessed.

I am also cursed. These days everybody is in the business of inventing syndromes — Restless Leg, Dry Eye, and others. Permit me to add one more. A distant cousin of tinnitus I’ll call Repititus.

It’s the song or the jingle that enters your head and refuses to leave, settling in on the couch of your frontal lobes and elbowing everything and everyone else out of the way. Awake, asleep, doesn’t matter. Can’t be silenced or displaced until the next interloper moves in.

I don’t mind (as much) when the invader is one I’ve consciously looked up and listened to. If I get two days of “Winning Ugly” (‘the other side is screeeaaming!’) or “no retreat, baby, no surrender,” I can accept that it’s largely my own fault.

Occasionally, the offender is welcome. Mozart’s clarinet concerto in A major or Philip Glass’s The Hours. They’re their own cushion on the couch, one you can ride on like a cloud.

But that’s not the usual case. There’s no defense against something like the “Hot Pockets” jingle. Hot Pockets. That’s the whole thing. Hot Pockets. Over and over and, you know.

Or you’re listening to the radio and some host’s bumper music comes crashing in, Eleanor Rigby or Crazy or What is Love (this, like the whole post, is mean — when you see the original video, you WILL be stuck). You didn’t ask for this, but by golly you’ve got it now.

Worse, much worse, when it’s a song you never liked in the first place. The Repititus gods don’t care at all. It’s like telling someone not to think of an elephant. Say the name and suddenly you’re stuck with Barry Manilow, Karen Carpenter, or (hell on earth) Barbra Streisand. “People who need people… Aaaaah!”

Mostly it’s just a constant low grade irritant, like, well, tinnitus, and I’m not making a federal case out of it, except that I guess I am at that because it represents a huge chunk of my subconscious time I’d rather have to myself, thank you. Why I’m calling for it to be named an official syndrome. Maybe there’s a palliative drug with hundreds of fatal side effects they could advertise on TV with an unmemorable soundtrack.

I’ll close with the one that’s occupying my otherwise prodigious brain right now. Saw a Leonard Nimoy obit that referred to him as a West End Boy. What? Was he British? No. He was a Boston kid. No matter. The damage, as they say, was done. The Pet Shop Boys’s monotonous song sailed into my brain and took up residence, eating all the potato chips and driving Raebert into the bedroom. Nothing I can do about it.

Unless… I can, on bended knee, beg for a better replacement.

Just popped into my head, that one. Don’t think it’s going anywhere. Welcome to my world.