by J. R. Practix

Achy (adj.): Suffering from dull continuous pain: e.g. she felt tired and achy.

That’s not what it makes me think of!

Because of the foolishness of a crazy song, when I hear the word “achy,” I think of Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart.”

I don’t know what it is about our society, but for some reason or another, to escape the doom and gloom of everyday problems, we will occasionally take on trends which are absolutely too silly for words. Our nation has a whole series of these:

• The hula hoop: a circular plastic tube you placed around your waist, to wiggle around to keep it constantly rolling.
• How about The Twist? I saw a movie the other day and people were doing The Twist and I wondered how we were so blind to the stupidity of the vision?
• Of course, that goes for La Macarena, too.

We have these notions that certain things are cool for a season. They are silly and we want to escape the drudgery of thought, so we jump on the bandwagon and start tooting our horns with the rest of the off-key crowd.

Achy Breaky Heart??? How did that ever get past a publisher?? How did that get recorded?

Somewhere along the line we need monitors in our society who remind us that our particular difficulties are not so seriously devastating that we need to escape to utter childish pursuits.

I see them every day–people chasing this, pursuing that…and I’m telling you, even things like Twitter and Facebook will eventually have the same fate as telegraph lines, designer phones, 8-track tapes and My Space.

Didn’t they have an Achy Breaky Heart dance?? That is the definition of a double hell.

I am not trying to be some sort of curmudgeon who doesn’t see the joy in an occasional flippant trend, but when we’re chasing down causes which we know are stupid even as we’re doing them, it would just be better to avoid the detour.

And you know what’s worse? This guy, Billy Ray, is still traveling around every night–singing that song to adoring fans who remember where they were the first time they heard it. Do you know where I was? In musical hell!

It’s just too much. Even the word “achy” itself is a little bit “Sesame Street.”

Please just be mature enough to go ahead and have an ache.