First, let’s get this annual plug out of the way: You know what might make a good Father’s Day gift for the nostalgic dad in your life? A copy of Cabin Pressure! No plans for a paperback edition yet, but the hardback is perfect for summer, ‘cause nothing keeps an edge of the beach towel down like a thick boarded binding!

All right, I feel all dirty for that bit of promotion, so now I have a gift for all you readers. Recently I emailed my friend Brian to tell him that I had a song stuck in my head for the past few days and it was driving me mad. He wrote back, “This should help get it out,” and included a link to the following YouTube video. I urge you to watch the whole thing, because it insidiously bores its way into your head, and the fascinating thing about it is that the longer you watch it, the more questions it raises.

Well, Brian was right. Any other song I’ve ever heard in my life vanished, and only this song, “Losing You,” remains. You might think, “How could that be? That woman’s voice is terrible.” Fine. Doubt me. Listen to it one more time. NOW IT WILL NEVER LEAVE YOUR HEAD. I went to bed with it running in an endless loop in my head, and I woke up with it resuming where it left off. Brian says that he always watches it whenever he needs to wipe another tune out of his mind. Frankly, this may be one of those instances where the cure is more harmful than the illness.

The video haunts me. First of all, there’s the fact that when the singer finally appears, she is the complete opposite of what I thought she would like. I showed it to Christine, who said, “Do you think that’s really the woman singing?” To which I say, what would the real singer have to have looked like for them to have thought that a sexier substitute might be a woman who looks like the offspring of Rhea Pearlman and Joe Viterelli?

When Brian first sent it to me, it was without any explanation, so I didn’t know if it was a music video or what. When I watched the opening footage, with its incredibly slow pans of Chicago sites and buildings, I thought someone had made a montage of all the exterior establishing shots for every Chicago-set sitcom. The way the camera pulls out on that one building, I thought it was a shot that would lead to a scene in Bob Newhart’s psychologist office. I expected to hear Carol saying, “Get your own coffee, Jerry,” not this caterwauling.

Look, forget the storyline: woman gets in limo, reflects on brighter days with mulleted motorcyclist, and then goes on flight – it’s a story as old as mullets themselves. What entrances me is that the distracted, uninterested singer looks like she was filmed while trying to remember where she left her keys. And I love the mise-en-scene: she sings from the shores of a lake, just ten feet in front of a giant drainage pipe. Nothing says “I miss you, Johnny Mullet!” like pollution.

I post this video and my glee over finding it at my own risk. There are probably some of you saying, “Why is he so fascinated by this? Everybody knows who this is.” Tonight I did a little web searching, and found out that this woman is Jan Terri, who was an aspiring singer/limo driver who made these videos in the early ‘90s and handed them out to her passengers. (Hence the limo-happy storyline. Had she worked in a Dairy Queen, it would have been about how a woman remembers her motorcycling affair while sucking on the business end of a Blizzard machine.) The videos went the pre-internet equivalent of viral (dubbed and traded VHS tapes). In other words, she was the 1993 version of the “Chocolate Rain” kid. (She was interviewed and mocked on a 2000 Daily Show, apparently.) So to those of you long aware of her, this is like reading about someone marveling at discovering Saved By the Bell: Can you believe this guy called Screech? Such is the risk of the internet; every time you get joy out of discovering something new in the crannies of the web, there are thousands of people who think you're a yutz for not finding it years ago. But if it is new to you, you’re welcome, and enjoy humming it for the next week. Why should I suffer alone?

Yesterday my old camp friend Brandt brought his family to visit us at our vacation rental for a BBQ. His parents also came; his dad had been the camp’s legendary assistant director for all the years I was there. He was a guidance counselor and social worker during the year, and a genius at sniffing out and stamping out bad behavior. He could get any kid to cop to doing something wrong and understand why his actions were morally unacceptable in mere seconds. He trained all the young counselors in his ways, and during any role play in which we’d act as the truculent, unrepentant, misbehaving kid, he’d have us apologizing and offering to clean the entire camp within seconds. Though he explained his methods, nobody else could ever master them; when faced with our real problem campers during the summer, we’d try to replicate his maneuvers but somehow end up cleaning up the entire camp ourselves.

It was nature’s way that his son Brandt would be a complete hellion, much like the way that a minister’s daughter is often the town slut. As a young camper, Brandt terrified me. My most vivid memory of him was during my first summer at camp, in 1980. It was before an event we called Circus Day, which kicked off with all the campers dressing up in costumes for a parade down to the main field where earlier we had all set up carnival booths. (I was always confused by why we called it a parade, when the entire camp was in it, leaving no room for spectators. No matter how many costumed participants, fire-eaters, or baton-twirlers you may have, if no one’s watching, it’s not a parade, it’s a group walk. Or, at its most optimistic, a parade rehearsal.)

Anyway, there we all were, milling around the parking lot, waiting for the “parade” to begin, when I was aware of a melee firing up about five yards away. Counselors rushed toward a scrum of campers gathered around a dust cloud of swung limbs. I saw one staffer reach in and drag Brandt out. Brandt was dressed as a clown, with a big flower-shaped collar around his neck that he’d made out of cardboard. But he was not a happy clown. He was an enraged clown. His face was twisted into a mid-fight rictus of fury, his arms still flailing. I imagine this was what Bozo would look like if he’d just caught his wife in bed with Ronald McDonald. It really was a wonder that I wasn’t terrified of clowns after that.

I steered clear of Brandt for the rest of my camper life, but when I became a counselor, he was working in the kitchen crew (it paid more), and we became friends. He’s a hilarious wiseass who sometimes delivers punchlines in an exaggerated Jackie Gleason fashion that’s very contagious. He’s one of those guys whose cadences you find yourself unintentionally aping after extended exposure. Here are three random memories of him from our camp days.

1) On a day and night off when we were 19, I took a misbegotten road trip to Montreal with him and our friend Rich that was 90% road thanks to bad planning and worse senses of direction. To fill the endless hours in the car, we busied ourselves by mocking each other. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the trip that I realized that Brandt never got mocked. I would tease Rich, Brandt would pile on, and we’d high-five gloriously. Then Rich would give crap back to me, and Brandt would magically be right there beside him, egging him on. From then on he was dubbed “Captain Alliance.”

2) Brandt once went on an alpine slide ride and wiped out, leaving a swatch of his own forearm skin behind on the asphalt track. He returned to camp with this ugly wound, but refused to get it treated. Every day we’d beg him to take care of it, as we were getting grossed out by its festering colors and angry weeping. Finally, one day he showed up at the dock with a pristine white bandage over it, after finally consulting the nurse.

“Thank God,” I said. “Why’d you finally do something about it.”

He shrugged. “I got tired of waking up with it sticking to the sheets.”

3) On the final day of our last day of camp in 1988, we were walking through the grounds, having finished cleaning and closing up our activities. The big staff party was that night, a drunken bash that everyone lived for during the last couple of weeks of camp, when we’d all gotten burned out. Nearly all the kids were gone, but as we got to the assembly grounds, we saw two ten-year-old twins whose parents were arriving very late arguing by some rocks. They were notorious pains in the asses who had been driving the staff crazy all summer. When they saw us, they both ran up and started simultaneously trying to explain what the other one had done wrong. Brandt interrupted.

“Hey, kids, guess what?” he said.

They quieted down and stared at him.

“SUMMER’S OVER!” he yelled, giving them both the finger, and then he proceeded past them on his way to the party.

Now Brandt has two kids, and there is no reason in the world they should be well behaved. Genetically and karmically, they should give him nothing but headaches. And yet they – a 5-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl – couldn’t be sweeter. That he would be an effective disciplinarian and loving father is too much to wrap my head around, so I am assuming that all praise should go to his wife.

My two-year-old daughter Lila instantly adopted Brandt’s son as a hero, and followed him around everywhere, laughing at him and pointing at him and narrating to the rest of us what he was doing. The three kids went upstairs, and we heard some thumping around, but nothing so alarming that anyone went upstairs to check, because there were never tears or screaming.

That night, after Brandt’s family had gone, Lila began jumping on the bed with glee, something we don’t let her do, and that, frankly, she’s never showed much interest in. And then, when it was time to go to bed, she stood up on the bed where she was just read stories, and crouched down into lunging position, about to fling herself off the bed down into her porta-crib. My wife Christine stopped her, and Lila was heartbroken. She explained through tears that that’s what Brandt’s son did, and, from what we could gather, possibly what she had been doing with him. This might not seem like much, but Lila couldn’t be more risk-averse, so the idea that that afternoon, just above our heads, she had been doing cannonballs into a flimsy crib was astounding.

I chalked it all up to toddler hero worship. Although now I wonder whether Brandt’s son said to her before he left, “Your dumb parents probably won’t let you do this anymore. But just ignore them, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

I think Captain Alliance is rearing an army of his own.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have received good reviews for Cabin Pressure. And it’s always satisfying to read a thoughtful critic praising your work. But today I got perhaps the strangest compliment from a friend that was, oddly, far more satisfying than anything I could ever read in print.

This good friend of mine called me to say she’d finished my book and found it very funny. In fact, she recounted, she was laughing so hard at certain sections that her husband tried to take it away from her to read it himself. But then, she said - and I quote - “He was reading one of the early chapters, and he started to laugh, but it was really painful because he’d just had a vasectomy. So he gave it back and said he’d have to read it later, when he was fully healed.”

That’s right, folks. Only the heartiest of testicles can stand up to the raw comic power of Cabin Pressure. For the paperback, I want that on the cover as a pull quote. Maybe my book should come with a Surgeon General’s warning label: READING THIS BOOK MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR EMBATTLED SCROTUM.

I feel like this could be a good marketing tool. When The Exorcist came out, the studio exploited anecdotes about audience members fainting from fear at screenings, and it only enhanced the movie’s mystique. I could do something similar. Maybe I can make it into a macho challenge to readers: Read Cabin Pressure…if you’ve got the balls!