So we always sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Years, and whether it’s my bad ears and faulty imagination or the slur of sleepy singers with too much punch in them, or the fact that I don’t speak Scottish and no one told me we were switching languages,  I always heard the words different.

To my tender ears the song was called “Old Anxine”, and it went thus:

“Should all acquaintance be forgot, in days of Old Anxine…”

Difficult to interpret, no doubt, but after much thought I came to the conclusion that Anxine must be something about anxiety, some stressful condition or state of woe.  Old Anxine, then, was some pretty bad days that our forefathers went through, and then they wrote this song referring to them.  Like the Potato Famine or the 1976 Bucs.

The gist then, is that if you forget everyone you know, like you wake up and have amnesia and you forget who all your friends and family and co-workers are, so that you have no more acquaintances; and then on top of that you find yourself in days of Old Anxine, meaning either really bad days that are like the really Old Bad Days that we all remember, or else actually in those bad days themselves (whether by time travel or else the guy was living in those days when he wrote the song)…

That’s where I always got stuck, because then everyone would sing about Old Anxine over and over:  “For Old Anxine, my dear, for Old Anxiiiiiine…”  Then they would start over.  No one ever told me what to DO if all acquaintance should be forgot in days of Old Anxine.  It was like people were coming up with this horrible hypothetical situation where you wake up in terrible times and don’t know anybody, but then right when they’re going to tell you what to do about it, they are drunk and so they just start singing about those Old Anxine days over and over again to their old drunk wife.

Therefore the song could run thus in a modern way:  “Hey man, here’s some advice.  If you ever forget everyone, and you’re in some trouble like those really bad days…hey, wow, remember those bad old days, pretty mama?  They were really bad, huh?  Yeah, they were bad.  So anyway, if you ever forget…”  And on and on in meaningless repetition.

Why those depressing, frustrating lines were always just right for joyfully ringing in the New Year and kissing someone was beyond me.

I am just glad I have never yet found myself in that situation.  But if I ever am an amnesiac in times like those bad times, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:  wow, those times really sucked.