I was about to name these two songs that have been stuck in my head for 5-6 years, but I’m thinking now it’s not that they’re stuck in my head, it’s just that they’re the Default Humming Songs. So like if I’m trying to look nonchalant, or on the rare occasions when I actually am nonchalant, these are the songs that invariably pop out. Sometimes the hum, sometimes the scatting, sometimes the hum backed with a kind of trip-hop beat that I can do with my tongue at the same time—I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you how it is.

Now, the DHSes are not all-time faves, and in fact probably songs I haven’t even listened to since college, and they also seem almost deliberately obscure-ish, as if I was trying to come across as Captain Hipster of the USA, but again, I’m just laying down the facts, and the facts are these: The Wedding Present’s cover of the Go-Betweens’s “Cattle and Cane,” and “The Wit and the Wisdom” by Husker Du, and feel free to add your own umlauts there because I’m a busy man making my way in today’s hectic world and don’t have the necessary resources at the moment.

I notice now that they both use the “x and y” construction in their titles. Is this the secret to their staying power? I should add that I saw The Fast and the Furious because a) at the time I’d seen every Vin Diesel movie, but more importantly because b) I really appreciated the fact that they chose not to call it Fast and Furious, which is what you’d expect. Putting the definite articles in there really gave it a loftier sort of feel, like The Naked and the Dead, say. Also: under-the-car glowing.

And I also want to clarify (who am I, all of a sudden, Barrish?) that I only hum the intro to “The Wit and the Wisdom” and not the lengthy Mould shred-fest that consumes the majority of the song. And the souls of any teenagers within earshot.