The Super Collider Blues

Sometimes when I get sad working on the super collider, looking for traces of the neutrino and that mean old Higgs boson particle, I reach for my Sears Roebuck guitar and play:

My project leader comes over. If you don’t find the alpha particle by five, Ingmar, she says, I can’t justify your annual salary of 180,000 E. She looks at me hard. I know you’re not dumb, she says, you’re a Swede.

And I say, Who are you calling a Swede, tra-la? Do I say good morgun? Do I eat herrings?

But the boss lady, she just sashays on down the hall, saying, Come off it, Ingmar. You look and sound like those people in Fargo.

Seriously? I say. Fargo? I’m a bluesman.

I take up my Sears Roebuck guitar and play:

The boss lady comes back before noon. She points to the bubble chamber and asks me what field are the anti-particles suspended in? I wipe my brow and say to her, I call that field the yumpin yimminy power flow.

While she smacks herself in the forehead, I take up my guitar and play:

The boss lady tells me, Swede, we’re not interested in musical physics here. Come up with an explanation using strong and weak forces and leave out the yumpin yiminys. She shows me her expensive new algae-powered wristwatch and winks. What am I supposed to make of that? I know good and well it’s lunchtime because I keep my eye on the algae.

This deuce next to me, Pierre from Luxembourg or Belgium or someplace, comes over and expresses a keen interest in my guitar. He takes me to his cube and plays his flute after wiping that nasty cafeteria lunch off his lips. That cafeteria lunch here at the super collider site is to be avoided at all costs. It’s all hard Brussel sprouts and high fat dressing and strictly from smog-filled urban gardens.

With his lips now spotless Pierre pipes out an uplifting Magic Flute Papageno birdsong with sunny skies crowded with chirps and tweets and other Mozartian bird mayhem. Some days I see him fluttering and shaking in his cube like a birdman himself. This is some weird cat, but he can play. He quizzes me and asks where I came by my interest in American blues music. It’s odd to find someone with my straight blond hair and blue eyes who isn’t into ABBA, he says.

I tell him that before I came to the super collider I taught particle physics at the University of Heidelberg for a few terms, busking around campus under the name of Blind Louisiana Johansen, PhD. And not a soul bought my tapes!

Before lunch is over Lisette from the Sorbonne comes over to say hello. She’s new and Pierre does the introductions, calling me an authentic bluesman from the American south despite my ski slope-filled youth and Nordic complexion. I’m the real deal, Pierre says, as she will see when she hears me sing and play guitar. Either that or I’m a great kidder, he says.

I take her fine hand and raise it to my lips. Enchante, I say.

Enchante, repeats Pierre, probably wishing he had my way with women.

Lisette says I do look like an Alpine skier rather than a blues hand, and I get a little defensive. I go on MyBloodline.com, confident I am the delta bluesman I identify as. Lo, the results come back 98% ice fisherman and 1% highlander and 1% sawdust. As good as Mick Jagger! I take up my guitar and play:

Late in the afternoon the boss lady tells me to do beta decay. Keep your nose to the neutron, she says, or your head’s on the block, Iceman.

I take up my guitar and play:

At the end of the day I make an astonishing discovery: If I use open tuning on my Sears Roebuck guitar instead of standard, I can play “Smokestack Lightning!” Then the boss fires me for insubordination!