Incorrigible

This morning, instead of waking up with a song in my head, I awoke with a word: INCORRIGIBLE. This word appeared in my head with absolutely no context, as if someone had decided out of the blue to implant a random mantra in my mind. If a song you can’t get out of your ear is an earworm, is a random word burrowed in your brain a mindworm?

When I tried to think of any reason for “incorrigible,” I couldn’t come up with any. If I’d awoken with “inconceivable” in my head, I could blame The Princess Bride. If “unforgettable” were in mind, I could blame Nat King Cole. “Dirigible” might have appeared due to recent news stories about the Chinese spy balloon. But try as I might, I can’t think of any famous quotes, memes, or news stories involving “incorrigible.”

I did dream last night, but what I remember about those dreams is ragtag and fragmentary, with nothing shedding light on “incorrigible.”

In one dream, my brother and I were a “Scooby Doo”-style crime solving team searching for clues in an odd assortment of crimes. (I should note that in real life, I don’t have a brother.) In one caper, we were sharing a brownstone with random friends, and a group of bad guys broke through our kitchen window looking for guns. Naturally, we suspected a mysterious neighbor who parked his enormous SUV in his spacious kitchen.

In another dream, J and I were photographing a bombed-out building with posters on the doors that said “If you lived here, you’d be homeless by now.” The building had a standing frame, but the walls and windows had been blown out, and for some reason people were filling out raffle tickets for a multimillion dollar prize, slipping those tickets through the mailslot in the (intact) doors.

These dreams are curious enough, but none of them offer any clues into “incorrigible.”