Sunday, July 13, 2008

It Be Hot And Quiet In The Sticks--

Sometimes the heat and the stillness make life seem like it is going stale. Not really true but the heat on the brain slows things down to where you swear there is very little happening.

Such is the un-air-conditioned life for me.

The neighborhood noises are dampened by the lack of motivation in my neighbors. The dogs are too hot to run the fence and bark; the street is empty of bicyclists and walkers. Even the mail lady is less inspired to yell from her window at my sleeping dogs. It's just too hot to make much noise at all.

Here is more fiction from "The Lights Go Off, The lights Go On". Now where's my fly swatter?

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Hearing yourself think is easier in a quiet space than a noisy space. In a noisy space a thought is lost within the noise. If you are your thoughts and you can’t find your thoughts inside of you-- if the noise is so loud it drowns out the tiny voices in your mind that make up your favorite parts of yourself--than the noises become you. You are now noise and not yourself and what was special about you becomes a generic sound such as the blap blap blapping of a Harley Davidson motorcycle racing up a freeway onramp.

Noise enters through your ears and demands to take over without argument by simply asserting its intensity. Filters in the brain are over-stressed to do anything about this external assault and your quiet thoughts are scattered like curb debris and swept up into the great heap of other brain activities.

You try in your mind to scream the noise away, but your yelling in your head just makes you mad and you end up yelling at your window which is covered with blankets to keep out the noise.
“Who are you to do this to me!” you yell in your walled-in space.

“Who am I to have this done to me?” you hear as a lonely voice in the back of your overloaded mind.

A hospital is a quiet-ish place full of tiny noises. If you lie here and focus, you can hear the living and the dying. You hear families scolding young children and favors asked for. You hear progress reports and bad news given over telephones. You hear the giggly stories of nurses sitting at their desks and the mumblings of men and women who have fallen from their minds and cannot climb back inside themselves to make some sense of anything.

If you lie here and listen, you get an inkling that tragedy and comedy are inseparable conditions. It is an act of balance displayed like a circus family tree. In a hospital, the life we live can be heard by lying quietly with your feet pointing ceiling-ward and simply listening. You learn to love the sound of everybody breathing. The sound of air funneling through a hairy orifice is a glory and a miracle. You lie here breathing like I do and you are thankful you can hear your every breath.

2 comments:

travistee said...

It is hot here too. 100 degrees, and humid, and still. I just want to lie on the living room floor and watch Asian films.

Cheesy said...

I am going to escape to the beach next weekend... I need some BIG surf noise....