Noise

One of the more disconcerting things about living downtown is the night noise; most specifically, the sirens.

Granted, we don't live in New York City. In fact, granted, the population of my entire state could fit on the island of Manhattan, and if we all managed to politely scootch over just so, there'd still be room for the state of Rhode Island to squeeze in beside us. But still. There is a certain expectation of quiet in the inky black of night, and even a single siren piercing the air is enough to shiver one's timbers.

I had a meeting yesterday morning. One I was called to, and was wary of attending. All day Monday, my racing mind sent my nerve endings on a wild goose chase for calm, until I could feel myself wrapped up in a tangle of knots based on little more than morose overthinking. I don't know what it was I anticipated, really. Or maybe the fraying nerves were a result of not knowing what to expect. Whatever the case, I spent the late hours of Monday and the wee hours of Tuesday morning in a topsy turvy state, tossing and turning, pacing and thinking, generally working myself up into a zombie-esque lather.

Throughout the sleepless night, the noise of the city rang out clarion clear - a fire engine here, a chopper coming in for a landing atop the nearby hospital there. A train snaking through the valley in the hush of night across the river, sending the chugs and clanks bouncing off the mountain to reverberate across the valley and up my front steps.

When my alarm went off, it was anti-climactic. I was already awake, heart pounding, eyes wide open, waiting.

As it happened, the meeting itself was anti-climactic, too. A brief conversation, a few pats on the back, a handful of action item takeaways, end scene.

Enter nap.

Wholly typical of me to get myself all worked up for nothing. Happens time after time after time. I wonder if this is just part of a natural instinctual "fight or flight" mechanism or some carefully nurtured automated reaction to the outside world? 

Perhaps it's a simple marriage of the two, one too-finely honed and the other too-dutifully cultivated.

Rhythm and flow.

Don't let this scare you.

It's an exercise of faith and will and curiosity. It's doing the only thing I can do, the only thing I want to do, the only thing that works but the one thing I've never really done in public, unchecked. Raw, with no artificial ingredients added. Unvarnished, with no compulsion to hide the carnage.

It doesn't scare me.

It's what the very definition of 'is' is, assuming such definition exists.

My mind is racing around at a ridiculous pace, as it is wont to do, and while this happens on a near-constant basis, the inner tumult today is succeeding in incapacitating my external mobility. It's like...well...imagine you are in a butterfly filled atrium. A gazillion of them dart and scatter, hover and soar, float and amass around you, leaving you standing still and amazed, awed and dazed, until even putting one foot in front of the other requires more attention than you are willing to pry away from the dazzling sight before your eyes to accommodate.

Does that make any sense to anyone else but me, I wonder?

I cannot get my thought patterns to heed a directional purpose today. Of late. But today, especially. They are darting and soaring and floating and scattering in random arcs and waves, and maybe, just maybe, they are getting away with this high level of abandon not because I am, necessarily, powerless to stop them, but because I am willfully, lazily, perhaps even (oddly?) self-enchantedly captivated by the nonsensical hum and buzz they create in the process.

Does *that* make sense to anyone else but me, I wonder? 

My body is the passive to my mind's aggressive, my mind the manic to my body's depressive, and on days like these, never the twain shall meet. It's best just to enjoy the ride, or go with the flow, let the one half exhaust itself while the other recharges and wish for the best - the resumption of yin to yang, of balance and equanimity -  tomorrow. Or the next day. Or soon. Ish. Soonish.

It's the unbearable lightness of being, played out in real time, with a real life.

Namely, mine.

Is this approaching the point of abnormal yet? Surpassed it, by miles? Should I care? Do I care? Would it make any difference if I knew for sure?

See?

I am less surprised that I am managing to string more than two words together at a time than I am by the fact that I am also managing, of sorts, to hold the needle and thread. The words, they are in plentiful supply. Whole geysers of them erupting at unfathomable PSIs through the membranes. Managing to hold them still enough to document, as it were, is the vastly more fascinating aspect here. It's like finding the secret to capturing lightening in a bottle, entirely by accident, hoping not to get too badly burned in the process.

Live action reality. As it happens. And so it goes.

An irregularly scheduled disconnect of the synapses, reboot required.

It is what it is.

Welcome to the jungle.

Watch it bring you to your knees.

And hope it doesn't, really.

It never has before.

Has it?

Sunday morning.

I walked out onto the back deck this morning at the precise moment the city's cacophony of church bells began to peal their various calls to the varietals of faithful on this seventh day. The tolling chimes reverberate through the valley, marking this day of worship, of rest, of rejuvenation and of preparation in tonal harmony that resonates far beyond the differences of the disparate altars from which they emanate. Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian - inside the walls of these fortresses of religion the messages can be similar but dissonant. But outside, all within earshot are offered up a singular, unified message: these bells toll for thee, come unto us.

It's an enchanting and spiritual moment, regardless of your particular faith or religious inclination, irrespective of whether you choose to believe or steadfastly doubt. The bells toll and moods lift in time with their charm. It can't be helped. It can't be avoided. The bells toll and serenity wins out, even if only for the scarcest glimmer of a moment. If you're lucky, if you're willing to give in to it, the peace will linger long after the last tinny echo fades.

It's not a bad way to start the day, all things considered.

I did not attend my father's wedding.

1. This first line is from 'Year's End,' one of eight short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's book Unaccustomed Earth. This title was named one of the best books of 2008 by the New York Times Book Review for good reason. Lahiri's writing is luminous.

2. She uses the following quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom-House to introduce this collection:

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Read it again. How profound is that?

3. After going more than a week without a computer to call my own (mine fried, the husband's and son's machines don't count), I am the happy new owner of a lovely laptop with Windows 7, an incredible graphics card and lots of shiny bells and whistles.

4. The best part of a new computer is the ability to start over with a clean slate, leaving two years of technological detritus behind and building from scratch. I'm inspired - even tempted - to empty out whole rooms of my house and start fresh toward the same end.

5. Speaking of detritus...have you seen the show Hoarders on A&E? Wow. I mean, just...wow. What more is there to say? The show breaks my heart and captivates me in that train wreck kind of way, all at the same time.

6. And speaking of hoarding...there are more than 1000 posts on this here blog. That's a whole lot of something being said about little bits of nothing. Kinda boggles the mind a tad.

7. It also boggles the mind to think that the holidays are nigh upon us. In less than two weeks, family will begin rolling in from various map points and lo, the season shall be greeted. I'm quite sure I say this every year, if not every week, but time? She flies like a bird heading south for the winter with a winter squall on its tail.

8. So, I'm reading this book called Columbine, written by a journalist named Dave Cullen who has been on the story since about noon the day of the horror. I feel very confident in stating that history will prove this account to be the definitive authority on the circumstances leading up to and following the events of April 20, 1999.

9. I'm not sure how or why or even when I developed this obsession with full fledged examinations of they hows and whys of true crime American-style, but it's there. Not the sensational tabloidy rot, but the deeper examinations of the basest human behavior, its cause and effect. It's almost a neediness - to understand the inexplicable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. I don't know. But I do know that this book rates right up there with Capote's In Cold Blood, Mailer's The Executioner's Song, and Bugliosi's Helter Skelter in terms of laying bare the psychologies inherent in the criminal mind while exposing some of the social realism of environment's unwieldy role. 

10. I'm equally afflicted with a lifelong obsessive bent regarding Russia's 'Time of Troubles,' the ascension of Tsar Nicholas, and the ultimate gruesome fate of the Romanov family, for what it's worth.

11. Cheery today, aren't we? Here's a lighthearted note: a box just arrived at my door from Coldwater Creek. Granted, it contains a black cardigan/jacket and a dark gray mock turtle pullover, but there's also a pumpkin colored sweater to brighten things up. Happy now? I know *I* am.

12. Our late afternoon sky of late has hovered thickly, emitting that gauzy steel gray 'snow is coming' foreboding. Perhaps my mood and mindset are just following suit. When the snow actually does fall, it will be a delightful thing. But the brooding weather leading up to it seems to guide my soul like the whims of the moon direct the rise and fall of the ocean's tides.

13. It's probably good I've reached the end of the week's thirteen random thoughts already - who knows how deep into the rabbit hole I could go were I to permit myself to ramble on with no set end point in mind today. I'll leave you with this:

...in my head, a person who was out walking and walking in the dark comes to a little house with a light on.  She waits at the door for a moment, and then goes in and finds such a welcome that she stays.   ~ Elizabeth Berg

Soon enough, the light will come on again. It's flickering a little in the distance, even now.