THINKING OUT LOUD

I moved out here to the desert years ago because I’m sick. It’s a very specific ailment; not something I can take a pill for. When it’s bad, it’s bad, let me tell you that much.
Imagine a hell where you constantly have to piss like a racehorse, but the bathroom is locked and the headlights never stop coming.
Imagine a hell where words and names are forever stuck on the tip of your tongue, but you’re never able to shout them out.
Imagine a hell where you can’t take a deep breath and step back, even for a moment.
That’s what it’s like when silence becomes an object floating just out of your grasp, something you could touch if you only had a minute to concentrate. But morning, noon, and night for me, it was noise, noise, noise, and thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, and I couldn’t shut them out.
Save yourself the trouble of thinking too deeply about that; I’ll just tell you what it was like.
Be grateful you’ve never had to experience the sensation of running down a busy city street with your head on fire, helplessly attuned to the suicidal thoughts of a complete stranger somewhere above you. As I ran, I searched the tops of concrete fingers for any sign of the man talking himself into jumping off a building. I didn’t know which building he was on, just that it was nearby.
I felt him summon the courage to step off the ledge, and then I felt him change his mind on the way down.
We screamed together.
One minute, my head was full of a wild, lashing electrical panic, like the lightning bolts of a Jacob\'s ladder, and I thought for an instant that I could actually feel the force of wind against my skin, and see the ground fast approaching. Terror rushed through my skull and my heart skipped not one, but several beats. My feet were standing on nothing.
The next thing I felt was an abrupt nothingness, like the sudden plunging darkness of a power failure. Somewhere nearby came the sick sound of a body going through glass. He hit like a bag of wet meat, and the car\'s alarm went off.
He changed his mind on the way down.
My blood came to a screeching halt and I collapsed in the middle of a busy sidewalk, clutching at a trash can for support as waves of cold sweat moved over my skin and sapped my strength. I sobbed uncontrollably-- the sensation of feeling another human going \"off the air\" inside your own head is utterly indescribable.
Be thankful that you’ve never had to listen to the \"so-called\" pious, praying for lasting peace with their enemies by day, while lusting for their violent deaths at night. The chatter never ends. I went through three mouth guards just to keep from gnashing and grinding my teeth to mere nubs in frustration.
Do you know what really happens when people of different races and colors pass each other on a sidewalk? I do. They smile big out of personal guilt, while whipping sharpened stones of fear and anger at each other, like children in a rock fight. They hand out hate like spare change.
After a bad attack, I’d run home and draw the blinds, lock the windows, turn on the shower and the sink, flush the toilets, and I would scream and scream and scream some more just to block it out. I would scream till the neighbors complained and the cops showed up, and there’d be one big glittering darkness of buzzing bathrobes and shiny badges in my doorway. And yet with all that noise, I could still hear them out there.
I’d find myself fetal-curled in the center of the floor; my hands clutching my head, and my head stuffed under a pillow, rocking back and forth and staring at the door as it began to vibrate, ever so slightly. Waiting.
Doors double-locked or flung wide-open, they’d come through: the freight train of random thoughts created by the people living in cubes similar to mine, by the people in passing cars, by the people walking past the building where I live, by the people flying in planes far above me, by the people riding in trains far below me, all of them dragging their horrible chains behind them and moaning like ghosts.
The clean thoughts, the loving thoughts, the dirty, hateful, vicious thoughts, the thoughts of doubt, guilt, fear, and intimidation, all of them, clanking endlessly across the threshold of my apartment and barreling straight for my poor head, like freight cars full of ugly animals.
There were mindless thoughts that reminded me of watching a cage of gorillas in the zoo fling poop over the walls.
There were black, boiling thoughts that made me want to sit in the street and wait for a truck.
There were empty, burned-out thoughts from minds so ravaged they felt as though they’d had lye poured in their ears; there was nothing I could do for any of them but get outside and try to walk far enough away. I couldn’t speak to these faceless transmitters, and I didn’t know who they were or what they looked like.
It was like channel-surfing through hundreds of really bad programs while suffering from the world’s worst migraine, unable to turn the TV off and just go to bed.
Something had to be done.
One day not too long ago, I passed a guy sitting at the window counter of a coffee shop; an older guy, gray hair, long sleeve plaid shirt button-up, neat moustache, lines around the eyes. Probably someone’s father, or favorite uncle; just sitting there, staring at the street.
And there was nobody home.
You see, people-- well, most people-- never shut up long enough to come up with an original thought of their own. They’re like the radio you forget to turn off when you leave to go on vacation: it’s just constant noise. Honestly, I’m not being mean. Most people spend most of their time doing the same thing I was, except they sit on a couch and pay a ridiculous amount of money just to keep something, anything else in their heads. Some of them are afraid of what they might find, some of them are afraid there’s nothing there to begin with, and still others are afraid of the rules they were raised by; rules which not-so-clearly state that it’s a sin to think such thoughts in the first place.
My point being: people are never quiet.
But this guy was quiet like midnight in a cave, a puff of cold air on a hot day. I was so used to walking down the street with my fingers dragging through gardens of shimmering neurons that the emptiness inside him practically jumped up and bit me.
I stopped short. He was breathing but he wasn’t blinking, and I stood there for a minute, watching him to see if he noticed me. He was alive, but completely vacant. I was fascinated. His mind was like a soft hole created by a pulled tooth that you can’t help but explore with your tongue.
Suddenly he moved away from the window, and that’s when I noticed he was in a wheelchair being pushed by a nurse. His brain had been damaged by a stroke.
Anyway, that’s when I started hanging out in the little coffee house across the street from the Golden Harvest Retirement Home, seeking solace in the voiding shadow that radiates from the building.
Thoughts inside the Golden Harvest are delicate, like lace and sunlight. One minute it’s 1963. Then it’s 1964. Then it’s 1957. Then it’s 1962. With all the sedatives those people are on, their memories are muted. It’s like watching old 9mm movies, assembled out of sequence and viewed through two inches of cheesecloth.
Once in awhile I’d get a really weird spike as someone in the building fought their way towards consciousness, like the silvery splash of fish in a pond. Just for a minute I could feel a person inside, an actual identity. Moments later, they’d slide back under the surface and vanish again.
I found other places to get better reception.
I spent hours walking in museums wrapping myself in the silent warmth of fascination the first time someone sees a painting that moves them. It was during moments like those that I could almost hear my name again, when I thought I might be able to sleep.
I’d go to libraries and walk among the stacks with my head turned to the side pretending to scan for a title, listening to the books people were reading. It’s like TV, but the programming is a better quality and the channels all have decimals in them.
I strolled through parks on warm summer evenings; on a good day, I’d fall in love for the very first time seven, eight times an hour. The rush was like nothing I can explain.
From a safe distance I’d watch people meditating in the park as they strove to quiet their minds and follow their breath as it left their mouths and rose into the unknown. Together we traveled high into the clouds to a place where nothing was.
I followed people on bike paths that wore headphones, and lost myself in their drag. I’d close my eyes, seeing and relying on their perception of the bike path to guide me. It’s like going for a drive and seeing everything from inside the driver\'s head, with no control.
I wandered the streets alone at night, buffeted by gentle gusts of brightly-colored lust exhaled by strangers behind brick walls.
Unfortunately, these moments were too few and spaced too far apart, so I left the noise behind. I found this place for sale in the back of a magazine, a run-down church hidden in the middle of the southwestern desert. Protected from random thoughts by the mountains, I live miles from anyone, anywhere, and anything with only the blowing wind and rising moon to sing me to the sleep I deserve.
And for now, I can hear myself think.