inner-sarcophagal cacophony

 

My head constantly buzzes. Lots of yours do too, I know. It steals my sleep and makes me drive like I’m texting sometimes when I’m not. Looking ahead at this commitment to the Slice project heading into the first weekend I figured which pockets of time for each day I’d have to write and also what was going to be happening on each day so I could add possible subject pondering to the all the time noise I live with. Today was a monster truck thing with my boys on a non-kid weekend, which is always a bonus, but I also realized it would be in the MORNING after a night out with a crew that usually lasts long and produces next day, ahem, headaches. I envisioned myself writing with an aching head about my noisy head  and even thought I would end the piece with some neatly wrapped notion on how sometimes what it takes to drown out the noise is to spend some time with children and very very loud noise to sort of cancel it out. But that would be a lie.

The kids had fun and it was good, as always, for my soul to be with them for some bonus time. But the waves and walls of physically aggressive truck sounds and people and crowd smells and uncomfy seats on top of my whiskey regret from last night did not, somehow, cancel out the noise inside. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve been a dude in flux for way too long and sometimes I feel like I’ve just recently fallen off the ledge of change from whence a majority of my head noise commenced and allow myself forgiveness due to a learning curve I never saw coming. Today I had new noise in with the usual nagging daggers as well. About a year ago I finally epiphanied and lessened my narcissism (a little bit) by realizing my noise is not special or unique to me. Lots of people have similar noise, lots of people have it worse, and lots of people don’t have anywhere near the bounty of support and good golden things to be thankful for. Knowing that brought some solace somehow. The noise of course, however, persists. I’m always thinking, worrying, planning, fighting – you know, being a flawed human person.

I am not exactly a slave to the noise. When I get to be with friends like last night, and Friday night as well for that matter, the noise is minimized and I embrace adult interaction. Or when I etch out time for great art, like a movie, or even just some perfectly chosen music while I clean up – that’s good when I can get it. I’m really just getting used to being alone so much and that’s when the noise boils over. I know this. It’s fine. The main time the volume inside lowers and usually is muted is in my classroom in front of kids with a lesson to teach. Weekends are awesome. Of course. But today as I write I am very glad that I have an entire week’s worth of lessons I look forward to teach. You know those lessons – the good ones. Obviously we strive for them all to be the good ones and I’m sure some of us come real close to achieving that. But I’m still at the point where I get giddy when a really good one comes up and this week, as a cohesive whole, is a good one. So the plan now is to get to the week and hide from the noise behind my work. I will greet each and every student with more meaningful zeal tomorrow. I will also try to write something a little more uplifting soon. No promises. Ha. The loudness of purposely overly loud trucks did not subsume my inner droning today. But that’s ok. I’ll get a tomorrow and I’ll get to do what I love and I’ll appreciate every second of its shielding nature. It’s just, sometimes there are no built in, neatly wrapped endings.