Anyone who's met me - or hell, even listened to the show - knows I'm a talker. I can talk a lot & say very little. I think I've always talked too much.
In third grade, at Caldwell Elementary School, my teacher, whose name I believe was Mrs. Carnes, she had no tolerance for chatty or squabbling kids. If you were yapping uncontrollably, or if you were fighting, she'd put you on a little rug in the corner of the classroom, on which you'd sit & you couldn't say anything nor move. She called it the "bicker rug." & I spent a fair amount of time on that bicker rug. Not for bickering though.
But I wanted to tell you two stories about how talkative I am. The first involves a pen pal I got in twelfth grade. I took first year French in twelfth grade for complicated reasons, involving me wanting to irk my mother, & also because I took two years of Latin & the school didn't have a third year program. One aside: I took two years of Latin & remember very little of it. That's kinda crazy when I think about it now. I figure the class was pretty lame, & I remember the guys in the back corner cheating off me when we had pop quizzes, since I was probably the only person in class who memorized the vocabulary words the night before. Another aside: I think I still have the textbook. I liked it so much I stole it. Anyway.
In French class we were able to get pen pals because you could write to a living person who spoke the language, unlike Latin where they encouraged you to write to priests & by the time I was in twelfth grade I was too old for them anyway. (Sorry, stupid joke, can't help myself.) I had three pen pals, two in France & one in Belgium. The French girls were very silly & wanted to know how cute I was & I knew I wasn't & I stopped writing to them basically because they wanted to write in French. I had just one year of French & I was probably not going to pursue it.
The Belgium girl however wanted to know about me & my life & my country & also she wanted to write in English. So we stayed in touch. All through college I would send her cassette tapes with music on them & some where I talked to her. She did the same, & in fact, she once sent me a tape of a Dutch group called the Nits which I love to this day.
In 1992, I had the chance to go visit her, & I did, & it was an interesting journey & when we were in her room at her little co-op in Gent & I was looking through her record collection, I was blabbing away & she was looking at me quizzically & I said, "What is it?" She said, "I didn't expect you to talk so much."
We still talk, I called her on her birthday this year & was reminded of that moment. Because I was just yammering on & on.
There's one way to get me to stop talking, & that is to give me psychedelic drugs. On acid I can't turn away from the experience enough to form thoughts. The same is true on ecstasy. In both cases I am so enraptured with what is happening in my head (& on e, with what's happening all over my body) that it takes me fucking forever to turn a thought into words.
My wife is the exact opposite. She won't shut up. Back in our druggy youth, I used to ask her to invite people over to keep her company while we were rolling because I simply couldn't keep up. One friend of hers, with whom she was chatting during one of these times, noticed how quiet I was being, & I saw her whisper confidentially to the wife, "Is Gary okay?"
In typical Gary-on-drugs fashion, it took me a few minutes to process the experience & respond. By then, they had moved on to other topics, so when I commented, they just laughed.
If you heard the show - was it last week's? the week before? - when I talked about my recent marijuana experience, you may recall I related a similar experience. I was paying attention to what was going on in my brain - where there was an abundance of talking to be sure - & couldn't respond readily to the wife, which made her think something was wrong with me. I did manage to tell her what I said on the show, which was this: I'd been through similar things before, I knew it would end eventually, she shouldn't worry.
It was probably the quietest evening she's had with me in a long time.
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