White Noise
By wull
- 441 reads
White Noise
When the world bears down
Keep in mind that those you fear
Are the same as you
The other day - it was Saturday - I decided to visit a greengrocer's to
buy some potatoes. Simple.
To you.
Whether or not this is part of my condition is completely unknown to
me, but I can feel people. I can feel their thoughts like psychic
static, white noise that hisses away in the background mostly
unnoticed. I've been told I'm like a beacon - if I'm on a downer, so is
everyone else in close proximity --if I'm happy, it spreads too. But it
works both ways.
Where I live, Saturdays call hundreds of people from the many outlying
villages as far as twenty miles away. In its own little way, Ayr is a
focal point. Now, while I consider myself intelligent, I don't count
myself a snob. However, much of what is attracted is white trash that
bring their poor, unwanted, child-benefit bringing offspring to a place
where they can be soundly beaten before an uncaring audience. It also
brings out the junkie, the tourist and that most hated of all God's
creations old people.
I would like to justify my words before I start to sound like Travis
Bickle, or some kind of nazi. There are many, many unwanted kids around
here. Very little compares to the experience of hearing a sixteen-year
old mother shout at her 18-month kid to "get a fucking grip, Steven".
Now, I'm positive that if young Steven were able to understand the
words, he would feel a great compunction to get that grip. He would get
that grip like a motherfucker. However, he can only feel the emotion
behind those words. He can only feel the anger, or worse - the sheer
indifference. I also know that it must be really hard bringing up a
kid, but God created a wide range of prophylactics in order that you
can still get jiggy without having to bring any more two-legged cattle
into the world.
Junkies. Many, many junkies. I worked briefly with people with heroin
abuse issues. During that time I met people who had genuine problems -
they all had genuine problems. There were two types of people who came
to the project - people who thought of themselves as people who needed
help - and there were the victims. The victim mentality is in my mind
the white trash mentality. These victims, junkies, differed very much
from the heroin abusers. While some of the abusers found themselves
slipping back into the habit, most of them had the guts to take the
blame on their own shoulders. The junkie blames society. The junkie
blames that perverted uncle. The junkie blames anyone but him or
herself.
I have severe issues with the guys who made the film Trainspotting.
Irvine Welsh wrote what was for me an excellent book wherein the main
issue was friendship and loyalty, with heroin acting as a catalyst.
Terrified of alienating a massive market by portraying heroin abuse in
a realistic manner, they had to stylise the movie to appeal to the club
culture of the time. I don't think it glamorised it any way, but it
definitely gave it a stylish edge. Small rant over. Sorry.
Anyway, due the fact that there is nothing else to do, a great number
of people in this area turn to heroin. And you can see them everywhere.
It's worse when they have kids. Jesus, I'm just depressing myself
now.
Tourists. It's not their fault. Maybe it's because I live here that I
can't grasp the concept of coming from America where you can get guns,
porn and more guns to the West of Scotland where you can get
emotionally, sexually and educationally repressed individuals asking
you what you're looking at. And you can't even shoot them.
The only real tourist anecdote I have is one time I had been getting my
lunch and was returning to the office when I saw a guy in a plaster
cast giving a bag of something to another guy. Everyone else in the
street missed this. The guy who received the bag dove into his car and
sped off and plaster cast boy glared at me. I winked at him with a
cheery grin. About thirty seconds down the road, at a set of traffic
lights, a hand came down on my shoulder. I may have mentioned my
aversion to human touch. I may also have given the impression that I'm
fairly jumpy.
I grabbed the hand and folded it down, twisting the wrist. My elbow
went into his armpit and I pulled him to his knees. Someone grabbed me
from the other side. Both my arms were in use at this moment, so kicked
out rapidly twice, to the character's knees. He went down, screaming,
"Dad!"
Another voice cried out, "Frank! Omigod, Frank!" in an American
accent.
I whipped round to the guy I had on his knees. It wasn't - as I had
previously thought - plaster cast boy. It was a middle-aged man. With
his wife and teenage son, who was holding his leg and crying.
>LookmansorryIgrabbedyouitwasamistakewhichwaytothebeach.
I let him up and apologised.
>Which way to the beach? he asked after he checked out his whinging
whelp was okay.
I pointed to a sign across the road that said "To the beach ->" and
pointed rather conveniently to the beach, and had done so for as many
years as I could remember.
>I just wondered, the guy said - get this - >Because it's an old
sign.
Fucking Americans.
Then you have old people. These also fall into similar groups - the
victims and the ones that just won't stop. Old people should be revered
for their wisdom, experience and years of service to society. Old
people should be shot for being malicious old shites, for stopping dead
in the middle of the street when you're walking behind them, then
having the audacity to draw you a dirty look, for pushing onto buses
before you whilst glaring at you, daring you to stop them, when you
were going to let them on first anyway. I love individual old people,
they are fantastic. As a group - not so keen.
All of the above people have so little going on in their heads that the
emptiness of their static, coupled with their sheer numbers, means that
I feel as if I am lost in my own head. While I've never had an actual
panic attack, Saturday was the closest I've ever come.
When I leave the house, I go with a destination, goal and vector of
return planted firmly in my mind. I also I ensure I have my minidisk
player with a full battery and the volume as high as it will go -
having something to concentrate on helps filter them out. As it
happened, I was walking with my flatmate, so barring pure ignorance on
my part, I couldn't listen to my music.
I'm pretty sure that my psychic static is a physical manifestation of
an anxiety about groups of people and is all in mind, but sadly I
believe that your world is in your mind, so it is pretty real to me. I
could feel all this pressure, my anger rising as I had to make way for
people who I could realistically pick up, move out of my way and put
back gently - or just kick out of the way.
Then I heard a voice.
Just a quiet one.
Go home.
I panicked. I spun looking for my flatmate. I felt a cold slab of fear
drop on my chest. Shit!
I took just over a second to find her face. I just needed to know I
wasn't physically alone. I very nearly grabbed her hand. Breathe. I
couldn't. Eye contact.
>Ruth??
>What's up.
Calm. The urge to take the shortest path home was gone. I couldn't stop
shaking, my relief a testament to how scared I must have felt. The sole
reason I didn't flip out completely was the fact that I recognised the
voice. It was my own. I've never heard anyone else's voice. Yet.
I have what I call a segmented personality, which is similar to
multiple personality, but is different in that the separate
personalities don't manifest anywhere else than in my mind. I am aware
of there being four other "Wulls" inside me.
There's an 8 year-old who relates to kids, who has is hopeful,
innocent, scared, open. There's the 12 year-old who's learnt his place
to a degree - he gets the shit kicked out of him because he's too
scared to retaliate, he's scared to hope, scared to be open, wary,
jumpy. There's the 15 year-old who just learned the power of the
clenched fist - he's found something he's good at and something he
enjoys, violence is the only solution. There's the 18 year-old who's
mum died leaving him alone, reminding him that no matter how hard, how
good, how clever, how kind, how angry you are, it's futile - all of it.
He's terrified, realising friends desert, move on, he knows the stark
loneliness of spending his first night in a four bedroom house that had
been full a week prior in the dark, straining to hear the coughing fit
that would mean he had to get up and help his mum.
Then there's me. The one who does all the thinking. I'm eight, twelve,
fifteen, eighteen, twenty-three and a hundred. I'm like a conductor and
a lion tamer. I try to keep myself in check. I try to keep myself sane
in the face of a world that tries it's best to push me the other way. I
try to keep myself sane in a mind that tries it's best to push me the
other way.
In the world that terrifies me so much, I saw a mocking look of self
satisfaction that I knew wasn't really there. I saw a fog of faces all
as lost as I am in their own ways. So many thoughts, so much emotion,
pain, joy. I wanted to be out of them. The sweating, heaving mass, the
uncaring amoeba of humanity, the tide of lost and drowning souls.
At least when I'm away from them I can forget that I'm one of
them.
I got the potatoes first, though.
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