Dance of Days
Last night for no good reason, except that I was playing a game and watching Sunday evening Football on ESPN, I stayed up a bit later than I think I really should have. I know this because my whole day at work I was completely dazed. I just felt like I wanted to lay my head down at my desk and go to sleep right in my cubicle. So fastforward to the end of the day. 4:00pm hits I split and I begin my 1/4 mile walk to the overflow parking lot that I’ve had to park in most days while I’m at work. There’s a cheesy bus that comes around but shoot I’d rather walk gives me a little exercise and half the time I arrive at my car before the bus would have gotten me there anyways.

Ok to the point. I was walking to my car, and for some reason, my mind decided to take this walk and really pay attention to all the sound going on around me. I don’t know whether i made a concious decision to hear everything, or if it just happened. All i can say though is that it made that walk i’ve done a 100 times a completely different experience. It was amazing how much stuff you could hear just on my way. It was noise. It was that background filler that everybody blocks out and ignores. I don’t know why anymore. I don’t know why you’d wanna block that out. Hearing all those sounds made me feel the most alive I had felt all day. Hell that short 1/4 mile walk was the most alive i’ve felt in a while. From the start of the walk I was hearing first the hum of the highway that is about a 1/2 mile off to my left. Then I was hearing some jet plane sounds from BWI airport. Now all of these sounds were distinct. My brain was parsing them. I knew what direction they were all coming from. I’d hear the cars driving up the road from behind me and I’d distinctly recognize the ones coming towards me. I’d hear the cars around the corner before they came into view. All along I was also hearing the bugs. The crickets chirping in the grass. The beetles humming in the tree. Something that sounded like a delapitated cicada ( I say this because if you took a cicada sound and made it non-constant and only had the sound chirp out at 1 second intervals every few seconds). Furthermore I heard some birds off in the trees that I couldn’t see. But i knew just about where they were (I should know what these birds were just by the sounds, at least I know my father would, and probably would expect me too as well ;) ). I have to say I was pretty speechless for how much sound I was percieving for my short walk to my car. I almost wanted to stop and just listen some more. Even then I couldn’t stop because one of the sounds that kept the whole experience going was my own footsteps adding there own rhythm into the mix. Even if I could have spoken or said anything, I don’t think I’d want to ( not to metion talking to yourself while walking alone isn’t quite the sanest looking thing lol).

That whole experience brought my day into a good spin, and I needed that. Its one thing i can take away from an otherwise very mediocre day, a monday if I ever saw one. It was a really interesting thing. Half way through my walk I began to think about writing this entry on here. One of the biggest reasons is because it is very much the antithesis of an experience I had a few years ago, that I wrote about in a journal later on that night. The journal entry I called “Of admiration of silence”. I think may transcribe it onto here as soon as I’m done this entry. It will create a good balance to this current piece. The basic idea (and possibly you’ve read it already by the time you get to this entry) is that I had an experience of almost no sound. Somehow I was walking down the street and sound just dampened to utter silence. There wasn’t any wildlife, cars, planes, hums of electricity. They may have been there, but something in the air that night dampened it all out into a void of sound. It was very much the opposite of todays experience, though they were both very refreshing and good.

Well speaking of Noise. I got a whole lot of Dischord today. Whole bunch of Fugazi CD’s, the Minor Threat compilation, and a book called Dance of Days by Mark Anders(e)n. Dance of Days is about the history of the DC Punk scene. Should be a really interesting read. Its gonna be a punk month I can feel it. I think the way my last month has gone, things will definately be different. Even going back to normal, whatever that is, would be different, since the last month has been quite a rollercoaster ride.

rock it, believe it.