JULY 27, THURSDAY

CHATTERING

I‘ve been wondering about my addiction to writing. Somehow I see a connection between writing and psilocybin and the way psilocybin opens up a person‘s mind so that a person make all kinds of hallucinatory connections to the world that enters them into an amazing dream world in which everything is more intense. For some reason I like the idea of getting high on magic mushrooms more than I have a desire to try them for myself. I tried pot years ago and it was pleasant enough, but I‘ve had no desire to repeat the experience. When legal pot arrives in North Carolina I don‘t think I will succumb. In either case, pot or psilocybin I prefer keeping my wits about me. I like centering on something with intensity and opening myself up to it through words while being fully conscious. I am not attracted to altered consciousness. I can concentrate in this way when reading or listening to music or writing or looking at a film or talking to someone. I am currently getting physical therapy for a stiff neck, but my pleasure in getting massaged for a half hour comes as much from talking with my therapist about travel and cells and the loss of loved ones as it comes from being massaged.

Whenever I enter a restaurant there is the sound of humans chattering with each other.

When everyone is talking at the same time my Apple watch warns me that I am in an area with over 81 decibels of sound and that three hours of exposure will damage my hearing, which already is damaged with the constant sizzling of tintinitis always there. Why is everyone talking if they can‘t hear each other? It reminds me of a tree filled with crows who make a terrible racket as they chatter to each other. Do humans really have that much to say to each other? Why can‘t they sit quietly and then when something really significant occurs to them, say their piece and then be quiet again.

That brings me back to the intensity of feeling that psilocybin causes when it connects us to the world around us in new and intense ways. Being open and responsive feels really good. When I am talking to myself by putting words on the screen as I am doing now, I feel good. That is why I write. And so, of course, it isn‘t because humans have anything important to say to each other that they chatter away in a restaurant. The reason that they chatter away with each other at a dangerous decibel level over the sound of the mood music is because it feels good. Connecting with each other feels good, it isn‘t what we communicate, it is the communication itself that feels good, the physical process of talking.

Years ago my friend Sam Scoville organized a group of us called the Basement Writers. We would write essays to each other which we would share by email and then meet once or twice a week for a discussion, which sometimes connected with the emails and sometimes didn‘t. We enjoyed the process immensely, both the writing and the talking. I enjoyed it so much that sometimes I recorded our talking sessions and would type out the notes of our meetings in order to preserve them. But what I discovered was that no one was interested in reading my notes. I wasn‘t interested in rereading them, either. In fact, when reread our sessions were almost incomprehensible, a jumble of disconnected ideas. An outsider reading the notes of our meetings wouldn‘t have been tempted to join. There was nothing there, and yet we were having a great time.

I keep a journal, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages a year. Do I ever look at what I have written? Never. Do I store and assemble what I have written? No. What I write is on a hard drive for awhile and then it is gone. The closest I have to a record is what I type here on these posts. But I don‘t look back over these posts either. Some people read what I write, listen to my chatter, and sometimes, rarely, respond, and sometimes mark, like. That‘s nice, it means that I am chattering to someone else as in a restaurant.

I am in an old man‘s group that meets in McDonalds every Friday at 10 a.m.. We chatter with each other for an hour and a half.

But the point is, at least for me, that it is the process of chattering, of talking, that is alive and writing is alive, simply the process. We are chatterers and like having someone to chatter with. What we say doesn‘t matter that much as you can see from this post. But thanks for reading along and letting me have a good time chattering.