Neurological Complaint

I think I had anticipated back in 2005 that the Americans would call the symptoms of my neurological complaint "Free Speech".

 

I talked aloud to myself most often between around half-seven in a morning and half-past ten in a morning. This was whilst walking the one and a half miles to the supermarket, I would for the most part manage to keep my mouth closed inside the store and then afterwards I would walk around to Phresh Cannabis which opened at half-past nine. I would most often buy a gram of flower and then I would talk to myself the way back to the apartment. After sitting and smoking a joint and sipping iced-coffee mocha, I was fine. The chattering monkey achieved cessation. 

 

Sometimes walking along the side of the road I could assume the guise of a sage and walk down to the supermarket practicing here-and-now Zen without talking to myself, but it would require full and complete concentration, like I was balancing a full cup of hot tea on my head. I would let myself go as soon as I got out of the supermarket, rewarding myself for excellent behaviour. Sometimes I thought I talked to myself because my conversation was playful and interesting and the roads long and boring. The town was like an underpopulated ghost-town, it seemed the most un-university like town I had ever known. I would often fall the illusion that because I couldn't see anybody else, they couldn't see me. I would never speak to myself if I knew others could see me. I would do it more if I had poor sleep, and I often had poor sleep, been hyper-sensitive to auditory stimulation. I would also do it more in summer than winter and especially if I were wearing a hat, sometimes I would rip the hat from my head and I would stop.

 

One time I tried chewing gum whilst I walked the roads, one can't talk to oneself whilst one's chewing, but the gum would seem to rapidly lose its flavour, quickly harden, and I found it mostly unpleasant. The cars would still drive past and see my mouth moving. This would invariably spook other people. 

 

The people who worked in Safeway would gather together in a circle in the corner of their store. I helped forge team unity; they would choral chant in unison. This they felt empowered themselves over the individual, they acquired strength. They must have supposed that my talking to themselves meant they were the one's been talked about and so it meant they talked about me. This spooked some of the staff into requesting transfers. Safeway wasn't safe for me. But outside of the store, I really wasn't concerned about them, and they, nor any American, ever formed any part of my running monologue. I was never angered by them, they were trivial. 

 

In the summer of 2017 I found myself walking down to Safeway and realising I was holding my personal notebook in my hand. There was no need for me to be holding it! Why had I brought it out?! In the store I placed the notebook in the wire-mesh basket and walked around the store. I bought iced-coffee, a strawberry C-Monster Odwalla, and plain and jalapeno bagels, and cream cheese, pepper-jack cheese, heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce. I paid for the foodstuffs at the self-service checkout and left to buy my gram from the cabin around the corner. 

 

Half-an-hour after getting back to the apartment I wanted to write. Where's my notepad? and I looked, riffling through bags, and moving files and published books, but I couldn't see it anywhere. I realised, I must have left it in the store.  

 

I ran the entire way down to Safeway and when I arrived I was sweating profusely, but the girl who worked on the self-service checkout said, "It's not here, I haven't seen it". And I left back for the apartment. When I got back, I looked through everything and I could not find it anywhere at all, I remembered I had it in my hand, and I had it in the basket, I didn't have it in Phresh Cannabis. It had to be in Safeway! 

 

I ran as fast as I could back down to Safeway and when I walked past the cigarette kiosk I saw the manager was shaking his head at me and he walked away without words and I went back to the girl on the self-service checkouts and she said, "It isn't here," and I said, "It must be!" and the manager came over holding and waving the notebook and I was so grateful and relieved.

 

There was nothing at all in the notepad that should have been a concern to them. Nothing that was their business. There were random analog thoughts scribbled in ink centred on the theme of my struggles with David Bowie, and DJ Shadow had been mentioned too. 

 

When I came out of the supermarket and into the parking lot I noticed there were four Sheriff's cars parked in a quadrant. Had Safeway called Washington County's Sheriff's department because I'd dropped a notebook? There was absolutely no information written in there that should have been any concern for them at all, at all. I do not write like Hollywood TV/Movie writers with an obsession for violence and murder, similarly I do not write like the paranoid police state creates its fictional antagonists for the fake local and mainstream news. I'm not that kind of writer.