I'm Scared of Distorted Noises

That's right, you read correctly. Not much truly upsets; I leave bugs be, clowns are alright, and the dark is actually pretty rad. However, for reasons not entirely identifiable by me, I'm scared of noises that just don't sound right. They send chills down my spine.

My earliest memory of this fear effecting me is from when I was about six. A few Christmases earlier I had received one of those large picture books with buttons on the side. The buttons played noises when pressed to supplement the picture book. I believe the book was about Sonic the Hedgehog. Anyway, after years of use, the battery powering the speaker in this book began to die. In my experience, a very low power battery in certain electronics can start to create undesired events. For example, when the battery on my surround sound remote in my basement starts to die, the remote will randomly decide to send signals to the receiver; consequently it sometimes turns on full blast IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Well, this is what the picture books speaker decided to start doing while I tried to sleep many nights.

Now, this wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that the sounds it played were entirely distorted, and unidentifiable. These demonic sounds coming from my closet haunted me for life. To this day, I have trouble listening to distorted sounds. Most recently I've lost sleep because I heard a lot of speech played in reverse on the television earlier. For whatever reason, this scares the hell out of me.

Death of a Fish

When I was his age, I faced a similar debacle to Gopniks son. In fact, it still kind of bothers me to this day. I'm talking about the concept of consciousness, and how it creates our identity. This idea began to bother me when I was about ten, and I made a comment about blue being our dogs favorite color. My dad laughed and quickly began to explain to me that animals such as dogs don't take into consideration things like that. It may seem trivial to you, but I feel after learning that fact I began to pity animals; the concept of having no sense of artisticness or imagination was/is a frightening thing to me. People often make off handed comments saying that they wish they were such and such animal, but in reality that would be an extremely stagnant lifestyle when compared to a human's.

I'm also bothered by the fact that our memories are what help us retain our personal consciousness. If you think about it, if you forget this particular moment reading this blog five years from now, you are no longer the same person. If you don't recall this particular state of mind, you're in a completely different place. Scary huh? Animals only remember very important things, like specific people and what tastes good, but they don't have complex memories like we do. Consequently, animals have a very shallow identity. Your brain just exploded.

How I Write

Much like the way I function in everyday life, I write with very little preperation and in long but sporadic bursts. The latter idiosyncrasy isn't really a problem but I really need to work on the planning stage of my writing. As far as my writing enviroment, I'm not too picky; however, it's a much slower process if I'm doing it with others (I like to joke around alot).

Since my writing is fairly stream of consciousness in its early stages I get alot out of revision. I often find sentences that are sophisticated in nature but constructed like a first grader, and it's fun to refine them.

BUT, the underlying problem in my writing habits is my stubborn and picky attitude in the pre-writing process. I'll gather my ideas for a week, be extremely excited to begin writing a story, but within a single night I can decide that the idea is stupid and scrap the entire thing. This can happen several times in a single month. It's bad practice, I know, but I embrace it somewhat as it ensures I'm happy with what I write.

THE END.