Life through headphones

Psychological hypochondriacism runs in my family.

I feel like I live in a movie some mornings. The commute, backed by soft, slightly melancholy music gives the passing trees and industrial protrusions a cinematic affectation. Some mornings, like today, are bleak; October grays with shocks of color as the trees give up their vigor for the winter. Some mornings are verdant blurs when summer is in full bloom.

I feel like me when I just sit and let the world pass by. When I’m working I seem to loose my sense of self. I watch the person who is speaking to his coworkers and he feels foreign, and yet familiar in a more intimate way than anyone else could ever be. I feel like me as the world streaks by with “Antennae” providing the background music for the bits of my life taken up with the world shut out by ear buds.

I can’t write without the world shut out. I’ve tried. Even in an empty house, with the same music on the stereo; the words won’t come. There’s something about having sound blocked out so completely by a pair of earphones that lets me focus.

Thinking back, I remember cheap plastic earphones and elementary school reading lessons. Maybe that’s where it started. I don’t remember much about those lessons. I do remember sneaking off when we had free time to disappear into those earphones, away from the cacophony of bustling seven year olds.

I met my wife through headphones. It was an intercom headset, at a theater production. I lost my wife though headphones, blocking out the bustle that our house and my life had become, disconnecting until she felt abandoned and left.

It’s easy to look at this now and realize it is a defense mechanism of an Introvert. Maybe it’s more than that. Psychological hypochondriacism runs in my family. There are an infinity of psychiatric self-diagnoses to be researched while the world streaks by in its gray blur and “The Cinematic Orchestra” provides the focus for me to come back to myself.