Dangers of spending too much time in your own company.

You come up with schemes! Not all of them bad.

And that’s the danger.

Quiet is much more frightening than having company of some kind, even if that company is the paranoid ravings of memories and regret, whispering echoes of missed opportunities and repressed cravings.

Or that’s how it would seem. I don’t know. I guess so. I’ve never had much space to myself. That’s what happens when you grow up with a family that’s slightly larger than a village, at least in noise if not always in population.

I could never quite tell what the rush was to get things said. I could always tell that there was one, though, you know. Interrupting was expected, and most people compensated for that by finishing what they had to say anyway. From early on, I had a choice to make: contribute to the fuzz, or wait my turn. My turn rarely came, so I wrote things down so I wouldn’t forget them, and I kept waiting.

Now I live alone. For the first time in my life I have the opportunity to say whatever I want, and for as long as I want to say it. There is the minor sidebar to that, which is that there’s nobody there to listen. As I say, in the grand scheme of things, that seems minor. As far as I can tell, talking to nobody in particular has almost the same aggregate effect on the universe as talking to, you know, most other people. And I’m a fairly good listener, so it balances out, as far as I’m concerned.

I have to watch myself, though. Living alone, having time alone with my thoughts, I keep coming up with ideas. I’ve never had this much space to myself, and I keep deciding how to use it.

I figure I should do something useful. So I’ve come up with an invention.

What I’ll do is lay all my books out on the ground, open to the first page. Then I’ll get a pair of binoculars and read the books from the mantelpiece. It’s the perfect scheme! I’ll read forty books at once! Then, when it’s time to turn the page, I’ll pull the string on the clever pulley system I’ve rigged which will turn the fan at one end of the room on for just long enough to blow all the pages over, then it will turn off really quick.

In this way, I will increase my reading capacity by a factor of forty and become a genius in no seconds flat.

The only thing I can think that will go wrong is if it’s a warm day and I need the fan for keeping the room cool. But it’s winter, so I don’t think I’ll have to deal with that for a while.

Unless someone lights the neighbor’s rooms on fire.

You see? These are the thoughts that come to us when we spend too much time alone. You need voices speaking in your life or you run the risk of staying in your room for weeks at a time, having food piped in, scratching on the walls, only to come out seeming perfectly sane. Right up until you publish your master work, Mein Kampf part Deux: The Funk Soul Years.

It might be a great idea for a sequel, but I think we’ve passed the era for it.

It isn’t a bad thing, when you are alone, to talk to yourself. It only begins to be bad when you stop listening to what you’re saying. That is when you know that you might be going a little strange.

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