The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Iner Thoughts - 9/17/04

Friday, September 17, 2004

Want to kick off with a question—Reader, do you think I’m going crazy?

It won’t hurt my feelings if you say yes. I just need to know. If there’s a glitch in the grey stuff, better that I catch it early.

It runs in the family, you know. My grandfather—on my mother’s side—wound up with a raging case of dementia before he turned fifty. He nearly killed my mom and her brother one night with a boning knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen. Thought they were rats.

So please. I need an outside perspective on this. But there’s nobody here, really, that I want to tell.

Gloomy autumn day today, broken up only briefly by some unwelcome sun. I feel better on a day like this... walking in a drizzle, kicking up drifts of wet leaves as I go. It just fits. I guess there's tornadoes on the ground in Maryland, little gifties left by Ivan the wayward. But nothing to carry me away here.

Right now I'm just tucked up in my pad in Dupont, watching the sad partial skyline from my window and thinking about the frosty Miller that awaits me in the fridge. It won't be hard to find— there isn't much food to get in the way. 

I started thinking about the graffiti again while at work today. Why did those words in particular jump out at me? Maybe some kind of special spray paint, catering to the visually impaired (aren’t vandals so considerate these days?). But the paint hadn't looked like anything unusual, afterward. 

The words themselves, then. Some mystical, hidden meaning must be afoot here! Let me just strap on my gypsy gown and find my scrying ball. These words must predict my fuuuutuuure.

"Fade" could mean just about anything. A fade haircut. An internal data system for the Federal Aviation Administration. The “Fade Killer” from the late 90s. That song by Mazzy Star? 

And "Iner"? I tried Googling it to see what I came up with. And the answer was, not much... the last name of some random Canadian artist? Well, I'd been thinking of it as a spelled-out word, but maybe it was an acronym. It had appeared in all caps: “INER.” There were plenty of organizations with that acronym, but none of them seemed relevant. 

I tried http://www.iner.aec.gov.tw/, which ended up being a Taiwanese institute that blared some welcome message in Mandarin, earning me funny looks from my office neighbors. Dead end there; nuclear studies overseas don't have much to do with my vision. 

Okay, so I know I said that I didn’t want to talk about this stuff with anyone around here. But I did bring the graffiti incident up to my hapless co-worker, Deb, today. Just briefly.

She’d been wading through another interminable story about her kids: “… and now it looks like Jenny’s going to need glasses too! Ollie’s able to handle the teasing, you know he’s just a very confident kid, but I worry about Jenny, sometimes she can’t stand up for herself. And ugh, the vision plan here isn’t so great, but I’m sure you know that, just wish that Buck could find another job, because you know he’d be able to get a better health plan in his line of work…”

Dale happened to walk by then, popped his eyebrows at me. He could see what was happening—Deb’s conversational black holes were common knowledge around the office—and he could have thrown me a line. But he just smiled and kept walking. Bastard.

I seized on the topic before she could move on to another one. I could save myself. “Yeah,” I broke in, “I do wish we had a better vision plan here, because I worry about my own eyes a lot. Why, just the other day…” And I told her about what happened.

I have to give Deb credit: she didn’t doubt any detail of my story for a second, as weird as it sounded. She just nodded and then said, “Have you considered a neuro-psychological root cause?”

“Uh… what?”

“Seeing those words by themselves,” Deb went on, “could be a kind of selective blindness triggered by trauma that you might not even be aware of. Like a somatoform disorder.”

Whoa. I found myself contemplating a new possibility—and this from scatterbrained Deb? I tried to keep the shock from my face. “That’s something I never… somato-what-did-you-say?”

“Somatoform,” she said, and tipped me a wink. “Listen, Mark, I was a damn sharp psych student in college. Had plans for grad school and everything… and then Ollie happened. But you know what? Ollie is the best thing that ever happened to me. And Jenny, of course. Oh, you wouldn’t believe what her teacher, that nasty Mrs. Vargas, said to her the other day, and you know that Jenny’s going to have a complex about her hair now. She was in class…”

And back to the crushingly boring stories. Broken up only ten minutes later by Gerald Ryloff appearing on the scene and giving her a watery little smile before tearing into her work checking a restaurant review. 

So I’ve been thinking about what she said. Trauma? I'd expect that more if I'd been in fucking 'Nam or something, but I've had a pretty tame little life. Or maybe she meant physical trauma, like an actual brain injury?

This is why I’ve been thinking about my family history, about old man Doucette mistaking his children for rats. Because there are two compelling theories here. Could be the wiring in my brain got jiggled loose by “trauma”—or could be it was faulty wiring all along. Either way, I should call my mother.

Tomorrow, maybe.

No big plans for tonight. No Friday Follies. I'm going to get cozy with a book or two and shut the world out. (Assuming my eyes hold up.) I foresee the same for tomorrow, as well, and maybe the next day; I think I deserve some break time. Dale invited me to a bar crawl that he’s planned with his friends for tomorrow, but I turned him down. The drinking part sounds fun, but the talking with strangers all day part? Not so much.

This may not sound like much of a life to you. I'll agree with that. But you don't always need to live a life with a capital L, to throw yourself into one activity after another. “Life” isn’t defined by expensive drawing classes and epic bar adventures. It’s the soft spots, the quiet moments, in between.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for my antisocial tendencies. 

I do know, though, that I need some time alone with my brain. Have to listen to it in the quiet; have to figure out whether I still recognize all the creaks and squeaks.

posted by Mark Huntley @ 6:46 PM

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