Chapter 1: Suburbia Cacophony
I opened the fridge at just past one a.m. to quench a dry throat with some cold water. As I pulled out the pitcher of water there was the chilled bottle of Bombay Sapphire Distilled London Dry Gin. The blue cast was always welcoming. But something was very wrong. Half of the gin was gone. Now I had not opened the bottle, so what happened?
I live in an apartment all by myself. I am focused upon grad school studies, my job at Hughes Aircraft Company, and my own computer science dreams and visions. I am mired in my own self destruction as I know no woman would be attracted to such a focused geek. Yes, I even wear a pocket protector filled with mechanical pencils, pens and a six-inch Pickett slide rule. Anyway, there is only about seventeen seconds per week to spend thinking about the women of my vacuous dreams. Sleep deprivation piled upon sleep deprivation, concentrated down to about three hours per night leaving me void of dreams. This was by design as the many open opportunities for my focused energy slowly reduced my sleep requirements down, down to the three hours. I do suffer over the loss of sleep dreams. Back in High School I used to have such vivid dreams when I was graced to sleep between 8 and 9 hours. I do need to close my eyes every afternoon for about fifteen minutes. Each of my handlers at Hughes knew to just leave me alone and I will recover soon from my “power nap”, completely refreshed and ready for the next onslaught of problems to solve. Now I do dream. They are my waking dreams which my ever-active Attention Deficit Disordermind is pumped up accepting journeys along the many side trips I am exposed to.
I do get distracted as when the trash truck makes its rounds. Or when the apartment above sends out the screaming Jimmy Hendrix from the 250-watt Macintosh amplifier with the KEF loud speakers resulting in my entire apartment being relegated to a deep resonate base, rumbling all of my windows and shaking all of my dishes. Or when the Hernandez's have their regular yelling bouts. The most recent version involving their fifteen-year-oldson who was caught by Jose dressed in his mom's bra, pink panties, and fish net nylons. Now Jose was incensed and, in a rage, grabbed his barber's strop and moved towards his son's room. But Maria was not going to allow this as she argued progressive potential punishments on her husband to get his attention.
"I will cut you off completely and you know I mean business."
"OK I will force you to leave the house. "
"I will divorce you. "
"I will seek an annulment from the church."
"I will move my boyfriend into the apartment."
The final comment got Jose's attention and he placed the barber's strop down and calmly said:
“I am walking up to Buzzy's Tavern where I plan to spend some time on my reserved stool.”
So now you know that all of this extraneous audio stuff is being captured and stored in my brain for some unknown potential consideration.
These interruptions were disruptive to my normal tasks as when I was working on the equations for my quantum computer project. All of my current thoughts on the duality of computations were dumped as I imagine what happened to Samuel Coleridge when he was crafting the wonderful poem Kublai Khan. The poem was composed one night when he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China, Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a visitor. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300-line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. The only means to recover my train of thoughts was to go to my lab journals and read them from a particular break point forward to obtain the flow once again. Did I tell you the incredible importance for disciplined capture of notes as the sessions proceed? You only need to suffer a couple of these brain fart interruptions to realize the need for proper documentation. You become a scribe doing automated equation writing where it does not impede:
In Xanadu did KublaKhan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea…
The process. I must be a little focused to make sure my writings continue to be legible at least to me.
Now the stress of those potential broken relationships, Jose & Maria, especially when there were children concerned, were just unacceptable to me as the kids were being offered upon the funeral pyre. But, all I could do was offer a few prayers. Oh, and for Roger in the apartment above me I had different plans. I developed a set of headphones with incredible dynamic range. I used rare earth magnets and piezo electric comb filters to project the image of the music right into his brain. Now I did add a remote control, which I kept, to pulse the water on hisbrain acting as an immediate sedative. His music was now relegated to the headphones thankfully ending the sound deluge in my apartment. Roger told me:
“Hey, I really enjoyed the headphones. They are better than any studio quality headphones and the music seems to go right into my brain. One sure effect is I occasionally go right into a sleep state. A very contented sleep state.”
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