Quick update: or, kind of unimportant ramblings after vacation...

Well, it's my first day back to work in the Big Apple after almost a week at my parents' house in the country. I hesitate to call it an actual vacation, since I spent my time there alternately running around between friends' houses, doing research for my book, working on some copy due this week, corresponding with editors, trying to track down a certain adult performer who forgot about our scheduled interview, attending a 1 year birthday party, and planning, preparing for, and executing a gigantic surprise birthday party for my parents. It was, to put it mildly, not exactly relaxing.

But, you know, when I came back to the city yesterday afternoon and was immediately pissed off by a woman in the subway who barked at me to move into the car even though I had literally no room to do so, then returned to a laundry-ridden apartment and a noisy street outside that made it difficult to sleep, I realized that even when I'm busy and stressed at my parents' house, having those crickets chirping outside sure does get one relaxed at the end of a long day. I don't know if it's just because I grew up with cicadas, crickets, frogs, owls, and all other manner of night-time fauna singing me to sleep, or if there's something inherently soothing abou their song, but I slept like a ROCK every night I was there, and last night could hardly keep my eyes shut for more than an hour.

Maybe I'll get one of those noise machines I've always scoffed at people for having in the past. My block is really very quiet, comparative to some others I've walked down at night, but there are always cars going by with their music too loud, alarms going off somewhere, and the inevitable late night mron who thinks that doorbells and cell phones are too high-tech and that screaming somebody's name outside their building is the best way to get their attention. A nice white-noise machine with some crickets might help me keep my city tension under control...

But, in other news, I have a fun, kind-of-NYC story to relate. It's only fun now that it's over, but you might find it interesting. On my journey back to the big city yesterday, my train stopped for 35 minutes in Philadelphia while the engine was switched. Before we got going again, a friendly middle-aged guy came and sat down next to me. He was a bit fidgety, but was reading a book called "The Poet's Handbook" or somesuch, so I decided he was pretty cool, and drifted off to sleep for a bit. When I woke back up ten or fifteen minutes later, I heard the oddest sound. It sounded like a muffled, high-pitched, conversational murmur, and it seemed to be coming from the guy next to me. As if he were having a closed-mouth conversation with himself. I pretended to be asleep for a while, listening, then made a pretty big show of waking up, hoping that it would shush him, since the sound was decidedly creepy. It occurred to me that perhaps the murmuring was his poetic process; maybe he was reciting a developing poem in his head, or working through the cadence of a new piece. But to me, it sounded as if he was talking to someone with his mouth closed.

My movement did shush him, but only for a few minutes. He fidgeted madly for a bit, half-standing and then sitting again, clutching his book against his chest, waving it in front of his face and thumbing the pages distractedly, before starting in on his murmuring. I ignored it, opened my own book, and tried to lose myself in its pages, but within a few minutes, his agitation had grown, and from the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of him slapping himself lightly on the cheek repeatedly, murmuring all the while.

This was getting a bit scary. The overall impression I was getting was that he was talking to a voice in his head, and was trying to slap it into submission, or to shut it up. Either way, I was not exactly comfortable sitting next to him. His fidgeting looked frantic, almost desperate, and the slapping was a bit over the line of what I'd like to call acceptable behavior on an Amtrak train. I briefly considered trying to talk to him, in hopes that it would distract him, but I was afraid that if I said the wrong thing or startled him too much, I'd send him right over the edge.

As it turned out, I just ignored him as well as I could for the hour and a half back to New York. It was not easy. When the train stopped, I waited until he'd already gotten in line to get off, placed a few people between him and myself, and waited until he'd already gotten to the escalator to get on it. All things considered, I suppose that if he
was hearing voices, he handled himself pretty darn well, but I was still just about as uncomfortable as I've ever been on a train. Poor guy. I hope he at least gets a poem out of it.