The Sounds of Silence

Silence:  The lack of any sounds.

A couple of weeks back a friend of mine from The Program invited SuperK and me to accompany his wife and him on a day trip to a large botanical garden/art museum complex about an hour away from our house.  It really sounded great.  We like to do this kind of stuff and it's helpful to have someone with experience navigating the bizarre network of 10 lane freeways that strangle the Vacation City area.  It also, alas, sounded like a long day for an anti-social, introverted, malcontent like me.  These people are really nice.   Really nice.  Smart, well-read, well-traveled, people that we have lot in common with.  And as a general rule people in the great state of Vacation City have a well-earned reputation for being laid-back and really nice.

Meh with the really nice.  I'm not all that enamored with really nice.  I tend to get along better with mildly sullen, somewhat cynical, less-than-enthusiastic people.  If you're sort of pissed off about something that you can't put your finger on then I'm more likely to want to hang out with you.  Not so much  if you're one of those people who think everything is great! just great!!

I thought I did pretty well.  I enjoyed the hour drive to the gardens and I enjoyed the first couple of hours walking around the vegetation with three other very chatty people and I enjoyed about half the lunch, sitting on a patio overlooking a lake that divided the Chinese gardens from the Japanese gardens.  Again there was no dead air.  Talking, talking, talking, I was ready to scream if someone said one more thing about anything.  It didn't have anything to do with who was talking or what they were talking about - I was tired of the sound of other people's voices talking about anything.

With me it's like flipping a switch, this change.  I'm OK and then I'm right on the verge of killing the next person who opens their mouth to share some wonderful, quirky anecdote.  I don't want them asking me questions, either.  I want to wander off and sit quietly, looking at the lovely scene spread out in front of me, with no voices, zero voices, bouncing off my tympanic membranes.

I was adrift and bereft for a bit, then rallied over a late afternoon cup of coffee, with more non-stop chatting, before completely, utterly flaming out for the drive home.  I was considering opening the door and throwing myself into oncoming traffic just to stop the voices in my head.  I wanted to ask: "So . . . what do you think of the phrase 'companionable silence?' " but I was already in the shit with my wife.  Asking everyone to name a sum of money that would buy their silence was right out of the question.

That car ride home still gives me The Shivers when I think of it.