This tree saw the cloudcover thicken and grow heavy.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Day: August 2, 2021
Caveat: On the mildly traumatizing effect of other people’s audiobooks
I had a weird breakthrough realization recently.
Someone I was chatting with asked if I listened to audiobooks. And I reacted with a visceral, emphatic, “Oh, no, I hate audiobooks.”
And then I thought to myself, now… where did that come from?
It didn’t used to be true. It’s a recent development. I used to listen to audiobooks now and then, that I downloaded from various places online. I used to listen to radio shows and podcasts, too, in a similar way. In fact I did that quite a bit in the years following my cancer surgery.
This new dislike has been brought about, I think, because of Arthur’s tendency to immerse himself in his audiobooks in ways that are both dismissive of my presence and that impair his own ability to function given the limits of his attentional capacity. And so, at some point, I started telling myself: I will never be like that.
It’s not just Arthur – but his way with them is more disruptive of his interactions with others than most people’s.
The easiest way to make sure that I won’t ever be like that is to simply convince myself that I don’t like audiobooks. So my insight, in this recent moment, was that I have, in effect, been mildly traumatized by Arthur’s audiobook habit.
Caveat: Poem #1828 “Not sure what this means”
ㅁ I dreamed the states became balkanized. Nevada was divided up. The senator from Elko believed he was a god. The Las Vegas one was ten years old. She asked me to try too.
– a nonnet. Dreams are weird.