There Aren't Any Quiet Places Anymore

Jimmy never agreed to swallow those pills that the quack gave him, but they put them into his body all the same, and then Jimmy wasn't Jimmy anymore. He was a thinker and they made him a talker, one of those types who speaks to fill space and hedge out all those nasty thoughts. There aren't any thinkers anymore, not really, not since we decided as a people that weird was a problem in need of solving. We need normal, and Jimmy wasn't normal, so they made him normal, like it or not. Now he fits better, and they're all happy, and Jimmy's happy, except that I get this hint of something in his eyes like he lost something.

They always tell me that we celebrate those weirdos, but damned if I see how we do that. Oh, we keep a couple around - put them on display, turn them into electrons and send them right to us so we can stare at them through the glass and feel like we did back when we were ourselves. They do it so we can get just a little taste of that thing we lost when we became normal. It's all part of this magic show society of ours, pretending we aren't doing what we obviously are.

They always had their ways, don't fool yourself, they're just smarter about it now. Time was, you wanted your kids to be normal (and you did, no matter what kind of books you bought for them), you let a couple of the already normal kids beat the hell out of them, and then you shrugged and said "Well, what are you going to do about it?" But that's barbaric, we've decided, and we're better than that kind of thing. Now we have pills and classes and it's much better, much more scientific.

Jimmy got beat up, you know, and it's because he was subtle. He didn't talk much except that he had something on his mind, and only if it was really important and really original. He wasn't loud like the space fillers, he didn't shout and grumble and bark to occupy the air with the sound of himself. So they had to fix him, to make him loud like the rest of them. They had to fix him, and not because he was stealing from his friends, or breaking things for thrills, or shoving his girlfriend around, or getting trashed and punching some guy in the face - it was the loud ones who did those things. They had to fix him because he chose his words. They had to fix him because subtle is scary.

That's the problem with loud, right there, it doesn't have patience for anything else. Loud is fast and subtle is patient. Subtle is nature and loud is "civilized," if you want to call it that. Loud is a noise that swallows you whole and won't turn you loose - the sound of speed, of a car peeling out, of thumbs on a screen, of a phone call and then another one, of the pre-cooked patty hitting the bun. Loud eats everything it can and blots out the subtle because it's the nature of loud to overwhelm what isn't like itself. Pretty soon there won't be any quiet places left.

Yeah, I'm just a crank, don't mind me. I'm content to sit here on this patio and watch the others chase their whisky with the cheapest beer they can find and spend the afternoon howling and fighting and screwing. It's an amusing display, I'll give you that. Shame I can't hear the music on the other end of the crowd - I hear the guy's really good if you take the time to appreciate it. Who has time to appreciate things? I'll get the sound file later, pump it into my head while I do about three other things. That's just as good, and I won't be wasting perfectly good time sitting around in the fresh air with my eyes closed.

I'm just an old crank, sitting here complaining like everyone else, hoping in my heart that someone will hear me complaining and think I'm really clever. Maybe a lot of people will think that, and I'll get my own blog about how no one sits and listens anymore, and they'll turn that blog into a book and I'll go on TV and then it'll be my voice filling the air. Then everyone can nod sagely and praise me and no one will ever notice that I'm a hypocrite, except maybe some other crank no one will care about. And that's the secret, we're all loud because we were born from loud. We're all loud except Jimmy and we fixed him.

Pretty soon there won't be any quiet places left, and all the smart and sensitive people shake their heads and fill the air with platitudes about the loss of innocence and then cash their checks. Maybe I'll be one of them. Maybe I'll have enough money that I can make my own quiet place and invite all the subtle people to come there and dream together. Maybe I can do it before Jimmy does something really loud.