Clever Thinking

I remember the first moment when I realized its power. My older brother found an old clock, the kind you wind up with a key. I must have been about 9 years old at the time. He was tinkering and the clock spring let loose. The noise was deafening: a sickening, screeching whirr. My mother stopped it somehow. She warned us she would have to let it go. I thought it would be fine, but when the sound started it up again my brother, sister, and I were just as terrified as when it had first gone off.  It struck me then that it was only a noise, and yet it penetrated to my core, rattling my sense of security. Maybe it just tapped into fears that were already there. Let them loose.  Anyway, I survived the onslaught of the sound. I also realized that that sound could not hurt me, but was still terrifying.

Years later, I was a young adult, living in my first apartment. It was an old tenement building. The floors were oak, the walls coated in horsehair plaster. One night, out of nowhere, there was a sound like broken glass. In my mind’s eye I could see some big guy hitting a window with a baseball bat. I jumped up, called 911, and tried to figure out the best place to position myself until they came.I lived in a small, troubled city. The police came fast, within minutes actually. They looked around inside and out, but couldn’t find a thing.When they left, I found I was too shaken to settle down. I decided to wash the dishes I had left in the sink. That’s when I found the source of the sound. A metal colander that was hanging on the wall had fallen onto the marble countertop, and in doing so knocked over a glass. The combination of sounds had synthesized into a very convincing imitation of the mayhem I had imagined.I laughed at myself for being fooled, laughed at how sounds had frightened me many times in my life. I also realized the power sound held over me. Whether a single noise coming from an old spring, or some sort of combination, sound had the ability to dig deep into my emotional storage center and pull out fear, or sadness or excitement, or well being. I thought of those moments at school dances, rallies, and in church when songs and chants had worked their magic on me.

After that, I was hooked. I was working as a video producer and so had the opportunity to experiment with sound. I would sit with headphones on listening the rich snaps, crackles and pops we picked up in recordings. I giggled over the sounds made by random items that I learned to work into soundtracks. I even loved the voices I recorded—the way they filled my ears. I started listening more, searching with ears for details in the sound and using those to add richness to the pieces I produced.

I became an NPR junkie, too, marveling over the way producers their build sound in layers to fill out the details of stories, reignite interest, or punctuate a moment.If you can hear, it is easy to take sound for granted. But when you recognize the power it holds over people, it’s just as easy to harness that power and put it to work.   

Okay, I know. I’m supposed to have started a blog and kept writing faithfully every day, or at least once a week…but always on a regular schedule. I get that. What I’m also getting though is that many people with many good things to say are terrified about starting to blog because they know that messing up is a very public act.

I say, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If you don’t experiment, you don’t learn…or at least I don’t.

Perhaps I should be more worried about my image. After all, it’s been a couple of years since I last posted to this blog, and that does look pretty lame. Of course, I could say I meant to do that and to stay tuned for my next biannual creation…but that would be untrue. In fact, I’ve been busy.

Yeah, aren’t we all.

Well, yes, we are and that is not excuse. But I haven’t been falling down on the job either because what I’ve been busy doing is purusing the web, reading blogs, commenting a lot, deciding who to follow, watching how people I like following hold my attention, and then figuring out where everything fits into my business plan. I’ve read some books, taken some classes, talked with lots of people and just generally tested the waters. I also started a second blog, bedfordtowntaxi.com, which was more of a news site…an experiment in grass roots, hyperlocal journalism, and I wrote for an actual tree-killer local newspaper, managed a couple of websites for a big university career office…plus did lots of other things I won’t get into here. 

What I didn’t do, was lose sight of my goal: to be part of the conversation that goes on everyday on the web…and more and more, I am part of that conversation. 

And now, I’m also back here at my blog as I intended to be all along…only now, a little smarter, a lot more confident, and hopefully worthwhile enough in people’s minds that they will come take a second look, or a first look maybe…but will actually read the stuff I write and maybe even comment and share my stuff. 

What I’d really like people to follow though is my example. The web is an enormous churning beast, filled with all kinds of people. Some make a great impression, but if you watch them closely, reveal themselves as less worthy of your time. Others are consistently great and worth keeping on the top of your list. Still others struggle to stay in, or just appear and then disapper like spring snow.  The only way to see where you might fall in the fix is to take your chances. If you want to up the odds that you will be successful, it is just like anything else: you must continue to learn and grow, and also recognize that you are another imperfect being tapping those keys and trying to make your mark on this big messy networked information phenomenon.