Sugar City Reverb

Life is a series of submersions into sound.  It creeps into the psyche and takes up space in vacant gray matter. The noises register there like squatters—alarms for work, alarms at work, the sound of a child breathing, the cat’s impossible half cry, the washing machine, the balloon stuck to the heating duct—all of them attached to some innocuous memory that never seems to elevate the heart rate. Never causes a sense of fear.  

But the noise of too many humans crammed together in a small space serves to derail every nerve ending in the body.  It causes synapses to vault into high gear and the world becomes amplified. Hypersensitivity bleeds all of it together into sonic chaos.

What if we could float to the ceiling away from their voices, rip ourselves apart with bare hands until it all goes into a state of lucid cataplexy? People talk, machines work. Movement for which we know makes sounds, but none register.  It’s a struggle to recover the senses, to convince the ears to work again.

Stepping into the evening air there was a silence that caused every lost thought drip from the brain. Reality was maddening. Who knows how it will continue?