Synesthesia

I turned three in 1980. My childhood years were spent teetering between a fatal confidence in my self and an equally unrealistic self-hatred. Both were part of my response to the world as well as the kind of self model that I possessed. I recall at a very young age fashioning myself as a generic character from a film who was vaguely teenaged or young adult with a slapstick presence in the world, bumbling and fumbling through it. Specifically, I would be walking the sidewalk toward the end of the street, eating popcorn, but this was my image of me, as a child, imagining myself and sympathetically  identifying with the naively innocent portrayal of myself as an older man by my child imagination.

I specifically remember two transient states in the sensation of my mouth laying in my bed at night. I would be tucked in, staring up at the wall. The room is quiet and my ears begin to ring in a high pitch. I see a white house down the street from mine and the sensation remains both in my ear and carrying through to my jaw and into my mouth. The second state is of a dark house next to the white house. While I'm imagining this house I can hear a deep sound, and my tongue wraps around the fullness of sound in my mouth.

By 6 I had begun my Catholic schooling and assumed my loner, quiet persona. I remember seeing my current landlord on the parking lot that doubled as our playground. I was leaning against a yellow concrete parking post, waiting for the recess to end. He was doing something similar. He shared with me a very deep fear he had of a spider falling into his mouth while he slept. Our encounter encouraged me to bring a very small stuffed animal to school in my inner coat pocket. The pocket was tucked away and warm, becoming a secret compartment for my enjoyment. I put the diminutive bear-creature in there only to never re-encounter my soon-to-be-landlord at the parking poles on the ersatz playground d.b.a. parking lot. We became friends years later as I was listening to 'Head Like a Hole' on MTV and he called me for information about our high school English class. I would spend the night at his house soon after, telling him about a GI Joe bazooka weapon that I had lost when I brought the character with which it came to class. He had actually found it and kept it in his room until that moment. At a fateful later moment when I could have gotten it back another friend tossed it behind the refrigerator where it remained until a kitchen remodel and was lost forever.