The Way Of The Buzz

The radio in my head is one kind of transmission, the reportage coming from the world another.

Ride in a car and play with the presets, hitting one button then the next at whim: that’s my inner dialogue–so long as you spin the volume dial at random too.

Top 40 hits of doubt and worry, golden oldie hopes, static, dead air with a stable of DJ’s pretending to be me.

Still, I somehow understand the origin of the broadcast, can parse the border over which these transmissions beam, who I am, who I was, nd who I might be carried along each wavelength. To be or not to be radio, always on, always with a bullet.

Here’s Darell Scott:

It’s four in the morning, I’m lying in bed
With a tape of my failures playing inside my head

And Elvis C. sings: “If I could fool myself, in a minute I’d fool you.”  Though I often think it is because I fool you, I can’t fool myself.

what so many people tell me–what I have often told myself is this: If

If I could act more like a decent person, a noble person, a polite person, a person who remembers the birthdays, who calls mom on Saturday or pays my taxes on time,

If I could dare or jump or speak or know or trust.

If.

If, then maybe the radio in my head would be more buzz, less buzz-kill.

—

“Buzz, buzz.”

That’s Hamlet to Polonius.  And that’s the transmission from the world.

Hamlet already has the information Polonius urges on him, that actors have come to town.  Yes, Hamlet says, I know there is big juicy news you feel you must tell me, but not only are you late in the telling, you convert the important–the arrival of actors who can mirror nature–into gossip meant to impress me.  In you, beauty becomes a commodity.

(This, in a way, is the point made in Solitude and Leadership, a sterling article by William Deresiewicz.)

—

I can make no solid case about maturation of the radio in my head.  Still, It is not exactly the same soundscape as when I was seventeen.  Like most of us, I have made modest attempts to work the dials, tune in to what few angelic sounds I can find, my better self.

Has Donald Trump done this?

—

One of the great treats of the city of Amsterdam is that you can be in areas so quiet you can hear the conversation going on from a second floor room even as you are in what might properly be called “downtown.”  At the same time you can walk up to areas where lots of people congregate and hear them ahead of you before you actually see anyone. On a summers night, when everyone eats outside, you can approach one of the streets where restaurants and cafes line up, still hear that private conversation from the second floor–they are speaking Dutch–but be   drawn towards the din that is ahead. It is a sound that is absolutely recognizable and entirely singular: lots of people talking and eating. You cannot identify any particular language, but you know there are all sorts of humans there, a block or two in front of you. This sound too is a buzz, buzz.

—

When NBA players and the coaches face the media they normally speak with clarity and honesty politicians never muster when they speak about the economy or the state of the race or the point of voting in the first place. I don’t know if Steve Kerr or Billy Donovan are good eggs outside the office or if I would enjoy a beer with them or if someone else in their jobs would do it better. And I know going to the world of big time sports (see Baylor or FIFA for most recent evidence) as a reference point for conduct is rather hilarious.  And of course athletes and coaches tend to give enormously pat answers. But right now, at least, there is too much self-evident truth in the world of basketball for a coach to pretend his team played well when they did not, to fail to mention how much skill the opponent possesses or how much effort the opponent puts in to the cause of playing the game well.