Throwback Thursday- No sensory filter

from July 28, 2013:

Today is one of those days where I have no sensory filter. Nothing gets relegated to the background. Everything registers as a cause for concern or wonder, immediately demanding my attention, at the same time as everything else. It’s a ridiculous state; I know it’s just an ordinary day. But I have to verify every modicum of it as such.

Every smell bothers me, every sound, every visual, if only because it’s accompanied by a thousand others, clamoring for a conscious acknowledgement and some sort of verdict, as if I must personally assign or confirm its place in the universe. It is so hard to hold onto a thought, much less a train of thought; to recall a memory, much less form a memory; to focus on anything when it seems I must focus on everything instead. It’s a ridiculous state, but an overwhelming and exhausting one just the same.

It made me think about something Philip Larkin said, about death: “the bits that were you/ Start speeding away from each other for ever/ With no one to see.” How can you hold onto your self when you are flooded, when you start to break down and dissolve?

This won’t last all day- it’s already much abated- but, still, I had somewhere I was going with all this, some sort of insight wherein all was resolved and hope restored or something, but then my son interrupted me half a dozen times to tell me what happened on various episodes of Ask Charlie, the cats meowed my ears off in hopes I would feed them an hour earlier, and my daughter insisted on my making mashed potatoes, and I forgot what I was going to say.

It had something to do with cairns.

Still don’t remember.