​That Condescending Tone

I don’t know whether I should tag this Poetry or Short Story. It’s kinda like a story. It has a beggening a middle and an end. A crux and something resembling a resolution. But really this is kind of just a disorganized jumble of allegories that follow a theme and convey a message. Like a parable but….not… idek.

“That Condescending Tone”

As I frantically scampered about, trying to ensure that each and every little thing was as it should be I was approached.

Reluctantly, I spent one of my few and precious moments to glance up. It was the voice of reason.

“I don’t have time for you today.” I said bluntly. “Normally I’m all for reason, but if I don’t accomplish the many things that need doing then they simply will not get done. So if you could please peddle your smug attitude elsewhere I would appreciate it.”

“Alright, sorry to interrupt, go about your business.”

The voice of reason has always operated using the same tired play book that it had developed when it dealt out it’s first admonishments. And though the complexity of the admonishment has developed in leaps and bounds since the dawn of audiolinguistics, the structure of it’s process had not changed a bit since it’s first conveyance via the waggling of a brow. You see the voice of reason has always been a performance artist. Here it will make a pointed show of playing the silent observer. But silence is not it’s nature. It is, after all, a voice.

I continued my stress driven, panicked, and erratic attempts at damage control. With my left hand I was putting out a fire, with my right hand I was signing a waver stating that I am of right mind and that I know what I’m doing. With my other left hand I was cleaning up my mess and with my other right hand I was taking care of my hygiene. With my other other left hand I was doing someone else’s job for them and with my other other right hand I was calculating probabilities and impossible odds.

A sound in the silence. A shifting of fabric, perhaps a clearing of the throaght. Nothing was in fact silent in my flurry of exertion, but those sounds rang out through the cacophony I was conducting like the sound of wind-chimes in a gale. It pierced through the turbulence of my mind because it did not come from me. “Here we go.” I thought as I braced myself for a lesson in the obvious, perhaps even a sermon on the fallacy of control. But no. Nothing.

As the voice of reason sat and “observed” I did my utmost not to look up. I wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction of a queue. After some time had passed, presumably enough time for the voice to feel that it had manufactured an air of punctuation, the voice of reason broke the surface tension of my comfort once again and ripples of possibilty bloomed out in all directions.

“Why are you so flustered?”

And there it was, the second move in the world’s oldest chess strategy. That was the bait. It was rhetorical. If I answered the question then I was ceading ground to the voice. But it was also a dare. If I ignored it entirely then I was dodging the issue. A classic set up. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. So there I was playing chicken with the voice of reason. I sighed. Then I shuddered as I acknowledged my mistake. Point voice. I sighed so deeply that my soul got an airbubble trapped in it causing a spiritual cramp. The sigh could be felt flowing through the universal web of subtext that spanned the wide cosmos of diction. A ripple that would in turn be felt by all of the tiny hungry consessions that writhed within advitories in the plane of peripheral thought. All of the little ifs, and the buts, all the ands, and the ors. All the little thoughts half thought without the strength or drive to manifest. A sigh that rang out like a dinner bell for all the thoughts that were too weak to manifest themselves alone.

“I’m flustered because everything around me is completely out of control and if I don’t take control then nothing will ever find any order. I feel as though I always have to do everything around here or nothing will ever get done. So, as I said before, and as much as I would like to, I simply do not have time for you today.”

“Okay.” Said the voice, continuing to observe. My neck and back nearly folded themselves into a pretzel so that my feat were resting on my shoulders; an involuntary reaction to the soul crushing anticipation of what I believed would surely be an anti climactic and sophmoric lecture. It wasn’t a question of whether or not it would, but rather when. When.

The voice of reason, ever the con artist, was able to guess, based purely on gut feeling, exactly how many beats of silence to leave after “Okay.” Each beat of silence lulled my suspicion away like a quiet lullaby sang to a child in its crib. To eat all of it’s fears and burdens, lulling it to careless sleep and allowing peace to grow.

So when I opened my mouth to tell the voice to stop being coy and just get to the point, not a single syllable had managed to escape me before the voice of reason closed the gap and dropped the other shoe in one clean swift action. The accuracy of the voices timing stripped the breath from my voice in an instant. A moment earlier and my will for rejectioned wouldve been renewed. A moment later and the trance cast on my would’ve been dispelled, replaced once more with my density. But no, the voice of reason is a force of instinct believe it or not. Like any biological function the efficient employement of the voice of reason is as much an inherited skill as it is a learned one. And so, at the most critical moment available the voice chimed back in. Dunking me once more into the chilly bilge of anxiety and irritation that the silence had stolen away with.

“Do you have to do this often?”

I let out yet another sigh that could be felt reverberating through the deepest dankest halls of social causality. 2 voice, love me. If the first sigh was the dinner bell then this sigh, this sigh was chum in the stream of coniousness. Bait for bigger, nastier, more actualized notions. The kind that creep about just barely outside the realm of concious thought. The kinds of notions that lay patiently, waiting for your subconscious to drop it’s guard for but a moment, sneaking in through the vertices of your disposal, when you are neither here nor there. Barging in like the Kool Aid Man when you’re not lucid enough to stop them. Slipping through while you teeter on the cliff that overlooks the valley of hypnogogia.

There it was, that was the genius at the heart of the voice of reason’s strategy. It didn’t have to scold you, or punish you, or belittle you. Those are tools of brutish conversation. Introducing desired notions in such an involved manner? That was beneath the voice. The voice need not inject into oneself the concepts that it carries in its belly like a Trojan horse because the voice of reason, no matter the source of the sound, is your own voice. The voice need not do something so blunt as to TELL someone WHAT they know. It merely reminds them THAT they know something. After that human curiosity will do the heavy lifting.

The voice of reason is a right bastard. It taunts you with glimpses of what you already know, and then it challenges you to bring the bigger picture into focus. It may lead you by the hand a bit, but it makes you take the journey. It will walk you from point A, but you will arrive at point B alone. And when you do you’ll have to know that it did not bring you to these thoughts, it merely told you that they were here. You traversed that expanse on your own. No thought was planted, no notion injected, no opinion installed, you were not brainwashed, you were not tricked, your autonomous thoughts remain unmolested.

Make no mistake, the voice of reason has designs for you. It has the will to see you changed but not the will to change you. Someone else may evoke the voice of reason but eventually the voice becomes yours. Before you know it the person that played the catalyst may have faded into the same blurred lines in which the thoughts you don’t think loom in waiting, but the voice of reason may still be there and with nothing else around to blame you are confronted with the truth you wished so deeply to ignore. That you know, that you always knew, that the only person you’ve been fooling is yourself.

“I do this often, but no, I do not have to. I need control, I need to convince myself I either have it or that I can gain it.”

3-love, match point.

“Why?”

“Because I realize that if I am to surrender to faith in the unfolding then I must acknowledge within myself that my own journey is not about me, that I am a passenger of my own life. That all my vain attempts to seize control are nothing more than tantrums and that control is only something I can have over myself. And to accept that. That’s hard.”

“Is it really easier to try to control the world, to try to pull all the strings all the time?”

“No, but…If I try my hardest and fail to exert control on my world then the results were as expected and I tried my hardest. But taking control of your mental state and taking responsibility for your actions is not a skill or a muscle or an effort. You’ve either taken control of yourself, or you have chosen not to, and I find it much easier to blame the world for being broken than to blame myself for being weak.”

Game set and match. The voice of reason defeats Colby by a landslide. And it just makes it look EASY.

You cannot learn from the voice of reason, you can only be reminded of what you know.

It’s not the voice of reason I can’t stand. It’s that condescending fucking tone.

If you read all the way to here thank you so much, you are appreciated.