Everyone has a little voice in their head that narrates constantly. It gives different voices to characters in novels, remembers the sound of your parents, and can even mimic the voices of celebrities at your leisure. That inner voice is always speaking to you, and for these reasons, it is very impressive. Can you imagine life without that semi-understandable monologue? It would be terrible.
That being said, I think mine is broken.
I’m not saying that I don’t have a constant commentary of thought; quite the opposite. Sometimes my mind-voice becomes my actual voice, in fact… unfortunately, this usually happens when I’m on the bus or walking in a densely-populated area. I am frequently muttering something to myself as a reminder, or singing along to the tune stuck in my head. This usually results in a few concerned looks and the occasional someone crossing the street to avoid what they assume to be an asylum escapee. What I am trying to say is that occasionally the ‘inner voice’ that we all know, love, and trust decides to betray us worse than Lando Calrissian. This treachery happened to me today.
Whilst at a coffee place with my dear friend Solitaire (and yes, that is her name), our conversation shifted towards the psychoanalytic approach to a character that we are co-writing. Yet like the ghost of Christmas past, Sigmund Freud arose, rattling his chains whilst demanding that we make him the subject of conversation through a ‘brain fart’. I should state that I find most of Freud’s work to be outdated and ridiculous, and so when I say ‘Christmas Past’, I am referring to the worst Christmas pasts of your life. The Christmases where all of your gifts were out-dated socks, and your sexist/racist/distant relative (who no one remembers inviting to dinner, yet they seem to have found their way inside) arrived only to replace the turkey your parents worked so hard to make with a picture of a turkey. Subsequently, when you asked them about it, they replied “same difference”. Yes; that is how I feel about Sigmund Freud.
In any case, my intention had been to quote Freud’s famous saying “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” (for a reason that escapes me) with the best darned Austrian accent I could muster. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was not an Austrian accent. It wasn’t even a German one.
I’m sure you are asking your screens ‘what came out? Stop prattling, you damn-ed narrator and tell me’. Well, dear reader, what came out instead of the accent our good pal Sigmund possessed can only way be described as ‘a 1930’s Jersey/New York stereo-type newscaster, looking for his next break so that he can join the mob’.
Book-talk forgotten, the other patrons of the establishment (most of whom were students, as finals are coming up and sleep has become but a myth) were forced to listen to two idiots call for ‘gum-shoes’ and refer to each other as ‘doll face’ for the next half an hour. This is not the first time that my accents have misfired, and I doubt it will be the last.
I suppose that living without these inner voices would be hard. Language would be less concise and we would be constantly forgetting the voices of our loved ones, only to be startled in the middle of the night by said subjects and their voices. Therefore, dear reader, I conclude not with the wish to eliminate the voice all-together. Instead, I conclude with a wish for someone to change Sigmund Freud’s Wiki.
-J. Dixon-
Terrified and Graduating... 