Hemispheres

The strangest thing happened to me today and it left me mute.

I had Erin with me in the car. We had just finished lunch at the Blue Swan Diner. She had the turkey club, I had the BLT. We had fun, but we were in a scorchingly bright, sunlit booth. I think we both prefer to dine in dimmer surroundings. The light seemed to hush me. I think it may have even dried out her turkey. She noted both.

 

I’m driving back to work in Eatontown, going up West Park Ave., heading almost due west. The sun was about as high in the sky as it gets this time of year and its beams were strained through tall trees to my left. I remember Erin saying, “You know all the back roads.” The flickering shadow/light of the filtered sun hit my left eye and totally disoriented me. Or so I thought. My right eye could see the road just fine. My brain started freaking out. One millisecond I was cool. The next millisecond I was, “where the hell am I?” This lasted back and forth for a good thirty seconds (do the math.) High sun staccato strobes glint and glare off the shield of glass before my left eye whipping and whirling me out of the now of now and into some scary state all the while my right eye gazes ahead, focused on the road, smoking a Newport Light. Left eye: rave, LSD trip. Right eye: driving, thinking about work, listening to Erin. I then hit a long shadow and the discordant symphony between right and left eye, left and right brain, stopped.

 

The rest of the day I could barely talk. And it was a strange day to not have talked. That’s another story.

 

Later, I was in a meeting with Michael, Lisa and Cathy and toward the end, Michael said that he could see my mind working; he could see that I was only hearing every third word. He thought I was being creative, and I was trying to. I was. But I was only half there. I feel like half a ghost of me is walking cold on theside of the road trying to get back to the Blue Swan. And the other half has a wicked headache.

 

Something's not right.