Seff Talk

Really, I have started to notice that I am talking to myself a lot. Outloud! Seff talk. I don't do much in the way of Driver's Tourette, like I wrote about earlier, but it is more along the lines of a higher grade of mumbling. Like, "I wonder where I put..." and "Is that my street?"

Many of these are questions to myself, "...now where are my keys...?" or "...is that really what I'm going to wear in public?" but most of them are sentence fragments and partial thoughts, "Let's see, I've got my list, the stuff for Goodwill..." Shouldn't I be able to finish them silently, or not at all? Nobody else is listening for crying out loud.

For the rest of my activities, I keep lists. These are a substitute for seff talk in a way, as I can write the list and forget the subject until it is the time and the place to perform it. Now that is something I have done all my life, a compensation for a limited memory, or as an older friend put it, "My memory is terrific. It is just real short."

Andy Griffith amused me greatly with his story of Hamlet as told by a good ol' boy. He described the soliloquy as "seff talk." None of my stuff rises to that level at all, and in fact, if I were Hamlet, instead of any "To be or not to be" queries, it would be more like "Did I just step in dog poop?" According to Andy, in order to properly perform that sort of seff talk, you have to "set and look away off," and he laments that those people don't speak as "gooda English as we do." If you haven't heard his version ("...and they was a fightin' and he run the fella thew..."), it is "a purty good show." In my opinion, and ironically, if more young people could hear that version of Hamlet before they read it, the more they would appreciate the story and get down to all the wonderful Shakespeare that lies beneath the story.

You don't suppose all this seff talk is a manifestation of years and years of destroying brain cells with the evening toddy, do you? Whatever.

Until they lock me up.