Crickets in Normal entries

Sometimes I forget this journal even exists and I’ll be walking around checking my pockets, looking under furniture, not sure what I’m looking for, just sure I’m missing something.

The artist formerly known as AmyG (who, hopefully, is sitting in the dune grass watching gulls) told me once that she liked my hobo-train-cricket voice. 40 percent of the hobo train stuff was hyperbole, crickets, cicadas, grasshoppers, however, have had a profound effect on me, more so than I can manage to describe. My entire perception of sound is meaningless without crickets.

As a kid I would hear them in waves, in complicated harmonies and rhythms, and cicadas were powerful, their screech lingering in my hearing. My earliest memory of an outdoor concert was on the Thames, swans floating regally along the river and in between the spaces of the music was the waves of thrumming of crickets, integrating into the music and the voices of people on blankets, underpinning the sounds of the earth and my species spinning and grinding.

I take my morning bike rides just after dawn; there’s mist rising from the marshes, little clouds of gnats and the sound of crickets. I smile and say good morning to other bikers, dog walkers and joggers. The smile always has some pity to it when I see headphones. No, I won’t go into a rant, neither one about anti-social behavior nor one about safety, but, the best music I know I can play anytime, crickets have a short window. Personally it bothers me to be out in the world and crippling one of my senses, I depend on hearing to follow what’s going on behind me, but, too, the world is always singing to us, seems rude to change the channel. Huh. Not rude; unwise. I think if the exercise is so mundane — nope, I promised no kvetching. Crickets.