SENSORY DEFENSIVE MALE

After we had been living together a while, my wife said to me one day, “You are sensory defensive.”
Because she is a health professional she can get away with using big words like this. But I put her in her place by saying; “More sex will cure that.”
“Hm, that seems to be your answer to everything.”
Well, as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
But yes, I am sensory defensive, which means sharp noise, clutter, bright lights, they all set me off. If we start off on a trip somewhere and there is the faintest noise in the car I will pull over and find the noise and silence it. I like to walk into a room where everything is neat and shipshape, and if my house is messy I have to clean it; and not later, but right now. And just to complete the trifecta, bright glare from a windshield can bring on a migraine.
And, frankly, outside of sex, I’m not so crazy about touching.
So you can imagine what having a 14 month old toddler is doing for a man like me. Our house has become clutter central. And now that Vivienne has ‘found her voice’ (the wife’s words) and begun screeching like a flight of Banshees let loose from the gates of hell to inflict a pernicious din on the unsuspecting, I am seriously considering using my Black & Decker adjustable speed drill to drive wood screws into my forehead.
Which is all a long way of saying that I lost my mind last weekend.
It wasn’t pretty, but then, it has been my experience that my life rarely is. However, I do have some tools I use when my hardwiring shorts out and the bad tapes start to play in my head. And so the first thing I did upon losing my mind on Saturday was to call my friend Louis; mainly because I needed someone well-adjusted to speak with.
I know Louis is more balanced than I am because he; listens to public radio, flosses his teeth, practices yoga and meditation on a daily basis, is unfailingly kind and considerate to others, has street smarts from being raised in Queens, can parallel park a car better than any man alive, successfully runs his own business, and eats no processed sugar. Oh, and he is a graceful dancer too.
If he weren’t such a nice guy he would be insufferable.
Still, I called him anyway, and then lay on the couch in a dark room with the cell phone pressed to my ear. It was sort of like a psychiatric visit, only over the phone and without the hope that any real progress would ever be achieved.
The essence of our conversation was that we stumbled upon the disturbing truth that in our century plus of cumulative living, neither of us had as yet attained an understanding of women.
At first we found it unfathomable that two smart guys like ourselves could have gone this long without a clue about women. But the more we talked it, the more we realized that we were probably not likely to get a clue any time soon either.
Lying on the couch in the dark talking to Louis and realizing that I wasn’t the only one without a clue about a subject some might consider vital, well, that made me feel a lot better. So much better, in fact, that I decided to call another male in the hope that my recovery would gather speed. And the lucky recipient of my call was my younger brother Matt in Atlanta, and I talked to him about football for so long that my cell phone battery died.
You would think that it would take a lot of talking to kill a cell phone battery. And you would be right. Still, I wasn’t done talking, and so I called my brother back on the land line and we spoke football some more.
And here is a remarkable fact; after the first 5 minutes of our conversation, neither of us offered a fresh insight or original slant on football over the next 2 hours of talking time. We just kept repeating the same pithy observations over and over, first me and then him. But it did not bore us, or at least not me; I found it strangely comforting.
After we had beat the dead horse of football to death he talked about his job for a while and then happened to mention that his BMW was on the fritz and he was looking into a new car, and so we exchanged sage advice on cars for another half hour with, again, neither of us offering a fresh view after the first couple of minutes.
Now this is a crucial difference between men and women; when women talk on the phone for hours on end they talk about three things; their feelings, their relationships, and their feelings about their relationships.
Feelings and relationships did not come up in my conversation with my brother. Unsurprisingly, this omission did not bother either of us. We are guys, and guys talk about sports, work, and machines, and sometimes, if we are really desperate, action movies and rock and roll bands. So you can see, we had touched nearly all the bases, so to speak, in our dialogue.
When I awoke on Sunday I was sane until the Banshee began to sing and the sound bounced off the walls and dug into my brain through the right ear I damaged back in 1973 at a Black Sabbath concert by sitting too near the stage while totally stoned on Panama Red.
And then I lost my mind again. And it stayed lost all day until my son called me from New Zealand where he and his wife are traveling for a year and we talked about…….you guessed it……….sports. And since my son is a pretty high brow fellow we followed the mandatory sports dialogue with a thorough exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s music and the best zombie movies of all time.
Again I felt better until Monday morning whence the Banshee sang her hideous song. Luckily I was going to lunch with my buddy Mike and when I described being sensory defensiveness to him, and how I even had to pull the car over to detect and silence any stray noise, he just nodded his head and said he was exactly the same way.
Mike has a thoughtful, reasonable mien, as befits a man who teaches Political Science to college students. He said he lived his life in fear of being proved dissolute.
I just loved that. It felt just right to me, the perpetual perfectionist.
So once again I felt better, having demonstrated the old chestnut that misery loves company. And I stayed feeling better right through swimming 2500 meters at my gym and donating blood down at the Redwood Blood Bank—a place where I am welcome even when disturbed because, let’s face it, they are desperate for my blood -- and coming home where the Banshee still sang here hellish song and, to my surprise, it did not bother me.
On Tuesday I reached out to my old friend Bill and he reminded me that before adopting Vivienne I had told him that my job was to write the checks and provide a safe and stable environment for my family. I needed to be reminded of this. He said my duty was to provide the setting in which the chaos of childhood could occur; as it is predestined to do. And he suggested that within this space I carve out my own room – a ‘man cave’ he called it – to retreat to when it all got a bit much for me. Again, sound advice.
So you can see that it helps to have friends who are not loony.
On Wednesday I went to see my therapist, because, let’s be honest, a guy like me needs all the help he can get. When I described losing my mind, my therapist didn’t seem particularly surprised or alarmed. Either this is because he has seen it all before, or he just figures Jeff is going to lose his mind and there is no sense in getting all worked up about it.
I’d prefer to think the former.
And when I described my efforts to regain my mind he nodded approvingly and said, “A guy like you, you probably need a lot of friends.”
Now, what do you think he meant by that?