I hear little voices in my head and they tell me what to do. Everyone who knows me personally is reading this, nodding their heads solemnly and thinking that this explains everything. Those fortunate people who only know me through my articles are looking at their friends and saying, “See, I knew something was wrong with him.”
Actually, I’m not the least bit crazy, despite what some friends and family members might think. The two specific “voices” that I am referring to are the same ones that you have in your own head (to a greater or lesser degree). I am referring to my conscience and something I like to call my idiot alarm.
My conscience is the louder of the two. Not once during all my years have I needed to ponder whether something I was about to do was right. Most of the time I listen to my conscience, and it keeps me out of trouble, but having lived with it so long, I have gotten to the point where I can simply ignore my conscience and say what I mean anyway. However, not one to leave well enough alone, it will continue to hound me later on, yet never offer me good advice on how to amend the situation.
My other little voice is my idiot alarm. Unfortunately, it is the quiet one. It would save me a lot of trouble if it would shout at me like my conscience, but it comes across like a timid friend, almost whispering its advice about one second before the idiotic event takes place.
You know what I’m talking about, right? Sure you do, because you have one of these too, and like mine, yours is probably so quiet, you don’t listen to it until it’s too late. This is the little voice in your head that lets you know, for example, when you’re one beer away from too many. When a friend offers you “one more,” this is the voice that speaks quietly from the back of your mind, “Don’t drink another beer. You’ll regret it later.”
My idiot alarm’s lack of volume has gotten me hurt, or at the very least, badly embarrassed many times throughout my life. When I was 17 years old, I skied into a pier and ended up with a nice scar on my head. I thought that I could swing out away from the boat, let go of the rope at just the right moment and coast leisurely to the pier, where I would simply grab the ladder to stop my forward momentum. My idiot alarm kicked in, not before when I might have listened, but after I released the rope.
“Um, pardon me, but you picked up too much speed when you swung out from the boat, and now you’re going way too fast to stop yourself just by grabbing the ladder. This will probably hurt really bad.” It did, but only after I regained consciousness.
The only time that not hearing my idiot alarm did me any good was when it got me to stop smoking. At one stage of my life, I smoked fairly regularly. One fine morning after waking up to discover that my ceiling-mounted air conditioner had leaked all over my carpet, I found that I was absolutely dying for a cigarette. I stood for a few moments, my bare feet getting increasingly cold on my wet carpet, searching in vain for a match or lighter, when suddenly my eyes fell upon my toaster. Those of you who understand electricity already know where this is headed, but I’ll continue for those who, like me, have to learn all its wiles the hard way.
Now standing in a sizeable puddle, I pressed the button on the toaster, waited until the heating elements were glowing red, then leaned over with the cigarette in my mouth and stuck it down into the toaster. The second before my lips made contact with the edge of the toaster, my idiot alarm quietly informed me of the danger inherent in the situation. Alas, it was too late for me to process the information and heed the warning.
There was an intense flash of light and then total darkness, since I had managed to blow the circuit breaker to that room. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself on my couch, which was several yards away from the toaster. My cigarette was in smoldering tatters, as was the mustache I had been trying hard to grow. I picked the pieces of tobacco and paper from my teeth, patted my hair back down, decided that cigarettes were indeed a hazard to my health and for once thanked the voices in my head.